Donald trump

New York Alexandra rang me from London to enquire about a man by the name of Klaus Schwab: ‘He sounds like the greatest threat of our time. Should I be worried?’ ‘Nah,’ I answered. ‘He’s just another typical smooth-talking, smarmy Davos Man. ‘That’s what scares me,’ said the wife. For the very few of you who have not heard of Klausie baby, he is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, or WEF, a grandiose title and well deserved to be sure, although it once created a social media video that contained the slogan: ‘You will own nothing, And you’ll be happy.’ The WEF is where technocratic

‘I know Vladimir Putin very well,’ said Donald Trump yesterday, speaking of the Ukraine crisis, ‘he would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now.’ As with a lot of Trump utterances, that statement is at once arrogant, preposterous — and probably true. Maybe it is a coincidence — or Trump’s often-cited luck — that the last major crisis over Ukraine was back in 2014, after Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and Putin annexed Crimea. Or perhaps not. Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognised Back then Barack Obama led the free world and, busy as he was, he offloaded

Donald Trump famously boasted that he could ‘stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody’ and still not lose voters. That was back in 2016 and the following years proved his point. We are now in the winter of 2021, however, and the 45th president may at last have stumbled across a way to alienate his fan base — by endorsing vaccines. Covid is today the most hostile frontline in America’s all-consuming culture war. Resistance to the national vaccination drive has become the stickiest point. You are either pro-freedom or in bed with the Great Globo Pharma Conspiracy. Trump has adopted a more middle-ground position: encouraging people to take the vaccines while

Less than a year into the Biden presidency the world suddenly is a very chaotic place. The hasty and botched US exit from Afghanistan has created a terrorist-led state. Iran is ploughing forward with its nuclear plans. Russia has leverage over European energy supplies. Communist China is no longer hiding its totalitarian nature and global ambitions. And yet the US, UK, Germany and other major democracies seem more concerned about climate change and what may or may not happen 100 or more years from now than tackling the very serious threats to the free world’s national security today. This dangerous moment is what the late George Shultz dubbed a ‘hinge

Do you remember the president who gave Vladimir Putin everything he wanted in Europe? The president who consistently ignored the advice of military experts, hoarded Covid vaccines, peddled nativist rhetoric about American manufacturing, turned Washington, DC into an 80s sci-fi dystopia during his inauguration, expressed his astonishment at the number of interracial couples on television, and planned a mass deportation of Haitian refugees fleeing an earthquake, a hurricane, and a coup? Readers of The Spectator are clever enough to know that I am talking not about Donald Trump but Joe Biden. For months now I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void: Biden is everything Trump wanted to be.

Joe Biden is facing what will likely be the defining event of his presidency. The gains made in Afghanistan are evaporating in record time under his watch. But Biden doesn’t want to be a foreign policy president. He wants to be the man who ended wars, taking credit for America’s Covid recovery, funnelling trillions of dollars into infrastructure and education while the Federal Reserve’s printing presses are warmed up and there’s still appetite to spend. But like his Democrat predecessor — and the man whom he served as vice president — he has been dealt a different hand. President Obama was loath to see the atrocities taking place in Syria