America

J.D. Vance is just about the least popular conservative in Britain right now. The US Vice President’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, and more recent leaked text messages discussing strikes on Yemen, have left Vance mired in scandal. Even in America, home of the MAGA movement, he is among the most disliked veeps in history, at least at this early stage in his term. So it’s no wonder that last week Vance tried to move back onto his home turf and the issues for which he first became famous as a writer: the impact of globalisation on the American working class. In a room full of tech entrepreneurs, his championship of

This is an extract from today’s episode of Spectator TV, with Freddy Gray and Ben Domenech, which you can find at the bottom of this page: Freddy Gray (FG): America is – to use [Vice President J.D.] Vance’s words – bailing out Europe again, and [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth says ‘yes – it’s pathetic’ in capital letters. That clearly shows was they’re thinking about foreign policy. What did you read into it? Ben Domenech (BD): I think you’re completely right to highlight that potion because it is one of the areas where I think we can gather a bit more about their thinking than we have before… They simply do

Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the Atlantic is so mind-blowing it’s hard to know what to say in response. It defies belief that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, appears to have accidentally added a top journalist to a Signal messaging group with senior government officials – including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Defence Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence – to discuss top-secret military action. It boggles the brain that the people running the most powerful country on the planet, the Principals Committee of US national security no less, use childish emojis to discuss a bombing campaign which they helped co-ordinate in order to kill 53 people.

Over the past few months, I’ve wished that almost anyone was education secretary instead of Bridget Phillipson, who seems to be on a one-woman mission to destroy thirty years of school reforms. I’ll be honest, though: by ‘anyone’, I didn’t mean Donald Trump. But this week, President Trump showed how much better he would be in the job than Phillipson, signing an executive order instructing her US counterpart, Linda McMahon, to begin dismantling the US Department of Education. If only Keir Starmer had arrived in Downing Street last July and ordered Phillipson to set about the process of doing herself out of a job. Instead, she is proving with every passing

When Donald Trump ordered the declassification of thousands of secret government documents on the assassination of president John F Kennedy, it looked like it would be a red letter day for America’s conspiracy theorists. The reality has been rather different. The JFK files – as well as other documents about the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which were released on Tuesday – look like a very damp squib. These documents lead to more questions than answers Around 2,000 documents were included in the release from the US National Archives and Records Administration. But despite Trump’s insistence that the files should not be redacted, many still have passages