Donald trump

Thursday

Blake Neff

There’s a logic to Donald Trump’s incendiary diplomacy

On his very first day as Colombia’s new President, Abelardo de la Espriella received a dramatic house-warming gift: a billion dollars, courtesy of Donald Trump. Three days later, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the country – but correlation is not causation. The President’s ten-figure donative arrived as aid for the militarized crackdown de la Espriella has promised against Colombia’s fearsome drug cartels and jungle guerrillas. And de la Espriella quickly showed himself eager to align with President Trump by adding Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, Trump’s signature new venture in Latin America. With this old-fashioned exchange of gifts, de la Espriella became the newest member of the eclectic global club of Trump allies. This is not a stable alliance.

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Donald Trump becoming the new Jimmy Carter?

One day President Trump wants to dial down hostilities with Iran. “We’re low-keying” the conflict, he said Sunday. A day later, though, he was keyed up. After Tehran demanded reparations from Washington as part of its attempt to resurrect June's Memorandum of Understanding, Trump said on Truth Social that it was the Iranians who should: Compensate America for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat. Now it is Trump who has become a hostage of Tehran The problem is simple. For all his bluster about staring down the mad mullahs, Trump is on the run.

carter

Tuesday

Cockburn

Trump’s White House helipad do-over

Get to the chopper... but not yet. More construction is underway at the White House, as President Trump has directed contractors to redo their work on the new helipad, a project that started at the beginning of July. Photos taken show crews taking apart their hard work. According to the Washington Post, Trump is "frustrated with its appearance”, and is questioning its placement on the sloped lawn of the White House. Two anonymous sources say he’s debating whether “the slope of the White House lawn needs to be changed.” You cannot question an artist's process. Construction began on the helipad even before it was announced publicly, with the goal of completing the project before President Xi Jinping visits in late September.

helipad
Vuk Vukovic

Trump’s posts aren’t alpha

For up to $100,000 a month, investment banks, hedge funds and algorithmic trading firms can now buy access to President Trump's Truth Social posts milliseconds before they are made public. The premise is that Trump’s posts move markets so much that getting access to these posts mere milliseconds earlier is enough to gain an edge in the market – the elusive alpha that hedge funds are so obsessed with.  Critics are labeling it a blatant violation of insider information laws. Without going into the legality of the offering, I want to challenge Trump's claim about the actual value of early access to his posts. We found no evidence of any systematic trading strategy that could deliver a profit Given Trump’s continuous impact on markets, I decided to run an experiment.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

My top tips for Andy Burnham

I am cautiously optimistic about our new leader. For one thing, the fact that Mr Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity hire among our more recent UK prime ministers. This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place. Occasional catastrophes cause much less annoyance than frequent peeves One tip. Government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Can Trump improve the ‘terrible’ Dulles Airport?

Air Force One may not use commercial airports, but Donald Trump has nonetheless taken the initiative to plan a major overhaul of Dulles International Airport, the government-owned DC area international airport. Alongside Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Trump revealed the plans of the $22.5 billion renovation in the Oval Office this afternoon. The President emphasized the "bipartisan" nature of this project, which is included alongside the administration’s other efforts to “Make Washington DC Safe and Beautiful Again.” “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you don’t want to go and be subjected to this airport. Because this airport – it’s a terrible place to be,” Trump said.

dulles

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The media will miss Trump when he’s gone

Hats off to President Trump! At the conclusion of his speech to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump donned a red cap with 2028 emblazoned upon it and declared that he had hit upon a scheme to “save” the ratings of the new media. “I am pleased to announce my intention to run for a fourth term as President of the United States,” he said.  Trump evoked a few titters from the assembled press corps at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but that was about the extent of the hijinks. In one sense, it’s no laughing matter. What will the press do without Trump? He’s correct in viewing himself as its savior. Without the 24/7 entertainment provided by the Donald, views would dwindle.

correspondents

Friday

Freddy Gray

Will Trump’s ‘massive attack’ be on Yemen?

It is my solemn duty to report that, as ever in Trumpworld, the news zone has flooded and we are paddling through a reality-bending time loop. Last night, the government reapplied tariffs on more than 80 countries, on this occasion using dubious concerns about "forced labour" to justify the charges on Britain, the EU, Australia and elsewhere. Tonight, the President will attend the rearranged White House Correspondents’ Dinner, three months after the last one was canceled following another assassination attempt. The dinner will be held at the Waldorf Astoria, DC, which used to be the Trump International Hotel. The guest list and security will be tighter this time, and Donald should have a chance to make some good jokes.

Christa D’Souza

Should politicians have tans?

The cult economist Adam Tooze generally discusses matters far beyond my understanding on his podcast Ones and Tooze. While roasting in my flat during London’s heatwave, however, I found myself gripped by a segment he did on the economics of beach recreation. Did you know that 50 percent of Americans going on holiday regard getting a tan as more important than the actual holiday? This correlates with the rise of the “tanfluencer” and “tanmaxxing” among Gen Z and the revival of the full-on, George Hamilton-style tan. As a bit of an old tanorexic myself (remember, fellow boomers, the smell of Bergasol?), I’m quietly thrilled. First, because if this is a competition I will almost certainly win it – spot the brownest white person in the room: that’s me!

tans
Charles Moore

Burnham’s solutions must not lie in the 1970s

Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 percent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Vladimir Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil-fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretense that things can be made cheaper by fiat.

Bill Kauffman

Picnicking in the park on July 4

Our July 4 was low on bombast and high on fraternity this year. There were no stealth-bomber flyovers, no tanks treading ominously down Main Street or any other minatory displays of military hardware straight out of a Soviet-era Moscow May Day. Even Lee Greenwood left us alone. I’m told Washington was another story. For the first time since Covid, “Picnic in the Park” was back in Batavia. This much-loved festival of food, music, and smiling, “hey, how ya doin’?” encounters fills the bosky park across the street from the New York State School for the Blind. (One of Batavia’s many ironies is that the best view in town is from the blind school.) For years, my wife, daughter and I manned the Landmark Society’s strawberry shortcake stand at Picnic in the Park.

Thursday

Cockburn

Mike Lindell’s long-shot bid for Minnesota governor

“For the best night’s sleep in the whole wide world, visit mypillow.com” is a jingle that punctuates every hour of Fox News viewing. Now “MyPillow guy” Mike Lindell is changing his tune: for the best governor of Minnesota in the whole wide world, vote Mike Lindell 2026. Lindell is a Trump ally, businessman and election conspiracy theorist. He’s known for his rags-to-riches origin story, rising from a crack cocaine addiction to achieving sobriety and turning to religion. He founded My Pillow in Minnesota in 2004. For readers unfamiliar with Lindell’s political history: before his run for governor, Lindell was sued by a voting machine company, then known as Dominion Voting Systems,  for defamation pertaining to false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

mike lindell
Kilby

Do deals get done at Sun Valley anymore?

Silicon Valley is really just a few hundred people connected by favors and money. Most of us rely on this network, but few know how it really functions. This new column reveals the inner wiring of the American tech world. Traditionally, the Valley’s message to Washington has been: keep out. Now Sam Altman is offering the government 5 percent of OpenAI – worth some $43 billion – as a gift. Quite a conversion. The Valley that once worshipped Ronald Reagan now warms to Donald Trump’s economics. The state already owns a slice of Intel and a cut of Nvidia’s chip sales to China. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has introduced a bill that would take half the equity of the biggest AI firms in a one-off tax; so for Altman, 5 percent seems a cheap insurance policy.

Paul Wood

The strange death of Islamism

Iranians have adopted a new sport in the past few years: knocking the turban from a passing cleric’s head. There are points for technique and for how high and how far you can get their headgear to go. These are small acts of revenge against a hated religious elite who came to power on a wave of arrests and torture and who, as recently as January, ordered thousands of peaceful protesters to be shot in the streets. It’s also a symptom of something larger. Political Islam is in retreat across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. “The strange death of political Islam” is an idea that’s in the air at the moment. Rule by clerics, and by others who claim to speak in the name of God, is going out of fashion in the Islamic world.

Spectator Editorial

The ADHD administration

At the start of the second Trump administration, the words on everyone’s lips were “breakneck speed.” On the day of his inauguration, Donald Trump declared a border emergency, designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations and challenged birthright citizenship. He withdrew from international climate agreements and ditched Joe Biden’s mandates on electric vehicles. He rescinded various Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. On January 20, 2025, he issued pardons for individuals connected to the 2021 riot on Capitol Hill. And he established the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), which empowered Elon Musk to begin hacking away at federal bureaucratic bloat. Trump signed 143 executive orders in those first 100 days, more than any previous president.

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Jeanette Rubio, first lady in waiting?

Marco Rubio proposed to his then-girlfriend, Jeanette Dousdebes, in 1997, at the top of the Empire State Building. After she said yes, he asked for the engagement ring right back, concerned that it might slip off her finger and fall on the way down. Only once the couple got to ground level did he return it. Jeanette entrusts her possessions to Marco to this day. “I just love that she makes her husband hold her phone,” one Washingtonian says. Unlike many of the wives and girlfriends of the Trump administration, Jeanette Rubio has not created an exaggerated version of herself online. “Wife of Secretary Marco Rubio,” her Instagram bio reads. It links to marcorubio.com, which contains a picture of Marco and the words “Thank you!

Roger Kimball

Trump’s battle for sovereignty

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on a roll. Docket his consistently robust responses to Hamas, Iran and NATO for future delectation. On July 13, he wrote a brilliant op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “Why We’re Dismantling the International Criminal Court.” Then, on July 20, the State Department released “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” a 64-page report detailing Cuba’s 40-year effort to infiltrate susceptible groups in the United States. As a prefatory summary notes, Cuba’s campaign was less about politics or economics than, at bottom, “a revolution against western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.

Monday

Andrew Collingwood

There is no alternative to the Strait of Hormuz

As a UFC aficionado, President Donald Trump might know what a twister is. It works by cranking the victim’s head one way while controlling his hips in the other. Apparently, the pressure that this places on the spine is agonizing, leading to a rapid tap out or life-altering injuries to the back and neck. In the Middle East, the President finds himself in a geopolitical twister. On the one hand, Iran’s Memorandum of Understanding terms are too unpalatable for President Trump to swallow – crystalizing as they would an unambiguous defeat, with all the strategic and political consequences that that would entail. On the other, the US Air Force has been unable to suppress or interdict Iran’s missiles and drones.

Friday

Roger Kimball

Only cheats fear the SAVE Act

David Axelrod, Barack Hussein Obama’s chief strategist, was clearly worried about Donald Trump’s prime time speech about election integrity last night. Hyperventilating on X Tuesday, he warned that “If @POTUS really trots out Pulte, Patel and a crew of political apparatchiks posing as intel experts... to announce they've uncovered ‘evidence’ of foul play in 2020, it’ll only heighten fears that he'll claim an ‘emergency’ down the line and claim extraordinary fed power over elections. If so – and there are plenty of other signs of manipulation brewing – the most important battles of the midterms may be in the courts.” Let’s begin by considering Axelrod’s rhetoric.

trump save act

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The Trump monotony

One of Donald Trump’s greatest strengths is his ability to repeat himself endlessly. It takes some doing. At 9 p.m. tonight, he says, he’ll give the world a big primetime showstopper announcement. It’s expected that he will reveal something about foreign influence or operations in "the stolen election" of 2020.  Escalate, threaten, befuddle, try to find an off-ramp on more agreeable terms, and if necessary bore the enemy into submission We don’t know exactly what, but we can be sure Trump will reiterate that he actually won three presidential elections, not two, and that he’ll use this stunt to push The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act. That’s currently his pet obsession. And Trump just keeps going until he gets what he wants.