Us politics

Donald Trump is playing hard to get. Asked yesterday at the White House whether he would meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for an interview, Trump began back-pedalling on his previous and emphatic ‘100 per cent’. Now, Trump said, ‘we’ll see what happens’. For good measure, he threw in a few of his favourite terms of opprobrium such as ‘witch hunt’ and ‘Democrat hoax’. And in a tweet he lambasted ‘Sneaky Dianne Feinstein’ and said it was high time for Republicans to ‘take control’ of the Russia investigations. Feinstein is a liberal grandee from California, whose putative sneakiness consisted of releasing a 300-page interview by the Senate Judiciary Committee with Glenn

How the mighty have fallen! Only a year ago, Steve Bannon was being feted as the power behind the Trump throne, the stubble-faced grey eminence who would start a trade, if not an actual, war with China and create a new Republican Party that was based on populist rather than corporate interests. Now all that is gone. After a very public defenestration by Trump, which has resulted in him being ousted from Breitbart, Bannon stands almost bereft on the right. Even his former protege and ally, Steve Miller, stuck the shiv into Bannon, declaring on CNN that he is an ‘angry, vindictive’ person whose ‘grotesque comments are so out of

Will the Trump presidency be replaced by the Winfrey one? The hunt is on for a celebrity to take on Donald Trump and right now America has been seized by feverish speculation that Oprah Winfrey is it. On Sunday night, Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, where she delivered a speech that pointed to ‘a time when no one will have to say “Me Too” ever again’. ‘A new day’, she said, ‘is on the horizon’. The kudos keep pouring in. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, an inveterate Never Trumper, called it ‘spine-tingling’. She’s certainly locked down the Hollywood contingent: Reese Witherspoon said: ‘It sounds

The most piquant part of Michael Wolff’s gossipy new book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, is the ease with which he insinuated himself into the White House. Wolff explains that Trump initially thought he was interested in landing a job. When Wolff said he actually wanted to write a book about the administration, Trump expressed bafflement that anyone would want to write one but said it was OK for Wolff to talk with administration officials. Fox News is reporting that the communications team ‘urged all of the senior advisors to cooperate. They thought this was going to be a positive book for the President’. So Wolff apparently

Forget North Korea for a moment — President Donald J Trump today launched a devastating assault on Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and the man often credited as the architect of his success. Replying to bitchy comments Steve Bannon reportedly made in Fire and Fury, a new book about the Trump White House by arch-muckraker hack Michael Wolff, Trump exploded. His comments are worth reading in full: ‘Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating

It has not gone unnoticed that a number of commenters to my occasional Spectator blogs harbour keen, if not outright enthusiastic, views of the current occupant of the Oval Office – a touching display of faith that suggests there truly is something special about the relationship between America and the United Kingdom. So in the conciliatory Christmas spirit, I wish to offer five ways that the Donald could surprise his critics and come out on top in the new year. First, the stock market. The professional naysayers are almost unanimous in saying that the era of big gains is over. Then again, they said that last year. What if Trump’s