Us politics

Today’s midterm election is bound to put a bit of swagger back into the steps of Democrats. If polls are anything to go by — and since when have they ever led anyone astray? — it will be a dolorous evening for Republicans as they watch state legislatures, governors, and Congress turn Democratic. CNN has the generic gap between Democrats and Republicans at 55 per cent to 42 per cent. Politico purports to discern an upswing for candidates such as Kyrsten Sinema. Maybe a new political category will also be detected — the shy Democrat voter who scurries to the polls, half ashamed at surrendering his or her Republican identity to pull

The Trump economy has defied all sceptics and naysayers. Unemployment is at half-century record lows, wages are up, and Wall Street opened November by bouncing back from a rocky October. Trump was supposed to be a reckless leader who would panic the markets. He hasn’t. His tariffs were supposed to torpedo the economy. They haven’t. If Americans vote on jobs, wages, and the business climate come Tuesday, Republicans will keep the House of Representatives and expand their Senate majority. But do voters ever think of midterm elections as a referendum on the economy? Conventional wisdom says no, but the reality is more complicated. Republicans lost 26 seats in Ronald Reagan’s first midterm

Once again, America is under attack. If it’s not hordes of migrants swarming over the border, it’s murky jews financing un-American attacks on the president of the United States, aided and abetted by a ‘fake news’ media in hock to the Democrats, liberals, and other malignant handmaidens to American weakness and decline. Of course we know what’s going on here. We know these eruptions of Trumpery are intimately connected to the mid-term elections and the administration’s need to rally conservative voters to the cause, to stave off possible Democratic advances. But it is not just that and we know this too. This is Trump embracing the freedom of being Trump.

Kanye West’s association with Donald Trump is well known. But there is another politician that the rapper-turned-political-activist likes to pay attention to this side of the pond: Caroline Lucas. While Kanye has nearly 30 million followers on Twitter, the list of those he follows is far more exclusive – numbering just 120. So imagine Mr S’s surprise when among that distinguished group he spotted the co-leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas: Lucas is the only British politician Kanye follows. So what does Kanye see in her? Among recent pearls of wisdom shared by Lucas are tweets about beer duty, farming and fracking. Move over Trump, there is a new politician

The most astonishing thing about Nikki Haley’s resignation as US ambassador to the United Nations is that she leaves on a tide of goodwill, with the demeanour of a woman with a job well done. It says a good deal about the calibre of coverage that the only aspects of interest in her tenure was whether her departure was timed to coincide with Brett Kavanaugh’s reception into the Supreme Court and whether she was intending to stand for the presidency herself any time soon. There was a bit of teeth sucking at Donald Trump saying that she’d brought “glamour” to the role – ooh, sexist! – and reflections about the loss

The European Union finds itself in a bind. Donald Trump’s reintroduction of sanctions against Iran has left European diplomats desperately scrambling to salvage twelve years of nuclear diplomacy. On Friday, Jean-Claude Juncker underlined the EU’s commitment to keeping the deal alive, saying that ‘Europeans must keep their word and not give in to a change of mood, just because others are doing so’. The EU has its work cut out, but is using every tool in its arsenal to prevent Trump from undoing its efforts. A blocking statute previously levied in the 1990s has been updated and re-initiated, allowing European companies doing business with Iran to recover damages in court. Last month, Brussels

The news that the US, Canada and Mexico have agreed a new trade deal, USMCA, may have caused a little surprise this morning among Trump critics. Isn’t the US President supposed to be leading the world into a new dark age of protectionism, sparking a 1930s-style depression as he puts the interests of a few blue collar workers in rustbelt industries above the health of the US and global economies as a whole? Yet for anyone who has been following Trump’s methodology the news shouldn’t really have caught them unawares. Trump, it is true, was elected thanks in part to promises to protect US workers from unfair foreign competition. Yet

President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to increase trade. Under his wise rule, he assures us, American trade will thrive. It will be Yuge! Why would anyone doubt that desire? He’s a businessman and businessmen want to do more business not less. In pursuit of this, Trump has also said that that he favours a low or no tariff world, but that it must be based on reciprocity – an easily understandable form of fairness but one which has earned Trump scorn from right, left, and centre. The subject came up at a dinner I attended recently. It was mostly populated by right of centre journalists

The obvious reaction to Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw the US from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is that it isn’t exactly going to help the Brexiteers’ cause. For months they have been arguing that everything will be okay in the event of a ‘no deal’ Brexit – we will simply trade under WTO rules. And then comes along the leader of the world’s largest economy and says he wants out of that organisation, threatening its existence, or at least its position as the undisputed arbiter of global trade. But then another thought springs to mind, with even more severe repercussions for the world: Donald Trump is becoming predictable. We