Us politics

Why does Donald Trump hate dogs?

Here’s an aspect of Donald Trump’s personality that I’ve never got past: his hatred of dogs. When Trump tweeted on 5 January that his former aide Steve Bannon had been ‘dumped like a dog’, he recycled an insult he has hurled more than a dozen times since declaring for president, according to the indispensable TrumpTwitterArchive.com. After the 2016 election, a wealthy Trump supporter offered the new First Family a gift of an especially adorable Goldendoodle. On a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the supporter showed a photo of the dog to Trump. The President-elect asked her to show the photo to his then ten-year-old son, Barron. ‘Barron will fall in love with

Britain’s epic vanity: do we really think Trump cares that much about coming here?

Boris Johnson is absolutely right to say that his successor as London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has behaved like a ‘puffed up pompous popinjay’ about Donald Trump’s cancelled visit to Britain. And they aren’t the only ones. The whole ‘Trump visit’ story has become an embarrassing mass exercise in British grandstanding. In fact, if you want a perfect example of British delusional thinking look not at Brexit, look instead at the way we have handled the prospect President Donald J Trump’s arrival on our shores. Nothing better illustrates our sense of self-importance, our priggishness, and our ability to convince ourselves of rubbish if it makes us feel good. Long before Trump

Donald Trump’s greatest peril could soon become a reality

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

Ross Clark

New York’s fight against the oil giants is political posturing at its worst

Was there ever a more pathetic piece of political posturing than the attempt by New York mayor Bill de Blasio to sue five oil companies, including BP and Shell, for the cost of building £14.8bn ($20bn) worth of sea defences to protect vulnerable parts of the city? To add to his virtue-signalling, de Blasio has also announced that the city’s pension funds will seek to divest from the shares of oil companies. One should never under-estimate the ability of the courts, whether in the US or elsewhere, to come up with perverse judgements but it ought to be pretty improbable that New York could win the case. While there is

Donald Trump’s evisceration of Steve Bannon is complete

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

Freddy Gray

What becomes of Breitbart without Steve Bannon?

How quickly Steve Bannon’s dark star has collapsed. Not so long ago, friends and enemies talked him up as a media genius. He was a political guerrilla operative you underrated at your peril. He was ‘Trump’s Rasputin’, or ‘President Bannon’, the man who really controlled the White House.  Then he lost his job in said White House, fell out with Donald J Trump, and now, a few days after the publication of his comments in Michael Wolff’s book, he has stood down as head of Breitbart news.  The power that Bannon represented turned out to have been the Mercer family, who had bankrolled Bannon, Breitbart and Trump’s campaign. They decided that their relationship with President of

An Oprah Winfrey bid for the White House should trouble Trump

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

Hamilton: America 1776? Or Britain 2016?

Hamilton is the most exciting American cultural export in decades. It’s now showing in London every to large, delighted audiences — and we Brits love it. As a musical, it takes a dusty, distant slice of history and infuses it with excitement, intellect, lightning wit and an intoxicating whiff of sexual tension. I know this because I saw it in New York two years ago, just before Britain’s EU referendum. And I was struck by the way it captured — not always intentionally, I suspect, given the impeccable liberal credentials of the cast and writers — the political mood in America and over here: revolution, uncertainty, unrest, the falling of old orders and rising of new.

His critics can’t admit it, but Trump’s crazy tactics are succeeding

Among the many new political maladies of our age, one has been left largely undiagnosed. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition whereby intense dislike of the 45th president renders sufferers unable to understand what he is trying to do or allow that he is capable of success. Trump is hard to admire, it’s true, and seems to revel in his ability to appal. But therein lies the secret of his power: with a few tweets, he can set the world’s news agenda and drive his critics to distraction. Take this week, when he tweeted that his nuclear arsenal is larger than that of Kim Jong-un. His comments were seized

Trump’s latest triumph could easily still end in tears

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

Steerpike

Fire and Fury of the Trump book ‘exclusives’

It’s fair to say that Michael Wolff’s explosive biography of Donald Trump has caused a stir ahead of its publication. It’s a struggle to find a news site that isn’t splashing on its claims – from Trump’s supposed desire to lose the election to Steve Bannon’s comments on Russia. Despite the US President’s lawyer has issued a cease and desist letter to block the official release of Fire and Fury, the publisher has decided to release the book today four days ahead of schedule. Hacks are now at pains to show that they managed to bag their copy ahead of schedule. Although the Times has the official UK serialisation, the Guardian

The end of liberalism

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed.  We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate.  We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children.  We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera.  Amid these seemingly unlimited personal choices, we can see the

Stephen Daisley

Iran’s uprising exposes the left’s shameful double standards

Why is Jeremy Corbyn silent on the protests in Iran? A cynic might say that the Labour leader could hardly be expected to bite the hand that fed him £20,000 for appearing on the state’s propaganda channel. But Corbyn’s motivations are not financial. He and those who share his worldview simply cannot stomach being on the same side as the United States, even if that means abandoning Iranians crying out for democracy, justice and human rights.  That may shock soft-left indulgers of Corbyn but it shouldn’t. When the socialist journalist James Bloodworth contends that left-wing politics ‘has become so solipsistic that much of the time it operates strictly negatively’ he

Donald Trump unleashes fire and fury on Steve Bannon

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

Steve Bannon’s thirst for revenge is a big worry for Trump

Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unbuttoned. Last night, he tweeted referring to Kim Jong–un that: ‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my button works!’ To Trump, size matters. Yesterday was a big—or bigly—day for Trump. He started it off by taking a swipe at Hillary Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin, declaring that she should be locked up for email malfeasance, an old charge that he periodically resuscitates. For good measure, he fulminated about the ‘Deep State’ at the Justice Department that be believes, or purports to believe, is conniving to shield Hillary Clinton from prosecution and to undermine

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump’s mad Twitter diplomacy is starting to work

Say this for Donald Trump — if he does bring on nuclear apocalypse, at least he made it funny. Every amateur Freudian with a media platform is now dissecting his latest ‘mine is bigger than yours’ exchange with Kim Jong-Un, perhaps not realising that the joke is on them. Here is what Trump tweeted: It may make people feel clever to say how stupid that tweet is. But, as always with Trump, one should try read behind the idiocy. Ignore the sheer silliness, try to get your head round the fact this man is leader of the free world, and you can see that Trump is not in fact bragging about

Five things that could go well for Donald Trump in 2018

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

Will Donald Trump be assassinated, ousted in a coup or just impeached?

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Paul Wood on whether Trump could follow in Nixon’s footsteps and be forced from office: The ‘most deadly adversaries of republican government,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton, arise ‘chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?’ Hamilton’s warning against ‘intrigue, and corruption’, published in 1788, speaks eerily to the Washington of today, where Donald Trump’s enemies imagine he is a Russian ‘agent of influence,’ bought or blackmailed by the

Is Donald Trump a new Winston Churchill?

Is Donald Trump a new Winston Churchill? Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, whose daughter Sarah serves as Trump’s press secretary, suggested as much in a tweet yesterday. After watching the new biopic Their Darkest Hour, a tribute to Churchill’s fearlessness in 1940, Huckabee announced that he had been reminded of ‘what real leadership looks like’. He added in a second tweet that for eight years America had a Neville Chamberlain in the form of Barack Obama; now such pusillanimity has been replaced by resolute courage: ‘in @realdonaldtrump we have a Churchill.’ A new battle over Britain has now erupted. Huckabee’s animadversions have been met with outrage and ridicule in the

What explains the idiocy of the liberal elite? It’s their education

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: James Bartholomew on the liberal elite’s reaction to Brexit and Trump: Enough! Enough! For months, the so-called liberal elite has been writing articles, having radio and TV discussions, giving sermons (literally) and making speeches in which it has struggled to understand those strange creatures: ordinary people. The elite is bemused by what drives these people to make perverse decisions about Brexit and Trump. Are they racist, narrow-minded or just stupid? Whatever the reason, ordinary people have frankly been a disappointment. Time, ladies and gentlemen, please! Instead, let’s do the opposite. Let’s try to explain to ordinary