It was the year an American presidential candidate declared: ‘We got too much dignity in government now; what we need is some meanness.’ Even without this call to arms, meanness was abundant. A prominent journalist, on live television, derided a rival as a ‘queer’ and harangued him ...
In his new account of Donald Trump’s presidency, Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff describes how Trump’s ‘adviser’ Steve Bannon counselled fellow White House newbies to read The Best and The Brightest as preparation for their administration’s tasks. Rarely for the mordant Bannon, his enthusiasm for David Halberstam’s 1972 classic ...
Richard Nixon remains one of America’s most intriguing presidents (1969–74). Intelligent, shrewd, and possessing a keen sense of the public mood, Nixon represented the ideal presidential model. His grasp of foreign policy has been unmatched by his successors, and his domestic policies represented the last hurrah of ‘New Deal'...
On 12 August 2017 a mob of neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, chanting racial epithets while openly carrying rifles and pistols. Many of the participants were from groups that advocate not just racial supremacy but the end of the US federal government, which they see as tyrannical ...
Competing with Middle Eastern wars, terrorist attacks, and presidential tweets, Asia still tends to receive less attention than it merits. Furthermore, while geopolitical tectonic-shifts are occurring in the Indo-Pacific, it can be difficult to step back from daily headlines to assess the current transformation in its entirety. In Easternization, Gideon Rachman ...
Beneath a frantic veneer of normalcy, American politics is not okay. It is as if Punch and Judy have careened out of a dive bar, tripped down the rabbit hole, smashed head-first through the looking glass, and found themselves running all three branches of government. Core to this is that unlikely combination of words, President Donald Trump.
This is an angry book. David Cay Johnston has been doing investigative reporting on Donald Trump's business practices for nearly three decades, and this book is a compilation of ...
When I arrived in America, green card in hand, I soon got down to my favourite pastime: discussing politics over grain-based liquor. I was surprised to find that President Barack ...
Politics is personal in the United States, far more private than it appears from outside. When political allegiance becomes tied to character, revealing one reveals the other ...