Taxicab Confessions

I’m in London for the wedding of two great friends who are at the heart of political and cultural London society. Former Prime Minster David Cameron gave the toast at the reception last evening.

So it was appropriate that on my ride over to the reception, my cab driver decided to use the opportunity of the holiday traffic to explain the misery—at least as he saw it—of living in a post-Brexit, post-12-years-of-the-Tory-party England. (It’s famously customary for London cabbies to chat. It’s less customary for them to start conversations, as mine did, with “I am a socialist” because most London cabbies are conservatives.)

Still, it’s just one of those ever-green English truisms: If you want to understand the pulse of England, talk to a London taxi driver. Or rather, listen and learn.

My driver had a litany of issues. And let me just tell you: We think things are bad in the U.S., but all is not so peachy in the UK either.

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Donald Trump and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week

For rather obvious reasons, my phone has been pinging with texts and emails from readers suggesting that Donald Trump is having a very bad week. There’s the fact that the Trump Org was convicted of tax fraud. Then there’s the fact that his chosen Senatorial candidate, Herschel Walker, was beaten in the Georgia run-off by Sen. Raphael Warnock. And then there’s the news broken by the Washington Post that an outside team hired by Trump discovered items with classified markings in storage that they’ve passed on to the FBI to add to the pile found at Mar-a-Lago.

So, yes, the former president has probably had better weeks, but I am not sure that the consequences for his future are as disastrous as some of the alarmist headlines imply.

First: his business. I phoned around to my sources in real estate, who include people who run funds that have lent to Trump, and asked, Does the conviction change anything? Would you lend to him again?

The answer was yes.

Let me repeat that. Yes.

As long as you are not a bank, where the underwriting committee probably would not let you lend to a business with a conviction against it, lending to Trump is actually now more enticing for the aggressive investment funds.

Why?

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

The Working Royals vs. the “Working-It” Royals

I wish I could tell you that I had come up with the outstanding aphorism of “the working Windsors vs. the working-it Windsors” to describe the rivalry—scratch that—the open warfare going on in the U.S. between the “American” side of the House of Windsor (the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, otherwise known as Harry and Meghan), who are currently residing in California, and the Prince and Princess of Wales (aka Catherine “Kate” and William), who are now visiting Boston. Instead, it was coined by my brilliant friend, the historian and philanthropist Amanda Foreman, who, like me, is American (she was born in the U.S.) but spent most her childhood in Britain before moving here in her twenties.

Foreman explained in the funniest, most on-point article I have read on the topicthat Brits who hoped that the Waleses’ visit to Boston this week might clearly illustrate their superiority in what Foreman lists as “duty, probity, discipline, decency, discretion, loyalty and commitment”—versus the Sussex’s currency of “self-actualisation, self-healing, self-identity, self-care, self-expression, self-confidence and self-love”—hoped in vain.

This, Foreman says—in an article for the UK Sunday Times so spikily excellent that I wish it had been published in the U.S.—has to do with a generational divide. According to Foreman, Americans under 40 (i.e., the demographic who don’t read New York Magazine and therefore didn’t appreciate its “Meghan of Montecito” expose in August) don’t want duty, probity, etc. No, they want something called “me-spiration” which, says Foreman, is “not a philosophy so much as an ego massage and…a pure money maker.”

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

The World Cup: Politics, Petrol & Power

Even if you are not an avid football fan, most likely you’ve noticed that, for the first time, the World Cup is being played in the Middle East—specifically in the tiny state of Qatar—and that there have been all sorts of controversies to do with that.

In no particular order:

Gianni Infantino, the President of FIFA, gave a surreal hour-long interview, seemingly to try to defend Qatar’s human rights and LGBTQ rights abuses (criticism has been levied on the death toll of the migrants building the World Cup stadiums) by accusing the West of being hypocritical.

Then there was the whole flip-flopping on buying alcohol in the stadiums.

Then there was extraordinary fact that Saudi Crown Prince MBS—who, in 2017, joined forces with UAE premier MBZ and Egypt and Blockade to blockade their ultra-wealthy rival Qatar—showed up to the World Cup Opening and, grinning, clutched hands with Qatar’s ruler Emir Tamim Al-Thani for photographers.

This despite the fact that, owing to a dispute over the TV rights, Saudis cannot watch the football live—which makes it doubly ironic that Saudi Arabia won a football match against Argentina!

Apparently, the Saudis are so amped up, they are flocking into Qatar to watch the games. And now the Saudi club Al Nassr is trying to buy UK superstar Cristiano Ronaldo.

Noticeably absent from the action in Doha is MBZ, who reportedly wanted the World Cup to happen in the UAE. “He’s not public-facing like MBS, and you never know—depending on who is in the final, he might go for that,” a source told me.

But who did show up regardless of who was winning on the football field? The U.S.’s Middle-East-Beneficiary-in-Chief Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump.

But what does it all mean for you in your armchair at home?

Find out at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Et Tu, Ivanka?

No one knows better than Ivanka Trump about the power of imagery, which I wrote about earlier this week. (She’d cropped Kimberly Guilfoyle, her brother’s fiancé, out of an Instagram photograph. She said it wasn’t deliberate. But Ivanka is not somebody who puts up Instagram posts without deliberation.)

In case you’ve forgotten (and you may have, because it feels like a lifetime ago), before she went into her father’s White House, Ivanka had a clothing line. The line had its ups and its downs, but it had one powerful asset that remained consistent: Ivanka’s messaging. This is a woman who once wrote in the introduction of a memoir, “Perception is more important than reality.”

Therefore, the fact that Ivanka did not show up at Trump’s presidential announcement just to smile and say “good luck, Dad” sent a much clearer message than the statement she released declaring she wanted to stay out of politics and parent her three young children.

In Republican consultant circles, there was a fairly startled reaction to her absence, made only more glaring when, two days later, she was photographed wakeboarding. In other words: She wasn’t absent from her father’s speech because she was doing anything especially meaningful with her time.

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

What a Crop

“A picture is worth a thousand words” goes the adage.

And never was that truer than with the picture Ivanka Trump posted to commemorate her half-sister Tiffany Trump’s wedding this weekend. In the photo are five statuesque blondes who were all, other than the bride, dressed in flowing, pastel-colored or light metallic dresses. Just one thing was missing: Don Jr.’s fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle, 53, who had been dressed in black, and who Ivanka had cropped out of the photo.

Though she later posted the photo in its entirety to her Instagram Stories with three “smiling face with hearts” emojis, Ivanka’s initial omission highlighted what my sources report as “tensions” between the former president’s eldest daughter and Guilfoyle, whose colorful dating life pre-Don Jr. is said to be one of the major causes of a long-held mistrust between the two women.

“It was well known that Ivanka was not a fan of Kim,” someone who knows both women well told me.

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

“A major lesson for us is that this 2020 nonsense has got to stop.”

Like many, I found last night’s midterm results somewhat perplexing. I know that many commentators have said that regardless of who wins the Senate, the results are a rejection of Trump and an endorsement of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, but is it that simple?

I asked Trump’s first political consultant, Sam Nunberg, who worked on the Trump 2016 campaign—and who also lives in Florida—for his take. My readers will be familiar with Sam by now, and what he said was fascinating.

The most urgent message, in Sam’s view, was the GOP has got to stop talking about the 2020 election and “move on.”

The second is that, yes, DeSantis could beat Trump in Iowa—but not if Trump gets indicted…

You can listen here or read below for a transcript of our conversation at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Here’s Why Trump Crony Tom Barrack Was Acquitted of Spying for the UAE

After seven weeks at trial, longtime Trump ally Tom Barrack was acquitted today of all charges against him regarding the allegation he acted as an unregistered foreign lobbyist for the United Arab Emirates.

Why?

There are three main reasons I believe that the jury acquitted Barrack and his young associate Matthew Grimes.

Read them all at “Vicky Ward Investigates.” 

All Roads Lead to Putin

This afternoon, the trial of Trump crony Tom Barrack drew to a dramatic close. You could hear a pin drop as prosecutor Sam Nitze—who, as I’ve written about before, has a flair for the dramatic—effectively scaled back his tone and his strident demeanor to tell the jury sotto voce that essentially it doesn’t matter how much they admire 75-year-old tycoon Barrack or agree with his opinions on the Middle East or how much sympathy they feel for 29-year-old Matthew Grimes for making the mistake of choosing the wrong mentor in Barrack. The law is the law, Nitze said—and Barrack and Grimes went “way, way over a line” by working as unregistered foreign agents for the UAE, according to the evidence, which is composed, at least partially, of dozens of damning text messages and emails.

Nitze also said repeatedly that Barrack lied in the courtroom, leaving me to wonder if that ultimately could leave the defendant open for additional perjury charges.

There was one moment that I found especially fascinating: when Nitze talked of how complicated it is when private citizens get muddled up in national security issues. He pointed out that yes, the UAE is a U.S. ally, but look at the recent photograph showing UAE President MBZ with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In other words: Allegiances shift, which is why we have protocols and a State Department. (Finally, I understood why the government had Rex Tillerson testify at this trial!)

At the mention of MBZ with Putin, Barrack put his head in his hands.

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Davos in the Desert Impacts a Trump Crony in Court

There’s heavy irony in the fact that the trial of Trump crony billionaire businessman Tom Barrack—focused on allegations that he and a young aide acted as foreign agents for the United Arab Emirates, a country that has generally been considered a US ally for decades—continues apace while over in Saudi Arabia—a kingdom that is 500 miles from the UAE and is their closest ally—the Saudis are hosting Wall Street’s brightest and best at the annual conference nicknamed “Davos in the Desert.”

After the jury left Monday’s proceedings, there was chat among the lawyers about Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of the private equity giant Blackstone. Barrack’s defense team wanted to show a video of Schwarzman essentially saying the same flattering things about the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman that Barrack has. (This flattery is along the lines of his reforms and efforts to transition Saudi Arabia away from an oil-based economy.)

The government objected. The prosecution, in particular Sam Nitze, has repeatedly made it clear—especially during his cross-examination of Princeton Professor of Near Eastern Studies Bernard Haykel—that they will not tolerate images of either MBS or his mentor MBZ, the leader of the UAE, being depicted as some kind of fuzzy, Teva-wearing philanthropists without offering an alternative view of their autocratic regimes.

If the judge allowed a video of Schwarzman talking up MBS to be played, Nitze said he’d want a video of somebody else saying something less flattering: “Just like they have a video clip, we’ll look for other video clips. Jamal Khashoggi might be a name that surfaces again in terms of people saying different things than Mr. Barrack.”

(In the end, the judge did not allow the video into testimony, not wanting to go down a rabbit hole.)

But the conversation in the courtroom could not be happening at a thornier, more fragile moment in relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia—one that reflects on a vast international stage exactly the political battle going on inside the Barrack trial, even though the UAE and not Saudi Arabia is the country that Barrack is accused of spying for. Unfairly perhaps for the UAE, they’ve become almost indistinguishable.

Read the rest at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”