Latest news with #HarryCole
The Sun
28-04-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Donald Trump has slaughtered woke, trans sacred cows, shut down illegal migration & rocked the EU – what's next?
Harry Cole, Political Editor Published: Invalid Date, WELL it certainly feels like far longer, but today Donald Trump sails past the 100 day mark in the White House, leaving a world reeling in his wake. With a frantic — perhaps even manic — energy, the 47th President has installed his grip on Washington and the West with eye-popping results. 9 9 9 9 He has sacked thousands of civil servants and taken out whole government agencies at home, while abroad he has flipped over the tables of international norms, once again. Nato countries are in a tizz after being told to finally pay their way, while the EU wobbles under regular assault from a President that hates everything it stands for. China has been hit with the sort of giant stick it uses to throw its weight around the world, while in Iran enemies spend their days nervously looking skyward fearing the dreaded crack of a drone strike. At home Trump has shut down swathes of illegal migration on the southern border and left the human rights brigade howling at the moon with his sweeping deportations back to South America with the flick of the pen. It turns out this sort of thing can be done where there is the political will and a tough enough hind to ignore the shouting. Woke and trans sacred cows have been slaughtered within the US government by Presidential decree, leaving ultra-right-on corporate America scrambling to ditch their own DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) agendas in a dramatic game of catch-up. Wasteful international aid spending has gone up in smoke, while every day the Elon Musk -led Department for Government Efficiency is exposing eye-watering fraud and waste that has taken the American taxpayer for mugs. Carnival of chaos Meanwhile, once scathing tech titans and world leaders, including Sir Keir Starmer, have been quick to take the knee in a newly decorated West Wing that appears to have had its interior design done by Auric Goldfinger. 'It's just a higher level of respect,' the President chortled to the Atlantic magazine this week. Critics howl, markets have wobbled and the world has watched agog as the reality TV guru has turned the Oval Office into a near nightly must-watch docu-drama where you never quite know what will happen next. Blistering tariffs turmoil could spiral into WW3 as China fears 'century of humiliation' plus Europe faces crucial choice Dictators have been fawned over, friends have been lambasted and domestic political enemies humiliated — all while the cameras rolled. Ever the showman, the shot of the leader of the free world standing on the White House balcony last weekend flanked by a giant Easter bunny as he gave solemn remarks about the death of the Pope was a typically and hilariously iconic image that just about sums up the madness of the last the four months. But unlike his first tilt at the Presidency, Trump has installed a White House machine and Cabinet that seem to have his back. The media leaks that plunged his first administration into a den of toxic back-stabbing and paranoia have been plugged, bar a spectacular mishap of two of his most senior lieutenants accidentally texting war plans to a cock-a-hoop magazine journalist. And for a man who knows he only has a couple of years before he becomes a 'lame duck', he has certainly been in a hurry and appears to be enjoying conducting a carnival of chaos. 'The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,' the President added to Atlantic. 'And the second time, I run the country and the world.' But is he right? And is there a method to the madness? That is the million dollar question that will come to define President Trump's entire legacy. His critics will say otherwise, but what other President has been able to bend the global news and economic agenda to his will in such a way? Countries, including Britain, are literally begging the Americans to spare them from the pain of tariffs — and in doing so, offering to scrap their own import levies on American goods. Trump was talked into a 90-day pause on the most vicious of export duties by Wall Street giants and by seeing the rocketing cost of American debt. Rocketing cost of American debt But that has not stopped world leaders from swinging into action to try to ease their punishment beatings, vowing to close trade deficits and ease barriers to business with the Americans. Should Trump pull that off — and his 'Liberation Day' tariff assault on the world's free markets actually results in lower tariffs and barriers around the world — then he will be laughing. But it will take far longer than 100 days for that pipe dream to be believed. And while the President tells the world he is greatly loved and everything is going swimmingly, the numbers tell a different story. At home his enemies have been quick to leap on an 80-year low in approval ratings for a President after 100 days. For a man who sees TV ratings as the ultimate success benchmark, his 39 per cent approval standing has clearly niggled him, with the President taking to social media to slam pollsters. 9 9 9 Meanwhile, abroad it is a similarly downbeat picture. According to pollsters Ipsos, only 39 per cent of Brits now think the US — once the undisputed leaders of the free world — is still a 'force for good.' That is down 17 points since Trump's remarkable comeback election victory late last year. Alarmingly, across 29 countries, the average of people saying the US is a 'force for good' is just 46 per cent, which is lower than Communist China, for the first time, who are at 49 per cent. Positive sentiment about America has dropped in 26 of 29 countries after Trump's tariff wars sent global markets into freefall and he threatened to invade his nearest neighbours — perhaps not entirely seriously. With the menace of his New York real estate dealer past, he has threatened to annex Greenland, Panama and even the King's own Canada. Rogue state Meanwhile, it appears the President was talked out of bombing Iran with the help of Israel in a bid to rid the rogue state of its alarmingly advanced nuclear developments. A rear-guard action from his own isolation team led by Vice President JD Vance appears to have won the argument, for now, that the administration was elected to stop being the world's policeman. And the tense ceasefire in Gaza, that briefly saw the release of some of the Israeli hostages, has lapsed back into fighting and blockading Hamas, who show no sign of backing down. But nowhere has there been a clearer sign of the President's failure to deliver than in Ukraine. After promising to bring peace within days and weeks of taking office, it appears the self-proclaimed deal-maker may have bitten off more than he can chew. Lavishing praise on Putin has not worked, nor has biting off Zelensky's head in front of a global TV audience. Losing patience with Putin The Kremlin appears to be thumbing its nose at the White House, while it is far from clear that any Ukrainian leader could sign up to the terms being discussed — tracts of land lost to the invader and no guarantee that Putin would not be back for the rest before too long. Trump talks about his loathing of bloody war, but it is far from clear there is an end in sight beyond a total capitulation. The White House said yesterday that the President was increasingly losing patience with Putin's refusal to properly come to the table. But you can not help feel that he is itching to lift sanctions on Russia rather than twist the thumbscrews even further right when the time to squeeze is here. The sovereignty of a ravished nation must not play second fiddle to Trump's desire for economic gain and attempt to lure Russia away from closeness to China. While it may not hurt his domestic standing much, a failure on Ukraine could poison Trump's already rocky standing around the world. Trump's rocky standing And he does not have long to turn things around and for the fruits of his big promises to come true. Those that know him best say there is a zeal to Trump 2.0 that was just not there in his first term. Some put that down to his surviving the horrific assassination attempt last July, where he dodged the reaper — and a sniper's bullet — by just an inch. Others say it is the freedom from the concerns of re-election that mean he has been truly unleashed. But he does not have long. Unable to stand again due to the two-term limit, by the end of next year the question of who comes next to keep the MAGA flame alive will be dominating. The ceaseless pace of the US election cycle means it will not be long before the mid-terms come around and eyes are on the 2028 race. Were the Republicans to lose the House in 18 months' time, Trump's enemies will have more than just screaming in their arsenal as they crank up hearings, probes and the inevitable attempt to impeach him once again. And unless he is careful, plenty of decisions and moments from these first 100 days could give them just the ammunition they need. 9
New European
10-04-2025
- Politics
- New European
Harry Cole's vivid imagination
Now he's done himself no harm by penning a batshit mental piece for his paper which should find favour with immigration officials scouring media types' output to ensure they're simpatico with the MAGA agenda. Last year Rats in a Sack reported how Harry Cole, the Sun's political editor, was desperate to desert these shores for Trumpland. With his Tory contacts out of power, and not being groomed by News Corp bosses as management material, Carrie Johnson's ex-boyfriend was said to be keen on a transatlantic transfer. Under the unwieldy headline 'Americans kept asking me 'What the hell is going on in Britain?' – we need to be very worried by the answer', Cole paints a picture of a recent trip Stateside in which everyone – 'from cab-drivers, bellboys, waitresses and strangers to security guards' – was concerned about the state of the UK under Sir Keir Starmer's apparently dystopian rule. 'Complaints ranged from locking people up for things they post on social media, the near-endless stream of protest hate and bile in our cities every Saturday afternoon to the scarring legacy of a generation of kids mutilated by the NHS at the Tavistock gender clinic,' writes Cole, shaking his head at the potpourri of issues his accent had provoked curiously well-informed bellboys and waitresses to bring up with him. 'But most chillingly, there was a repeated fear of ever visiting over concerns they would be mugged or stabbed,' he adds of the inhabitants of notoriously crime-free America (mass shootings in 2025 so far: 91, with 118 dead and 338 wounded). While conceding that some of this was prompted by 'endless knocking pieces from left-wing US broadsheets' – conjuring up images of cabbies tut-tutting over the New York Times op-ed pages – Cole warns that 'the message is clear: Britain looks totally bonkers at the moment and is serving as a chilling warning for America of what might be'. In particular Americans were apparently desperate to bring up unprompted with Cole the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, a woman convicted at Poole Magistrates' Court last week of breaching an abortion clinic protection zone, US bellboys being famously consumers of the website of the Bournemouth Echo. Such cases were putting off 'the very people we need to welcome with open arms to spend big at our globally loved landmarks', worried Cole, space constraints alas preventing him from noting that inbound travel to the US is now projected to decline by 5.5% this year instead of growing by nearly 9% as had previously been forecast, thanks largely to the conduct of the sainted Donald Trump. Cole filed this 1,000 words of what our American friends would call baloney on April 6 and has since been forced to spend the best part of a week writing about how his hero has knocked $6.6 trillion off the stock markets. What a sad loss to the British media landscape he'll be once Uncle Sam finally comes calling!
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Analysis: An American Brexit?
I spent last week talking to some of the people in and around Brexit, Britain's crashing out of the European economic system and the closest parallel to what the US did with global trade last week. Then, the media and political class vastly overestimated how much voters cared about the 'economy.' 'British voters were told Brexit would hurt them in the wallet but they voted for it anyway,' Sun political editor Harry Cole, a pro-Brexit voice, said. 'They either didn't believe the doomsday warnings or they didn't care, because the message they wanted to send the elites trumped the short-term pain.' The politics, he said, 'defies the usual logic and playbook of 'it's the economy, stupid.'' For some Brits, the trade-off — a prouder, more independent, poorer, and weaker nation — may have been worth it, said Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times commentator who wrote the book on Brexit. Others 'didn't believe it would make them poorer — or more to the point, didn't believe that the things that countries measure to decide whether they're richer had any impact on them.' Last week, Brexit's architects could finally point to a dividend, as one of them, Matthew Elliott, noted to me: Britain got hit with smaller Trump tariffs than did the EU. He said that Trump is succeeding one place where Boris Johnson failed — in being 'very, very clear with the rest of the world why you've done this and what you want the outcome to be.' So far so good, perhaps. But another lesson of Brexit is that politico-media bubbles burst. Today most Brits think Brexit was a mistake, though there's little political will to rejoin the EU. And the people who rebelled against immigration and globalization, said Shipman, 'are still looking for someone who can deliver for them.' 'Comparing Brexit and Trump's trade tariffs isn't apples to apples,' David Luhnow and Max Colchester wrote Saturday in The Wall Street Journal. 'The U.K. economy is far more dependent on trade than the U.S., which boasts a much larger and dynamic domestic economy. Brexit wasn't done to right a trade deficit; the U.K. was seeking to retake control of issues from Brussels such as trade policy, regulation and migration.' A conducted on the eve of Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariff rollout found voters' opinions of his economic policies had essentially inverted since October, with 52% of respondents saying they disapprove. In his Liberation Day remarks, Trump cited the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 as evidence that tariffs once drove US economic prosperity. 'It's what we would call a lie. False. Not true,' said Andrew Cohen, a professor of history in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, told the Guardian. 'He's wrong. No one thinks that. Even conservative economists don't think that. Even protectionist economists don't think that.' California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the governor of the world's fifth-largest economy, has begun soliciting backchannel trade agreements.
