Donald trump

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Sign of the times

As if on cue, The World At One on Monday (Radio 4) ended with a short (too short) interview with an Austrian documentary film-maker who recently made a film about Brunhilde Pomsel, secretary to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The announcement of her death in Munich, aged 106, prompted the conversation, which happened to follow all the stories about the repercussions of President Trump’s executive order banning those from certain countries from entering the US. The significance was not lost on the ever-astute Martha Kearney. Florian Weigensamer described Pomsel in great age as ‘just incredible’. She was ‘quick-witted, funny, a great storyteller’. But, said Kearney, ‘She was working at the

Michael Beloff

Another challenge for Trump

James D. Zirin is an experienced litigator as well as the host of a popular television talkshow. In this provocative polemic he uses skills developed both from behind the bar and in front of the camera to mount the charge that the US Supreme Court is a political court. How far does his evidence support his claim? In 1803 Chief Justice Marshall invented the doctrine of judicial review, by which the Supreme Court had the right to strike down Acts of Congress and executive action as inconsistent with the constitution. Inevitably, it then became involved in issues that were heavily political. In 1857 the court upheld the property rights of

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

My pick for the pious political hypocrite of the week award

I would like to propose Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as the winner of the pious political hypocrite of the week badge for her response to President Trump’s temporary immigration halt. From today’s Guardian we learn that Ms Siddiq is one of a number of Labour MPs who have warned that the UK Prime Minister’s allegedly ‘feeble’ response to President Trump’s recent immigration order risks making UK Muslim communities feel ‘disenfranchised and disillusioned.’ Apparently the consequences of this failure could be ‘played out on our streets’ and ‘turning a blind eye to the reality of this ban we run the risk of losing the trust of an entire generation of young British Muslims.’ Now

Tuesday

Matt Purple

Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ is nothing of the sort, but what the hell is going on?

Among Donald Trump’s many neologisms is the ‘What the hell is going on’ evidentiary standard. It was introduced by Trump during his presidential campaign as his biggest dare yet: ‘a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on’. A high hurdle to clear, no doubt, and a controversial idea. Whether it would ever be implemented was unknown—after Trump’s election the Muslim ban was scrubbed from his website, then restored, with a spokesman blaming a technical glitch. Now we have our answers. Fleshed into public policy, figuring out ‘what the hell is going on’ means the government

Tom Gross

The self-righteous backlash to Trump’s immigration ban could play into his hands

Donald Trump’s executive order which, he says, was aimed at making it harder for terrorists to enter America, targets three groups: refugees in general, who are blocked from entering the U.S. for the next 120 days; refugees from Syria, who may be barred indefinitely; and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries (countries initially selected by the Obama administration), who are barred from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days. The executive order is morally unacceptable (it amounts to collective punishment), strategically dubious (since many terrorists are home-grown or came from countries other than those seven), and was initially implemented in a confusing and clumsy way which caused distress and uncertainty

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Nine questions those protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration ban must answer

I wonder whether there might be any long-term effects from shouting ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘misogynist’ all the time? It is possible that it is hard to think while your fingers are in your ears and you are shouting names at everybody. I just put the thought out there. Certainly the consequences of not thinking much seem to be all around us.  Though the Trump administration has decided to put temporary travel restrictions on people from certain countries, the policy seems to have certain internal inconsistencies. For instance, as Gordon Brown said in 2008, 75 per cent of Britain’s security threats originate from Pakistan. As anybody involved in the American security apparatus in

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Brexit’s day of reckoning and why Trump’s critics are wrong

At last, says the Guardian, MPs will finally have a proper say today on Brexit. David Davis has said the debate comes down to a simple question: do we trust the people? But for the Guardian, it’s a mistake for MPs and peers not to try and ‘get in the way’ of pushing the triggering of Article 50 back beyond Theresa May’s ‘self-imposed deadline’ of the end of March. It’s clear that the outcome of last June’s referendum left Parliament reeling: ‘casually drafted regulations’ backed up the vote and ‘with no leave process mapped out, the Commons failed to muster the resolve to force its way into the process of

Monday

Steerpike

Rachel Johnson slaps down her brother over Trump’s visa ban

After Theresa May’s seemingly successful visit to the White House, the Prime Minister has been accused of failing to stand up to President Trump over his visa ban. What’s more, No 10 has said there are no plans to cancel his state visit despite growing protests over the event. Now the Foreign Secretary is also under fire. Although Boris Johnson has received some praise for his announcement that British dual citizens (of the seven countries on the ban list) can visit America, it’s not enough to please his sister Rachel. After Boris declared that the government would ‘protect the rights and freedoms of UK nationals home and abroad’, his sister stepped

Sunday

Katy Balls

Theresa May discovers the problem with events

This weekend Theresa May discovered why it is a prime minister most fears events. After a well executed two-day charm offensive in America cementing the UK/US special relationship, the Prime Minister was plunged into a row over President Trump’s decision to stop travellers and refugees from seven Muslim countries gaining entry into the US. May’s sluggish response to condemn the move (after initially dodging the question in a press conference in Turkey) has led to her being branded ‘Theresa the appeaser’. As Jeremy Corbyn appeared on Peston on Sunday to put pressure on the Prime Minister over her relationship with Trump, May borrowed a trick from Osborne and sent David Gauke to try and clear up

Saturday

James Forsyth

A US / UK free trade deal is the big prize for Theresa May

Theresa May’s team will be basking this morning in the write-ups of her successful visit to Washington. As I say in The Sun this morning, the big prize for her is a US / UK free trade deal. Government ministers think that, given the political will on both sides, the deal could be negotiated in just eight months. There is also confidence in Whitehall that the US will be prepared to grant an exemption for public services which would ‘protect’ the NHS. This should do much to reduce the intensity of the opposition to the deal. Trump’s protectionist rhetoric is often cited as a reason why a US / UK

Thursday

Peter Jones

Beyond words | 26 January 2017

In his inaugural speech last week, the new President Trump said, among much else, the ‘American carnage’ of poverty, ignorance and criminal gangs ‘stops right here and stops right now’. Since nobody with the slightest intelligence would offer such hostages to fortune, there is no point in paying attention to what he says, any more than to what he tweets. This disrespect for words would have appalled the ancient Greeks, who were well aware of the power of language, both for good and ill. The sophist Gorgias, for example (d. c. 380 bc), talked of the superhuman might of logos (‘speech, utterance’) which was such that it could make you

Taki

High life | 26 January 2017

 Gstaad The snows came tumbling down just as the camel-drivers headed back to the Gulf. In fact, they never saw the white outdoor stuff. And a good thing it was, too. The outdoor stuff makes everything look so pretty that the glitzy types might have been tempted to return. God forbid. Let them stick to the indoor white stuff. The problem with Gstaad is the local council. They remind me of the EU: they’re intransigent, short-sighted and stick to a losing game. In Brussels they keep passing more and more laws and regulations. In Gstaad, they keep putting up their prices and building more and more apartments. As a gentleman

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 26 January 2017

I keep finding myself singing ‘Nellie the elephant’ who, packing her trunk and saying goodbye to the circus, went off ‘with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, trump’. I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to the jungle whence he came; for irrespective of whatever he does in government, even if some of it proves to be beneficial, he is unworthy to be president. The president is not only the country’s chief executive and commander-in-chief; he is the symbol of national unity and the protector of the American constitution, and he has already failed in both these last two roles. His

Dot Wordsworth

Carnage

‘This carnage stops here,’ declared the headline in the Daily Telegraph, quoting President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. My husband tried to make little jokes about it. ‘Would you buy a used carnage from this man?’ was probably the best, by which you can imagine the standard of the others. I wondered when I first read it what slaughter or butchery Mr Trump was referring to. ‘This American carnage stops right here’ were the exact words. Immediately beforehand he had been talking of ‘mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape’, a poor education system and the harm done by gangs

Toby Young Toby Young

Would I still hate actors’ rants if they all agreed with me?

I feel a bit sorry for Piers Morgan. On Tuesday, Ewan McGregor was due to appear on the sofa with Piers on ITV’s Good Morning to talk about the Trainspotting sequel, but he failed to turn up. Later, the actor explained on Twitter that it was due to the journalist’s remarks about the women’s marches that took place last weekend, in which he described some of the participants as ‘rabid feminists’ and suggested he should organise a men’s march in response. I had a similar experience about five years ago when the actor Matthew Macfadyen pulled out of an interview he was due to do with me. Like McGregor, he

The Spectator

Barometer | 26 January 2017

Nuclear near-misses It was revealed that last June an unarmed Trident missile test-fired off Florida from a British submarine headed in the wrong direction, towards the US. Some other accidents involving nuclear weapons: 24 Jan 1961 A B52 bomber exploded in mid-air after taking off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Three of the four activation devices on one of the two hydrogen bombs it was carrying were turned on. 8 Dec 1964 A B-58 caught fire on the ground at Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana. The nuclear bomb on board was burned but did not explode. 18 Sept 1980 A worker at Little Rock

The Spectator

Trading places | 26 January 2017

After any other US election it would cause little comment that the new president had chosen the British Prime Minister for his first meeting with a foreign leader. Yet this time, Theresa May’s trip to Washington feels quite a coup. She has fallen out of favour with her fellow EU leaders, sent home from December’s summit in Brussels without any supper as they tried to portray her as internationally isolated. Yet here she is being invited to the White House, lured with the promise of a trade deal. How long ago it seems that Barack Obama was threatening to send Britain to the ‘back of the queue’ if the country

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A Berlin Wall moment for political correctness

Because we’re all so obsessed with what it was that made the Nazis tick, we tend to overlook the bigger mystery of how hundreds of millions of people, for a period considerably longer than the lifespan of Hitler’s Germany, remained under the spell of communism. This is a question that Czeslaw Milosz set out to answer in his 1953 classic The Captive Mind. Milosz was a Polish poet, prominent in the underground during the Nazi occupation, who served as a cultural attaché with Poland’s post-war communist regime before quitting in disgust and fleeing to the US, where he taught at Berkeley and achieved eminence as a Nobel-prize-winning dissident exile. What

Liam Halligan

Keynes’s grandchild

‘Did you really deserve the Nobel prize?’ I ask Amartya Sen. ‘Why do you think you won?’ When you’re sitting opposite the world’s most respected living economist, at a time when the dismal science is under intense scrutiny, an opening question should be punchy. Thankfully, Sen, an 83-year-old Harvard professor, has a sense of humour. ‘You can’t ask me that,’ he says with a grin. ‘I have absolutely no idea why I won.’ He then composes himself. ‘Like any researcher, I’m happy if my work interests others,’ he says carefully. ‘But it would be a pretty bad way to conduct one’s life, thinking about how to win prizes, rather than

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Washington Notebook | 26 January 2017

On Wednesday afternoon I went to the British embassy in Washington for ‘a tea and champagne reception’ to mark the inauguration of President Trump. Like most institutions, the embassy has struggled to come to terms with the Donald. We all know (thanks to Twitter) that Trump wants Nigel Farage to be the UK representative in DC, which must leave the current ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch, feeling a bit tense. Still, Sir Kim managed to draw some big Republican beasts to his party: Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich to name but four. Everybody said the special relationship was very special — they would, wouldn’t they? — and