Politics Archives

Friday

August 8, 2025

A Trump-branded peace deal

Mount Ararat rises over Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, its peak often lost in clouds. It is the country’s national symbol, yet it stands across the border in Turkey. That border has been closed since the early 1990s, when Turkey sided with Azerbaijan against Armenia – cutting Armenia off from its largest western neighbor and leaving it dependent on narrow trade corridors through Georgia and Iran. For three decades, the conflict shaped the politics of the South Caucasus, drawing in Russia, Turkey and Iran. The peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, signed today in Washington, represents more than the end of a long-standing territorial dispute.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Putin awards Order of Lenin to CIA chief’s son

John Reed, a young Harvard graduate and journalist, thought highly of the Bolshevik revolution and chronicled it in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. He is one of three Americans buried along the Kremlin Wall. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin extend a similar honor to Michael Alexander Gloss, the son of Juliane Gallina, a deputy director for digital innovation at the CIA? Earlier this week, Putin handed President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff something from Russia with love – the Order of Lenin. Putin apparently intended for it to be passed on to Gallina whose 21-year-old son died fighting with Russian forces against Ukraine in 2024. The Order was created in 1930 by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union.

David Sypher Jr.

The devaluing of American citizenship

President Trump’s call for a new US census that excludes illegal immigrants has stirred up exactly the kind of debate this country needs – but not necessarily in the way he’s proposed it. Let’s be clear: the spirit of Trump’s order is right. It’s outrageous that congressional seats and federal funding are based, in part, on populations that include people who entered this country illegally. Sanctuary states like California, New York and Illinois benefit politically and financially from shielding those who bypassed our laws, while law-abiding states are left underrepresented. The American people have every right to demand that representation reflect citizenship, not lawbreaking.But even as I share the outrage, I can’t support the tactic.

Alan Dershowitz

My battle to buy pierogi might end up in court

I have been going to the farmers market in Martha’s Vineyard for nearly half a century. I buy corn, tomatoes and homemade products. Until last week every vendor at the market treated me with respect and loved to have my business. I spent about $100,000 on farm and home products over the years, so I was shocked when one vendor refused to sell me their pierogi. It turns out that this particular vendor, Krem Miskevich, doesn’t approve of Zionism – that is support for Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people. To be a Zionist does not require agreement with Israel’s policies or actions – just its right to be. I strongly believe in Zionism. It is an essential aspect of my religion.

Kate Andrews

The fog of tariffs

It was an all-caps kind of evening for the President. “RECIPROCAL TARIFFS TAKE EFFECT AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social last night, minutes before the clock struck 12am. “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, LARGELY FROM COUNTRIES THAT HAVE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF THE UNITED STATES FOR MANY YEARS, LAUGHING ALL THE WAY, WILL START FLOWING INTO THE USA. THE ONLY THING THAT CAN STOP AMERICA’S GREATNESS WOULD BE A RADICAL LEFT COURT THAT WANTS TO SEE OUR COUNTRY FAIL!” The Santa imagery is interesting, and fitting. For decades now, one could be forgiven for thinking some kind of magic was being conjured up, as consumer choice skyrocketed while prices plummeted at the same time, and once-deemed luxury items became accessible for the vast majority of households.

Thursday

August 7, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Putin taking Trump for a ride?

Already the Kremlin is setting the terms of the forthcoming summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff, Trump's emissary, set the meeting in motion with his mission to Moscow on Wednesday, which Trump called “highly productive.” But productive of what? Putin’s foreign-policy adviser Yuri Ushakov stated today that it was the White House, not the Kremlin, that wanted the meeting. He went on to dismiss Trump's proposal that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could take part in a tripartite negotiation, noting that “for this to happen, certain conditions must be created. Unfortunately, such conditions are far away yet.” Those conditions remain the complete surrender of Ukraine. The Kremlin, in other words, has a strategic plan.

Freddy Gray

Tariffs and the psychodrama of Trump diplomacy

A bleached white conference room, somewhere near Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. On one side sits Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, in his soldier-boy outfit. On the other, Russian President Vladimir Putin in dark suit and tie. And in the middle, a beaming President Donald J. Trump. "People said this could never happen," he says, as Zelensky and Putin stare awkwardly at the floor. "But it’s a beautiful thing." A White House memo lands in inboxes across the world: "THE PEACEMAKER-IN-CHIEF..." Pure fantasy, perhaps, but Trump does have an almost cosmic ability to get what he wants – and he really wants to end the war in Ukraine. Last night, having spent weeks telling the world how "disappointed" he was with Putin, Trump abruptly announced "great progress" in US-Russia dialogue.

trump Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin shake hands (Getty)

Daniel McCarthy

Donald Trump has bent reality to his will for 200 days

Donald Trump remains the master of political reality 200 days into his second term. His administration drives the headlines, not the other way around. Take the fracas that erupted over last week’s downward adjustment to the previous month’s employment numbers. Any other president would have been put immediately on the defensive, desperate to justify his performance to the whole country. Trump simply fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – and all the headlines since then have been about the firing, not the numbers. Not only is President Trump not a prisoner of the press, he’s not a prisoner to his own legacy. In his first term, Trump involved America in no new wars. Less than six months into his second term, he took America to war with Iran.

Neal Pollack

Nancy Mace: the fairest of them all

“Trump in high heels” is how Congresswoman Nancy Mace described herself earlier this week when she announced her candidacy for governor of her home state, South Carolina. We don’t know whether Trump in high heels already exists because we still haven’t seen the Epstein Files. But let’s not assume the worst, and let’s examine Mace’s claim at face value. Does she really have Trumpian qualities? Like Trump, Mace has some idiosyncratic political views, while also going hard in the paint with the antiwoke rhetoric that has helped restore the Republicans to national dominance. Mace was the first female Corps of Cadets graduate from the military college The Citadel, where her father was on the faculty, and published a memoir about the experience in 2001.

Wednesday

August 6, 2025

Ben Domenech

Theater kids are holding Texas hostage

The theater kids are at it again. The Texas Democratic party is engaged in yet another performative act of resistance – one perhaps less embarrassing than the likes of Representative Greg Casar's iconic nine-hour "thirst strike," but far more damaging to Texans in the moment. The decision by more than 50 Texas representatives to flee the state for the climes of California, New York and Illinois rather than confront the realities of their political margins doesn't just act as a grandstanding method of opposition to a redistricting policy that would stand to Republicans' benefit – it also is holding up the legislative response to the recent flooding disaster, something of significant need to the damaged communities.

Jane Stannus

Jailed for embarrassing the Canadian government

At long last, the Ontario government’s drawn-out legal proceedings against the organizers of the Freedom Convoy is winding to a conclusion. In a move seen as surprisingly vindictive, the Crown is seeking minimum sentencing of seven and eight years of jail time respectively for leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.As Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre posted on X, “Let's get this straight: while rampant violent offenders are released hours after their most recent charges and antisemitic rioters vandalize businesses, terrorize daycares and block traffic without consequences, the Crown wants seven years prison time for the charge of mischief for Lich and Barber. How is this justice?

Tuesday

August 5, 2025

Cockburn

Trump starts Christmas now

There’s no small irony in the fact that Texas Democratic state legislators, fleeing a congressional redistricting attempt by Texas’s Republican majority, have sought shelter in Illinois. They’re acting like political refugees in what is, in fact, the most gerrymandered state in the country. Look at Illinois District 13, which snakes up from the Missouri border nearly to the gates of Indiana, bisecting the state (and District 15) like Illinois’s small intestine. Chicago is a very populous city, but the state has carved up its Congressional districts like a turducken, giving us as many (D-Chicagos) as humanly possible. The Illinois Democratic machine has had an outsized influence on American politics, much less Illinois politics, for decades.

President Trump tracks Santa in 2018 (Getty)

Neal Pollack

Jim Acosta’s AI interview is a Black Mirror monster

An absolutely ghoulish spectacle unrolled on YouTube yesterday, as disgraced former CNN Trump gadfly Jim Acosta “interviewed” teenager Joaquin Oliver. The problem is that Joaquin Oliver was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018. This interview took place with an AI simulation of Joaquin. On what would have been Joaquin’s 25th birthday, his father, Manuel Oliver, released this Black Mirror monster into the world. To make matters worse for the AI simulation, it had to talk to Jim Acosta. On the one hand, the stream, as of this writing, has barely 6,000 views. The average seven-year-old Roblox streamer does better than that. However, the interview is so deeply disturbing, so bald-facedly manipulative, that it deserves scrutiny.

The Spectator

The Spectator and Douglas Murray win UK defamation claim

The Spectator and Douglas Murray have today won a defamation claim brought by Mohammed Hegab, who "lied on significant issues" in court and gave evidence that "overall, is worthless." The judge rejected Hegab’s claim because the videos he publishes are ‘at least as reputationally damaging to him as the article’ Hegab, a YouTuber who posts under the name Mohammed Hijab, claimed that an article published in September 2022 about the riots in Leicester, England, had caused serious harm to his reputation and loss of earnings as a result.

Mark Tushnet

How to reform judicial review responsibly

L.W., a transgender girl, her parents, and her doctor agreed that it would be good and medically appropriate for her to receive gender-affirming hormone therapy. The state of Tennessee, where L.W. lived, passed a statute in 2023 prohibiting transgender minors from receiving such treatment. Did the statute discriminate against L.W. on the basis of sex? The US Supreme Court said it didn’t. In 2023, the British government planned to send to Rwanda people who tried to get to the United Kingdom on small boats and then seek asylum. Would that policy violate the asylum seekers’ human rights because the conditions in Rwanda were unsafe? The UK Supreme Court said it did.

Monday

August 4, 2025

Juan P. Villasmil

Is Bukele a tyrant or a triumph?

El Salvador’s young and telegenic president, Nayib Bukele, has rewritten the rules. Term limits? Scrapped. Presidential terms? Extended. Runoff elections? Abolished. If all goes according to the script – penned and passed by his party in the legislature – Bukele will remain in power well into the 2030s, if not beyond. A decade ago, such a move might have sparked bipartisan alarm in Washington. Today, reactions are mixed – with many in the growing MAGA wing cheering El Salvador’s constitutional shake-up as a win of their own. This shift is a window into a deeper realignment in conservative foreign policy: one that moves closer to the unapologetic defense of national interest and drifts further from the spread-democracy-everywhere consensus.

Alex Castellanos

Trump is winning. That’s the GOP’s biggest problem

Nothing is more dangerous than success. In America, anyone can survive failure – you get up, dust yourself off and try again. But few politicians, or political parties, survive success because success kills urgency. And without urgency, voters don’t vote. President Donald Trump has been dangerously successful. With a seeming snap of his fingers, he has restored our nation’s borders. He has dismantled elite wokeness – rescuing our God-given pronouns and kicking men out of women’s sports. He has neutered Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons, ended taxpayer-funded pro-Hamas campus activism and quashed Bidenflation. To the astonishment of our foreign policy establishment, he has strengthened Europe’s support of NATO to match our 5-percent-of-GDP goal.

Freddy Gray

Ann Coulter: On immigration, Trump 2.0 and the Epstein Files

Ann Coulter, an American author, lawyer and conservative media pundit, joined Freddy Gray on the Americano podcast last Friday to discuss why she backs the UK's Reform party, why she supports Trump in his second term, what's really going on with the Epstein files and more. Here are some highlights from their conversation. Why don’t politicians follow through on illegal immigration promises? Ann Coulter: Americans have been voting not to give illegals benefits, to deport them, to make sure they can't vote, for now almost half a century, and the politicians will never give it to us. That was what was so striking about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Oh my gosh, they really seemed to mean it.

David Sypher Jr.

Democrats don’t hate gerrymandering

When more than fifty Texas House Democrats bolted for Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum, legacy media lauded them as modern-day freedom riders. Spare us. The walk-out is no act of moral resistance; it is partisan self-preservation wrapped in civil-rights cosplay. Democrats don’t despise gerrymandering – they despise losing control of the process. Texas Republicans, who hold both chambers and the governor’s mansion, are pursuing a mid-decade redraw that could net five new GOP-leaning congressional seats. That is tough, bare-knuckle politics, but it is also constitutional. Map-making belongs to state legislatures, and nothing in Texas law forbids drawing lines more than once a decade. Faced with that reality, Democrats chose not to debate, amend, or even vote “no.

Cockburn

Trump eulogizes Woke on Truth Social

President Trump announced a major vibe shift on Truth Social today, declaring that he, like any other sane red-white-and-blue blooded American, finds Sydney Sweeney sexy, especially because she toes the party line. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there,” he posted. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em, Sydney!” Why Trump put “flying off the shelves” is a question only for advanced semioticians, but the White House’s stance is clear on this cultural hot point: Sydney Sweeney good, left-wing “Nazi” denunciations of Sydney Sweeney bad. But Trump wasn’t done. He turned his Sydney Sweeney boosterism into a full-blown cultural critique.