Donald trump

Thursday

Lara King

The political power of America’s First Dogs

From the moment Donald Trump’s presidency began, he was lacking something. But Joe Biden is about to make up for it — twice over. Trump was the first president in more than a century not to have a dog in the White House. Biden’s German shepherds Champ, 12, and two-year-old Major will be filling the vacancy left by Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and continuing a tradition of First Dogs that can trace its pedigree back to George Washington. Far from being mere political poodles, many First Dogs have made history in their own right. Calvin Coolidge’s collie Rob Roy was the first dog to feature in

Niall Ferguson

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’. Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Donald Trump is impeached again – what now?

Tonight Donald Trump became the first president in the history of the United States to be impeached twice. He was first impeached in 2019, accused of pressuring the President of Ukraine to provide information on his political challenger Joe Biden. This evening, Trump was impeached again on the grounds of ‘incitement of an insurrection’ last Wednesday, when his address at a rally led to a violent mob storming the Capitol building to try to stop Biden’s formal confirmation as president.  While the vote in the House of Representatives was mostly split along party lines, ten Republicans broke from the party to support Trump’s impeachment, including Rep. Liz Cheney — the third-highest ranking Republican in the

Daniel DePetris

Trump’s legacy is in tatters

The fallout from last week’s storming of Congress by a pro-Trump mob of misfits and criminals has made the controversy over the infamous 2016 Access Hollywood tape look like a cakewalk. In the week since the worst political violence in Washington, D.C. since the British burned the White House and the Capitol Building in 1814, three cabinet secretaries have resigned in disgust over Donald Trump’s response to the melee. The White House is now stocked with dead-enders and hangers-on. Some of Trump’s most loyal allies, including former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, senator Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, have either denounced the president or

Tuesday

Johan Norberg

Donald Trump and the limits of free speech

Is Donald Trump’s expulsion from Twitter an attack on free speech? A great many Republicans are saying so. You certainly can call it ‘deplatforming’: when you lose your speaking invite, your social media posting rights or your book deal. Josh Hawley, a Republican Senator, has claimed that his First Amendment rights were violated by Simon & Schuster when they decided not to publish his book. It’s a problematic definition, since it means that Simon & Schuster are also violating my free speech by not publishing my books. And in fact, the rights of most aspiring authors on the planet. But of course, the First Amendment expressly refers to laws made

Jacob Heilbrunn

Could Trump go bankrupt?

‘Send in the troops. The nation must restore order. The military stands ready.’ Aficionados of the New York Times may recall that these sentences appeared as the headline of Tom Cotton’s op-ed in June that led to the departure of the paper’s editorial page editor James Bennet. Bennet resurfaced as a guest author of Politico’s Playbook newsletter last week. But how the times have changed! These days it is Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser who has embraced the Cotton Doctrine. She is demanding that the city be placed into what amounts a state of martial law. Ten-thousand National Guard troops, up to 15,000, are slated to guard the city against the motley

Saturday

Kate Andrews

Trump’s social media ban creates a host of problems for Big Tech

Facebook and Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump is, legally speaking, fairly clear-cut. Both are private companies which set the rules on who is – and isn’t – allowed to use their sites. Even if you’re the leader of the free world you have no automatic right to a Twitter account. The same logic applies to Parler – the self-described ‘unbiased’ social media platform – which has been booted off Google’s app store over its refusal to remove ‘egregious content’. As with Facebook and Twitter, Google Play is perfectly within its rights to select what apps it will and will not host. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be serious consequences that arise from these decisions. Frustrations from

Mark Gettleson

Will Republicans impeach Trump?

Renewed moves to impeach President Trump in his final days in office, following the storming of the Capitol Building, are gathering steam in Washington. To add further to the drama of the past week, Twitter announced yesterday that it was permanently suspending the President. Nancy Pelosi went as far as calling on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to limit Trump’s access to the nuclear codes, as some had attempted with Nixon at the height of his Watergate meltdown. As for the Republican establishment – especially those in the orbit of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell – they have wanted Trump out of the picture ever since Election Day.

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Joe Biden’s Big Tech takeover

Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump is like bolting the stable door after the QAnon shaman has gone. The damage was done long before the assault on the Capitol was planned on social media. Long before Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, social media had reduced American democracy to a lurid freak show. The ban also shows how far the big-tech oligarchs are prepared to go in order to retain their absurd and damaging monopolies. After the 2016 elections, social media promised to clean up their act. The digital fiascos of the 2020 election and its aftermath confirm that Big Tech is incapable of being the value-free guarantor

Robert Hutton

Boris shouldn’t be allowed to forget cosying up to Trump

Eighteen months ago, I had the pleasure of telling Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s now departed head of communications, about the nickname that the American president had come up with for Britain’s new Prime Minister: ‘Britain Trump’. My amusement was matched by the look of horror on Cain’s face. This was very much not the label that Number 10 wanted for their man in 2019, and it’s even less so in 2021. The coincidence that both men rose after uprisings at the polls in 2016 is just that, they argue – a coincidence. The ‘Johnson isn’t Trump’ case is well made by James Forsyth in the Times, and it’s right, as far

Thursday

Alex Massie

After Trump’s carnage, Joe Biden is the president America needs

A day of infamy but also a clarifying one. The scenes at the US capitol building yesterday were both a wholly predictable and a predicted finale to Donald Trump’s wretched presidency. Predictable because it was obvious four years ago – at least it was obvious to those who cared to open their eyes – that Trump was a festering threat to America’s great democratic experiment. And predicted because everything Trump has said and done since losing the presidential election in November led inexorably to this final, shabby, shameful coda to his presidency. For if you spend years lying to people and years telling them they are being cheated, you cannot

The Spectator

Trump’s final outrage

A mob descended on Capitol Hill last night acting on lies and disinformation, but there was no foreign actor to blame. This hostility was homegrown and came from the highest echelon of government. The President of the United States has been stoking fear, division and doubt since his defeat in November’s election, and yesterday it bubbled over into an attack on the very heart of American democracy.  Trump had been speaking at a ‘Save America’ rally where he invited crowds to march on the Capitol. ‘You’ll never take back our country with weakness,’ he told them, ‘you have to show strength’. Trump’s supporters showed their ‘strength’ by disrupting a debate over the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: New year, new lockdown

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced harsher coronavirus restrictions in England, resembling those last March, except that bubbles continued. People must work from home if they could; schools were closed and this year’s exams cancelled. Another £4 billion was directed to businesses in retail, hospitality and leisure. At Westminster, parliament was recalled. In Scotland, golf courses remained open and churches were closed. In England, churches remained open and golf courses closed. The actions came in response to a sharp rise in Covid infections, many from a variant virus. One in 50 were estimated to have the disease. At first, 44 million in England were put under newly-invented Tier 4

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Democratic takeover is nearly complete

In the days following the US presidential election in November, political centrists reached a hasty verdict. Never mind all the squabbling about voter fraud — they had won. The extremes had lost. Donald Trump, the maniac, was out; Joe Biden, the moderate, was in. Yes, the increasingly radical Democratic party still controlled the House of Representatives, but as long as the Republicans won one of two Senate run-off races in Georgia in January, the crazies would be checked by a Republican majority in the Senate. The markets rallied. All was well in establishment la-la land, despite the pandemic. Well, guess what? On Wednesday morning, it became clear that the Democrats

Jacob Heilbrunn

The fallout from Trump’s American carnage

Congratulations, President Trump! It took a while but you’ve finally achieved the American carnage that you purported to descry in your inaugural address four years ago. It would be hard to think of a more symbolically apt end to your presidency. Trump’s shameful, revolting and tawdry taped message late on Wednesday urging his supporters to disband devoted more urgency to calling the election a fraud than condemning their storming of the US Capitol. All that was missing was the claim that there are good people on both sides. Trump has already failed. He is no 18th Brumaire but a tinpot authoritarian Trump long ago forfeited any claim to dignity. The idea

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Only Trump is to blame for the Capitol chaos

On a recent visit to Central Europe I heard a joke that was going around in those parts, as well as further East. The joke — such as it was — was that America spent so much time trying to export democracy in recent years that it forgot to keep any for itself at home. The joke isn’t great, but it is telling. And it is a tale whose ugliest reverberation could be seen on Wednesday when supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC. After a year of protests, these protests — in support of the President — will join the many others from the last

Wednesday

The Spectator

Farewell, Donald

Madeleine Kearns To Trump or not to Trump? Whether ’tis nobler on the page to be a morbid cynic or a self-righteous arse? That is the question those of us working in American right-wing media have been staring in the face for four years. Looking back, the Trump years feel like one of those awful ‘would you rather?’ games that teenagers play. ‘Would you rather be half-fish from the waist up or from the waist down?’ ‘Would you rather have pubes for teeth or teeth for pubes?’ You know the sort. Of course, you can make the case for either option if you really want to (and some people do),

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The never-ending smugness of the NeverTrumpers

In March 2016 as Donald Trump looked likely to be the Republican party’s nominee to run for president, more than 100 foreign policy professionals signed a letter vowing not only that they wouldn’t work for him should he become president but that they would work ‘energetically’ to prevent his election. As the months wore on, the light in which the signatories appeared often shifted. Once Trump became the nominee, and then the President, these representatives of the ‘national security community’ appeared to have demonstrated one of the most damaging things any such group could demonstrate: their own irrelevance. It turned out that more than a decade and a half into

Tuesday

Bruce Anderson

The hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s death penalty critics

Everyone is entitled to complain about Donald Trump’s behaviour after the presidential election. No one should be surprised. He is acting entirely in character. It was always certain that he would become the worst loser in history. In comparison, Ted Heath, the incredible sulk, seems almost gracious. But there is one respect in which the President’s detractors, including Joe Biden, may be guilty of hypocrisy: when it comes to the death penalty. In recent weeks Donald Trump has faced much criticism for allowing executions to take place during the presidential transition period. Previous outgoing Presidents had taken the view that if a condemned federal prisoner had exhausted every hope except

Thursday

Rod Liddle

A conciliatory P.J. O’Rourke is not the satirist we know and love

There was an acidic bravura and beauty in P.J. O’Rourke’s early journalism and a gleefulness in the ease with which it raised ire. Hitherto, satirists — and especially American ones — had tended to come from the left, none more so than O’Rourke’s mentor Hunter S. Thompson, who campaigned long and hard for George McGovern in 1972. Not Patrick Jake. He sprung like a jubilant, potty-mouthed leprechaun from a country which had fallen back in love with itself after the self-flagellating miseries of Vietnam, Watergate and Tehran. Under Ronald Reagan, the economy flourished, the Cold War was won and while the left still carped and cavilled, aghast at the demise