Cockburn’s Diary

Trash talk Who gets to call themselves MAGA these days, anyway? Politico Playbook declared this weekend that “MAGA is whatever Trump decides it will be” – the administration’s go-to defense when the President does something the further-right side of his base doesn’t care for, such as dispatching military support to Ukraine, say, or running interference for the Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Heading into the midterms – and we’re past the halfway point of 2025, so we are heading into the midterms – Republican candidates up and down the country are already attempting to bill themselves as the most “MAGA” in the field, in hope of garnering a Trump endorsement that could see them win office.

Fumbled… As Texas digs out from last weekend’s catastrophic flooding, the state’s leaders are using the only metaphor its residents understand – football – to try and shift blame. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a great protector of the Republican establishment, said at a Tuesday press conference, “Every football team makes mistakes. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who is to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say ‘Don’t worry about it, man. We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again and then we’re going to win this game.’” But the “losing team,” in this case, appears to be the Republican-run Kerr County, which did not have a proper flood warning system in place.

A great travel miracle has occurred – and Cockburn, who flies frequently and disgruntledly, couldn’t be more thrilled. The TSA, as of either yesterday or very, very soon, will no longer require airline passengers to remove their shoes when going through security. Shoes on/shoes off has been the bane of every commercial airline passenger’s existence since British terrorist Richard Reid attempted to detonate his shoe bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001. Since then, it’s been federal policy to X-ray your Nikes and, repulsively, your flip-flops. Now either that threat has passed – or maybe it wasn’t ever that much of a threat. Regardless, we are free. Cockburn would like to see some other flying experience changes to accompany this one.

Deport Elon Musk? “Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” President Trump lightly threatened on Truth Social close to midnight. But Musk, who is proposing the formation of a new “America party” in reaction to Republicans passing the Big, Beautiful Bill this week, doesn’t seem to really care about electric vehicle subsidies. His X feed is an unending stream of warnings about the runaway national debt and promises to fund the re-election campaign of gadfly Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky. But Daddy Trump isn’t playing nice. This morning on the White House lawn where he always unleashes his punchiest quotes, Trump said, “We might have to put DoGE on Elon. You know what DoGE is?

President Trump and Congressman Thomas Massie are in a somewhat peculiar standoff. The President takes issue with Massie’s opposition to bombing Iran and to the Big, Beautiful Bill. In an over 300-word Truth Social tirade, Sunday, Trump called Massie a “pathetic LOSER,” “lazy,” “grandstanding,” “weak” and “ineffective.” Massie has remained relatively calm. On Monday, he posted a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social jabs alongside a video of one of the national debt trackers he designed. “I’m going to program my debt badge to display the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since @realDonaldTrump has tweeted at me last,” he wrote. But it’s not just Trump who is targeting Massie’s seat.

You don’t mess with the Zohran Here in the capital, the President has been doing his utmost to wrangle Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran into a ceasefire neither government seems to want. It’s... not going great. As he departed for the NATO summit at the Hague, Trump said of the conflict: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” Meanwhile on the Hill, senators are poring over the Big, Beautiful Bill to see if they can whip up a version of it they’re willing to pass by July 4. But Cockburn finds himself looking north to the Big Apple – and wondering whether the mayoral primary could offer signs of life for the Democratic party.

What do you want to be when you grow up? A pilot? A firefighter? An ICE agent? Since the explosion of the LA riots,  the online gaming platform Roblox has seen kids “role-play as ICE agents” and anti-ICE protesters. Despite Cockburn’s doubts, this is considered “fun.” Internet scholar Taylor Lorenz explained to Cockburn: “Roblox has become like this metaverse where kids and young people go to sort of mimic real-world events. They role-play as teachers, or they have a family.” It’s just like The Sims, but with round-ups and deportations. It seems the game is mimicking real life: just like the protests in California became violent, so did the simulated ones.

A few months ago Team Trump tried to organize its war-gaming plans on the messaging app Signal. It didn’t work. It appears the team has taken to an even more secure platform, as the Iran-Israel war escalates, communicating instead on X. US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee shares with the President, Cockburn and everyone else: Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century – maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have so many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts.

Radio Ga Ga That’s it, yes, it’s war! Forget Israel and Iran’s back and forth, ignore the tanks on Constitution Avenue: the real conflict of the week was the heated Briefing Room scrap between two titans of radio, John Fredericks and April Ryan. It all kicked off on Wednesday afternoon ahead of the press briefing, when Trump-supporting call-in host Fredericks sidled in and started airing his grievances about how the briefings used to work under the previous Trump administration. He was moaning about how he never got to ask questions due to the focus-pulling antics of CNN’s Jim Acosta and April Ryan, who, sources tell Cockburn, he referred to as the “woman from urban radio.” Fredericks said this... while directly next to Ryan.

RealClearPolitics, the polling data aggregator, is undergoing a round of cuts. In a letter to staff last Wednesday, seen by Cockburn, publisher David DesRosiers writes: “Good people, our people, and the families that they serve will be impacted. We are sorry.” While cuts to media are nothing new given the challenging business environment, the reasoning behind RealClear’s reductions is somewhat unusual. “We find ourselves under attack from a shadowy new threat – this time from the Right,” writes DesRosiers. “A cabal of so-called conservatives is now attempting to stamp out independent voices. They have persuaded some of our previous benefactors who supported RealClearFoundation while it benefited them to withdraw philanthropic support.

How are you marking Pride Month? This weekend in the DC area, there are really only two ways to go about it. First, despite concern that the second Trump administration would scythe wholesale through gay rights, America’s capital is hosting World Pride, a two-week-long festival of rainbow-patterned frivolity.  Though there may be fewer corporate sponsors than in the Biden era, DC remains as gay as it ever was. In Northwest, 15th St is painted in rainbow colors and the gay bars are packed to the rafters. In Northeast, a two-day music festival kicks off tonight at the RFK Festival Grounds, headlined by Jennifer Lopez and a nice young man called Troye Sivan.

Cockburn is not a regular viewer of The Daily Show. It is no longer as epoch-defining as it was in Jon Stewart’s heyday. But he did take an interest in Stewart’s segment last night with Carole Cadwalladr. For the uninitiated, Cadwalladr is a former Guardian and Observer columnist from the UK most prominent for her reporting on Cambridge Analytica. CA is the political consulting firm known for its contentious use of Facebook data in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum. After Brexit came what Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill dubbed “the middle-class meltdown to end all middle-class meltdowns.” “And at the heart of it all,” wrote O’Neill, “was a writer for the Observer called Carole Cadwalladr.

Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump… Truss? Cockburn was surprised to hear from across the Pond that Liz Truss – who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom for just 49 days – had plans to set up a social media site. “What I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about,” the former PM said at a conference in England last month. The move would see Truss compete with X, Parler, Gettr, Gab and, yes, Truth Social, Trump’s social media app. How will she pull it off? With some American assistance, it seems. Cockburn understands Truss’s network is set to be part of the media conglomerate John Solomon and Mark Meckler are working to establish.

Who will be the Democratic party’s Joe Rogan? That is the $20 million question facing the party, as Democrats try to recover from the last election, when the podcasters had the power. Setting aside Rogan’s status as a longtime backer of both the Democrats and Bernie Sanders, the party’s plan to win back heterosexual, cisgender young men reads like a Barnard gender studies thesis. The plan’s codename, SAM, stands for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” and sets out to “study the syntax, language and context that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” Some free advice from Cockburn: normal young men don’t use words such as “syntax” in their everyday speech.

At the start of the week, The Spectator wondered how on earth Speaker Mike Johnson would get the Big, Beautiful Bill through the House, in the face of unified Democratic party opposition and seemingly intractable divides on the GOP side. The answer, it turns out, involved copious amounts of alcohol, side deals, naps, late-night staff shifts and the Democratic gerontocracy. Congressman Gerry Connolly’s sudden death on Wednesday shocked Washington. It also proved to be a boon to Johnson’s math. The Speaker ended up with more wiggle room, because one Republican who failed to vote slept through the late-night final tally. After months of debate, the House passed the bill 215-214; it now heads to the Senate, which is poised to change it and send it back.

Alina Habba, President Trump’s new United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, got her first major collar this week: Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, who Habba charged with assaulting, impeding or interfering with law enforcement after a scuffle outside an ICE facility got rowdy. One of McIver’s Republican colleagues in Congress quipped to Cockburn that there are “so many Democrats breaking the law,” yet “so few US Attorneys ready to charge them for it.” Habba’s actions were predictably opposed by all Democrats in Congress, and may already be reshaping the governor’s race in Habba’s home state of New Jersey. Where you sit on this issue determines whether you think McIver is guilty of assaulting ICE agents.

Who knew what about Joe Biden’s mental state and when did they know it? That question has driven a lot of Washington chatter this week, thanks to the upcoming release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Ex-Biden aides, cabinet secretaries and 2028 potentials have been under scrutiny – but so have the book’s authors. Tapper has gone so far as to retain top crisis PR agent Risa Heller, the Breaker newsletter reports. Heller’s clients have included Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents. Why does the CNN anchor find himself in such esteemed company in the week of his book launch?

How Biden blew it Joe Biden’s final act is to serve as the Democrats’ tell-tale heart. His public appearances are a haunting reminder of the lie told by so many in their party: that there was nothing wrong with the 46th president during his time in office. Biden is on a “don’t call it a comeback” tour ahead of the release of a book from Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper that threatens to reveal the poor physical and mental state the president was in during his time in office. So far we’ve learned that Biden’s “physical deterioration was so severe in 2023 and 2024 that advisors privately discussed the possibility he’d need to use a wheelchair if he won re-election.

Melaniabsent Where in the world is Melania Trump? That’s the topic of a dishy piece from the New York Times’s Shawn McCreesh. The First Lady “vanishes from view for weeks at a time, holing up in Trump Tower in Manhattan or in Florida, where she can lie low at Mar-a-Lago,” writes McCreesh. “It’s like having Greta Garbo as first lady.” Despite staffing up the East Wing, “she rarely goes into the office.” It has been suggested that the First Lady would not be spending much time in Washington during her husband’s second term, preferring to be in New York with her son Barron or down in Florida. However, McCreesh writes, “Even regulars at Mar-a-Lago say they don’t often see Mrs. Trump around the premises.

Met Gala turns @TheDemocrats into @PopCrave Celebrities from the music industry, the NFL and Hollywood joined Kamala Harris at the annual Met Gala fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. In an embarrassing tweet emulating viral celebrity accounts such as @PopCrave, @TheDemocrats (yes, the official social media account for the entire Democratic party) wrote, “Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala.” The defeated presidential candidate wore a black and white dress in a possible homage to Cruella de Vil. Despite the online slavering at DNC HQ, Emily Smith notes elsewhere in The Spectator that Harris’s audience might have been on the other coast.