Donald trump

Today

Roger Kimball

Shots fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Donald and Melania Trump entered the hall at 8:16 to cheers and applause. “Hail to the Chief” was followed by presentation of the colors and the National Anthem.  We had a brief introduction from Weijia Jiang, this year’s president of the White House Correspondents Association, followed by dinner. Two questions hovered in the background. One, how would President Trump treat the press? And two, would he, as had many presidents in the past at this event, treat the audience to a little self-deprecating humor? “Donald Trump” and  “self-deprecation” are not words you often hear together, but who knows?  The President is also a master communicator who reads his audience well.  

Friday

Travis Aaroe

The Palantir manifesto doesn’t go far enough

Tech companies like Palantir now find themselves in a bind. Wanting government contracts, they have a reason to stay politically neutral. At the same time, they rightly suspect that the greater part of the left has already marked them for destruction. The hostility has little to do with Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Austrian economics, or its occasional calls for a property-based franchise – an old National Liberal demand rather than a fascist one. Rather, the left is hostile to technology because it is America’s conservative party, suspicious of anything that threatens to undermine old solidarities. MAGA was quick to forgive corporate America after it called a, at least temporary, halt

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Cockburn

Julia Varvaro did nothing wrong

Even by Washington’s sordid standards, this has been a particularly grubby week. Things kicked off with the departure of vacation queen and Josh sauvi B enthusiast Lori Chaves-DeRemer from the Department of Labor; they continued with a tell-all from the ex-girlfriend of former ICE deputy director Madison Sheahan. Don’t get Cockburn started on Congress (Juliegrace Brufke’s “Case Study in Congressional Smut” is worth a peruse.) There is no shortage of salacity, yet Cockburn can’t put his finger on why he’s so entranced by the stories from the Daily Mail and the New York Post regarding DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism Julia Varvaro and her much older ex-boyfriend, Robert Bianchi. Bianchi withheld his identity and approached the Mail with text messages and

NATO
Daniel DePetris

The contempt Trump feels for his NATO allies is mutual

The war in Iran has revealed plenty about America’s ability to inflict damage on its enemies, Tehran’s capacity to resist pressure and Washington’s broader tendency to get itself stuck in the Middle East – a region several US presidents planned to extricate from. The conflict has been paused since April 7 due to a ceasefire that Trump extended earlier in the week. But it is nonetheless revealing a gradual systemic shift in the so-called international order that has been bubbling beneath the surface for years. The movable object is none other than the transatlantic alliance which, through NATO, has bound the United States and most of Europe into a single

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Why Trump hasn’t stuck the knife into Starmer

As public messages of support go, it scored pretty low on the conviction-o-meter. “Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom acknowledged that he ‘exercised wrong judgment’ when he chose his Ambassador to Washington,” said President Donald Trump on Truth Social last night. “I agree, he was a really bad pick. Plenty of time to recover, however! President DJT.” Uh oh. None of the trademark capitalization, which suggests Donald’s heart isn’t really in it. Some aide must have just spoken to him about Keir Starmer’s Peter Mandelson crisis, or perhaps a news story came to his attention. You know a British prime minister is in trouble when an American president

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Monday

Ross Clark

Tariff refunds are a nightmare for Trump’s economy

Donald Trump’s second presidency began with a blaze of executive orders which horrified and impressed in equal measure. It also begged the question: if it really were so easy for a president to circumvent the legal obstacles and assert his will, how come none had behaved in this way before? A year on, we are learning the truth: no, a president can’t just do what he likes, and there is a horrible price to pay if he tries. In the case of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs the notional bill is $166 billion. That is the sum that US Customs believes it will have to refund to importers who paid tariffs which were

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Robert Hardman

Why Donald Trump won’t embarrass the royals

Elizabeth II was never particularly enthusiastic about birthdays. They were a good excuse for a parade or an honors list, but not a patch on a major wedding anniversary, let alone a jubilee. Those were a celebration of true dedication, not of mere longevity. Even so, were she still with us, the late Queen would have acknowledged that her centenary on April 21 is a big deal. It would also have created a delightful conundrum for the Buckingham Palace anniversaries office, the department that sends out 100th-birthday congratulations from the sovereign. At the start of her reign, she was sending 385 of those each year across all her realms (by

Friday

Charles Moore

The only ‘civilization’ Trump will destroy is his own

If, as Donald Trump had threatened, “a whole civilization” had died earlier this month, the whole civilization concerned would have been that of the United States, not of Iran. If an American president had deliberately ordered the death of a civilization – whether or not such a thing is achievable – America’s claim to world leadership would have collapsed. Like, I suspect, many, however, I did not go to bed that night thinking that Trump would carry out his threat. I remember my parents telling me that, during the Cuban missile crisis, people truly believed there might be nuclear conflagration at any moment. It did not feel like that this

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Tim Shipman

Britain’s ‘drone gap’ makes it vulnerable

When John Healey was asked, onstage at the London Defence Conference, whether the armed forces were “ready” for war, the Defence Secretary replied: “Yes.” One of those present says: “That was greeted with near incredulity in the room.” Another attendee compared Healey’s plight to someone “playing French cricket,” with critics from all sides hurling balls at his ankles while he tried to bat them away. “You can’t score any runs in French cricket.” George Robertson, Healey’s most respected Labour predecessor and a former secretary general of NATO, was not present; he was in Scotland celebrating his 80th birthday. But he returned to give a withering interview to the FT and

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Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The politicization of everything

“A number of observers of the political, moral and spiritual life in recent years have taken up the famous theme of the decline of the West,” the French journalist Luc Ferry wrote in Le Figaro at the end of January. “They recall that civilizations are mortal, like human beings, and that our own, far gone in decadence, is dying. Nevertheless, I fail to see how one can include the United States in this pessimistic reading of history. Not only does it remain the most powerful economic and military power in the world… politically speaking, whatever one thinks of [Donald] Trump, of his antics and his perverse narcissism, it is difficult

Christopher Caldwell

A change has come over Trump

Geostrategists used to fret over the “Eastern Question” or the Maginot Line or the Missile Gap. Today there is no doubt that the overriding geostrategic question of our day is whether the President of the United States is playing with a full deck. With the US-Israeli war on Iran failing, and depleting much of both countries’ non-nuclear defenses, with the Strait of Hormuz closed and western economies spiraling toward depression, Donald Trump greeted the world on Easter morning with a message to Iran’s leaders to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” then threatened the next day to wipe out Iranian civilization. He then denounced the Pope for having imparted

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Spectator Editorial

How Trump loses friends and alienates people

It is a long haul until the midterm elections in November. Many threats and deadlines will have been issued to Iran in that time, many cycles of optimism and pessimism will have been completed. The war may be over, or Donald Trump may be bogged down in an intractable conflict which he privately wishes he had never started. Regardless, his administration must start preparing for what looks to be an increasing certainty: that the Republicans will suffer a heavy electoral reversal. That was looking likely even before Iran and its effect on oil prices. The President’s tariff wars have protected some, but the overall effect on blue- collar jobs has

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Matt McDonald

Can Liz Truss and CPAC Make England Great Again?

“We have an elite who have been in power for at least the last 40 years, who fundamentally don’t like western civilization and they wanna destroy it,” said Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days in 2022, as she spoke to a half-full room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. It was her third such speech. The Liz Truss who addresses American audiences bears little resemblance to the awkward, growth-obsessed economics nerd who somehow ascended the greasy pole of British politics, only to slide back down at staggering speed. She’s changed her vocabulary – and her talking points. The few attendees of her panel, snappily titled

Tuesday

Cockburn

Mary Vought exits as Heritage comms chief… for $500k payout: source

Another high-profile departure at the Heritage Foundation: Mary Vought, who served as the think tank’s VP of strategic communications, bids adieu this week. “I’m grateful to @KevinRobertsTX for entrusting me with this position. It’s been an honor to work alongside some of the nation’s foremost policy minds while leading Heritage’s talented communications team – a group I am deeply proud of,” Vought tweeted. “I am returning full-time to my company, Leverage PR.” “Thank you, @MaryVought, for your great work,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts wrote in response. “It’s been a pleasure to work with you for nearly a decade – both @TPPF and @Heritage – so I look forward

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Tom Switzer

If Trump hates the Wall Street Journal, why is its editorial board dictating Iran policy?

For the better part of a decade, Donald Trump has been an avid, if irascible, reader of the Wall Street Journal – particularly the columns overseen by its long-time editor Paul Gigot. Because the Journal is among the few American conservative outlets willing to criticize Trump – on everything from tariffs to temperament – he has developed a habit of denouncing it in public while devouring it in private. The Journal, Trump recently declared on Truth Social, is “one of the worst and most inaccurate editorial boards in the world.” The ritual extends to annotated hard copies – margins filled with indignant scrawl – before the offending pages are FedExed

Thursday

Doug Stokes

What Trump gets wrong about NATO

The idea that the United States has been swindled by its NATO allies is not new. Robert Gates, in his valedictory address as secretary of defense in June 2011, warned bluntly that future American leaders might not consider the return on defense investment in Europe worthwhile. He spoke of a “two-tiered alliance… Between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership… but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.” Gates was no populist. He was a career intelligence officer and establishment Republican, and his warning carried real weight precisely because it came

NATO
Michael Evans

Get ready for Epic Fury Part II

It could be the shortest negotiation in history. The United States and Iran, with their respective peace plans, are so far apart that it’s difficult to see how their differences can ever be squared.  A two-week ceasefire, which has already been broken, brought relief after five weeks of war and steadied the oil and stock markets. But the agreed ceasefire is looking fragile, as US Vice President J.D. Vance admitted. There had been “legitimate misunderstanding,” he said yesterday, over whether the ceasefire extended to Israeli action in Lebanon. Iran is beginning the peace negotiations by ignoring the realities of what Trump has achieved in the past five weeks If there

Wednesday

Paul Wood

Trump’s fantasy of victory

Among the many gifts the Watergate scandal gave us was Nixon’s White House press secretary declaring: “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” That was after months of sticking to increasingly threadbare denials. In Donald Trump’s White House, operative statements become inoperative from one day to the next. That’s especially true of Iran. In 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, Trump went from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to “this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out, as the meme has it.  The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran is a lesson that you can win every

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Why Trump is tempting 25th Amendment talk

During his remarks in Budapest, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is trying prop up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as he runs for reelection, appeared to think the unthinkable. Vance, who has been a hero for MAGA anti-interventionists, went all-in on attacking Iran. He indicated that America might resort to “tools” in its arsenal that “we so far haven’t decided to use.” Now the White House is denying that it plans to deploy nuclear weapons against Iran, after frenzied social media speculation that it might. Negotiations with Tehran are ongoing – and Trump told Fox’s Bret Baier that “if negotiations move forward today, and there is something concrete” that tonight’s 8 p.m. deadline “could change.” As Iran’s refusal to capitulate has exerted a maddening effect upon President Trump,

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Saturday

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

Pakistan, the world’s only Muslim nuclear power, has traditionally been an international sideshow. No longer. The country has reportedly been passing messages between Washington and Tehran in efforts to bring an end to the Iran war. It is has a five-point plan aimed at restoring “peace and stability” across the region. How have the Pakistanis pulled off this remarkable diplomatic makeover? The answer starts with some critical decisions the Pakistanis took last year. After the four-day armed conflict between Pakistan and India in May 2025, both sides claimed “victory”. But crucially Islamabad publicly acknowledged Washington’s role in achieving a ceasefire (something India refused to do). Pakistan later nominated President Donald

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