Daniel McCarthy

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

How a Latino wave carried Trump to victory

Donald Trump’s victory this time may not be the surprise that his 2016 win was, but for his critics it’s even more of a shock. Trump has been impeached, arrested, convicted, shot at, and relentlessly demonised as a ‘fascist’ over the last four years. None of that was enough to stop him. Just the opposite:

A ripple, not a wave, will decide the US election

What can the 2020 and 2016 elections, the previous votes in which Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, tell us about today’s race for the White House? There are three layers to a presidential election, only two of which really matter. The overall ‘popular’ vote only counts for bragging rights. Trump has never won it.

Can Trump ‘Get Out the Vote’?

35 min listen

Freddy keeps up Americano tradition by speaking to Daniel McCarthy ahead of the election. On the podcast they discuss how Trump’s get-out-the-vote project is working and the impact low-propensity voters could have on the result, whether this election will be plagued by inefficiencies in the American electoral system and if J.D. Vance is actually the

Vibes don’t matter. Donald Trump is still the underdog

Hillary Clinton has a simple but bitter lesson to teach Donald Trump’s supporters in 2024: the best way to lose an election is to assume you’ve already won it a week before it happens.  ​The MAGA movement ­– aiming to Make America Great Again, namely by Making Trump President Again – has never been more

Who is the new House Speaker?

29 min listen

Amber Athey and Daniel McCarthy editor of Modern Age Journal and columnist at The Spectator join the Americano podcast to breakdown the long House speaker battle which has finally culminated in Trumpist Mike Johnson getting selected.  

The brave new world of artificial wombs

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take place within a test tube, and incubators have pushed back the earliest time when prematurely born infants can survive outside of the womb. We can edit genes and modify animal organs for successful implantation into

Will Donald Trump run again?

35 min listen

2022 has only just begun but a lot of minds in American politics are already looking towards the next presidential election in 2024. For the Republicans, the big question is will Donald Trump be their nominee and if he isn’t who will fill that very large hole? Freddy Gray sits down with the editor of

January 6 was an alarm bell for America

If you’re tired of hypochondriac journalists’ takes on January 6, then try Thomas Jefferson’s. He delivered his judgment on events of that sort back in 1787. ‘I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,’ he wrote to James Madison, ‘and as necessary in the political world as storms in

The vanishing presidency

Joe Biden is beginning to feel like an ex-president after only nine months in office. The last two Democrats to occupy the White House, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, arrived with a spirit of renewal, not to mention tremendous legislative ambitions. Biden came in with a spirit of reversal: he was not Trump. His selling

The War on Terror is a war of religion

Compare the world 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to the world two decades after Pearl Harbour. World War Two was a vivid presence in popular culture and national memory in 1961, but America in the first year of John F. Kennedy’s administration was in no sense living in the shadow of Japan’s attack. That

Joe Biden’s party is over

Washington, DC The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won the last presidential election with a record 81 million votes. But the exiguous margins of their hold on the House and Senate, with fewer than 51 per cent of the seats in either

What does Trump want now? Revenge — and a second term

The figure of the ex-president is one of the most endearingly republican features of American politics. He who was the most powerful man in the world for as many as eight years turns overnight into a political fossil. He’s no longer the leader of his party, much less his country. Whether in his fifties or

The persistent myth of a non-political Supreme Court

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a terrible blow to Democrats, but there is an important point to be considered – the principled arguments Democrats made in 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia prevail. Democrats insisted that the Scalia vacancy should be filled swiftly by President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, but

After Trump, the reckoning

As voters prepare to pass judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency in November, they might want to entertain a few counterfactuals. Imagine that Russia had annexed Crimea during the Trump years rather than while Obama was president. MSNBC and other left-wing media would have hawked claims that Trump actively conspired with Putin to let the Russian

Joe Biden’s Republican Convention

Joe Biden’s range of emotional expression has narrowed with age – when he wants to convey feeling now, he shouts. Anger is the only thing that gets through, even when he’s trying to be hopeful or inspiring. And his acceptance remarks at the Democratic convention were well short of inspirational: the nominee didn’t seem tired,

Why Jeff Sessions lost to a Trump-backed candidate

32 min listen

With Daniel McCarthy, contributor to Spectator USA and editor of Modern Age. On the podcast, he talks to Freddy Gray about how Sessions was defeated by the new cyborg that is the Republican party — half-Trump, half-GOP machine of old, and what this means for Trump’s re-election prospects.

Could Joe Biden be the Hillary Clinton of 2020?

The 2020 struggle for the White House is shaping up to look a lot like the 2016 contest. Once more the Democratic field is narrowing to Bernie Sanders and an establishment Democrat who lays claim to Barack Obama’s legacy—this time Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, rather than his first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. And

What Donald Trump must learn from Boris Johnson’s triumph

Donald Trump has reason to feel good about the British election. The success of the Brexit referendum in June 2016 was the harbinger of Trump’s own sensational victory against Hillary Clinton five months later. Will history now repeat itself, with Boris Johnson’s triumph heralding Trump’s re-election? What connected Brexit to the Trump-Clinton race was the stagnation

Democrats don’t want to impeach Trump

Democrats are eager for the 2020 election to be defined by something other than the issues. The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 is well remembered as a partisan fiasco. Yet the attempted impeachment of President Trump is off to an even more partisan beginning: Republicans in 1998 succeeded in winning over many House Democrats