'Donald Trump is right to describe 2024 election as a final battle'

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Frank Bruni in The New York Times
Katy Balls in The Times
Gareth Roberts in The Spectator
John Thornhill in the Financial Times

published 2 January 2024

Trump’s Final Battle Has Begun

Frank Bruni in The New York Times

Donald Trump has repeatedly called the 2024 presidential race the "final battle", said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. And he "just may be right", at least in terms of how "profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be" if he is the Republican presidential nominee. And if he wins the election, "the America that he moulds to his self-interested liking may bear little resemblance to the country we've known and loved until now".

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Rishi Sunak met the failed 2012 US presidential candidate Mitt Romney last year and "there are hints that Sunak is learning lessons from him", said Katy Balls in The Times. Sunak's priorities "appear to have a closer resemblance to Romney’s 2012 blueprint" such as a big tax cut over several years, a cut to spending, energy self-sufficiency and better schools. But the question for Tory MPs is "whether this adds up to a plan to stop [Keir] Starmer or a route to respectable defeat".

"Fireworks at New Year are the purest distillation of the spirit of frippery," said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. So Sadiq Khan "appending a civic lecture to a firework display" was like "adding tripe to a trifle". And ITV "decided to ring in the New Year with a toe-curlingly sanctimonious montage of ludicrously wealthy actors, including Glenn Close and Idris Elba, lecturing its viewers about climate change", said Roberts. "For heavens' sake, bureaucrats and boondogglers – take a day off!"

The Oxford physicist David Deutsch's "principle of optimism" says that all knowledge that does not contradict the rules of physics can eventually be obtained through the application of science and reason, says John Thornhill in the Financial Times. AI is opening up new avenues for discovery, and many "zoomers" in Silicon Valley believe we should be "racing ahead with technological development at full speed", while "doomers" caution over the "collateral harms of new technology". But "the principle of optimism is a comforting theory, albeit a largely unprovable one, to carry into the new year".

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