Us politics

Friday

Matt Purple

American conservatives look to Europe for inspiration

Three years ago at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington, I convened in a large room with a small group of mostly British expatriates to watch Nigel Farage rail against the European Union. That was then; this is now, and today Farage is one of the event’s most iconic superstars. His speeches have been upgraded to the main ballroom where he’s received adoringly (the woman sitting next to me last year cheered louder for him than she did for Trump). Afterwards throngs corner him in hallways brimming with grins and hoisting cell phones high. Yes, welcome to CPAC, the volatile, star-studded Lollapalooza of American conservatism, held

Ed West Ed West

Citizenship is dead

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics. Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division. Chua

Wednesday

John Betjeman

Billy Graham by John Betjeman

Billy Graham, the American evangelist, has died at the age of 99. Here John Betjeman recounts his experience of attending one of Graham’s Greater London Crusade events, in an article first published in the Spectator in March 1954: Every night the Harringay arena is packed; every night throngs of converts—mostly young people—crowd up at the end of the service to the bare space below the rostrum, thence to be conducted by ‘counsellors’ to a room where they are interviewed and given tracts. This is the Greater London Crusade of Billy Graham and I think he must be cynical indeed who affects to despise the crusade or doubt the sincerity of

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Billy Graham’s legacy of Christian unity

As I write this, my Twitter timeline is filling up with tributes to Billy Graham, who has died at the age of 99. Donald Trump describes him as ‘the GREAT Billy Graham’. Well said, Mr President; for once, those Trumpian capital letters are perfectly judged.  What’s interesting is that so many of those tweets come from Catholics. Graham started out as your standard-issue Protestant revivalist, not just a Bible-basher but also a Catholic-basher. But when Pope John Paul II died in 2005, he described him as ‘unquestionably the most influential voice for morality and peace in the world during the last 100 years’. Today, Catholics and Evangelicals recognise that far more

Paul Wood

Donald Trump should be worried by the latest twist in the Russia inquiry

‘If Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia — is that a red line?’ Trump: ‘I would say yeah. I would say yes. By the way, I would say, I don’t — I don’t — I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody — and somebody — from Russia buys a condo, who knows? I don’t make money from Russia. In fact, I put out a letter saying that I don’t make — from one of the most highly respected law firms, accounting firms. I don’t have buildings in Russia. They

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Donald Trump heading for his Monica Lewinsky moment?

The stories about Donald Trump’s sex life keep coming. First, it was Stormy Daniels who stated that she had an assignation with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006. Now it appears that Trump also met another woman in 2006, this time at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. In an expose published today, the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow reports that Trump conducted a nine month long affair with 1998 Playboy ‘Playmate of the year’ Karen McDougal who was quite smitten by Trump’s charms, at least initially. Darrow has unearthed an eight page letter in which she describes in vivid detail her repeated encounters with Trump, including viewing Melania Trump’s bedroom at Trump

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Sod the Second Amendment

I just wonder how many more school massacres it will take before four words, which I am sure are already being muttered beneath the breath of millions of Americans, break out into mainstream opinion: Sod the Second Amendment.   It is all very easy to scoff at Americans for their love of guns and the obvious evidence that it is contributing to a murder rate that is vastly higher than in any Western European country. But US gun control is part of a wider fault in the practice of government, and one which is being committed increasingly by all developed countries –  the fetish for tying the hands of future legislators with

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Mitt Romney is back. Will he be a thorn in Trump’s side?

One of President Donald Trump’s chief political foils in the Republican Party — a party that increasingly resembles a Trump fan club more than a group of partisan but independent thinkers — is about to storm the national scene and send a jolt of energy to the dwindling and listless #NeverTrump movement. Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and wealthy businessman, is reportedly preparing to announce his formal campaign to be the next US Senator from Utah.  And with no serious Republican in the heavily-Mormon state willing to throw a hat in the ring to challenge Romney, it is a virtual assurance that he will win the election. The

Leah McLaren

What I learned from arguing about gun control with my Texan uncle

Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the one in Florida yesterday, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston. Uncle Bill likes to email me redneck jokes in the hope of getting my progressive Canadian dander up. Here’s a recent one: The premier of Ontario is jogging with her dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the premier’s dog, then bites the premier. She calls animal control. Animal control captures the

Wednesday

Steerpike

Janan Ganesh, citizen of… Washington, DC?

Theresa May’s decision to launch a verbal attack on ‘citizens of nowhere’ backfired in the snap election when metropolitan voters turned on the Prime Minister over fears her Brexit vision was an inward one. Happily, citizens of nowhere have since found some champions of their own. Citizen-of-nowhere-in-chief Janan Ganesh, the Financial Times columnist, kindly wrote a column titled ‘how to be a true citizen of nowhere’: ‘True, we tend to come from nowhere. I live in one continent, was born in another, but originate from a third. So I am not even from where I am from. I grew up in an ambiguous social class in one of those zone

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Obama’s drab portrait is a fitting metaphor for his presidency

Has Barack Obama become a flower child? His new presidential portrait, which is over seven feet high, depicts him on a chair staring ahead somewhat pensively as he’s framed by various flowers that reference Kenya, Hawaii and Chicago. It’s a fitting backdrop to a president who not only embodied the multi-cultural aspirations of America, but also wanted to be seen as a meditative fellow. His adversaries may well conclude that the flowers out him as what they viewed him as all along—a not-so-closet leftist. Meanwhile, his wife Michelle looks serene in a capacious, flowing gown that drapes to the floor. The question hovering over the portraits, though, is whether they

Sunday

Daniel DePetris

Mike Pence missed a diplomatic opportunity at the Winter Olympics

The opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea was a miraculous site.  The lights.  The fireworks.  The dancing.  The choreography.  It was everything we have come to expect from a world-class Olympic Games, a coordinated and ritzy show on behalf the entire planet. The Games in Pyeongchang, however, do stand out for one big reason: the massive sporting event is taking the form of a detente between North and South Korea, a minor easing of inter-Korean tensions that have plagued the bilateral relationship since the previous South Korean government shut down the joint industrial complex in Kaesong and Pyongyang stopped answering South Korea’s calls.  South Korean

Michael Moorcock

Beware the rise of the officious little Trumps

Returning to the United States a short while ago I received a stern talking to from an immigration officer. Why had I been in Paris longer than usual? I’ve lived in the US for nearly 25 years. I originally moved to be closer to my son, who was being educated nearby, and to my American wife’s relatives in Houston. We bought an old house in a small town about an hour from Austin. Built for his new bride by the only Confederate governor of Texas after he came back from the civil war, it’s rather eccentric. We fell in love with it immediately, planning to live there for at least

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Republicans would be wise to listen to Rand Paul before it’s too late

‘I can’t in all good honesty, in all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits,’ Senator Rand Paul announced last night. Never were truer words spoken. The Republican party, once the standard-bearer of fiscal probity, has now become signed onto massive deficit spending. It first began to consume the deficit elixir during the Reagan years. But now it has become a full-fledged addiction. Today, Trump signed a half-trillion dollar spending deal that will ensure that America runs trillion dollar deficits in coming years. The self-described ‘King of Debt’ is on his way to becoming the emperor of it. The dangers are

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Donald Trump has got a point about the NHS

Donald Trump has found himself in the midst of another international spat, fuelled this time by his attack on the UK’s national religion. In an attempt to verbally jab the opposition in his own country, the President has managed to rile up many thousands, if not millions, of people who have deep reverence for Britain’s National Health Service: I’m rarely on the side of Trump’s Twitter provocations, but this one, I’ll admit, isn’t half bad. While Trump is wrong about the protestors’ motivations (giving the tweet ‘top troll’ status), he is right that they march in the wake of a ‘broke’ system. Only extreme ideological dedication to those three little letters

Monday

Daniel DePetris

The GOP is now the Party of Trump

There was a time not so long ago when the political establishment of the Republican Party – the Mitt Romneys, Paul Ryans, and Lindsey Grahams of the world – were strong Donald Trump antagonists.  Trump would utter a racially charged remark about a Mexican-American district court judge being biased against him because he was Mexican, and Speaker Ryan would blast the comment as ‘the definition of a racist comment’.  Lindsey Graham, an also-ran in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, acted like a South Carolina preacher with a southern drawl, warning Republican voters of how dangerous Trump would be as Commander-in-Chief.  When the infamous Access Hollywood rape surfaced three weeks before

Saturday

The Spectator

Donald Trump has a genius for damaging his own reputation

It’s easy to see why Donald Trump gets angry. He is presiding over a robust economy, growing at the fastest rate of any major economy. His recent tax cut has encouraged jobs and investment to come back to the United States. Apple alone is redirecting an extra $38 billion in tax towards the Treasury’s coffers. Other employers are using the tax cuts to pay workers a bonus: AT&T is handing 200,000 of its staff a payout averaging $1,000 each. There’s so much economic optimism that even Democrat voters say they feel better about the economy than they did under Barack Obama. But Trump isn’t taking much credit. He is still

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Trump’s State of the Union address will change very little

Donald Trump had a lot to prove during his first ever State of the Union address this week. He had to demonstrate to the millions of Americans watching on television that he could deliver a semi-unifying and presidential speech and stay in one place for more than an hour without diverging into tangents. He had to show his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill that he is a take-charge kind of guy — somebody who has bold, transformational plans for America’s infrastructure and for the country’s immigration system. To Democrats and independents, he wanted to exhibit a kind of conciliatory persona, not one of his favourite character traits. And to the president himself,

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Trump’s sunbed optimism is rubbing off on the world

Donald J Trump’s State of the Union was as expected: long, boastful, cheesy — and largely right. Trump says he is creating a ‘new American moment’ — and it’s hard to deny that he is. Before he was president, and even in his inauguration speech, Trump painted only a vision of America in ruins. Now, after a year of him in charge, his message is reassuring and upbeat. It’s not the same as Reagan’s sunny optimism — it’s more post-modern and surreal than that — but it’s not far off. You could call it Trump’s electric sunbed optimism. It’s feel-good, it’s a bit orange, and it seems to be rubbing

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s State of the Union address shows he is ready for war. But who with?

It was a sound move by Donald Trump to single out the North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho in his first State of the Union address last night. In 2006, Seong-ho had hobbled his way out of what Trump rightly called a ‘depraved country’ to find freedom abroad. ‘Seong-ho, I understand you still keep those crutches as a reminder of how far you have come’, Trump declared. Seong-ho stole the show by rising to his feet and waving his old, battered crutches in the air to tumultuous applause at the United States Capitol. Earlier in the day, however, the administration made waves with the revelation that Victor Cha, who worked on