The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

In this context, talk of the royals acting decisively to cut Andrew off are wide of the mark. This scandal has gone on for the best part of 15 years since that photograph, and another of Andrew walking amiably in Central Park with Epstein, came to light. Arguably it was longer still: how long ago did his siblings, perhaps even his parents, know that Andrew was so self-entitled?

They must have realised, if his staff and the police were doing their jobs, that he had some deeply disreputable friends given he openly invited them to Buckingham Palace, or Balmoral, or even Royal Lodge, another of his perks.

If the family did not know about his sexual proclivities, they certainly knew about his extravagance with public money, because the trips were printed in the royal annual reports: the taking of a helicopter from the palace to an Oxfordshire golf course and back again in time for lunch, the private flights instead of scheduled services, all for the convenience of “Airmiles Andy”. Then there was the entitlement which demanded deference when he entered a room (“Let’s try that again, shall we?” when people did not notice his arrival, according to his recent biographer Andrew Lownie) or the supreme consciousness about his royal titles used on his letterheads in correspondence to his personal acquaintances.

He could get away with it while his mother, who inexplicably indulged him, was still alive. Queen Elizabeth did at least strip him of public duties and honorary colonelcies in the wake of his disastrous and, we now know, mendacious Newsnight interview six years ago, which he thought had gone rather well. But his behaviour has scarcely changed since, sidling into the limelight at public events, most recently at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in September, vainly trying to make conversation with an all too evidently discomfited Prince William. And clinging on desperately to his grace and favour residence at the 30 room Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, even into this week reluctant to give it up in the face of pressure from the king.

The public (and the media) were far ahead of the royals. There was no one of any consequence to speak up for him, a result of all those years of arrogance, and the gravity of the looming institutional damage was finally clear. The more intelligent royals realised that. The one imperative is to pass on the monarchy, if not as heretofore at least intact and untarnished. They have spent the last 190 years trying to undo the reputation of the Georgians, proving they are useful, responsible and responsive to their subjects; if not exactly like them, then role models for respectability and good behaviour. Andrew was putting all that in danger in an age when deference and discretion is no longer enough.

Finally, the famously indecisive king was prodded further. There was no alternative. The palace had lost control of the narrative. The days when the indiscretions of princes could be overlooked or hidden – think Edward VII and his predilection for chorus girls and mistresses, Edward VIII and his half-secret relationships with Freda Dudley Ward and Wallis Simpson, or even the Belgian Leopold II, who had sex with underage children (not as bad as his treatment of the people of the Congo, his private fiefdom, but bad enough) – were over.

Now it is the loss of titles and the continued and life-long public humiliation that will hurt Andrew, demoted to just Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, the most. As will the fact that he is the first royal to lose his titles in modern times; the last to do so was the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, who sided with Germany in the first world war, while Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was stripped of his knighthood of the garter after the second. Since one of Andrew’s few claims to fame is his service in the Falklands war, this will particularly sting. He is still a counsellor of state, theoretically able to stand in for the king, and he is still eighth in line to the throne, but neither of these will ever come to pass.

Yesterday a reporter asked Representative Joe Neguse, a Democrat of Colorado, about the administration’s withholding of reserve funds Congress intended would fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “If we come to November first, and these contingency funds haven’t been released, if nothing has been accomplished in restoring SNAP benefits, will you call on your Democratic colleagues to reopen the government and deal with these shutdown crises immediately?”

Neguse called out the dynamic in which observers refuse to hold President Donald J. Trump and MAGA Republicans to account and instead demand Democrats step in to fix whatever crisis is at hand. “The basis for your question is, and maybe the better way to state it would be, if the Trump administration continues to violate the law, if the Trump administration unlawfully refuses to release funds so that families in Colorado don’t go hungry, if the Trump administration refuses to follow the law, as they have for the better course of the last nine months, violating statute after statute, if in that scenario these actions unfold, then how will Democrats respond?” Neguse answered.

“That [in] my view would be a more fair characterization of the question that you’ve posed,” Neguse continued, “because it does feel a little bit like we’re in the Twilight Zone here with an administration that is lawless, violates the law with impunity, is now doing so with respect to the release of funds for families that may go hungry.”

Neguse noted that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House of Representatives from conducting business since mid-September, sending members back to their home districts. “We’re here in Washington,” Neguse told the reporter. “You’re here in Washington. House Republicans are gone. Six weeks and counting. Gone. Literally, gone. Won’t show up in Washington, won’t do town halls back in their respective districts. And somehow the question is posed to the House Democrats as to how we will respond.”

Neguse had a solution. He said: “The Trump administration needs to follow the law…. [Y]ou’ve heard all my colleagues repeatedly suggest we would like to negotiate an agreement in good faith with our Republican colleagues. That is why we’re here in our nation’s capital. The question should be posed to Republicans. When will they get serious about working with us in good faith, so that we can reach an agreement?”

Neguse noted that he was frustrated “with the fact that Republicans could just simply abandon their post for six weeks, that the Trump administration could just violate the law without consequence. It should offend everyone,” he said. “It certainly offends me.”

Johnson announced today that the House would not conduct business again next week. The House has not held a vote since September 19.

Also today, two federal judges found that the Trump administration’s suspension of SNAP benefits during the ongoing government shutdown is indeed likely illegal. The administration claims that it cannot use a reserve fund established by Congress for emergencies to distribute benefits scheduled to be cut off on November 1. That claim has drawn lawsuits to try to get food into the hands of the 42 million Americans—one out of eight U.S. residents—who use SNAP, receiving an average of $186 a month.

At a hearing in the lawsuit of Democratic attorneys general and governors against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Office of Management and Budget, and their respective leaders Brooke Rollins and Russell Vought, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts noted: “Congress has put money in an emergency fund, and it is hard for me to understand how this is not an emergency.” She gave the administration until Monday to decide whether to pay SNAP benefits from that fund.

In a lawsuit brought by several cities, a major labor union, and a group of Rhode Island nonprofits, U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the USDA to use those emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. McConnell ordered the administration to provide an update by noon on Monday, November 3.

“There is no doubt that the six billion dollars in contingency funds are appropriated funds that are without a doubt necessary to carry out the program’s operation,” McConnell said. “The shutdown of the government through funding doesn’t do away with SNAP. It just does away with the funding of it. There could be no greater necessity than the prohibition across the board of funds for the program’s operations.”

After returning from a trip to Asia yesterday, Trump left this morning for his thirteenth visit to the Trump Organization’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago. S.V. Date of HuffPost notes this $3.4 million trip brings to $60.7 million the amount taxpayers have spent on the president’s 76 golf outings in his second term.

From Air Force One, Trump posted: “I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House. It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era. I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble. This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”

Accompanying the post were a series of twenty-four photographs of the newly renovated bathroom in white marble veined with black, accented with gleaming gold fixtures.

At a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and SNAP is at risk, Trump’s celebration of his marble bathroom was so tone deaf it seems likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

Trump also posted about his current remodel of the Kennedy Center, where, according to Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Shelly Tan of the Washington Post, ticket sales have plummeted, leaving tens of thousands of seats empty. “I just inspected the construction on The Kennedy Center,” he wrote. “It is really looking good! The exterior columns, which were in serious danger of corrosion if something weren’t done, are completed, and look magnificent in White Enamel— Like a different place! Marble is being done, stages are being renovated, new seats, new chairs, and new fabrics will soon be installed, and magnificent high end carpeting throughout the building. It is happening faster than anticipated, one of my trademarks. My people are doing a really great job! We are bringing this building back to life. It was dead as a doornail, but it will soon be beautiful again!”

When he arrived in Florida, a reporter asked Trump about the shutdown and whether he would meet with Democrats despite the fact he has, until now, refused to, and has ordered congressional Republicans not to meet with Democrats either. “I’m always going to meet,” he said. “All they have to do is open up the country. Let them open up the country, and we’ll meet. We’ll meet very quickly. But they have to open up the country. It’s their fault, everything is their fault.”

Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump’s celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.

Although two federal judges yesterday found that the administration’s refusal to use reserves Congress provided to fund SNAP in an emergency was likely illegal and one ordered the government to use that money, the administration did not immediately do as the judge ordered.

Trump posted on social media that “[o]ur Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP,” so he has “instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” Blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, Trump added that “even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out.” His post provided the phone number for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s office, telling people: “If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW!”

“They were careless people,” Fitzgerald wrote, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

This afternoon, Ellen Nakashima and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported that the administration is claiming it does not have to consult Congress to continue its attacks on Venezuela. The 1973 War Powers Act says it does.

In 1973, after President Richard M. Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution to reassert its power over foreign wars. “It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations,” it read.

The law requires a president to notify Congress in writing within 48 hours of the start of hostilities, including the legal grounds for those hostilities, the circumstances that caused them, and an estimate of their scope and duration. The law requires the president to get the approval of Congress for any hostilities lasting more than 60 days.

On September 4, 2025, Trump notified Congress of a strike against a vessel in the Caribbean that he said “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities.” The letter added: “I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution.”

Monday will mark 60 days from that announcement, but the administration does not appear to be planning to ask for Congress’s approval. It has been reluctant to share information about the strikes, first excluding senior Senate Democrats from a Senate briefing, then offering House members a briefing that did not include lawyers and failed to answer basic questions. The top two leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jack Reed (D-RI), have both said the administration has not produced documents, attack orders, and a list of targets required by law.

Representative Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Nakashima and Robertson: “The administration is, I believe, doing an illegal act and anything that it can to avoid Congress.”

T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the Office of Legal Counsel under Trump, told a group of lawmakers this week that the administration is taking the position that the strikes on unnamed people in small boats do not meet the definition of hostilities because they are not putting U.S. military personnel in harm’s way. It says the strikes, which have killed more than 60 people, have been conducted primarily by drones launched off naval vessels.

Brian Finucane, who was the War Powers Resolution lawyer at the State Department under President Barack Obama and during Trump’s first term, explained: “What they’re saying is anytime the president uses drones or any standoff weapon against someone who cannot shoot back, it’s not hostilities. It’s a wild claim of executive authority.”

If the administration proceeds without acknowledging the Monday deadline for congressional approval, Finucane said, “it is usurping Congress’s authority over the use of military force.”

For nearly 250 years, America promoted freedom and equality abroad, even when it failed to live up to those ideals itself. Not anymore.

Trump “doesn’t have any policies, he has whims. It scares the **** out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”
“It’s unbelievable. I don’t know of a greater criminal in history.”

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Quote:

while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”

It's wrong, it should be hell in a handcart.

It's a reference to the Plague, the Black Death.

This allegorical locution is actually of an unclear origin.
It could possibly be a reference to the baskets used to catch guillotined heads in the eighteenth century. (See the wikipedia report)

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Quote:

while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”

I know it shouldn't, but that phrase really pisses me off. Richard Twatting Littlejohn used it all the time.

It's wrong, it should be hell in a handcart.

It's a reference to the Plague, the Black Death.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA[/youtube]

izzythepush wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Quote:

while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”

It's wrong, it should be hell in a handcart.

It's a reference to the Plague, the Black Death.

This allegorical locution is actually of an unclear origin.
It could possibly be a reference to the baskets used to catch guillotined heads in the eighteenth century. (See the wikipedia report)

Last Monday, October 27, right-wing personality Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for more than two hours, mainstreaming the podcaster whose praise for Hitler, vows to kill Jews, denial of the Holocaust, and apparently gleeful embrace of racism and sexism has, in the past, led establishment Republicans to avoid him.

When Fuentes had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in a gathering with then-former president Donald J. Trump in 2022, Republican officials condemned the meeting. Then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “There is no room in the Republican Party for anti-semitism or white supremacy.” Amid the blowback, Trump suggested the meeting had been accidental, with Fuentes attending as a guest of rapper Ye, and the dinner being “quick and uneventful.”

Fuentes emerged as a right-wing provocateur in 2016 during a brief stint as a student at Boston University but fell out of establishment channels after appearing at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis shouted, “Jews will not replace us.”

Sidelined, Fuentes launched his own independent show, where he attracted a fanbase known as “Groypers” who ferociously opposed established right-wing politics. As Ali Brand noted on Friday in The Atlantic, in 2021, Fuentes said he wanted to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party.”

Fuentes took on Charlie Kirk, who established Turning Point USA in 2012 as a vehicle to attract young people to right-wing politics, encouraging his supporters to troll Kirk’s events. As Will Sommer reported last Thursday in The Bulwark, just days before Kirk was murdered in September, Fuentes taunted him, saying: “I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I f*cked it. And I’ve been f*cking it. And that’s why it’s filled with groypers…. We already own you,” he said. “We own this movement.” By the end of October, Fuentes had about a million followers on X.

Certainly, neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the MAGA party. Last month, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hard-line pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Also last month, the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.”

Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed the Young Republicans’ chat as “stupid” jokes made by “kids,” although the eight members of the chat whose ages could be ascertained were 24 to 35 and included a Vermont state senator, chief of staff for a member of the New York Assembly, a staffer in the Kansas attorney general’s office, and an official at the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Carlson seems to think momentum is behind Fuentes. He has given Fuentes access to his own 16.7 million followers on X and posted a photograph of himself with his arm around Fuentes, both of them beaming.

The platforming of a white nationalist by a MAGA influencer who used to be mainstream started a fight on the right.

The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, posted a video defending Carlson’s interview from “the venomous coalition attacking him.” Activists founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank in 1973 in response to the 1971 Powell Memo calling for the establishment of “conservative” institutions to stand against the liberal ones dominating society. Heritage policies became central to the political thought of the Reagan Revolution and went on to shape the foreign policy of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, remaining a powerful force in Republican policy through Trump’s first term.

When Roberts took over the leadership of Heritage in 2021, he dedicated it to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Roberts says he looks to modern Hungary under authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as “not just a [italic] model for conservative statecraft but the [italic] model.” He brought Heritage and the Orban-linked Danube Institute into a formal partnership. The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán showed in Project 2025, which Heritage led, to map out a future right-wing presidency that guts the civil service and fills it with loyalists; attacks immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals; takes over businesses for friends and family; and moves the country away from the rules-based international order.

After Roberts put out his video, former Senate Republican leader McConnell commented on social media: “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends. Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

Senior analyst for tax policy at the Heritage Foundation Preston Brashers simply posted an image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting depicting “Freedom of Speech”—a man in a flannel shirt and a Navy bomber jacket standing to speak at a meeting—with the caption “NAZIS ARE BAD.”

When Roberts’s chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus reposted a missive suggesting that those unhappy with Roberts’s video should resign, Brashers retorted that “most of us have been at Heritage a lot longer than he has. But if losing my job at Heritage is the consequence of posting “NAZIS ARE BAD”, it’s a consequence I’m prepared to face.”

The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy marriage between business interests who wanted tax cuts and deregulation, represented by lawmakers like McConnell, and the racist Dixiecrats and religious traditionalists who wanted to get rid of equal rights for racial minorities and women. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Republican operative Grover Norquist explained in 1985, “but these groups can provide the votes.”

But while business got its tax cuts and deregulation over the years, the base voters of the party—especially the evangelicals who had come to see ending abortion as their key demand—did not see the country reorganized in the racial and gender hierarchies they craved. Trump promised to deliver that for them. When establishment Republicans fell away from Trump after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally—after Congress had passed and Trump had signed the 2017 tax cuts into law—Trump turned to the base, using the threat of their wrath to keep the establishment figures in line.

Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazism, a line establishment figures like McConnell, who is 83 and retiring from the Senate in 2027, finally seem unwilling to cross.

But there is greater instability behind this fight than the split in today’s Republican Party. What held the Republican coalition together was a call for an end to the New Deal government put in place by both Democrats and Republicans after the Great Crash of 1929. But while wealthier Americans were happy to get their side of the bargain, many Republican voters seem less happy with theirs. They seem to have believed that government programs helped only minorities and what talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh called “feminazis,” but the extreme cuts to the federal government first under billionaire Elon Musk and then under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought have hammered all Americans.

And now those cuts are hitting healthcare and food. Premiums for next year’s healthcare insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace are skyrocketing, and because of the way subsidies expanded under President Joe Biden, the hardest-hit states will be those that voted for Trump. Democrats in Congress are refusing to sign on to a continuing resolution to end a government shutdown unless the Republicans will work with them to extend the premium tax credits, but Trump is refusing to talk to Democrats about it.

The administration has been pressuring Democrats to agree to the Republicans’ terms for a continuing resolution by refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. On Friday, federal judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the government to use the emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. Trump promptly took to social media. Bashing the Democrats, he said he would ask the court for direction as to how the government could fund SNAP legally.

On Saturday, Judge McConnell ordered the administration to use reserve funds for at least a partial payment this week and quoted back at him Trump’s social media post claiming “it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding” once McConnell provided more clarity. Meanwhile, economics journalist Catherine Rampell reported today that the administration has told grocery stores that they cannot offer discounts to customers affected by the lapse of SNAP.

That the Republicans are feeling the pressure of voters’ anger shows in the repeated statements of both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that they will produce a health plan better than the ACA just as soon as Democrats agree to the continuing resolution. On Air Force One Friday, Trump told reporters that it’s “largely Democrats” who use SNAP, and today Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who oversees SNAP, told the Fox News Channel that Democrats support SNAP because they want to give handouts to undocumented immigrants. Trump “will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry,” she posted on social media.

Perhaps it is Trump’s Great Gatsby party of Friday night that has me thinking about the 1920s. Or perhaps it’s the Republicans’ Nazi talk.

The United States had a strong Nazi movement in the 1930s, strong enough that more than 20,000 people attended a Nazi “Pro American” rally at Madison Square Garden in commemoration of George Washington’s birthday in 1939. But it had an even stronger Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s, which burned like wildfire in the early years of the century.

After the horrors of World War I, an influenza pandemic, the visible rise of organized crime to get around the prohibition of alcohol, and the ongoing racial and ethnic changes to the country, KKK members across the countryside rallied to an “Americanism” that rejected international involvement, blamed the changes in the country on immigrants and Black Americans, and promised “reform.” Numbering about five million, KKK members swung elections, usually to the Democrats in the South and to the Republicans in the North. “We know we’re the balance of power in the state,” the grand dragon of the Illinois KKK said in 1924, “We can control state elections and get what we want from state government.”

But in 1925, powerful Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted of raping and murdering Madge Oberholtzer. When the governor, whose election the Klan had supported, refused to pardon him, Stephenson began to name accomplices in the corrupt web of state politics, making it clear that the championing of traditional values had been a con.

Membership in the Klan plummeted, but its anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-New York City sentiments were still strong enough in 1928 to sink Democratic candidate Al Smith. “We now face the darkest hour in American history,” Ku Klux Klan forces wrote when Smith won the Democratic nomination. They called him the “Antichrist” and burned crosses in the fields of Oklahoma when he crossed the state line. Smith won only 40.8% of the vote to Republican Herbert Hoover’s 58.2%.

But then, the next year, the bottom fell out of the 1920s economy of rich and poor that F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered in The Great Gatsby. By 1930, some Americans were on their way to embracing Nazism. But others turned away. As they dealt with economic ruin, rural white Americans had left the KKK, whose membership fell to about 30,000. And in 1932, voters elected Al Smith’s campaign manager, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his own landslide as he focused on a new kind of economy, giving him 57.4% of the vote to Hoover’s 39.6%.

Charles took his bloody time.

Sorry, catch ups

Quote:

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor should go to the US to answer questions on Jeffery Epstein if asked to do so, a UK government minister has said, as it emerged that the former prince’s name has already been struck from the official roll of the peerage.

Hours after the dramatic statement that King Charles had formally stripped his brother of all titles, including Duke of York, his HRH style and honours, Buckingham Palace said Andrew’s name had been removed from the roll, a move that in effect ends his public life.

The disgraced royal will move out of the 30-room Royal Lodge in Windsor and into private accommodation on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, with Charles making private financial provision for his brother going forward.

Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, will make her own arrangements. Their daughters, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, as daughters of the son of a sovereign, will retain their titles in line with King George V’s letters patent of 1917.

Andrew remains eighth in line of succession to the throne and a counsellor of state, but this role has previously been described as “inactive” as he was a non-working royal.

The justice secretary, David Lammy, as lord chancellor, is responsible for maintaining the roll and was due to be sent royal warrants by the king to remove Andrew’s name, though it remains unclear exactly when it took place.

The trade minister, Chris Bryant, said the government “warmly” supported Charles’s decision. “I think the vast majority of people in this country will think that it’s the right thing to do,” he told BBC Breakfast.

Describing Andrew as now “an ordinary member of the public”, Bryant suggested he should go to the US to answer questions about the crimes of the late paedophile financier Epstein if asked. “I think that just as with any ordinary member of the public, if there were requests from another jurisdiction of this kind, I would expect any decently minded person to comply with that request. So I feel exactly there same in this situation.”

He added: “What I’m basically saying is that I think that if Andrew is asked to do something by a Senate committee then I would have thought that he would want to comply.”

The king’s statement at 7pm on Thursday ended two weeks of difficult negotiations after Andrew said he would voluntarily cease to use his titles, a move that failed to stem negative headlines when it emerged he was fighting to stay in Royal Lodge.

Throughout the process, the palace is understood to have been conscious of the impact the king’s decision would have on Andrew and his family.

Sources indicated that the decision was prompted by serious lapses of judgment over Andrew’s involvement with Epstein. Recent revelations included that Andrew allegedly asked his police protection officer to arrange checks on his sexual assault accuser, Virginia Giuffre.

A leaked email led to claims Andrew lied when he said in his disastrous Newsnight interview that he had ceased contact with Epstein in December 2010, allegedly showing they were still in touch at least three months later. A photograph of the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein taken at Royal Lodge at what is believed to have been Beatrice’s 18th birthday party also emerged.

The king’s decision was also almost certainly influenced by the posthumous publication of Giuffre’s memoirs, Nobody’s Girl, exclusive extracts from which were published by the Guardian, in which she repeated her allegation – strenuously denied – that she was forced to have sex with Andrew on three occasions while trafficked by Epstein.

Palace sources have indicated that necessity of action was never in doubt. Removing a dukedom would normally require legislation. But the king is understood to have opted to abolish Andrew’s dukedom using his powers of royal prerogative rather than waste parliamentary time that could be spent on important matters of national interest.

The public accounts committee increased the pressure by releasing a list of detailed questions they had sent to the crown estate over Andrew’s 75-year lease on Royal Lodge.

Giuffre’s family said in a statement to the BBC she had “never stopped fighting for accountability”. “Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage,” the statement said.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/31/ex-prince-andrew-should-answer-us-questions-on-epstein-if-asked-uk-minister-says

I'm far from being a Royalist, in fact I find the idea of Royalty abhorrent.
I'm a Republican to the core.
Not the bastardsized version of republicanism that exists in the US today.
I find that just as repugnant as Royalty.
That said, I have to congratulate King Charles on stripping that pig of a man Andrew of his titles and privileges.
Although by all accounts it was William who really wanted him gone.
By doing this they've probably saved the monarchy, for now anyway.

I find it deliciously ironic that the Brits sacked their US ambassador and stripped a Royal Prince of his title for associating with the sex-trafficker Epstein while the Republicans and MAGA made Epsteins best bud their President and will do anything and everything to protect the piece of ****.
Score 1 for decency for the Brits.

Quote:

Trump “doesn’t have any policies, he has whims. It scares the **** out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”
“It’s unbelievable. I don’t know of a greater criminal in history.”

Harrison Ford in 'The Guardian'