Donald trump

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Making America crass again

Elsie de Wolfe was the pioneer interior designer whose motto was ‘plenty of optimism and white paint’. She banished brown Victoriana from America. And her work on Henry Clay Frick’s private apartments introduced new American money to old French furniture. If only she were with us today. For his first television interview as president-elect, Donald Trump appeared, imperiously, sitting on a golden throne in the style of Louis Quinze. My vision may well have been blurred by circumstances beyond, but I think there were period-incorrect wall and ceiling paintings on classical-allegorical themes in the background. All of this on cantilevered decks behind mirrored glass about 200 metres above Fifth Avenue.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Ten questions of sport

1. Can anyone explain why England wore dark blue, not white, for the autumn international against Argentina, just as they did against Fiji? Is there anybody in the whole country, other than the marketing department at the Rugby Football Union, who thinks it is a good idea to change England shirts for no other reason than to fleece the public whose children might want to wear one? Why don’t England stick to their proper colours: would the Springboks change, or Australia, or would the All Blacks become the All Purples? Seven different shirts in two years! Come off it.   2. Is the ongoing spat between Ben Stokes and Virat

Wednesday

Charlotte Gill

The fashion world had no moral compass – until Melania Trump came along

Will someone please dress Melania Trump? She looks like something out of The Only Way is Essex in those tight-fitting, mono-coloured dresses, matched with the plastic smile. But the fashion industry will not intervene, for its members have discovered a moral conscience. Designers including Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford and Derek Lam have made known their extreme reluctance to deal with America’s future First Lady. ‘I’d rather put my energy into helping out those who will be hurt by Trump and his supporters,’ said Jacobs. Separately, Lam stated that he would ‘rather concentrate [his] energies on efforts towards a more just, honourable and a mutually respectful world.’ Who knew these fashion leaders

Thursday

Peter Jones

Aristophanes on Trump

As self-important comics fantasise about unseating Donald Trump with their wit, they should remember the great Aristophanes. In 424 BC, he presented a comedy about the controversial politician Cleon. He was (apparently) the son of a tanner (ugh!), and was seen by contemporaries, including the historian Thucydides, as a ‘brutal’, ‘insolent’ but ‘very persuasive’ braggart — and all too successful. The play opens with two slaves driven out of their house after a beating by their new master Paphlagon (Cleon); he has risen to power by fawning on and flattering the gullible and senile Demos (‘the people’) and telling outrageous lies about his political rivals. So far, so Trump. In

Taki

High life | 1 December 2016

Richard Spencer made the front page of the New York Times two days in a row last week, and earned a half-page report on the third day. For any of you who have never heard of him — and very few have — he is described by the mendacious Times as the leader of the ‘white nationalist movement’, a movement not too many of us who believe in the white race are aware of. Let’s start at the beginning. After I ‘sold’ the American Conservative magazine to a man called Uns for one dollar — I have kept the cheque and will cash it only if in terrible need —

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Diary – 1 December 2016

It is odd when someone you know becomes a world-famous Nazi. You may not recognise the name Richard Spencer, but my bet is you soon will. He’s an American white-power activist who is often billed as the inventor of the ‘alt-right’. In the age of Trump, when everyone is panicking about the rise of extremism and the end of liberal democracy, he commands a lot of attention. Spencer has emerged as a media anti-darling — a hardcore version of the gay British controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos, whom I also know a little. (Hark at my social life.) Milo does the camp feminist-and-Islam-baiting thing; Richard is a full-on white supremacist. They both

Luke Coppen

Ultimate fighting president

Last month a rich, boastful alpha male savoured the greatest victory of his life in New York City. Almost no one thought he could do it, but he made it look easy. In the build-up he ridiculed his opponent mercilessly and feuded with enemies on Twitter. ‘I’d like to take this chance to apologise,’ he said straight after his win, ‘to absolutely nobody!’ This wasn’t Trump Tower, but Madison Square Garden. Conor McGregor had just become the first two-weight champion in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) history. Thanks to the Irishman, who combines the athletic talent of Muhammad Ali with the comic ferocity of Bill Hicks, the event broke the arena’s

Paul Wood

The Brits behind Trump

It’s the Brits wot won it. That is, the US presidential election was won for Donald Trump with the help of a bunch of British nerds — data scientists from a company called Cambridge Analytica. This was the claim, at least, made by the company in a press release a couple of days after the election. ‘No one saw it coming. The public polls, the experts, and the pundits: just about every-body got it wrong. They were wrong-footed because they didn’t understand who was going to turn out and vote. Except for Cambridge Analytica…’ Frank Luntz, a famous pollster and one of those so embarrassingly mistaken, said: ‘They figured out

Thursday

Christopher Caldwell

Diary – 24 November 2016

 Washington DC Washington has been, for the past two weeks, indescribably depressed. When I walked into the deli down the street to buy a bag of cookies, a neighbour who was having coffee with her girlfriends hailed me. ‘Are you as despondent as the rest of us?’ she asked. I told her: ‘No, I’m not.’ But that has been true since we moved into the neighbourhood 20 years ago. The students at the nearby Wilson High School ‘Human Rights Club’ staged a walkout a week ago. ‘We will march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Trump Hotel,’ they announced. ‘We will then stand before the building and hold hands.’ You would

Taki

High life | 24 November 2016

 New York   If only my wordsmith friend Jeremy Clarke had been with me. What fun he’d have had with the ungallant thing I did last week. Jeremy’s writing thrives on such occasions, but alas he’s in the land of cheese and impressionism. I had just finished lunch with my friend Alex Sepkus, a designer of unique jewellery, and a Catholic priest whose name I will not reveal in view of what followed. After all, the Catholic Church loves sinners, but hooliganism is discouraged. I was walking up Fifth Avenue, which was packed to the gills with shoppers, hawkers and tourists. When I got to 56th Street, it was blocked

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 November 2016

It is not self-evidently ridiculous that Nigel Farage should be the next British ambassador to the United States. The wishes of the president-elect should not automatically be discounted. John F. Kennedy’s wish that his friend David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) should be ambassador was granted. It is also not true that the post must be filled by a professional, or that the Prime Minister should not appoint a political rival to the post. Churchill gave the job to his main rival, Lord Halifax, from 1940. Certainly Mr Farage is not the conventional idea of a diplomat, but then Mr Trump is not the conventional idea of a president. Although its own

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 24 November 2016

Do you remember Liberace? Yes, of course you do. Who could forget him? The Wisconsin-born son of a poor Italian immigrant, Liberace turned a natural talent for playing the piano into a vehicle for achieving celebrity and wealth. As a child, he was regarded as something of a musical prodigy, but he wasn’t tempted by success as a concert pianist. He sought and achieved stardom by transforming himself into a bizarre showman, extravagantly dressed in lace and velvet, bejewelled with enormous rings, playing an equally bejewelled grand piano with a candelabra placed on it, and engaging in constant joking banter with the audience. He himself said, ‘I don’t give concerts,

Rob Crilly

Donald Trump might be going soft but his supporters don’t seem to mind

‘Mister Softie’, screams the headline on the New York Daily News, with Donald Trump’s luxurious comb-over transformed into an ice-cream twist. The president elect is back-pedalling, flip-flopping and cozying up to his enemies. Going soft. Before he has even taken up residence in the White House, America’s liberal media has declared Trump a traitor to the millions of people who delivered a shock election win. The reason is Tuesday’s lunchtime chat with the New York Times, in which he said he wasn’t that fussed about locking up Hillary Clinton, suggested he had an open mind on climate change and rather toned down his support of torture in the fight against terrorism. It is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain’s winning hand

On the morning after the European Union referendum, Britain looked like a country in crisis. The Prime Minister had resigned, Scotland’s first minister was talking about a second independence referendum and the FTSE was in free fall. In several EU capitals, there was an assumption that, when the Brexit talks began, Britain would be the new Greece: a country that could ill afford to reject any deal offered by the EU, no matter how humiliating. In the days following the vote, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, declared that Britain had just ‘collapsed — politically, economically, monetarily and constitutionally’. Five months on, Britain is in a stronger position than Rutte

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The pick-up artists who seduced a country

Many years ago, when I was a mere slip of a features journalist, I spent a weekend learning how to be a pick-up artist. Amazing. You assume it won’t work, that sort of thing, but it totally did. Towards the end of the second night, having not said an unscripted word in about half an hour, I found myself in the VIP room of a London nightclub, being gazed at in rapt adoration by a wildly attractive twentysomething blonde. Seriously, people don’t normally look at me like that. It was special. And then I ran away, terrified, because I had a girlfriend. My guide through all this was a man

Melanie Phillips

The devil they know

You will, by now, be familiar with the argument: that Donald Trump’s triumph in the American presidential election represents a kind of social and political apocalypse. That his victory came at the hands of fundamentally irrational, bigoted, disgusting extreme right-wingers beyond the pale of civilised values. It is axiomatic that there can’t be any good reason behind voting for him, so it is assumed that 60 million Americans were duped by ‘fake news’ which must now be suppressed altogether. In fact, the real ‘fake news’ was pumped out relentlessly by publications such as the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian and many other similar left-wing outlets which descended into hysterical denunciation

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Another mad day in Trumpland

Yesterday was another mad day in Trumpland — or America, as it used to be called. The president-elect started the morning off by promising, somewhat mystically on Twitter, that ‘Great meetings will take place today at Trump Tower concerning the formation of the people who will run our government for the next 8 years’. But the most fascinating event of his day —for us saps in the self-immolating media, at any rate —was his showdown conference with the New York Times. The meeting was nearly cancelled in the morning, after both parties failed to agree on its terms and conditions, and then put on again after a bit of confusing back and forth between

Tuesday

Paul Nizinskyj

Donald Trump and the five stages of libertarian grief

If you think Theresa May has made life difficult for ‘right-wing libertarians’ in the UK, spare a thought for the poor schmucks across the pond. I was in Washington DC for a few days either side of the presidential election and the overwhelming impression I got from various think tank wonks I spoke to was one of utter despair. When ‘liberty’ is branded on your currency and is supposed to be the whole reason your country exists, you expect to be thrown a bone every now and then – even the odd square meal under Reagan. But a contest between a warmongering progressive and protectionist nationalist was always going to

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Insulting people who think differently from you isn’t the way to engage people

There were two items on BBC radio this morning which rather summed up the Corporation thinking about the State of the World. One was a brief but telling discussion on the Broadcasting House programme as to whether our political discussion now is getting to the point where we can’t actually air differences at all;  that, after Brexit and the Trump election, we are so utterly divided ideologically that common ground is impossible to find. It was an interesting conversation between Catherine Mayer, the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, and Iain Martin, who, while a Brexiteer, is also opposed to Trump. Fine, except that it was preceded by the secular

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why Conrad Black was right about the genius of Trump

At least two former Spectator figures understood things about the recent American contest which eluded most commentators. The first is our former proprietor, Conrad Black. Disagreeing with the anti-Trump conservative National Review, for which he writes, Conrad filed a powerful piece at the time of Trump’s nomination: ‘What the world has witnessed, but has not recognised it yet, has been a campaign of genius.’ He enumerated virtually every issue where Trump was nearer to the voters than Democrats, the media, and other Republicans. The second is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, nowadays the Telegraph’s international business editor. In the 1980s, Ambrose wrote wonderful pieces from central America for The Spectator, the only British