Us politics

In his fateful interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, Steve Bannon’s remarks about taking a tougher stand on trade with China, battling his enemies within the administration, and the futility of military action against North Korea generated the most headlines. But it was a widely overlooked comment about identity politics that offers the most important insight into the brilliant and cynical political mind of President Donald Trump’s now-departed counsellor and former campaign CEO. ‘The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em,’ Bannon gloated to Kuttner. ‘I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and

‘In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any Country.’ So wrote the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee a few years before the outbreak of the American Civil war in a letter to his wife. It is a trite observation that the average American is poorly educated but my suggestion to those in Charlottesville who would remove Lee’s statue is that they study the history of their own nation more carefully. By analogy I can see arguments being made, for example, against the Catholic Church. I would disagree with them, but I

Ignore the usual bleating about Trump having ‘lost control’ and not being ‘fit’ for the presidency following his attention-grabbing speech in Arizona. Trump has never been fit for the presidency, if we accept that ‘fitness’ for high office means anything at all. His political career has never really been controlled by anything other than wild ego. We all know this, but we sometimes pretend not to. In fact, Trump’s speech in Arizona shows he is still aware of what makes his movement tick. His speech demonstrated a political nous that has been lacking of late — an awareness that a president needs supporters. In recent days, the Trump administration appears

Steve Bannon is out. H.R McMaster is in. It’s now starting to dawn upon some of Donald Trump’s most ardent admirers that they’ve been had. The main accomplishment of the Trump revolution has not been to forward populism. It has been to devour its own children. Trump entered office declaring that ‘this carnage ends now’. Not so. He’s been producing it in the form of lopping off the head of one adviser after another. Bannon is now promising ‘war’ against the ‘New York Democrats’ that he says are running the White House. If so, it will be a fratricidal one. Bannon was of course the brains behind Trump’s defeat of Hillary

Ding dong Steve Bannon is gone – and all the liberal world order is cock-a-hoop. As Democrat congressman Tim Ryan said, ‘Good. He had no business being there to begin with.’ Or as Nita Lowey, D-N.Y. put it, ‘Steve Bannon should have never been a White House official.’ Maybe it is a good thing that Steve Bannon, an apocalyptic thinker better suited to Breitbart and Talk Radio agitation than real power, is gone. And yet and yet – in the craziness that is Trumpland, Bannon was the closest thing to a coherent strategic thinker in the White House. Who is there now? Bannon had principles – mad ones, perhaps –

Here are some of the many insults that Donald Trump has ladled out over the years. On Senator John McCain: ‘He’s not a war hero.’ On Senator Rand Paul: ‘I never attacked his looks, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject matter right there.’ On Jeb Bush: ‘He’s an embarrassment to his family.’ On Jeb Bush’s family: ‘Do we really need another Bush in the White House—we have had enough of them.’ On Hillary Clinton: ‘Such a nasty woman.’ On Rosie O’Donnell: ‘I’d like to take some money out of her fat-ass pockets.’ On Barack Obama: ‘He’s the founder of Isis.’ Yet Trump’s response to last weekend’s racist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia—an idiots’ Woodstock of warmed-over Ku Klux Klan bigots, arm-thrusting neo-Nazis, historically

On Sunday morning the White House, in an unsigned statement, came out swinging against ‘nephew-nazi and all extremist groups.’ Leave it to the Trump administration to bungle even the wording of neo-Nazi in its belated attempt to distance itself from the sanguinary events that took place on Saturday in the bucolic town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where the radical right gathered to chant ‘blood and soil’ and carry Nazi flags. Their mission was to decry the impending removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who lost the Civil War to Ulysses Grant. The odious David Duke, a leading neo-Nazi who speaks worshipfully of Donald Trump, had slithered out of

On this week’s episode, we’re discussing the war of words between President Trump and North Korea, and asking whether it could spill over into an actual war. We’ll also be looking at the plight of the Yazidis, struggling to recover from genocide committed by Isis in 2014, and, finally, wondering whether it’s better to stay in the UK for your summer holidays. First, North Korea’s increased militarisation was met this week by a threat from President Trump to unleash ‘fire and fury’ against the rogue state. Conjuring up images of nuclear warfare on the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki created something of an international panic, but are we really

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the America atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a lovely port city that also served as a Japanese naval base during the second world war. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce in a radio address Japan’s surrender, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. The atomic bombings saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, but they remain the only time that a country has actually deployed these fearsome weapons. Donald Trump’s implicit threat to unleash an unprecedentedly devastating nuclear attack on North Korea that would apparently eclipse Hiroshima and Nagasaki offers a reminder that in this regard

For reasons I find hard to fathom the French did not come out in force to riot against the recent visit of President Trump to France. Normally the mildest provocation has them pouring into the streets to do battle with the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the CRS, notorious for their brutal handling of demonstrators. My wife, half-French herself, suggested that the quiescence of the French public reflected respect for Bastille Day, which President Macron had invited Trump to celebrate. I pooh-poohed that on the grounds that the storming of the Bastille in 1789 marked the beginning of the venerable French tradition of public rioting and was if anything a spur

Donald Trump has a yuge problem in special prosecutor Robert Swan Mueller III. The American president’s anger at having this legal thorn in his administration’s side explains much of his recent erratic behaviour, as Daniel McCarthy explained in the magazine this week. Now we learn that Mueller is using a grand jury – a group that meets in secret and has the legal power to compel testimony – and that can only be an aggravation for Trump. He can keep saying it’s a ‘Witch Hunt’  – maybe it is – but a witch hunt could bring down his presidency, or at least make it impossible for his administration to function.