This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Spectator podcast with Isabel Hardman.

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Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. Somehow it has already been two years into a Trump presidency and America is facing midterm elections. Will Democrats win in a landslide? We also delve a little deeper into the political fault lines behind the Jamal Khashoggi story, is Turkey taking advantage of his death?

And last, is the use of wild animals in circuses really the great injustice that campaigners say it is?

First, America is going to the polls again. This November, the House of Representatives and

a third of the Senate are facing re-election in the midterms.

Some predict that the Democrats will win in a landslide and retake control of the currently Republican Congress.

But Freddie Gray, editor of Spectator USA, writes in this week's cover piece that the Democrats aren't in for such an easy right.

The Brett Kavanaugh case has incensed the American right and Democrats still haven't learned to appeal to the country's working class. Freddie joins me now together with Leslie

Vinger-Muri, head of the US and the Americas program at Chatham House. So Freddie, you're in

Washington at the moment. Let's just start with the explosive devices that have been sent to

various prominent figures. What's the mood like where you are? Well, very selfishly, I mean,

I think I can make this joke because nobody's hurt and nobody has died. Very selfishly,

as soon as I'd written a piece saying that the Democrats are becoming the sort of nastier force in

American politics, some presumably right-wing lunatic sends lots of bombs to Trump opponents.

I think the mood here is feebrile. It's always quite feebrile, particularly in the run-up to an election.

And this sort of thing just makes it a little bit more excited. What was quite

typical was how it descended into partisan fighting before everyone had said, agreed that it was

a terrible thing. Leslie, do you recognize that account of the sort of partisan sniping

over quite serious incidents? Yeah, I think we've seen this with so many things. If you think about

the Russia investigations, they've also been read very much through a partisan lens. So yes,

it's amplified by the news media, which is very much divided into echo chambers. And when

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