Politics

Donald Trump has become something of a sole man. His cabinet members and White House visitors report that the president has developed a penchant for handing out $145 Florsheim shoes in an effort to up their sartorial game. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell reported that Dr. Johnson recoiled at an “eleemosynary supply” of shoes as an impecunious student at Christ Church, Oxford and threw them away with indignation. Trump’s followers have no such freedom of action. “All the boys have them,” one official told the Wall Street Journal, which ran a picture of his administration leaders obediently lined up and wearing the same shiny black leather numbers. The war increasingly resembles a prolonged exercise in folie de

Albertans are very good at keeping things that damage their prosperity out of their province. Take rats, for instance. The vermin were designated an agricultural menace in the1950s and after 18 months of chemical warfare Alberta – which is the same size as Texas – was declared rat-free. Today a poison-laced buffer zone with Saskatchewan province and a vigilant population stops their return. The leaders of the resurgent Alberta independence campaign have identified a new set of damaging pests to keep out: the federal government in Ottawa and its new ally the Chinese government. While they believe that Ottawa is taking too much of their money – Alberta is by

The American-Israeli attacks on Iran were publicly called Epic Fury, but behind the scenes it is Britain’s handling of the war which provoked that reaction – not just from Donald Trump but from the UK’s allies in the Gulf. A Labour peer was in Washington when the first missiles slammed into Tehran on Friday evening and Keir Starmer refused to voice support. A member of the Trump administration told the peer: “Britain used to not contribute that much, but you were a good ally. Now you’re contributing nothing and you’re not even a good ally.” A version of events has quickly become established: a Prime Minister with a near-religious belief

The celebrity circles surrounding the second Trump administration are pretty thin. Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, Adam Sandler’s close friend Rob Schneider and a scant few others support the President in ways loud and quiet. But other than pop star Nicki Minaj, whose residence in Trumpistan has caused a lot of head-scratching, no entertainment celebrity occupies a more prominent place in the MAGA firmament than the musician Robert Ritchie, better known to the world as Kid Rock. “I call him Bob,” Trump once said. Kid Rock, the second most famous white rapper from Detroit, has long been in Trump’s social circles. He was a guest at Mar-a-Lago before either he or