The US is descending into Autocracy

The nearer we get to inauguration day the more concerned I am about the US. The New York Times has an extraordinary opinion piece by a professor of international affairs at Princeton and a former US ambassador to the Czech Republic, asking if America is “Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?” The answer I’m sorry to say is, yes. More than that, there’s no question of sleepwalking, the US is marching boldly and clear-eyed into authoritarianism. Trump hasn’t bent the election process to gain power, or even hidden his true agenda. We know exactly who he is and what he plans to do over the next four years.

Trump gets away with insurrection

Jack Smith, the US Department of Justice special prosecutor appointed to investigate Donald Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, has published his final report despite last minute efforts by Trump’s lawyers and Republicans to block it. You can read its 137 pages HERE although as far as I can see (and I've only looked at it this morning) it contains no new revelations. It looks as if it simply brings together the mass of detailed evidence against Trump and his co-conspirators and their efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.  I'm not sure why his legal team tried so hard to prevent it from being seen.

The tech oligarchs and deranged conspiracy merchants driving the Trump agenda.

For the uninitiated, Peter Thiel is the billionaire owner of Palantir and the mentor of Vice President JD Vance. It was apparently him who persuaded Trump to select Vance as his running mate. Palantir by the way, is the company awarded a multimillion pound contract to reorganise the NHS databases, expressly against the wishes of many doctors and those opposed to the creeping privatisation of UK health services.  Now, the Financial Times has done us all a favour. It provided a platform (free to read) for Thiel, a dedicated campaigner against democracy, to air his thoughts on the Biden administration and politics in general. 

Is Trump America's Hitler?

At the very end of last year, I wrote a post on here about the lessons we can draw from German history in the 1930s. At the time I wondered if perhaps I was reading too much into Trump’s idiotic and incendiary rhetoric but I see that if anything I was understating the risk. The astonishing press conference he delivered on Tuesday looks like a foretaste of what's to come. His seemingly off-the-cuff comments about taking over Canada, Greenland and Panama by economic or military force were not so much dead cats as live hand grenades, designed perhaps to unsettle and cower his political opponents.

Trump's descent into madness begins

I think we all knew that the election of Trump meant Washington would get a bit chaotic but I don’t believe anyone could have anticipated how insane things would become even before the official inauguration on 20 January. Yesterday the president-elect gave a totally unhinged press conference at his Florida retreat in Mar-a-Lago, the likes of which has never been seen outside a black comedy. It was terrifying and laughable at the same time. I think he’s gone completely demented.  Trump refused to rule out using military force or economic coercion to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. Think about that.

Musk turns on Farage

The love-in between Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s potential mega-donor Elon Musk, the world’s richest moron, is no more. What promised to be a game-changer in British politics seems to have come to an abrupt end. Yesterday Musk tweeted (or should I say X’ed?) that Farage was the wrong man to lead Reform. Apparently Farage doesn't "have what it takes" presumably meaning that he isn’t sufficiently racist, which will be a surprise to most of us. It obviously caught Nigel on the hop since he had appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning political show a few hours before, defending Musk, a man he has claimed "backs our party" and has referred to as “a hero.”

Julian Jessop like King Canute

I’ve posted quite a few times about Julian Jessop, an economist and enthusiastic Brexit supporter. He is the Chief Economist and Head of the Brexit Unit at the IEA, once of Tufton Street London, the ground zero of British Euroscepticism. You can’t get much more of a Brexiteer than that. He has a piece in The Telegraph this week rejecting the widely held view among remainers that Brexit is costing £100 billion a year in lost GDP and £40 billion in tax revenues. He’s right in so much as the OBR, from where the figure comes, has always been clear that this will be reached in about 2035.

Starmer needs a reset

The Times has commissioned some polling which reveals voters see Starmer’s government as “incompetent”, “dishonest” and “unsuccessful” and think Starmer will fail at all six of the “milestones” he has set for his government, according to YouGov who carried out the survey. After just six months in office and having done very little, I think this shows how effective the right-wing media has been in the propaganda war. It isn't to say Labour are blameless.They have contributed to their own problems by the sheer paucity of ambition. Starmer has learned nothing from Trump or Johnson. Voters today expect bold stuff to be announced at least. They don't mark politicians down for being too ambitious.

Trump's coalition is splintering already

Donald Trump is facing the same problem that the Tories ran into over Brexit. He and his supporters could all agree during the campaign on what they didn’t want (open borders, US involvement in overseas conflicts, tax revenues wasted, a rising national debt, etc) but now they need to agree on what it is that they do want, and therein is the problem. It's blindingly obvious that Trump has never had any detailed policy discussions with any of his appointees. The first major arguments are developing over the use of H-1B visas for speciality occupations, or highly skilled migrants.

Lessons from History

I’ve been watching series 1 of the BBC documentary Rise of The Nazis, first broadcast in 2019 and covering Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. The three episodes are available HERE on iplayer. What surprised me was how many disturbing parallels there are to recent events in America. The German president at the time was Paul von Hindenburg, an aristocratic Prussian and Chief of the General Staff in the First World War. Like Trump, he was a man without any real political ethos and thought pliable and easily manipulated by those around him.