More on Project 2025

The more I read about Project 2025 the more unhinged it looks. There are only so many ways you can describe US government departments as failing, too expensive and instruments of the left. Project 2025 exhausts them all in the first couple of the 30 chapters. After that, it becomes totally repetitive and incredibly boring, to be frank. The private sector is always right, according to the authors, and the government is always wrong, something we in this country might take issue with after our experience with the water industry, the rail network, power generation and various other privatised utilities. 

The Trump Mayhem Begins

Trump is creating mayhem before he’s formally sworn-in as the 47th POTUS. He’s already at loggerheads with Republican senators over some of his bizarre choices of people to run his administration. For health, Trump has appointed Robert F Kennedy Jr. To describe RfK as a nutter is a serious understatement and probably an insult to nutters. He thinks vaccines don’t work and has plans to stop research into new drugs for eight years. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, an article on a political website claims he’s even crazier than you might think. He only has the job because he agreed to stand down as a candidate in the presidential election and endorse Trump. He never stood a chance of actually winning but it's thought, being from a Democrat dynasty, he would damage Harris’ campaign by drawing a few of her supporters.

Trump and Ukraine

A history professor at Yale, Timothy Snyder, has written a rather perceptive piece for The Boston Globe about Trump and the fate of Ukraine under the moron in the White House. Snyder is pretty active on social media and usually, he Tweets about the far right and the risk of sliding into fascism. Trump hasn’t a clue about geopolitics and talks as if negotiating the end of a war is the same as reaching a deal on price with a supplier or stiffing a sub-contractor when it comes to paying, something he’s quite adept at. Snyder argues convincingly that if the US fails to support Ukraine, it could destabilise the whole international order.

Project 2025

I’ve started to read Project 2025, a 922-page document titled Mandate for leadership published last year by The Heritage Foundation. It’s a collection of essays by different people on various aspects of the US government and how the “administrative state” should be deconstructed and dismantled to ‘return power to the American people.’ It looks like a prescription to wrest power from ‘woke’ bureaucrats and give it to the president who is assumed to be an almost Godlike being with infinite wisdom and perfect organisational ability. He or she is expected to know what the American people want at any given moment and force that through using a stripped-down executive branch.

The Queen: Johnson is an "idiot"

Tim Shipman, the chief political commentator at The Sunday Times, revealed some more details about the illegal prorogation of parliament by Boris Johnson in 2019. His article yesterday is the perfect spoiler to Johnson’s book Unleashed, published a few weeks ago, with the added benefit of containing some truths. The unprecedented move involved The Queen in what turned out to be both a scandal and illegal, something prime ministers must avoid no matter what. Johnson, however, was a willing participant and heavily involved in the plan which he knew ran the risk of being declared unlawful by the courts.

Trump: the moron who conned America

Donald Trump has every serious personality disorder known to modern psychology. He has been guilty of each of the seven deadly sins at one time or another. And with the possible exception of murder, has probably breached all of the Ten Commandments. Yet these obvious traits were not enough to disqualify him as a candidate for the US presidency and a few days ago 72,557,157 Americans deemed him fit to be rewarded with a second term in the White House. This tells us all we need to know about modern America.

Trump's victory is a wake up call

There can be no sugaring of the pill. The real America didn't stand up. Probably close to 20 million Democrat voters from 2020 didn't even bother to vote so Trump’s stunning victory in the US election is disappointing, damaging, and deeply depressing.  I had hoped that Harris might have won. I had hoped that it would at least have been a close result. I hoped that there might have been enough people capable of seeing through Trump, but amazingly, after all we knew about him, over 70 million voters chose him over Harris. He even won the popular vote by 4 million, something he's never done before.

Will the real America please stand up now?

Polls close in the US election today. The campaigns have ended and now it’s up to voters to choose between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. She is a normal human being and well qualified for the job, a former prosecutor, a US senator and VP to Joe Biden for the past four years. He is a convicted felon, and according to the New York Times, "unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit." 

The Tories are headed for oblivion

The Tory party’s direction of travel changed dramatically in June 2016. I think we all know that. It’s safe to assume that had Cameron won the EU referendum it would have spiked UKIP’s guns and headed off any possible threat from the far right. Cameron's position as leader would have been strengthened allowing him to distance the party from some of the more extreme elements. They would I'm sure have continued as moderate and centre-right and perhaps with Osborne at the helm might still be in office. The 2017 election wouldn't have been necessary and they still had sensible men like Philip Hammond, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke and others.

Another Trump presidency would be "perilous"

The decisions by the owners of the LA Times and The Washington Post not to publish editorials endorsing Kamala Harris looks like political cowardice as other newspapers across the USA attack Trump without necessarily recommending Harris.  The latest is the Las Vegas Sun in Nevada, originally a Reagan, Bush Republican state but which voted for Obama (twice) and Clinton and Biden in 2016 and 2020. However, it's still a close race.  The Sun says: Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becoming a troubling concern. It is a measured if devastating piece which begins by telling readers that the nation "must confront the fact that beyond his hateful character, he is crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness."