Remember Kamala Harris laughing throatily on the phone to Joe Biden after they’d dumped Trump in 2020? “We did it, Joe. We did it. You’re gonna be the next President of the United States.”
Erotic, I thought. The hottest words …
The true President of America’s Fifth Republic
The fireworks in America this Fourth of July will be fuelled by the country’s imminent election, in which a convicted felon faces off against a doddering old man who is too senile to know that he isn’t really the President. …
Will Biden share Bannon’s fate?
All eyes are naturally fixed upon Joe Biden in the aftermath of last week’s “debate”. Will he stay in the race or bow out? Yet there is another, smaller political drama playing out inside the American political system at present, …
Why Joe Biden must save himself — and quit
When I first met Joseph Biden as a newly elected Senator in 1974 he was absurdly young and looked younger, but he had already suffered two tragedies: the financial downfall of his father from elegant affluence to poverty, and the …
Trump is converting America’s nuns
Bespectacled and berobed, a softly spoken nun may seem an unlikely figurehead for the hard-Right of American politics — but Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God isn’t just any nun. With her broadsides against liberalism, President Biden, and Satan’s …
The aristocrats who martyred Trump
I have no wish to add to the existential howl attendant on Donald Trump’s conviction in a Manhattan courthouse for a crime that I, like most Americans, would be hard pressed to explain. I don’t like Trump as a politician …
Trump is Hillary Clinton’s spirit animal
Sometimes, I feel a little bit bad for Hillary Clinton — and not just because she missed out on a history-making presidency by a paltry 80,000 votes. It’s because she’s a feminist icon who will nevertheless always be remembered for …
Trump’s conviction is an assault on democracy
Whatever you think of Donald Trump — and I for one think very little of him — his conviction as a felon for what would ordinarily be a minor misdemeanour by a biased jury is a grim day for democracy …
The ghost who haunts the MAGA revolt
Over the past half-decade, few intellectuals have undergone a renaissance like Christopher Lasch — and few renaissances have been quite as startlingly heterodox. After the 2016 election, Lasch’s posthumous 1994 book Revolt of the Elites was cited as a key …
A Trump dynasty will swiftly implode
With Oedipal drama never far from America’s political consciousness, it was only a matter of a time before Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron, was thrust under the spotlight. Would he, the nation’s pundits speculated last week, at the tender age …
America’s most embarrassing man
Spring, the season of rebirth, is as good a moment as any to review the second lives of the formerly cancelled. Some are faring better than others: Louis C.K., for one, is fully back in business, albeit after taking a …
Why America needs a monarchy
Americans expect much from their president — some would say too much. He is not only regarded as head of state, but as an all-powerful economic wizard and social engineer, in addition to being a media celebrity. Candidates offer up …
Clarence Thomas’s court of diversity
As the case of Donald Trump v. United States continues to chafe America’s social fabric, an unlikely character threatens to steal the ex-President’s limelight: the ever-taciturn Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. The demands for his recusal from the insurrection trial …
The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump
As Donald Trump endures the eternity of the next month or so on a wooden bench in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, legions of his followers will decry the legal proceedings against him. They will insist that the claims and …
How Antifa went mainstream
In early 2018, I attended a reading at an independent bookstore in the heart of bourgeois Brooklyn. It was to launch the memoir of a Mexican-American former Border Patrol agent who had become disillusioned and quit. To the surprise of …
