Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
The bitterly cold conditions in Iowa today have at least given journalists something to talk about. There’s a distinct lack of political drama, given everyone expects today’s Republican caucuses to be a blowout win for Donald Trump. The main questions of interest are: will Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis finish second? And will Trump break
36 min listen
This week: can anyone stop Trump? The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray takes a look at Trump’s ‘second coming’ in his cover story. He says that despite Trump’s legal troubles, he is almost certain to receive the Republican nomination. Freddy joins the podcast alongside Amber Duke, who also writes in the magazine this week about the
36 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Daniel McCarthy, editor of the conservative review Modern Age, about all things Donald Trump. Do his ongoing trials help or hinder his campaign? Do the Democrats want him to be the Republican candidate or not? And is there a bureaucratic ‘permanent power’ that Trump would overthrow if he succeeds? The Spectator
Donald Trump has dominated Republican politics for so long that it can be hard to remember the time when he did not. It’s easy to forget that at the beginning of 2016 he started the Republican primary process by losing the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, his more conservative rival. ‘He stole it,’ Trump tweeted
23 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by pollster James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners. They speak about the upcoming Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and whether Trump’s opponents have any chance of beating him. They also discuss the impact of Trump’s trials, and JL Partners’ viral word cloud which both Biden and Trump have been attempting
It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, 5 January, the US President will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to mark the third anniversary of the riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021. He would have done it on the day but the event had to be rescheduled due to
52 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to classicist, military historian and author Victor Davis Hanson. In an end of year review, they talk about antisemitism in the US today, the battle between right and left since 2016, and a potential future Trump presidency.
Does kicking a popular candidate off the electoral ballot protect democracy? Or is that in fact deeply anti-democratic? These are the questions that many Americans are pondering today after Colorado’s Supreme Court voted four to three to block Donald Trump from running in its state in the election next year, citing the insurrection clause in
Nikki Haley is now the favourite ‘not Donald Trump’ candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The former Ambassador to the United Nations has been making a big push among Republicans in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s primary vote on 23 January. And her efforts seem to be paying off.
25 min listen
The House of Representatives has voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, after three Republican-led committees alleged bribery and corruption during his time as vice-president. Could it actually be good news for Biden? Freddy speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn.
‘If Trump wasn’t running,’ said Joe Biden last week, ‘I’m not sure I’d be running.’ That’s a curiously uninspiring remark for an American leader seeking re-election to make. Yet ever since 2019, Biden’s pitch for the presidency has been essentially negative: if you don’t support me, you’ll get him. The trouble for Joe is that,
Hunter Biden was lost and now he’s found. That was the subtext of the president’s prodigal son’s speech outside Congress yesterday. ‘For six years, I have been the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine shouting ‘Where’s Hunter?’,’ Hunter Biden told reporters. ‘Well, here is my answer, I am here.’ If Hunter’s statement was meant
21 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to journalist and author Niko Vorobyov who wrote Dopeworld: Undercover in the secret war on drugs. 90 years after Prohibition ended, what are some of the biggest misperception about that era? And what has been the legacy of repealing the 18th amendment?
25 min listen
World leaders are in Dubai this weekend to discuss climate change, but are these Cop summits pointless? Joe Biden isn’t attending this year’s get together, allegedly because he’s focusing on the war between Israel and Hamas. Meanwhile, there have been reports that the Emiratis are using the convening power of the summit to sign new
Sans Trump, the Republican presidential debates of 2023 have mostly been piddling contests in a shallow pool. We’ve seen nasty insults — most aimed at or directed by Vivek Ramaswamy — and that’s fun to watch. But you can catch those bits on social media and the rest hasn’t been worth tuning in for. Maybe
Geert Wilders’s victory is another slap-in-the-face moment for the European Union. The complexities of Dutch democracy may mean that he struggles to form a strong government. But his victory, which seemed impossible just a few weeks ago, reminds us that, whether we like it or not, anti-immigration politics is the most potent force in 21st
Freddy Gray talks to McKay Coppins, author of the New York Times bestselling book ‘Romney: A Reckoning’. Romney has announced he will not seek reelection in 2024. What next for the ‘never-Trumper’, could he support the creation of a new centrist party? And how does he feel about the significant losses in his career?
42 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by Patrick Ruffini, pollster and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP to discuss who could be a serious competitor to Trump.
Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in
Not so long ago, Republicans called Democrats the ‘party of abortion’ as an insult, or a pre-election attack line. Now, it is the Republicans, as the party against abortion, who are losing. This is a grim reality for Americans who believe that the unborn deserve protection. Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the
