Us politics

Sunday

Rhys Jones

Welcome to the era of superfast politics

Donald Trump is not a patient man. Even his inaugural address lasted for only 16 minutes. Still, the message was clear enough: ‘The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.’ The slow-burning chit-chat of the Washington elite is the stuff of the past, a hangover of the ‘American carnage’ that came to an end last Friday. In fact, to save time altogether, Trump could have simply condensed his address into a single tweet: Americans are as mad as hell and they aren’t going to wait anymore!  Brexit voters will know what he means. They, too, are tired of playing the waiting game. A few weeks back, when Sir

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump’s illiberal visa crackdown is not as bad as Bush’s ‘liberal’ wars

America’s new visa policies are shocking, everyone agrees on that. Even Donald Trump’s administration calls its US entry vetting ‘extreme’. But before everyone calls Trump a fascist again, before everyone reaches once more for the Hitler and the Nazis comparisons, consider this: Trump’s ‘America First’ nationalism is defensive, not aggressive. It may be clumsy, it may be offensive, and it will of course be unfair on lots of immigrants. But it is not war-mongering. In this respect, Trump is very different to the post 9-11 George W Bush. He is also different to Barack Obama, who wanted peace but whose internationalism inevitably dragged him into more disastrous conflicts. Poor Theresa

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s failure to stand up to Trump will undermine her whole strategy

Theresa May’s visit to Washington to meet President Trump last week was seen, before it happened, as being beneficial to both sides. The Prime Minister’s allies in government thought this was an excellent opportunity for May to show the new President how it was done – and to send a message to the world that Britain really matters. But today things look a little less advantageous for the Prime Minister. That her visit was swiftly followed by Trump signing an executive order which halts all refugee admissions and temporarily bans people from seven countries has put the Prime Minister under pressure to criticise the man whose hand she ended up

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Theresa May’s embrace of Donald Trump humiliates Britain

So now Theresa May knows what it’s like to be Tangoed. Her visit to Washington, hailed a ‘triumph’ by friendly newspapers, has become a liability. Life comes at you fast, especially when you launch a diplomatic initiative on a wing and a prayer, not in response to a clinical evaluation of its likely outcome. Because who can really be surprised that hugging Donald Trump close would so swiftly induce a form of diplomatic blowback? Who is surprised that tying yourself to an administration as vicious as it is incompetent might prove a high-risk enterprise? The Prime Minister played two roles on her trip to the United States. She was both supplicant and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

If Trump fails to revive the American dream, then what?

President Trump’s inaugural rant prompted me to reread Let America Be America Again by the black poet Langston Hughes, who is said to have been an inspiration to Martin Luther King. Writing in 1936, Hughes spoke for the immigrant and ‘the poor white, fooled and pushed apart’ as well as his own people, ‘the Negro bearing slavery’s scars’: together, the millions of Americans ‘who never got ahead’ and have nothing for their efforts ‘except the dream that’s almost dead’. The poem is the authentic cry of the economically disappointed who feel themselves exploited by ‘that ancient chain of profit, power, gain’. It ends with a rallying call: ‘Out of …

Saturday

James Forsyth

A US / UK free trade deal is the big prize for Theresa May

Theresa May’s team will be basking this morning in the write-ups of her successful visit to Washington. As I say in The Sun this morning, the big prize for her is a US / UK free trade deal. Government ministers think that, given the political will on both sides, the deal could be negotiated in just eight months. There is also confidence in Whitehall that the US will be prepared to grant an exemption for public services which would ‘protect’ the NHS. This should do much to reduce the intensity of the opposition to the deal. Trump’s protectionist rhetoric is often cited as a reason why a US / UK

Friday

Matt Purple

Theresa May begins babysitting the world’s most powerful man

Of all the specimens in the Donald Trump menagerie—Charming Trump, Vicious Trump, Soapbox Trump—Subdued Trump may be my least favorite. It is true that the restraint my president showed during his press conference with Theresa May is in both our countries’ interests, but it is also uncomfortably artificial, like watching a space alien trying to cheer for a football game. Trump is who he is, an energetic insult comic at his most natural when he’s dissing the size of his political opponents’ hands. Watching him strain to appear statesmanlike always leaves you with the impression that he’s been pumped full of Valium. Nevertheless, he seems to have passed his first

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

May wants to be a ‘third way’ between Trump and the EU

Well, Theresa May managed to lay on the praise towards Trump without seeming too sycophantic, which made their press conference a reasonable success. May congratulated Trump on his ‘stunning’ electoral victory while describing Britain’s future as ‘open to the world’. May seems to be presenting herself as a reassuring ‘third way’ leader between the frightening wildness of Trumpism and the suffocating multilateralism of the EU. It is silly to call her Thatcher to his Reagan only a few days into the Trump presidency, but certainly today could mark the beginning of a very important ‘renewed’ Special Relationship. At times, May sounded like a schoolteacher, nodding approvingly at Trump as though

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May has learnt the art of dealing with Donald

The Trump / May press conference went as well as the Prime Minister’s team could have hoped. The new president was effusive about Brexit saying it was a ‘wonderful thing’, a ‘fantastic thing’ and declaring that it’ll be a ‘tremendous asset’ for the UK. He was also warm about May personally, predicting that their relationship was going to be ‘fantastic’ and opining that they had already hit it off.  Usefully for May, Trump also didn’t say anything outrageous, by his standards, at the press conference. In response to the BBC, he said that the US wouldn’t torture because Defence Secretary Mattis’s objections overrode his own personal belief that it worked. 

Ross Clark Ross Clark

No, Donald Trump hasn’t just brought Doomsday closer

Can there be a bunch of more self-serving individuals than the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which annually presents its assessment of global politics in the form of its ‘Doomsday Clock’? Yesterday, the organisation announced that it was moving its clock forward by 30 seconds so that it now stands at two and a half minutes to midnight – where midnight is Armageddon, the end of human civilisation as we know it. The reason, of course, is Donald Trump. As the scientists explained: ‘He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the US nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump’s diplomat: I helped bring down the Soviet Union, it’s the EU next

Just in case European Union leaders were in any doubt over President Trump’s feelings towards them, his rumoured pick for ambassador to the EU has been giving some pretty strong hints. Appearing on This Week, Malloch — who visited  Trump Towers earlier this month to discuss the potential role — was open about his Euroscepticism. This led Andrew Neil to ask: why would he even want a job to be US ambassador to the EU? AN: I mean you’re clearly not a great fan of Brussels or these bureaucrats like Juncker. TM: Well, I had in a previous year a diplomatic post where I helped to bring down the Soviet Union, so maybe

Ed West Ed West

A female culture war has begun

I didn’t go on the women’s march last weekend, and it’s not the kind of thing I’d go to. However, Trump’s previous form with regards the female sex is a reasonable cause for at least registering a protest. This is not to deny there are things I wish would be protested more, such as Rotherham, but I accept that’s basically whataboutery and no reason to ignore Trump’s behaviour. But you’d think, looking at an event like this, that there was a sort of culture war in which women were set in conflict with the patriarchy, represented by the three-times married president. Lots of women were marching for the right to have

Steerpike Steerpike

Lily Allen’s Trump protest backfires

Last week, Lily Allen became the subject of much mockery online after she claimed to have discovered the flaw in Theresa May’s plan for a global Britain. The pop singer said Brexit was unlikely to be a success as the ‘world still hates us’ because of… slavery. While Allen has refrained from offering any further Brexit analysis this week, she has managed to upset those she claims to be on the side of. The singer has recorded an anti-Trump song — which the website Gay Times shared online. Pleased by the publicity, Allen declared that this must mean ‘f–s hate Trump’. Fags hate trump https://t.co/VZekBaX7o5 — Lily Allen (@lilyallen) January 25, 2017 Alas

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Tony Blair’s Chicago doctrine is buried in Philadelphia

Theresa May mentioned Donald Trump only once in her speech to the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia tonight, but its centrepiece was a gift to him. In his inauguration speech, he said that the US was now out of the business of liberal interventionism. She told Republicans that the same applies to Britain. Here’s the key quote:- It is in our interests – those of Britain and America together – to stand strong together to defend our values, our interests and the very ideas in which we believe.  This cannot mean a return to the failed policies of the past. The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Washington Notebook | 26 January 2017

On Wednesday afternoon I went to the British embassy in Washington for ‘a tea and champagne reception’ to mark the inauguration of President Trump. Like most institutions, the embassy has struggled to come to terms with the Donald. We all know (thanks to Twitter) that Trump wants Nigel Farage to be the UK representative in DC, which must leave the current ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch, feeling a bit tense. Still, Sir Kim managed to draw some big Republican beasts to his party: Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich to name but four. Everybody said the special relationship was very special — they would, wouldn’t they? — and

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Trump is right to reinstate the ‘global gag rule’ on abortion

It has, to be honest, been rather hard to keep up with the flow of executive orders, policy pronouncements and big name appointments from the new US president: they’ve been coming thick and fast. So it’s been tricky drawing up any sort of running audit of debits v credits, though some changes, like the appointment of Jared Kushner to preside over the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, are sufficiently surreal to make you wonder why the Women Against Trump brigade didn’t put it on their placards. But there are pluses, depending on your point of view. And from where I’m at, Trump’s executive order reintroducing the ‘global gag rule’ – which sounds unhelpfully

Tuesday

Edmund Glover

The New York tabloid which turned for Trump

It has been claimed that Jared Kushner masterminded the success of a seemingly impossible campaign. He was the rational voice behind an irrational man and sanitised Donald Trump so effectively, it has become almost fashionable to support him. His reward is a seat at the President’s right hand: senior White House adviser in the Trump administration. His first job included welcoming Boris Johnson and Shinzo Abe on recent visits to the US. Back in 2003, Jared Kushner was still at Harvard.  His billionaire father Charles Kushner had oiled the wheels, gifting the university $2.5 million, before being convicted on multiple counts of tax fraud, election violations and witness tampering.  And this was all re-reported when

Rob Crilly

Donald Trump’s inner dictator starts to stir

It is of course nonsense to describe Donald Trump as a fascist or a dictator, as his opponents like to do. And yet… well, he does sometimes rather invite it.  There was his inaugural address in which he dusted off the ‘America first doctrine’ – as used by the isolationist, anti-Semitic group that urged the US to appease Nazi Germany. Then there is his interventionist strong-arming of companies to keep jobs in America. And on Saturday he stood at the CIA headquarters, in front of a wall commemorating the organisation’s fallen heroes, and boasted of the number of times he has appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Now comes a proclamation declaring the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Who are ‘the people’ in these new political times?

During the massive, impressive Women’s March in London on Saturday, in which thousands of noisy women, men and children stuck it to Trump, the organisers tweeted the following: ‘We are the people.’ Wait — it’s okay to say ‘the people’ again? Since Trump’s victory in November, and even more so after the Brexit Revolt in June, anyone who used the phrase ‘the people’ risked being branded a useful idiot of hard-right demagoguery. ‘Do you know who else spoke of “the people”?’, left-liberals would inquire, accusingly. ‘THE NAZIS.’ Brexiteers and Trumpeters ‘roar that they represent “the people”,’ said Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, as part of ‘their endeavour to silence any

Monday

Ross Clark

Forget ‘peace and love’. Protest language has turned violent

So Madonna says she doesn’t really want to blow up the White House. Her remarks at Saturday’s women’s march — ‘Yes, I’m angry, yes, I am outraged, Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’ – have, she says, been ‘taken wildly out of context’. She has missed the point. No-one remotely thought that she would personally mix the Semtex, or offer any help to someone else to do so. But she was using inflammatory language which she ought to know somebody, somewhere will take seriously. If an unhinged loner in the backwoods of Virginia heads to Washington with a pick-up full of explosives she