New Hampshire, then, was far from Donald Trump’s difficult second album. If anything, it was another performance of his Greatest Hits. His path to the White House is firmly in sight; Nikki Haley’s primary challenge, by contrast, has been rendered …
Ron DeSantis and the failure of pseudo-Trumpism
Now that Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the Republican primary race and endorsed Donald Trump, the race for the party’s presidential nomination has become more than just a battle of personalities — finally, it is a battle of ideas. …
Nikki Haley’s chameleon complex
In the political theatre of the 2024 Republican primaries, a curious spectacle unfolds: Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, is dancing a delicate ballet. Her performance, however, is less Swan Lake and more like a precarious tightrope …
The narcissism of the Never Trumpers
The “fascist coup” narrative, a self-regarding genre of literature popular with the “Never Trump” wing of the centre-right, has enjoyed a bumper crop in 2023. Earlier this year, as the legal challenges against Trump mounted and his popularity paradoxically surged, …
Why all this Trump hysteria?
A giant landfill of words has been dumped out on the subject of Donald Trump. I hate to add to the pile, but I feel I must. Unlike most participants in this industrial disaster, though, I have no wish either …
Gavin Newsom’s shadow campaign for the White House
In an unorthodox televised event that many read as a transparent ploy to boost the presidential aspirations of both men, last night California Gov. Gavin Newsom debated Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The event was billed as an epic forum to …
Inside the American Redoubt
North Idaho has long been home to those seeking to escape the looming collapse of America. This is a region doused in frontier spirit; a land where people openly carry guns, and where bounty hunters still operate, tracking down fugitives …
A cartel will decide the US election
Everyone knows the United States is in steep decline — except perhaps for its political leadership. The US Congress went without a speaker for the greater part of last month, seized for the umpteenth time by anti-statists. In the Senate, …
Republican hawks now want a war with Iran
Over the past decade, Republican hawks have looked on in horror as their party drifted away from the interventionist foreign policy of the Cold War years and the War on Terror. Last Friday, in a conference hall tucked inside the …
How magical combat can win the next election
At a certain point in the life cycle of every civilisation, intellectuals become entranced with the idea that there must be a rational order underlying the blooming, buzzing confusion of the universe. At this stage, most people hail the triumph …
How American liberals can win
For years now, American conservatives have been engulfed by an intellectual civil war, with various shades of the “New Right” fighting to overthrow “Conservatism Inc.”. What is less well-understood, however, are the changes taking place on the centre-left: the broad …
Vivek Ramaswamy and the rise of Indian America
Crammed together on a crowded stage during the first Republican debate of 2023, two figures stood out: 38-year-old Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a biotech millionaire with a Harvard pedigree, and 51-year-old Nimrata Haley (née Randhawa), an accountant, former governor of South …
What really causes Trump Anxiety Disorder?
Donald Trump stops me sleeping, and I am not alone. The multiply indicted former president’s fans sneeringly call it “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. Psychologists, who since 2016 have seen a rise in people anxious about the state of the world, call …
The Donald Trump Monster Movie
In Hollywood sci-fi movies from the Fifties, there is often a moment when the US military drops an atomic bomb on a monster. It then invariably emerges from the radioactive cloud unscathed — to the disappointment and horror of those …
The California militia ready for civil war
Redding, the capital of Shasta County in the far north of California, spreads out in thin strips of suburbia, its freeways reaching up into mountainous upcountry. Here, 19th-century gold-mining settlements crouch in the valleys among snow-ridged glaciers and lines of …
