Politics

The White House X account has won notoriety as a coven of young memesters scandalizing the nation. There have been meme images of leading Democrats decked out in sombreros, and clips featuring footage of Iranian military hardware being blown up interspersed with WiiSports.  Now the antics have been taken a step further. There is currently widespread talk of the United States “unleashing hell” on Iran once markets close this weekend, after its initial 15-point peace offer was rejected. There is even some frenzied speculation that things might go nuclear.  Not the best time then, to release a set of cryptic videos that seem to hint at some approaching cataclysm. One, at four seconds long, showed a pitch-black screen overlayed by TV static.

Mark Twain famously wrote that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, and similar rumors have proliferated about King Charles’s state visit to the United States not taking place as a direct result of the ongoing conflict in Iran. Dubiously-informed sources have suggested either that Charles himself is so personally offended by the outbreak of war that he has refused to head to America in a month’s time, or alternatively that the British government, smarting from the tongue-lashings that President Trump has handed out to the hapless Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have suggested that it would be a bad idea for the trip to go ahead at this time, and that the King should postpone the visit to the fall.

In the pantheon of Trump adversaries, Robert Mueller may rank at the very top. Everything about Mueller – his rectitude, his formality, his blueblood ancestry, his lifelong marriage to his high school sweetheart – was anathema to Trump who has sought, as far as possible, to disestablish the Washington establishment. Yesterday, Trump engaged in a round of gloating over Mueller’s death at age 81, declaring on social media that it couldn’t have come soon enough: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” Gee whiz. No crocodile tears from him for the G-Man who had devoted his life to public service. “It is clearly wrong and unchristian behavior,” Republican Rep. Don Bacon wrote. It should, however, come as no surprise.

As Ukraine emerges battered but unbowed from the third and most terrible winter of the war against Russia, its people have proved that they can survive and fight on even as Vladimir Putin's troops destroy swaths of their country’s heating, transport and electricity infrastructure. But one thing that Ukraine cannot survive without is money – and that, the European Union seems critically unable to provide.  On Thursday, a Council of Europe summit once again failed to remove a veto by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, on a €90 billion ($104 billion) tranche of funding for Ukraine.