Us politics

As awkward silences go, this was a doozy. James Comey, then FBI director, was sitting alone in an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner with a newly-elected President Trump. The two uniformed Navy stewards serving food and drinks had discreetly withdrawn. ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,’ the President supposedly said, according to Comey’s notes. Comey recalls: ‘I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other.’ At the end of the dinner, Trump is said to have returned to what seemed to Comey like the whole purpose of the dinner. ‘I need loyalty,’ he said, in Comey’s notes.

Yesterday’s announcement by Donald Trump that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is truly historic. The Paris accord was the closest the Europeans had come to getting the US to accepting timetabled emissions cuts in the now quarter century saga of UN climate change talks. The first was in the 1992 UN climate change convention itself, rebuffed by George H.W. Bush; the second was in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, signed by the Clinton Administration, effectively vetoed by the Senate and repudiated by George W. Bush. Now, Donald Trump has dashed their hopes for a third and possibly final time. It’s understandable that the European reaction is one of fury

When Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, he fulfilled what is presumably the dream of George F. Will, one of America’s pre-eminent climate change deniers. Yet Will is not fond of Trump. In fact Will, America’s Tory manqué, is manifestly unhappy about the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, where he is rapidly rubbishing everything that the modern conservative movement has stood for in recent decades. At least this is what Will would have you believe in his latest column in the Washington Post, entitled ‘Conservatism needs another Buckley’. Will means William F. Buckley, Jr., the man whom Evelyn

Donald Trump’s verdict on his audience with Pope Francis – ‘fantastic meeting’, ‘honor of a lifetime’ – may disappoint those who were expecting a showdown. The Pope is supposed to be Trump’s ‘antithesis’, ‘the anti-Trump’, his ‘polar opposite’ and so on and so on. But in the end the meeting was merely awkward, to judge by the photos, and the discussion was mostly confined to safe issues (life, peace and liberty good, persecution of Christians bad). People are making much of the grumpiest Pope photo, but Francis often looks bored and uneasy when he meets important dignitaries. He tends to cheer up around the poor and the sick.  If the

In 1981, when President Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, Washington Post columnist George F. Will went on to complain that the Reagan administration ‘loved commerce more than it loathed communism’. Well, yes. American conservatives have, more often than not, put commercial interests before ideological ones. Sometimes the two even coincide. For all his bluster about the dangers of Islam, Donald Trump seemed to have a dandy time in Saudi Arabia these past few days before he jetted on to Israel. The $110 billion arms deal that he signed with the Saudis, coupled with their promise to invest in Blackstone Group to boost American infrastructure projects, offers the

Istanbul The most dramatic part of President Erdogan’s visit to Washington this week was the punch-up between his security guards and Kurdish demonstrators on the lawn outside the Turkish embassy.  The protest was nothing unusual for a president who seems to provoke adoration and disgust in equal measure wherever he goes. Neither was the violent scuffle a surprise; Erdogan’s bodyguards did the same last time he was in the States. The news barely touched the Turkish press, and not only because there are few titles left on the news stands which offer opposition to Erdogan. When similar fights break out in the Turkish parliament, as they have done regularly over the past

This is an extract from Lionel Shriver’s diary, available in the new issue of the magazine, which is out tomorrow. Over dinner, my fellow Professional American Sarah Churchwell and I shared our dismay over what on earth to say about Trump in public. (Sarah Churchwell ever being at a loss for words will astonish her fans.) Days earlier, a punter had closed my festival event in Swindon with an ostensibly ‘simple’ question: ‘How do you explain Trump?’ Sarah posited a theory gaining mainstream currency. Many of Trump’s characteristics point toward dementia: forgetfulness (leaving an executive order photo-op without remembering to sign the order); volatility, irritability, impulsivity and paranoia; anxiety about stairs

Donald Trump either has nothing to hide about his relationship with Russia — or he is hiding in plain sight, as all good con artists do. What you believe will depend on your political prejudices and how you feel about Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.     The Washington Post‘s report yesterday that Trump shared ‘highly classified information’ about Isis with the Russian foreign minister last week has triggered the usual consternation in Washington. The most potentially damaging allegation is that what Trump told Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak has compromised an intelligence source, or broken the rule that intelligence-sharing countries do not pass on classified information without obtaining consent from or

What to make of the shocking news that Donald Trump has fired the director of the FBI James Comey? Senior Democrats are calling it a ‘Nixonian’ cover up of the Bureau’s probe into Trump’s links to Russia. It is easy to see what they mean. The abrupt move has strong echoes of the famous ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ during the Watergate scandal. As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it, “President Trump has catastrophically compromised the FBI’s ongoing investigation of his own White House’s ties to Russia.” It doesn’t look good. As usual with Trump, though, it seems impossible to figure out quite what he is up to. If he really wanted to

One hundred days is way too short a time to assess a presidency. On this, if little else, there was unanimity among our stellar panel, facing a 1,000-strong audience in the dramatic arena of Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre. In summary, The Donald’s performance has been erratic and high-risk, but he isn’t all bad: panellist and self-proclaimed friend-of-Trump Piers Morgan recalled a New York barman saying, ‘He’ll either turn out a great president, or we’re all gonna die.’ So why try to judge him so soon? Because it is presidents themselves, starting with FDR, who have chosen to highlight this artificial milestone — and Donald Trump went larger than most by setting

Is Ivanka Trump’s visit to Berlin a triumph for Angela Merkel, or a diplomatic disaster? As always, that depends on which newspapers you read. Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung called it a ‘a veritable coup for the chancellor,’ but the headlines in the British press have focused on the boos that greeted Ivanka at yesterday’s W20 Summit, when the President’s daughter described her father as a defender of women’s rights. Sat alongside Ivanka on the conference platform, Merkel looked distinctly awkward – but Ms Trump’s appearance wasn’t entirely met with groans and jeers. Her other comments were greeted with polite applause and, on one occasion, even cheers (she praised Merkel for enforcing

Man, the brass neck of Trump’s media critics. They’ve spent the past 24 hours tearing into Trump’s media man Sean Spicer after he made a stupid, crude Hitler analogy. Which is a bit like Shane MacGowan telling people off for drinking too much. These people have been yelling ‘Hitler!’ for months. From the minute Trump was elected they’ve been having Hitler histrionics, drawing daft comparisons between Trump’s oafish politics and the Nazis’ murderous tyranny, and shouting ‘fascism!’ and ‘1930s!’ like Tourette’s sufferers who’ve watched too much History Channel. It takes a lot of front, all of the front, for them now to finger-wag at others for their inappropriate Hitler talk.

Steve Bannon fast became the most powerful person in the world you’ve never heard of. The man behind the Breitbart website became Donald Trump’s chief strategist and was credited with both Trump’s presidential victory and his wholehearted embrace of an America First, nationalist position in his first month in office. But Bannon’s influence has been on the wane in recent weeks. He’s got into a power struggle with the President’s beloved son-in-law Jared Kushner; despite one of the rules of Trump world being that family always wins. The ‘establishment’ have also gained at his expense. As I say in the magazine this week, the Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and the National