Freddie Hayward

Washington, D.C., United States

US Correspondent at The New Statesman

Writer at Morning Call (The New Statesman)

US correspondent, @NewStatesman Contact: [email protected]

Articles

The dangerous relationship

1 week ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

Peter Mandelson’s brief grimace was the only sign the government knew the ploy was a stretch. He was peering over Donald Trump’s left shoulder in the Oval Office as Keir Starmer’s voice burbled through the loudspeaker on the Resolute Desk. The Prime Minister was extolling the UK-US trade deal as a monument to the Allied victory in 1945. It was the start of an unconvincing sales pitch to those listening back home. The reality lay to Trump’s right.
Morning Call: The dangerous relationship

1 week ago | morningcall.substack.com | Freddie Hayward

Good morning from Washington DC. It’s Freddie here. Westminster’s reaction to the Maga movement is bemusing. It’s as if the radio waves crossing the Atlantic get scattered, transforming President Trump into a Union-flag-waving royalist with a holiday home in Aberdeen. Thoughts on the US-UK trade deal below. Peter Mandelson’s brief grimace was the only sign the government knew the ploy was a stretch.
This trade deal belongs to Donald Trump

1 week ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

Keir Starmer is living out the wildest dreams of the Brexiteers. Buccaneering Britain got a trade deal with India on Tuesday, and now, No 10 has bagged the first post-liberation day deal with the US. JD Vance and a coy Ambassador Mandelson stood beside President Trump in the Oval Office as he proclaimed a deal that secures “billions of dollars of increased market access for American exports, especially in agriculture”.
Ross Douthat: “In the intelligentsia, it’s Catholicism or nothing”

1 week ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

On a balmy day in New Haven, Connecticut, a few hundred metres from Yale University, over chicken salad and raspberry iced tea, the most famous conservative columnist in the world was urging me to believe in ghosts. “Do you know people who think they’ve really seen ghosts?” Ross Douthat, who writes for the New York Times, asked. I know someone who thinks they have seen a ghost, yes.
Why Donald Trump couldn’t honour the Pope - New Statesman

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

The US president’s bizarre eulogy masked a deeper tension.
Can the White House stomach this trade war?

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

The question every finance minister, factory owner, stockbroker and person who uses money to buy stuff is trying to answer is whether Donald Trump’s tariffs are permanent. Will he back down on his huge wave of tariffs once other countries drop their own tariffs on American products? Or is protectionism the point? Team Trump itself does not seem to know. Each day more loyalists start to sound as if they hope the president is lying but fear he is being honest.
Elon Musk’s Wisconsin mission explodes

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

Elon Musk might have just lost his lustre in the Oval Office. Just days ago, he said Western civilisation hinged on whether the Republican-backed candidate won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The election results are now in, and the West has fallen. The Democratic-endorsed candidate Susan Crawford won despite Musk pumping $25 million into her opponent’s campaign, handing out $1 million cheques to voters and even paying voters $50 to take photos outside polling stations.
Gavin Newsom’s cynical, shallow podcast

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

The Democrats are getting into the entertainment business. During the campaign, they watched Donald Trump bypass the mainstream media by riffing for three hours in the studios of podcast kings such as Lex Fridman, Theo Von and Joe Rogan. Young voters listened enraptured, the thinking goes, and then bolted to the polls. So now the party is on a tortured search for that political elixir called “authenticity”.
What the Signal group chat really revealed about Trump's team

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

One way Europeans have coped with the return of Donald Trump is by clinging to the belief that the president and his team don’t really mean what they say. Anyone still labouring under that delusion should look at the leaked Signal group chat messages about a missile strike on the Houthis between the US defense secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials.
Trump’s Golden Age

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Freddie Hayward

In his inauguration speech in January, Donald Trump heralded a new “golden age of America”. “From this day forward,” he said, “our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” He promised a manufacturing boom, falling consumer prices and the colonisation of Mars.