Washington dc

Yesterday

Cockburn

Where to watch the World Cup in DC: Cockburn’s comprehensive guide

The World Cup begins this week, and Americans have been celebrating as only we know how: by fighting Europeans on social media about stadium size and atmosphere, and banning Africans and Middle Easterners from the country. Nonetheless, the next month offers a great opportunity to take advantage of DC’s status as a truly international city, and fraternize with foreigners while watching multimillionaires pass a ball around in 100-degree heat. For today’s special sports edition of Cockburn’s Diary, here’s your correspondent’s guide on where to watch each team in the District. Germany The Brig The Brig describes itself as a “secret beer garden.

Friday

Cockburn

President Trump won’t attend his son’s destination wedding

Cockburn isn’t the only one heading to the Bahamas this weekend. So is Donald Trump Jr. – to get married to Bettina Anderson in a private ceremony of around 50 people. It will be his second marriage and Anderson’s first. It sounds like Don Jr.’s father might be sitting this one out. “He’d like me to go,” President Trump told reporters Thursday, “but it’s going to be a small little private affair, and I’m going to try and make it… I’m in the midst – I said, ‘You know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.’” “He’s a person I’ve known for a long time,” he added. Political careers and family life often conflict but Cockburn won’t accuse Trump of being an absentee father just yet.

trump

Tuesday

Cockburn

Donald’s ballroom blitz

“This is Greek… more or less… it comes out of Greece… this is the ultimate facade for Greece.” Donald Trump is wielding a blown-up graphical rendering of one of the planned porticos of the new White House ballroom. “This is a different facade,” he says, pointing to another placard propped up on an easel, “This one’s Rome.” The President spent the morning touring the ballroom’s construction site with the press. Currently a forest of rebar and metal prongs, the project has now burst its bounds and is developing into a general fortress-cum-lair. A vast underground complex is to be built below the ballroom, housing a hospital, research facilities and meeting rooms for the military.

ballroom

Friday

Cockburn

Is the outgoing Border Patrol chief a sex tourist?

Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks has resigned, ostensibly “to retire and return home to Texas to focus on my family and ranch.” Banks served under President Biden but quit in frustration over the administration’s lax border policies. When Trump returned to office, Banks took up his old job again: like Cincinnatus, he came out of retirement to serve, and will now return to his plow. Perhaps “plow” is the operative word here. It’s widely speculated that Banks is in fact resigning because of a Washington Examiner investigation, which claims that he was a sex tourist who made regular trips to Colombia and Thailand while in post.

michael banks border patrol

Thursday

Douglas Murray

My night under fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protesters outside waved signs reading "Death to tyrants" and "Death to all of them." The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of his cabinet and senior officials. We were expecting him to give the assembled media a good roasting – and some of us were looking forward to it. Attendees had to show invitations to get into the hotel, but there were few ID checks and no screening as we went to the pre-parties thrown by the major news organizations. Only when we walked into the main dinner hall did we pass through metal detectors.

Monday

Cockburn

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner that wasn’t

Well, that was odd. Cockburn spent Saturday evening at the Substack party, hosted at the Renwick Gallery next door to the White House. He was handed what he was assured was a non-alcoholic cocktail were handed out upon arrival. Great. Leading lights of the “alternative” (read: once mainstream) media were dotted throughout the room. Cockburn spotted Jim Acosta and Michael Tracey before their now infamous clash over Tracey’s haranguing of investigative Epstein journalist Julie K. Brown. Things appeared to be shaping up for a salient White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with President Trump in attendance across town at the Washington Hilton with 2,600 journalists. A gunman had other ideas.

white house correspondents dinner

Friday

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.

Monday

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 telegram). By the end, it was over 16,000 (by card).

trump britain royals

Sunday

Oz Pearlman

Can I read Trump’s mind?

Making time to prepare to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has not been easy. Presently I’m flying back to New York, where I live, on a red-eye after a show in Las Vegas. My wife and five kids, all under the age of ten, are at home waiting for me. On average, I have one media appearance every day and a half between now and then. I’m not asking you to cry for me. All of this momentum and publicity is terrific. And my preparation for the big night on April 25 is always simmering below the surface. It feels as if reading minds for the last 30 years has been training for this moment. My goal is to have Donald Trump take part – and to save the best for last. If I could read only one mind in this world, it would be that of the most powerful person in the world.

oz pearlman

Friday

Cockburn

DC’s rat genocide

Like Amsterdam, like New York City, Washington is a rat city. Old buildings and moisture create the conditions for them to thrive. Rats provide the midsized city with classical urban charm. On the other hand, they’re vermin. As of this week, it’s official: DC Health is putting rats on the pill. The agency is planning to put “edible fertility control bait in areas prone to large numbers of rats.” Cockburn wonders if putting rodents on birth control is a little like attempting a regime change in a foreign nation. How much do we actually know about the delicate balance of the ecosystem? If we sterilize the rats, what comes next? Must we then move to kill all the eels in the Potomac?

Thursday

Kelly Chapman

No one in the DC political class is cool

No one in the DC political class is cool. For all our American spirit of independence, democracy still defers to the majority, and power compels even the most singular, Machiavellian mind to mold itself in the image of the people. Politics drains the blood out of the individual, replacing him or her with a bland and legible product, flattened into the image of at least 50 percent of the population. Prediction markets are a perfect example of this effect, shining the brightest lights into the caverns of cool, calcifying opinions into trends, trends into probabilities, and probabilities into certainties. There is nothing that poses more of a threat to cool than this, and no market hungrier for it than the politicos of Washington, DC.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Trump has given America back its heroes

This weekend, two statues were installed on the White House grounds. On the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building stands a statue of Christopher Columbus. On the south side is “Freedom’s Charge,” a life-size portrayal by Chas Fagan of two soldiers in the Continental Army, one with a rifle, the other with a billowing Bunker Hill flag. In ordinary times, the temporary placement of such tokens of America history at the White House might pass without comment. These are not ordinary times. On the contrary, America is just now emerging from a destructive frenzy of woke self-loathing and iconoclasm.  Just a few years ago, no emblem of American achievement was safe from crusading vandals.

Christopher Columbus (Getty) heroes

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address tonight, I thought of two homely things. One was something that a friend used to say to her young daughter: “Don’t forget to have an attitude of gratitude,” she would remind her preteen when that attitude was absent. The second thing I thought about was a fact I recently learned about Ulysses S. Grant. He was a great general, yes, and he was also a great, if generally under-appreciated, president. One sign of his greatness came posthumously. At his funeral, two of Grant’s pallbearers were Confederate generals. Grant had won the civil war, defeating the Confederacy, saving the Union. But in death he underscored his ultimate purpose: to unite the country.

sotu address

Tuesday

Christopher Caldwell

The deep state vs Nixon

Americans took a break from their partisan vituperation in February to mull over newly revealed testimony that Richard Nixon gave to grand jury investigators in 1975, a year after the Watergate scandal drove him from power. James Rosen, a veteran Washington journalist and the biographer of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, revealed the episode in the New York Times. Nixon had argued that his program of wiretaps had been made necessary by another spying operation that senior American military commanders were carrying out against him and his top aides.

nixon

Sunday

Jeremy Carl

My theatrical Senate confirmation hearing

It’s a bit difficult to explain a Senate confirmation process to those who haven’t gone through it. It is, to put it in a single word, intense. Years ago, the first time I had a hit piece written about me, I wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground and die. During my confirmation hearing, my attitude was more, “Oh, Chuck Schumer is denouncing me from the Senate floor as a racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist. It must be Monday.” I still haven’t even bothered to read the vast majority of press accounts or descriptions of me that have come out in the days since the hearing. It’s important in these processes to always know and remember who you are, because if you know that, what they are saying you are just doesn’t matter all that much.

Jeremy Carl Senate

Thursday

Conrad Black

The redemption of Richard Nixon

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public unease about the treatment of Richard Nixon.

Wednesday

Michela Wrong

A late Congolese ruler with a new following

At the exit of the National Museum in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is a whiteboard for visitors to leave their comments. On that whiteboard, full of underlinings and exclamation marks, are messages like this: “Thank you for your life.” “Thank you for our national unity.” “You left behind a glorious historical legacy. We plan to follow in your footsteps.” A giant photograph of the man the messages refer to hangs in the museum’s main hall as part of its new exhibition, a man in dark glasses and leopard-skin toque, smiling down at his people. More than 28 years after fleeing into exile, Mobutu Sese Seko, once known as “The Leopard” and “The Great Helmsman,” is back in the limelight in the DRC.

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Pete Hegseth is a polarizing figure who doesn’t quit

Pete Hegseth’s Saturday begins with personal training. The Secretary of War, @SecWar on your socials, is very fond of working out with the troops – something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram. Then he heads off to the Reagan National Defense Forum, the annual gathering of war hawks, policy nerds and defense contractors in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth, the veteran of the Global War on Terror, is there to fulfill his mission of denouncing the neocons. “Out with idealistic utopianism, in with hard-nosed realism,” he declares, insisting the United States will no longer be “distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building.

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

The theater of Washington

Suddenly it’s Ibsen season in Washington, DC. It’s true that only Shakespeare’s plays are performed worldwide more often than Henrik Ibsen’s. But to have two of the great 19th-century Norwegian playwright’s works running at once in the nation’s capital is unusual. And the works in question – An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck – deliver contradictory messages. Together they say something not only about the state of the arts in Washington, but also about the state of the liberal mind. Politics is very much a presence on the capital’s stages. The city’s two main Shakespeare organizations, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Folger Theatre, last year presented seasons heavily influenced by the presidential election.

henrik ibsen
partiful
Kelly Chapman

Why DC loves to hate Partiful

If you’re under 50, you may have noticed that Partiful has quietly annexed the American social calendar over the past year or two. The event-planning app, founded by former Palantir employees, began as another Silicon Valley toy, but it didn’t stay regional for long. Its loud dashboard aesthetic spread quickly through the Bay Area and then achieved escape velocity in Washington, DC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strong cultural current between tech and defense is what created near-perfect conditions for a social revival in nerd world. While I understand a bit of snobbery over the aesthetics, I’ve been surprised by the constant performative disdain I’ve observed accompanying its rise. Everywhere I go, I hear people say they “hate” Partiful.