Ben Domenech is an editor-at-large of The Spectator World.
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
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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
56 min listen
In a wide-ranging conversation at the White House yesterday evening, Donald Trump was in the mood to talk about everything under the sun – from the speedy success his second administration has had putting fear into the hearts of bureaucrats and Eurocrats, to why he believes there is a path to a balanced budget. He
In a wide-ranging conversation at the White House yesterday evening, Donald Trump was in the mood to talk about everything under the Sun.
The temperatures at game time in Kansas City and Buffalo this weekend were in the high teens and the low 20s, respectively, before both sank even lower as day turned to night. The temperature in Washington on Capitol Hill when Donald Trump began to give his second inauguration address was -2ºC a far cry from
The early attitudes from Democrats toward the new Trump administration are difficult to judge in a vacuum – and that’s the context we’re currently in a dozen days before the second inaugural. Last time around, it was only after the combination hits of the Women’s March and the manufactured Russiagate freakout that we saw elected
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Freddy Gray is joined by Ben Domenech, editor-at-large of Spectator World to discuss a strange video of Kamala Harris released by the official Democratic party account, Trump’s counter-signalling appointments and the realignment of the Republican party.
In Washington, you don’t name anyone disruptive or potentially transformative to your administration without dealing with flack from the Senate. They like things straightforward, predictable, vetted, established and preplanned — and Donald Trump’s cabinet of outsiders is anything but. The Brett Kavanaugh nomination was widely considered to be dead even among his most emphatic supporters (reportedly even the
This is a grim night so far, in terms of every piece of data that we have about how Kamala Harris is performing. Of the four different possible situations, one was obviously a big win for Harris, one was a small win for Harris, one was a small win for Trump, and one was a
Vice-presidential debates rarely matter in politics except as fodder for jokes and, for today’s lazier commentariat, memes of the lesser variety. The greatest moment in modern vice-presidential debate history is Lloyd Bentsen’s ‘you’re no Jack Kennedy’ zinger of Dan Quayle, a debate win so effective that Bentsen and Michael Dukakis lost 40 states. Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman’s
Third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is widely expected to drop out of the US presidential race soon, and possibly endorse Donald Trump. Live from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Freddy Gray speaks to Ben Domenech, the Editor at Large of The Spectator World, about how this could affect the election. As the DNC approaches
It’s time to acknowledge the obvious truth about 2024: it’s going to be an election about who Americans want to go to the White House – and who they want to go straight to jail. There are, of course, all the normal caveats about unexpected crises, and typical issues like the economy, Ukraine, abortion, China
For someone who is not yet 40, the path JD Vance walked to become the next potential vice president of the United States is a long and winding journey from the holler to Silicon Valley to the halls of the US Senate. It encompasses four different names – from James Donald Bowman to James David
The most surprising aspect of Donald Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate is how unsurprising it is, following months of debate as to the best choice for the GOP. The number of candidates considered seriously by Trump was a much shorter list than the wide swathe initially announced as being
The announcement by Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader of the United States Senate, that he will step down in November came in anticipation that he would be bounced from his role regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election. Either Donald Trump’s victory would be deemed by populists as a chance to remake the Republican party,
The math is clear for Nikki Haley. Even though she outperformed polling expectations in her home state of South Carolina, getting 40 per cent of the vote to Trump’s 60 per cent, her path to the Republican nomination is only going to get harder now. Thanks to significant Republican rule changes that increased the number of winner-take-all
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Freddy Gray is joined in New Hampshire by Ben Domenech, editor at large of Spectator World. On the podcast they discuss the pro-Trump establishment of the Republican party; how the Republican cohort have changed since the Obama election and what issues Trump can identify that appeal to voters.
Senator Mitch McConnell appeared to have another elderly moment in Kentucky following an event yesterday, where a question about whether he would run for re-election in 2026 left him silent as the cameras tracked the awkward scene. It is obviously not the first time that this has happened for McConnell — and the eighty-one-year-old deserves
One of the big questions in Washington and across the country as Joe Biden’s very public decline has accelerated is: who’s actually running the show at the White House? There have been various answers, including former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice; even Kamala Harris’s husband Doug
When Donald Trump’s attorney and spokeswoman Alina Habba took to the streets on Thursday in front of the federal courthouse in Washington, DC, she described the former president as ‘the leading candidate right now for president for either party’. It’s a slight stretch, but only slightly. Trump is within the margin of error against Joe Biden
