Us politics

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

New York suffers its deadliest terror attack since 9/11: what we know so far

Eight people have been killed in yesterday’s terror attack in New York – the deadliest such incident in the city since 9/11. The alleged attacker has been named as Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a 29-year-old Uzbekistan national who came to the United States in 2010 and worked as an Uber driver. The New York Times is reporting that notes written in Arabic were discovered in the vehicle used in the attack pledging allegiance to Isis. It is believed the attacker drove a truck along a cycle path close to the Hudson River in Manhattan yesterday afternoon at around 3pm local time, crashing into a number of people. A group of five

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Richard Nixon: the nightmare president of his age

In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and  lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of the press and the east-coast elite, and feelings of having been short-changed and despised by snobs, held steady until their hero and champion unmistakably broke the law and had to resign his second-term presidency. Nixon won a smashing re-election in 1972, even as it was apparent that the White House was awash with skulduggery. His

Friday

Stephen Daisley

The Democrats are on course to be Corbynised

Donald Trump’s approval ratings have dropped in every single state. He has failed to repeal Obamacare, build a wall or move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Trump has also lost his chief strategist, chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, four communications aides, three security advisers, an FBI director, a US attorney, a cabinet secretary, and his ethics director. After the torch-lit rally in Charlottesville, he managed to stick up for white nationalists, distance himself from them, and stick up for them again in the space of 48 hours. So what all-conquering, gravity-defying, poll-shifting political machine could possibly get this president re-elected? Step forward, the Democrats. The New York

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump and Theresa May desperately need each other’s help

In June, I mooted the possibility that Theresa May might consider emigrating to the United States to join the Trump administration, preferably as chief of staff. I’m sorry to see that she has spurned my request and that the charms of No. 10 Downing Street are proving more alluring than decamping for the White House. But I am somewhat consoled by the Telegraph’s report yesterday that May and her advisers are contemplating something even more radical—British entry into NAFTA, an accord that President Trump has dubbed the worst in the history of the American republic. This move could help make not just America, but also Britain great again. A revived

Rose Asani

Russia damaged Turkey’s economy in the name of diplomacy. Is the US about to do the same?

Istanbul President Erdogan has spent much of this year slinging muck at Europe’s heads of state, and he has damaged a number of already precarious relationships. Now it looks as if he is about to come up against the force of US diplomacy and Turkey may find itself in trouble. Turkey and the US have been Nato allies since 1952. During that time, Turkey has played up its strategic position for military bases close to the Middle East. In turn, the US has downplayed a number of disputes between the two countries, particularly in recent years as the conflict in Syria has raged on. Even as they seemed to be

Monday

Ross Clark

The Bombardier dispute could actually bring down May’s government

When governments fall it often comes from an unexpected quarter. Thirty eight years ago, James Callaghan’s government fell not as a direct result of the Winter of Discontent but from the fallout over a failed referendum on Scottish devolution. Over the past week we have heard plenty of speculation about Theresa May losing her job thanks to her cough at Manchester or through Brexit-induced civil war in her cabinet. But could we be missing something more obscure but at the same time more ominous? The more I think about it, the gravest danger to the government comes not from its handling of Brexit, universal credit, inflation or any of the

Thursday

Eric Weinberger

‘Taking the knee’ is a flawed form of protest

Kneeling, fundamentally an act of humility or deference, doesn’t seem the obvious protest against injustice when the National Anthem plays before a major American sporting event. The quarterback Colin Kaepernick made the gesture famous—and personal, since only he (and sometimes a couple of teammates) did it before his San Francisco 49ers took to the field for games in 2016. But two weeks ago, inflamed by President Trump, dozens of players (mainly black players, who make up around 75 per cent of the National Football League) did it, across the NFL. Their kneeling took different forms, and some contortions seemed to suggest ambivalence, with players kneeling then rising once the music

Jacob Heilbrunn

Rex Tillerson is the captain of a ghost ship

The US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s press conference yesterday was moronic. Earlier this week, NBC News broke the story that Tillerson, exasperated by Donald Trump’s shenanigans, called him a `moron’ during a meeting in July at the Pentagon. It took the intervention of vice-president Mike Pence, in the role of Trump administration life coach, to counsel Tillerson to remain in his post. Now, months later, Tillerson appeared at the State Department, which he has been steadily working to denude of any remaining diplomats or civil servants, to engage in a self-rectification session, pledging his fealty to Trump as well as his devotion to making America great again. Even Tillerson, however,

Tuesday

Ed West

Stricter gun controls won’t turn American into Denmark – but they’d certainly help

There’s a scene in the touching Richard Linklater film Boyhood where the young Mason goes to visit the rural family of his estranged father and is given a Bible and shotgun for the first time. I felt a niggling terror watching it, remembering Chekhov’s maxim, that the film would end with the boy taking the gun to himself, or his family, or his school classmates. It’s understandable why the audience might fear the worst, seeing as America’s spree-killing epidemic seems to has no end in sight, with a new low reached on Sunday in Las Vegas. Why doesn’t America just ban the damn things, people ask, or at least make

Monday

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump avoids gun debate in explicitly religious speech about Las Vegas shooting

Donald Trump’s statement to the nation about Las Vegas was platitudinous. Speeches by leaders in the wake of such horrors tend to be. But it wasn’t bad. He did the necessary: he called the slaughter ‘pure evil’, he thanked the Las Vegas police and protection services for their professionalism, he offered comfort and condolences to the families of the victims, and he called for America to unite in grief. ‘In moments of tragedy and horror America comes together as one, and it always has,’ he said. ‘It is our love that defines us today, and always will, forever.’ Schmaltzy stuff, but exactly what America wanted to hear. His speech was

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How will Trump react to the Las Vegas attack?

President Donald J Trump, the man who never sleeps, hasn’t woken up to the awful news from Las Vegas. Or at least he hasn’t yet gone on to Twitter to rave at the world, as he normally does after any terrorist attack or incident of mass violence. No doubt he will any moment. Until he does, the media will have to content itself with publishing distressing images and videos of the shooting and reporting what few facts we know. There isn’t anything else to say. It is worth noting, however, that Trump supporters have taken to pointing out that, while there have been around 40 terrorist attacks in Europe in

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The revolt against the Republican establishment is only just beginning

Beware the Moore. This is the doctrine that establishment Republicans such as the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who poured in millions of dollars to try and defeat Judge Roy Moore’s bid for the Republican Senate primary nomination in Alabama, were preaching in recent months. For good measure, President Trump also backed the current Senator Luther Strange, who was crushed yesterday by Moore. Trump has hastily deleted his tweets supporting Strange, including one declaring that ‘Big Luther,’ as Trump likes to call him, was ‘shooting up’ in the polls after he endorsed him. Now, Trump is tweeting that Moore ‘sounds like a really great guy who ran a fantastic race. He

Saturday

Ed West

Is America’s ‘despair epidemic’ about to arrive in Britain?

However stressful and bad things get for a parent of young children, there is always one thought that puts it all in perspective – just wait until they’re teenagers and they’re calling you up at 3am asking for a lift from a nightclub in New Cross. So reports like this one, showing that one in four adolescent girls suffer from depression, are bound to add to that gnawing feeling of dread. Firstly the caveats – any statistic that claims ‘1 in such and such’ suffers from this, or is a victim of this, should be treated with scepticism. Depression is also an ill-understood term, a medical diagnosis widely applied by

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Bernie Sanders is back – and he wants to reshape US foreign policy

If there was any doubt that Bernie Sanders is gearing up for another run for the presidency, his speech today in Fulton, Missouri removed it. Sanders appeared at the very spot where Winston Churchill pronounced in 1946 that Stalin was creating an iron curtain in Europe. Sanders, however, enunciated a more emollient message than the British prime minister, laying out the framework for a progressive foreign policy around the globe. He took some shots at Trump, but his real target was the Democratic establishment. Will he be able to push the Democratic party to the left on foreign affairs, just as he has on healthcare? Sanders reached into the old

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

At this rate, we’ll have to rename New York

Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood have I done a double take. I was raised in a slightly weird place. In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional distinction in the US is hard to come by, and I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t grow up around

Wednesday

Matt Purple

There’s still some method to Donald Trump’s madness

Donald Trump’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly was both an echo of George W. Bush and something original. At times, one expected the president to lapse into a Texas drawl and warn about ‘nuclear weapons’; at others he was distinctly The Donald. Despite the seeming contradiction, it was a fairly cogent and consistent address; it also overflowed with the customary bombast. Trump began firmly in carrot-top mode, gloating about how well the American economy had done since he was inaugurated. Then came an abrupt escalation: ‘Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists,’ Trump warned, ‘but threaten other nations and their own people with the most

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump discovers his inner neocon

Donald Trump fully embraced his inner neocon before the United Nations today. He lashed out at North Korea, indicating that he was ready to ‘totally destroy’ it. He upbraided Iran as a corrupt and malignant regime that had taken America and its allies to the cleaners with the nuclear deal—’One of the worst and most one-sided transactions.’ And for good measure, he scoffed at various socialist regimes around the globe. The only term missing in his dyspeptic assessment of the carnage around the world was ‘axis of evil,’ the phrase that George W. Bush made famous when he decried Iran, North Korea and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. The language

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Working with Democrats: Donald Trump’s latest plot twist

While Donald Trump seeks to cut a deal with the Democrats on immigration, his detractors on the right are starting to resemble the sinister clown Pennywise in the popular new horror movie It, who terrorizes a small town in Maine by living in a sewer and snacking on children. ‘Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair,’ writes Rep Steve King from Iowa, a longtime foe of illegal immigration. Trump’s specific sin? He’s wavering on booting out the so-called Dreamers, about 800,000 undocumented children under the age of 16 who crossed the border with alone or with their parents, in many cases as toddlers. Trump made a

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

What happened to Hillary Clinton? She lost

Eleven months on from foisting her second grabby megalomaniac on the United States, Hillary Clinton has resurfaced. Not to apologise for losing the presidency to an angry hairpiece who mimicked the disabled for laughs at campaign rallies — no, Clinton has a book to spruik. What Happened is published by Simon & Schuster and will be on the shelves from Tuesday. Clinton appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to promote what, if the trails are to be believed, will be a standard Clinton exercise in self-justification and blame-shifting. It takes a village to take the fall. She will blast primary opponent Bernie Sanders for enabling Donald Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ meme and

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is a gift for the Democrats

Donald Trump has become the Conor McGregor of American politics. For weeks tensions have been mounting in the capital of the free world as Republicans and Democrats prepared to square off over the debt ceiling and a government shutdown. The climactic showdown was supposed to take place at the White House yesterday. But in the end, Trump never put up much of a real fight. For all the huffing and puffing that preceded the meeting, Trump acceded to the demands of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi for raising the debt ceiling for a mere three months. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse tweeted: ‘The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal