A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is …
Why Trump is winning outside of America
Across much of the Euro-Atlantic, Donald Trump is an object of derision. The list of his foreign-policy sins is long: He’s callous towards his Nato allies and disdainful towards multilateral institutions and treaties. He introduced a “Muslim ban” and has …
Why liberal journalists need to be heroes
When Richard Nixon resigned as president 50 years ago, the country witnessed the birth of a monster. I am not talking about some sinister influence he exerted after his fall. I am talking about the media.
Having gratifyingly removed a …
Is the Kamala honeymoon over?
In 2016, mainstream analysts were virtually certain that Donald Trump would not win the GOP nomination. Then, when he did, they claimed that it was nearly impossible that he would win the presidency. They were convinced they were able to …
Why the Left hates MAGA Communism
I wanted to love MAGA Communism. When the movement emerged on X in 2022, it ruffled all the right feathers. It sought to meet working-class people where they were, channelling their frustrations while simultaneously dismantling the Left-wing establishment.
Predictably, the …
The revolt of the Rust Belt
On paper, Donald Trump’s decision to choose J.D. Vance as his running mate made perfect sense. The Rust Belt kid turned Yale graduate is an ideal figure to both troll America’s elites and woo its working-class whites. It is the …
Kamala’s ‘coup’ is a MAGA decoy
Reactionaries react, so it was only to be expected that as millions of fired-up Kamalamaniacs poured kabillions into Democratic coffers in the first week of the Vice President’s candidacy, a primordial strain of American politics reared its ugly head.
It …
Welcome to the Taxi Driver election
In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle (“You talkin’ to me?”), a disturbed cabbie who plans to shoot presidential candidate Charles Palantine before chance intervenes to steer him away from irrevocable catastrophe. The film serves …
How Biden channelled his MAGA spirit
When he walks out of the White House in six months’ time, Joe Biden will leave behind a complicated legacy. He will go down in history as the man who beat Donald Trump, the president who authorised America’s shambolic withdrawal …
Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady
For all the firsts that Kamala Harris represents as a presidential candidate, there’s one part of her identity that seems to both inflame her opponents and energise her supporters like none other. If elected, Harris will be not just the …
Trump and Biden shouldn’t fear death
Until a couple of weeks ago, the American electorate faced a choice between a presidential candidate probably suffering from early dementia and one afflicted by advanced narcissism. Should the finger hovering over the nuclear button belong to a senile Commander-in-Chief …
Searching for Britain’s JD Vance
A recurring theme in C.P. Cavafy’s poems is of the elites in some Hellenistic city in the Near East, long subsumed into the Roman empire, anxiously awaiting news from the imperial centre of the outcome of a great …
MAGA Republicans are nothing new
Just in case you haven’t spent the last week gripped by the question of who the Republicans would choose to nominate as their candidate for President of the United States, here’s the news: it was him. But it wasn’t exactly …
The new Donald Trump didn’t last long
“I’m not supposed to be here.” “Yes you are!” the crowd chanted back.
Six days before last night’s speech, Republican National Convention volunteers were in the middle of receiving training when news landed of the assassination attempt and they hit …
Why liberals envy JD Vance
If you want to know the secret of J.D. Vance’s meteoric rise, at the age of 39, to Donald Trump’s choice for vice president should he win, just glance at some of the more overheated liberal analyses of Vance’s success. …