Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Freddy Gray

The winter of Trumpian discontent

We seem to be fast approaching the winter of Trumpian discontent. The midterms are just weeks away, the mood within the White House is strained, and knives are being drawn on Pennsylvania Avenue. There’s the fuss over Katie Zacharia, the somewhat verbally challenged White House press secretary, and the surprisingly tough treatment meted out to her by Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday night. There’s the apparent volte-face over the fate of Nidal Malik Hasan, as Donald Trump declared that Hasan’s execution will not in fact be live-streamed. "He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad," said the Commander-in-Chief. "But this event will not be streamed.

Graham Keeley

After years of socialism, is Spain about to turn to the far-right?

Good-looking and always smartly dressed, Vito Quiles sports a wristband with the red and gold of the Spanish flag. It is ubiquitous among Vox supporters. He has made a name for himself in Spain by supposedly reporting on the hate figures for the far-right: migrants, housing rights protesters, students and far-left leaders. He confronts these figures to create provocative content online. Quiles, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, is part of a small but growing number of right-wing agitators who are attracting young people to Vox, a far-right party which less than a decade ago was regarded as a political joke.

Jack Smith
Roger Kimball

Jack Smith’s plot against the republic

Six hundred and thirty-nine thousand. Thanks to the indefatigable Chuck Grassley, we now know that that’s the number of individuals whose names Special Counsel Jack Smith hoovered up for Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice when Joe Biden occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (“Occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” it may almost go without saying, seems more accurate than saying “when Biden was president.”)  Senator Grassley has been terrier-like in pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by people like Jack Smith, Merrick Garland and their many confrères in the deep state, which is to say, the Democrat State. Grassley had earlier shown that nearly 5,000 GOP donor checks, mostly for piddly amounts, had been collected as “evidence” by Garland’s minions.

Jonathan Spyer

The West needs a coherent plan for tackling Iran’s proxies

Saudi missiles hit the Houthi-controlled Yemen Petroleum Company’s al-Sabaha facility near the Yemeni capital of Sana’a on Tuesday night. The Saudi strikes came in response to the Houthis’ earlier targeting of King Khalid International Airport on Saturday, when 12 people were killed. Another individual died in a similar attack the following day.    The ongoing and deadly exchanges of fire accompany a fierce ground conflict now under way in Yemen between the Iran-backed Houthis and the forces of the Saudi-supported Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), representing the legally constituted government of Yemen.

Freddy Gray

Robert Pape: America’s political violence is spiraling

32 min listen

Freddy speaks with University of Chicago international security scholar Professor Robert Pape about his book, Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Face of Violent Populism, exploring how demographic transformations, widening wealth inequality, and the normalization of political violence across the political spectrum are intersecting to pose a profound internal threat to American democracy and global stability https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Thursday

Simon Diggins

Revealed: NATO’s plan to combat Russia

Amid the Sturm und Drang of Donald Trump’s White House and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, General Alexus Gregory "Grynch" Grynkewich laid out what he terms NATO’s “Theory of Victory.” This is a concept of operations that will “block the initial attack... blunt it and prevent further advance. And, if required, break the enemy’s forces and the operational war fighting system that is arrayed against us.” In short: Block, Blunt and Break. General Grynkewich was careful not to point fingers but the location of his talk, at the Warsaw Security Forum, left no doubts as to who the potential ‘adversary’ General Grynkewich is both SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s lead operational commander) and USEUCOM, the commander of all US troops in the European theater.

NATO

Wednesday

Daniel Thorpe

Azerbaijan’s hijab ban has infuriated Turkey

There are few countries in the world with relations as close as Turkey and Azerbaijan. The two countries hail from the same Turkic ethnic roots, their languages are more or less mutually intelligible, and military cooperation has been strong – particularly in Nagorno-Karabakh against the Armenians. There’s even a phrase, “one nation, two states,” commonly echoed by both sides. Yet, a rift is now brewing between the two brotherly Muslim countries – over hijabs. Last month, the Azerbaijani government imposed restrictions in schools that “do not correspond to the principle of secular general education,” effectively banning headscarves worn by schoolgirls.

Alexander Kolyandr

What was the point of Trump’s diesel deal with Russia?

Donald Trump’s telephone call with Vladimir Putin last Friday was supposed to be about a suspected outbreak of plague in Russia, but it ended, as their conversations tend to, with a deal. Russia, the President announced, would supply America with more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 tons in November, a million tons “immediately thereafter” and another three million “within a short period of time.” The Treasury issued a license exempting Russian diesel from American sanctions until April. In the same breath, Trump proclaimed another energy ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv, the second in a month, and took another swipe at Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he would plainly like to see replaced at the ballot box.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Why Tom Cruise’s Digger flopped at the box office

Has climate hysteria finally run its course? I ask because the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the subject seems to have bombed. Digger, in which Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon so intent on drilling that he causes an ice shelf off Greenland to collapse, provoking climatic disaster, took only about $8 million in its first weekend, not great when it needs $280 million of box office takings just to break even. According to seasoned observers it is on course to lose Warner Bros $245 million, which would make it one of the worst cinema disasters of all time. Not even an endorsement from Jane Fonda, who described it as “a new way to wake us up about climate change” seems to have enticed the public. This didn't used to happen.

Gareth Roberts

Greta Thunberg is a protest addict

Greta Thunberg is in Paris. Yes, as if the French haven’t got enough on their assiettes with “youths” and “students” reducing the cradle of European civilization to smoking ruins, the overgrown Shirley Temple of Stockholm rocked up this morning outside a school in Saint-Denis. She told the crowd, “Young people are not being included in the conversation. Our future is being robbed away from us!” The clumsy structure of the latter sentence gave me an eerie sensation of an Armageddon-themed ABBA lyric. I can picture a mournful Frida singing it over flickering firelight. Few are the child stars, like Roddy McDowall or Bonnie Langford, who can sustain an adult career Greta certainly gets around, doesn’t she? Her passport must be like a tattered old dollar bill.

Aiden Abbott

Trump’s unconvincing imitators

The recent US adventures in Venezuela and Iran have not, on the American side, wrought the same losses of life and limb as those of Vietnam or World War Two. No field medics ferrying the dying and the dead. No trenchfooted cripples waiting for their commanders to find the difficult words for the difficult hour. Nobody in front of whom one might feel it inappropriate to begin a speech with: “Warriors, good afternoon.” Hegseth reached for an epic register only to be let down by his B-movie rhythm and hiccupy delivery Or, as Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War, put it last month: “We are no longer the ‘Woke Department’ or the ‘Weak Department.’ Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.

Benedict Rogers

The bravery of Joshua Wong

Joshua Wong, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists, turns 30 today. He should be in the prime of life, developing a career, perhaps starting a family. Instead, he is languishing in a prison cell, where he has spent much of the past decade. Wong faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. His crime? Peacefully – though persistently – demanding the freedoms that were promised to Hong Kong. Wong's crime? Peacefully – though persistently – demanding the freedoms that were promised to Hong Kong Wong was first jailed nine years ago, when – together with pro-democracy legislator Nathan Law and student activist Alex Chow – he became one of Hong Kong’s first political prisoners.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s schools protest has been hijacked

This is not going to be an easy week for the French police. More than 200,000 people are expected on the streets today in “Act 5” of the high school protest, and on Saturday the Gilets Jaunes will join a demonstration about the cost of living crisis. The extreme-left and their anarchist allies are set on disorder There will be violence. There was on Monday, which was supposed to be a relatively quiet day in preparation for today. It was anything but. In a school in Aubagne, in the south of the country, a 14-year-old boy opened fire with a hunting rifle, wounding two teachers and terrifying his classmates. Police are still working to establish a motive. Elsewhere in France, eight teachers were assaulted by protesters.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Trump’s decade of power: what went wrong?

31 min listen

Freddy speaks with Spectator columnist Christopher Caldwell about the ten-year legacy of Donald Trump since his 2016 election victory, assessing his second administration's high-water marks alongside the recent political and personal controversies that Caldwell argues have eroded voter trust, unraveled his populist appeal, and raised sharp questions about the future of the conservative movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Sam Leith

Why aren’t all executions public?

There is a boring, snooty, self-righteous school of thought that the judicial killing of a human being is a grave and dignified sacrament of the state. It says that where the law provides for the government to take a life, that is about as serious a decision as, in peacetime, it gets. This school of thought has it that the preceding judicial process must be exhaustive; that the condemned, no matter how repulsive their crimes, should be treated with respect by virtue of their status as human beings; that the whole punitive apparatus must see the process through with the sort of impersonal solemnity appropriate to its momentous arrogation of the right to take a life. Black caps, drawn curtains, ceremonious and exact procedures, shuffling clergymen…all that stuffy malarkey.

Jawad Iqbal

Trump will regret it if he attacks the Houthis

Donald Trump has opened up the prospect of America being drawn into a wider Middle East conflict, effectively a second front in the ongoing war with Iran. The US president said he is “going to look at” joining Saudi Arabia in the battle against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. It follows the Houthi missile attack on the King Khalid international airport in Riyadh which killed 12 people and injured 309 others. One of the 12 dead is known to be an American. There may be more US casualties among the severely injured. The attack on the airport has reignited fears of a wider regional escalation. The Saudis, despite their enormous oil wealth, cannot fight, let alone win, their war against one militia force “We may.

Sunday

Owen Matthews

Trump has found his midterms scapegoat

Donald Trump has called for President Zelensky to be removed from office. The US President is furious following a series of drone strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries, which came hours after Trump has signed a deal with Vladimir Putin lifting sanctions on millions of tons of Russian diesel fuel. Trump told reporters last night about a conversation he’d had with Zelensky. “I said to him, ‘Do what you want. Don’t hit refineries. There’s plenty of targets, don’t hit refineries...’ I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.

Friday

Freddy Gray

The execution will be televised

"Deus Vult." That, famously, is what the large tattoo on Pete Hegseth’s right bicep says. The phrase, which means "God Wills It," is a Crusader reference. Critics suggest the words have white supremacist connotations; Hegseth, formerly a major in the Army National Guard, believes it means fulfilling the Almighty’s plan to defeat America’s enemies. But what does God want? That’s a difficult question for mere mortals to answer. Does He want to see terrorists executed by firing squad on video livestreams for all the world to see? Because that’s what Secretary of War Pete desires.

Talarico
Neal Pollack

Where is James Talarico? 

In the midst of the most contentious Texas US Senate race in a generation, Democratic nominee James Talarico suddenly and mysteriously dropped off the campaign trail on September 29, and has yet to return, though his campaign claims a resurrection is coming tomorrow.  ​Talarico last appeared in public at a fundraiser alongside Robert DeNiro in New York City, which isn’t in Texas. On September 30, he showed his face on Zoom at a forum for the Hispanic Business Council, and said he had the flu. “I was ready to eat my favorite quesadilla tacos, but I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago, and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas,” he said.

mudslinging
Charles Lipson

The mudslinging midterms

This is not an edifying election. That’s putting it delicately. Any honest survey of the quality of the candidates and the arguments they are making will leave you deeply depressed. All across the country, voters are being asked to choose among truly dreadful candidates, whose main argument is that “the other guy is much worse.” Both parties do it. They do it because it works.   Unfortunately, the candidates don’t have to exaggerate to underscore how bad their opponents are. That doesn’t stop them from making it their battle cry. “My opponent is more corrupt than Tony Soprano.” “My opponent believes transgenders should play in your kid’s sport. After he’s rammed that outrage down your throat, he’ll force your kid to marry one.