America

As Donald Trump weighs up taking control of Greenland, Britain and the EU has fallen back on a familiar strategy: talk tough, and do nothing. The UK joined France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Denmark yesterday in making a joint statement affirming that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Arctic security, it said, must respect “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders.” Invoking it Article 5 the United States would expose NATO’s limits rather than overcome them If Donald Trump decides to take Greenland, Europe’s initial response would be loud, formal and legally impeccable. Europe and the UK would protest loudly, threaten, – and then do almost nothing at all.

President Trump offered Republican members of Congress a stand-up routine involving an imitation of transgender athletes lifting weights at the House GOP Member retreat earlier today. The President said that his wife “hates” when he does this and considers it “unpresidential.” “She said, ‘darling please, the weightlifting is terrible’,” the President recounts, before launching into his impersonation, replete with sound effects. The impression has been a regular feature of Trump’s rally speeches over the last year or so. Melania, he claimed, also said that his audiences didn’t like his dancing, pointing out that FDR would never dance as a counter-example. Trump conceded in his speech that FDR was “an elegant fellow,

On this occasion no one can accuse Donald Trump of hyperbole. The President praised the Delta Force team that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as “incredible.” The operation to capture Maduro – codenamed “Absolute Resolve” – was months in the planning, and Trump watched it unfold in real time. “They broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” According to the New York Times, the operation began last August when CIA officers infiltrated Venezuela and began gathering intelligence about the habits and movements of Maduro. They were assisted by stealth drones high in the sky overhead and the

Nicolas Maduro is a very lucky man. The Venezuelan dictator – or ex-dictator now – might not feel that way as he enjoys the hospitality of the U.S. justice system after being snatched from the safety and comfort of his own capital on the orders of President Trump. But once he’s had a bit of time to relax, he should compare photos of his capture, Nike-clad and brandishing a water bottle, to the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was dragged out his “spider hole” in 2003 – or the way Muammar Gaddafi looked when a mob of his own people got done with him. Maduro didn’t lose a war

The new naughty list just dropped, as the kids say these days. The pre-Christmas release of the Epstein files, or at least some of them – elves heavily redacted – has brought much-needed good cheer to all of us. Not every red face on Christmas afternoon will be down to port and brandy this year. And the cast of characters – Mick Jagger, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, Richard Branson and all the rest – sounds like the guest list for the worst televised Christmas Special ever. The release of the files as they stand, though, seems to me to add fuel to all sorts of conspiracy theories. In

The 22nd Amendment leaves open several possible ways a two-term president could serve all or part of a third term without being elected. The text of that amendment, as ratified, prohibits a two-term president from “being elected” to a third term, but it doesn’t prohibit him from “serving,” “acting” or “holding” that office. Indeed, the framers explicitly rejected broader exclusionary language that would have made it constitutionally impossible for a two-term president to get anywhere near the Oval Office. Instead they accepted a compromise that created a loophole bigger than the new ballroom in the East Wing of the White House. This doesn’t mean that President Trump will actually run

Peter Thiel has been described variously as “America’s leading public intellectual,” the “architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos” or as an “incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic” malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern has always been the future, so when The Spectator asked to interview him, he wanted to talk to young people. To that effect, three young members of the editorial team were sent to Los Angeles to meet him. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. WILLIAM ATKINSON: Following Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New

DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib.  It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Musk’s minions rampaged through government offices, whether it was the US Institute of Peace or the Wilson Center. The idea was that the bastions

The main thing that has made the Epstein files seem politically (as opposed to morally) significant is that Donald Trump remains obsessed with preventing them from seeing the light of day. He thus devoted much of Wednesday to importuning Republicans such as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert not to back their release. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican,” Trump declared, “would fall into that trap.” But senior Republicans, as Politico reported, are expecting mass vote defections in the coming week as legislators prepare to vote for a disclosure bill sponsored by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says that releasing the files is “not only

No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.” Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine

There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian – the flagship organ of the British left – organized a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of North Londoners telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush. One wishes that London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s election in New York might have had a similar result. Interviewed shortly