Barack obama

Trump will be much, much better for Britain

The deplorables are rather wonderful people, aren’t they? Both here and in the United States. The people’s revolution continues apace, defying the odds each time, defying the pollsters, defying the elite. I cannot tell you how pleasurable it was to scamper downstairs on Wednesday morning to check out the reaction on the Guardian’s website. It kept me cackling for hours. The previous morning the paper had concluded its fatuous leader column with the words: ‘Americans should summon a special level of seriousness and display a profound responsibility when they go to the polls.’ That alone had made me yearn for a Trump victory — the arrogant, chastising tone which liberals,

Liberal ideology created Donald Trump

Dear Democrat voters, You are probably the most influential and powerful segment of the human race today. In terms of cultural reach, you are supreme; politically you are masters of the universe; you have the ability to shape our world for good or evil, and for most of the past century you and your forebears have done a pretty good job of it. I’m addressing this to Democrats in particular because in the US, as in Britain, liberalism is the prestige faith; the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in American academia is now five to one, and up to forty to one in some social sciences. Eight of the ten richest

Trump’s big mistake? Turning the election into a personality contest

If, on the night of Monday September 26, a US presidential election had been held instead of a televised debate, Donald Trump would likely now be America’s president-elect. That morning the reliable on-line poll analyst Nate Silver, sympathetic to Clinton, had tweeted, ‘It’s a dead heat,’ and then, a few minutes later, ‘State firewall breaking up. Trend lines awful.’ In retrospect, one simple task stood between Trump and the presidency: he had to look like some version of a rational human being. He failed. As Conrad Black has put it, the office of the presidency has been seeking Donald Trump. That night, Trump essentially picked up the phone and told

The Spectator’s Notes | 27 October 2016

World leaders are preoccupied nowadays with what is known as their ‘legacy’. In practice, this means being linked with moral-sounding projects, rather than embedding clear achievements. Barack Obama is even more obsessed with legacy than his predecessors. What might be his final way of showing this? Some suggest he will order the United States to abstain if France brings forward its planned UN Security Council resolution calling for a Palestinian state, thus permitting the resolution to pass. If so, he will bring no peace, but who cares? He will have signalled his virtue. My invitation to the Pink News dinner (where David Cameron won an award) on Wednesday night promised ‘an

Hillary will beat Trump. But her presidency will be hamstrung just like Obama’s

The more you study history, the more you realise how hopeless it is to try predicting the future. Even sophisticated polling can’t prevent surprises like the two recent whoppers in the UK: the wrong prediction of a razor-thin margin for David Cameron in 2015, followed by the wrong prediction of a Brexit defeat in this summer’s referendum. I’m a history professor. If anyone knows better than to make predictions, it’s me. Nevertheless, I predict that the Democratic Party will win the presidency and the Senate in November, but will continue as minority party in the House of Representatives. Let me explain why. Every fourth year, presidential elections bring out plenty

What next for Barack Obama?

What is to become of Barack Obama when he retires from the US presidency at the age of 55? I have a suggestion. There is a vacancy on the US Supreme Court, which the Republican majority in Congress has blocked him from filling. Obama, a constitutional lawyer, is ideally qualified. And he might have more influence as a Supreme Court justice than he ever did as President. This is an extract from Chris Mullin’s diary from this week’s Spectator magazine.

Diary – 6 October 2016

Any day now, the government will make its long delayed announcement on whether a third runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. Personally I am against both. During my 18 undistinguished months as an environment minister, I learned one thing about the aviation lobby: their appetite is voracious. They want more of everything. Runways, terminals, you name it. I also learned that in the end, often after initial resistance, governments always give way. Although from time to time industry representatives hint that they would be prepared to make concessions on the handful of night flights that come in over central London each morning, disturbing the sleep of several million

Deadly silence

There was a time when the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo would have featured strongly in political debate in Britain. Just two weeks after a negotiated ceasefire appeared to have provided some respite, a war of attrition in Syria’s second largest city is escalating into a vast human tragedy. Last Saturday, a bomb dropped by Syrian government forces knocked out a pumping station which had been supplying water to two million people, 250,000 of whom are besieged in the rebel-held east of the city. On the same day, at least 45 people, many of them children, were killed by barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians — a now common occurrence. Food

Who’s at the ‘back of the queue’ now, Obama?

Wasn’t it one of the ‘Remain’ campaign’s big arguments that leaving the EU would deprive us of the ‘clout’ we enjoy in negotiating foreign trade agreements? I seem to remember someone even warning us that in the event of Brexit we would go ‘to the back of the queue’ for a trade agreement with the US. So much for being at the front of the queue. Today, the French minister for foreign trade, Matthias Fekl, demanded an end to talks with the US over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It comes hot on the heels of claim yesterday by German deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel that TTIP has failed.

Boring Corbyn has got it all wrong on personality politics

Brits sometimes think that ‘personality politics’ is a bad thing. Jeremy Corbyn has certainly suggested as much; just before he won the Labour leadership last September, he dismissed the concept as juvenile and egoistic. Instead, he said: ‘We are not doing celebrity, personality or abusive politics – this is about hope.’ But although Corbyn has stuck to that belief, he’s wrong – and a big part of his problem is not realising that. While some say the idea of personality politics is an American import, in reality Brits have been doing it for decades. Take Harold Wilson’s advisers planting hecklers at TV hustings so the Labour leader could deploy his best put-down lines. That was in

Clueless in Syria

The other day I was speaking to a Kurdish journalist who was held in Isis captivity for ten months. He and a colleague had had the bad luck to run into an Isis checkpoint in Syria. ‘How do you perform the midday prayer?’ they were asked after their car was waved to a halt. Unable to answer — they were not believers — they were immediately beaten around the head. Then one of the jihadis from the checkpoint was put into the back of their car and they were told to drive to the Isis base. The fighter had a pistol pointed at them the whole time, which was superfluous

Glimpses of beauty

Born in Michigan, raised in Lagos and educated in London and New York, Teju Cole is about as cosmopolitan as they come. In an interview with the American writer Aleksandar Hemon, republished in Known and Strange Things, he declares that ‘cities are our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they can be hives of tolerance.’ Cole, whose PEN/Hemingway award-winning novel Open City (2012) was a paean to the vitality of urban sprawl, is an art historian by training; the essays and reviews in this collection — gathered from several years of writing for publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker — reveal

Donald Trump wins the war of words against Barack Obama

Donald Trump doesn’t seem the forgiving type, so it’s no surprise he hasn’t let Barack Obama’s comments yesterday stand. Obama said Trump was ‘unfit’ to be President – so what did the Republican candidate have to say in response? He answered in the only way he knows how, by flinging mud back at the person who called him out. Here’s what he said: ‘Well he’s a terrible President, he’ll probably go down as the worst President in the history of our country. He’s been a total disaster, you look at what’s happened to the Middle East, what’s happened to Syria and his ‘line in the sand’.’ It’s unlikely Obama will

Barack Obama: the great unity president who divided a nation

Hillary Clinton can count herself lucky to have Barack Obama cheerleading her bid for the presidency. The outgoing President is ending his time in power with high approval ratings. People still approve of him after all these years; like Hillary’s husband Bill, Barack’s presidency is ending on a high. And last night, at the Democratic Convention in Phili, he gave an absolute belter of speech supporting her claim to the White House. It was the speech progressives have been aching to hear. Mr Obama addressed the American people directly, when he said: ‘Time and again, you’ve picked me up. I hope, sometimes, I picked you up, too. Tonight, I ask you

Bernie Sanders backs Hillary but not all Democrats are happy about it

So after the glorious disunity of the Republican convention, now is the chance for the Democrats to pull together and show their rivals what unity is all about. If only. As with so much of politics at the moment, the script is there to be broken and that much was clear when Bernie Sanders was booed as he endorsed his one-time rival Hillary Clinton. To be fair to Sanders, he did try his best to throw his weight behind Hillary. ‘Hillary, Hillary, Hillary,’ was the chorus of his speech which was intended to draw a line under a fractious primary campaign – and unlike Ted Cruz he could at least

Boris’s charm wins over at awkward press conference

Fresh from banging his head on the door of Downing Street, John Kerry has just been speaking at a press conference alongside Boris. But it wasn’t the US Secretary of State coming to blows during the heated Q and A session at the Foreign Office. John Kerry might be heading home tomorrow, but most of the eyes – and the barbs being flung from the audience of gathered journalists – were aimed squarely at one man: Boris. American journalists in London for Kerry’s visit appeared to see it as their sole opportunity to hammer the Foreign Secretary – and they certainly tried their best to make the most of it. There was

Steerpike

Did Melania Trump just out herself as a Democrat?

There’s no love lost between Donald Trump and Barack Obama. And yet for Melania Trump, the President’s wife Michelle appears to be a source of great inspiration. That much seemed clear from the Trump’s wife’s speech to the Republican Convention last night when she channeled Michelle Obama’s address from 2008. Here’s what Trump said: ‘From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond; that you do what you say.’ And here’s what Michelle said: ‘Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want

Cops and killers

 Washington, DC Considering how heavily its citizens are armed with pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns, military semi-automatics, crossbows and nunchucks, considering how ethnically diverse and historically divided the place is, and considering that it is home to a third of a billion more or less rootless people, it is surprising Americans don’t kill each other more. The United States is well policed, even if it has been hard to say so lately. In the space of a couple of days in July, black men were shot dead by policemen in two separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota. Video flew round the internet. A protest rally called in Texas became the site

Diary – 22 June 2016

It was a nice touch that MPs sat in each other’s seats in the Commons during the tributes to Jo Cox on Monday. I hope it helped remind Tories where they’ll be sitting permanently after 2020 if they don’t bind the party’s wounds on Friday. If Remain wins, then everyone must coalesce around David Cameron; if it’s Leave then Michael Gove. These things were managed much better before 1965 when the Queen decided on Tory leaders. For all his reservations about the premiership, Gove wouldn’t refuse Her Majesty’s request to form a government, not in the year of her 90th birthday. How do you think Jeremy Corbyn voted in the

Portrait of the week | 26 May 2016

Home The government published a Treasury analysis warning that an exit from the EU would plunge Britain into a year-long recession and could cost 820,000 jobs. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, speaking with George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at B&Q’s head office in Hampshire, said that leaving ‘would be like surviving a fall then running straight back to the cliff edge. It is the self-destruct option.’ Downing Street said that leaving the EU would make an average holiday for four people to the EU £230 more expensive. Gillian Duffy of Rochdale, the nemesis of Gordon Brown, the former Labour leader, spoke in favour of the Leave campaign. Ed