Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
One of the myths about Donald Trump is that he’s wildly unpredictable. In media terms, he’s an absolute banker: everywhere he goes, every time he opens his mouth or picks up his smartphone, he gives the press what we want. Take his glorious interview with the Sun this morning. It was timed to perfection. The
PART I President Donald Trump is less than impressed with Theresa May’s Brexit plan, it seems. ‘I’m not sure that’s what they voted for,’ he says. But how would he do Brexit? Boris Johnson said recently ‘Imagine Trump doing Brexit — what would he do. There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. Ahead of the Nato summit in Brussels today, Donald Trump had spent the last two days tweeting about the iniquity of Nato and the trade deficits between the EU and his country. He had singled out Germany for not contributing enough to Nato’s defence budget, and three times mentioned a
Uh oh – Poor Theresa. You know that when Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world, tells the media that you and he have a ‘very good relationship’, it means he doesn’t like you at all. It’s what he said about Theresa May this morning, just before he left for Europe. It’s also
Trump says he likes things ‘nice and complicated’ – well, in that case, he couldn’t be coming to Britain at a better time. Theresa May’s newly hatched soft Brexit plan, announced on Friday, has triggered two major resignations from her cabinet and another political crisis in Britain. David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, went late last
Last summer, the crowds in the fields at Glastonbury Festival filmed themselves chanting ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. It was the fashionable political statement of the summer. This year, there’s no Glastonbury — those fields lie fallow — and Corbyn-mania suddenly feels very 2017. Britain’s Instagram-addled middle classes are eager for a substitute form of mass entertainment
The stories are filed, the pictures are posted, and the media verdict is almost unanimous: separating children from their parents is wrong, it is unAmerican, and President Donald Trump is going to suffer for it. His administration is baby-snatching. The ‘optics’ are terrible, say the hyperventilating PR men and Washington know-alls. But if everybody stops
The stories are filed, the pictures are posted, and the media verdict is almost unanimous: separating children from their parents is wrong, it is unAmerican, and President Donald Trump is going to suffer for it. His administration is baby-snatching. The ‘optics’ are terrible, say the hyperventilating PR men and Washington know-alls. But if everybody stops
‘Imagine Trump doing Brexit — what would he do?’ asked the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, at that dinner which was recorded and leaked to Buzzfeed. ‘There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think that he’d gone mad. But you might actually get somewhere.’ Well, let’s imagine. What follows, brought to
Barack Obama tried to be the first Pacific President. He attempted to pivot America’s grand strategy eastwards in order to adapt to a changing world. He failed, by and large. After his meeting with Kim Jong-un today, Donald Trump has shown that he is moving further east. In fact, Trump could be turning into the
Barack Obama tried to be the first Pacific President. He attempted to pivot America’s grand strategy eastwards in order to adapt to a changing world. He failed, by and large. After his meeting with Kim Jong-un today, Donald Trump has shown that he is moving further east. In fact, Trump could be turning into the first truly Global
You can tell when Donald Trump has just achieved something: he starts being strangely amiable, and his critics start frothing at the mouth. He’s just met supposedly one of the most dangerous, evil men in the world — and made him look like a sweet overgrown child. He and Kim Jong-un just signed an agreement
If the BBC really is, as Steve Bannon says, a communications department of the global elite, they messed up badly last night. Emily Maitlis’s 20-minute long interview with Bannon on Newsnight was mesmerising television — even, or especially, if you can’t bear the subject. It was also the longest advertisement for economic nationalism yet delivered to
Did anybody really think President Donald J Trump wasn’t going to pull out of the Iran deal? He’s said all along he would and this Commander-in-Chief’s number one public image rule is that, unlike most politicians, he honours his word. Trump’s other big rule is that anything Obama has done he’ll undo. And Obama’s biggest achievement,
From 2009 to 2010 Sven Hughes worked for SCL group, the parent company of the controversial — now deceased — Cambridge Analytica. SCL/Cambridge Analytica and its CEO Alexander Nix have been in the news a lot lately, chiefly because of their role in the Trump campaign. The fall of Cambridge Analytica was prompted by a
As I’ve said before, but it needs saying again because these people never stop — the let’s-bomb-Syria brigade has never quite gotten over the horror of being rebuffed by Parliament in 2013. And this week, what with the latest reported use of chemical weapons by Assad in Syria, they’ve got their tails up again. We don’t
Remember the never-ending handshake? It was 14 July 2017, Bastille Day, and Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump opened their formal relationship as leaders of their respective countries by interlocking palms and refusing to let go. They kept at it for a good 30 seconds. They didn’t release even as Trump began kissing Macron’s wife. It
You could call it the John Bolton effect. The President’s new National Security Adviser has only been in the job a few days, and already Donald Trump is threatening war with Russia on Twitter: SMART! One can almost imagine Bolton’s moustache brushing Trump’s ear on that one. Trump didn’t talk about Russia like that before.
Nobody likes the sound of trade war, and rightly so. China’s new retaliatory tariffs moves against US products feel like the beginning of something bad: an escalating tit-for-tat trade conflict between the world’s richest countries which could choke the global economy. But there are good reasons to think that, far from being another silly move
The Cambridge Analytica story is full of hot air. Everybody delights in talking about how scary Facebook is, and lots of people believe the Donald Trump and Brexit campaigns somehow hoodwinked whole electorates — because, well, how else could they have won? We hear about creepy and sophisticated–sounding techniques such as ‘micro-targeting’ and ‘psychographics’. But
