Politics

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

If you tuned in to the first New York City Democratic mayoral primary debate hoping for vision, leadership, even a halfway compelling reason to stay in the city – you were sorely disappointed. What we got instead was two hours of political karaoke: forgettable performances, familiar refrains and not a single candidate who looked remotely prepared to lead America’s largest city out of the hole it’s in. The media crowned former governor Andrew Cuomo the winner, but that says more about the sad state of the field than it does about Cuomo’s abilities. He barely had to try. Like a career politician coasting on name recognition and reflexes, he sleepwalked through the evening while eight other candidates took turns lobbing stale criticisms his way. They all missed.

Two years after the fiery death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the warlord behind Russia’s Wagner Group, the global shadow war waged by mercenaries and contractors still rages on. And now one of the most well-known names in the mercenary world is back in the headlines: Erik Prince. The founder of Blackwater and longtime ally of President Donald Trump, is on the ground in Haiti, where he has signed a deal with the government to take on the armed gangs that have brought the capital to the brink of collapse.Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 after its contractors opened fire on civilians in Iraq and it now operates under a different name.

The BBC’s response to recent White House criticism over its Gaza coverage highlights the Corporation’s vulnerability on the question of impartiality in conflict reporting. What began as a public rebuke by Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, over a disputed report quickly developed into a broader interrogation of the BBC’s editorial assumptions and its long-standing handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, defended the Corporation and accused the Trump administration of dishonesty. Responding to Leavitt’s remarks, he said, “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself. She’s making a political point, basically.

Elon Musk’s departure from Washington was celebrated by many in the media. In the space of just a few years they had transformed him from a “Yay Science!” rocket-building Tony Stark stand-in doing awkward cameos on Rick and Morty into a crazed inhuman boogeyman, whose cars must be keyed, firebombed or layered with bumper stickers saying, “I bought this before Elon was a Nazi.” (Before you say that’s an exaggeration, there’s literally a Tesla with that sticker in my neighborhood – you can buy them on Etsy.

American divisions over politics look positively civil compared to the polarization that has gripped South Korea over the last few years. During the 2022 elections, Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power party (PPP) narrowly won the presidency over his liberal opponent Lee Jae-myung from the Democratic Party by a razor thin 0.73 percent. But Yoon hastened the demise of his own presidency when on December 3, 2024, he made the poor decision to declare martial law over baseless accusations that the National Assembly’s progressive opposition were collaborating with North Korea. Martial law lasted for only a few hours after both parties unanimously voted to lift the decree.

Washington, DC Usha Vance is on a mission. This year's low reading scores have shocked the White House into action – so they have placed the Yale-educated Second Lady at the helm of the reading recovery ship. But as well as addressing faltering childhood literacy, Vance has a host of other tasks to complete for the Trump administration. Vance described her role in Trump 2.0 at the annual US-India Strategic Partnership Forum hosted at the Waldorf Astoria in DC Tuesday. It includes reading challenges, the Special Olympics and US-India relations – fueled by her children's interactions with the country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The conference followed the launch of the "Second Lady Summer Reading Challenge.

Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill was supposed to slash government waste and inefficiency. So why is it going to result in an even bigger, uglier deficit? The legislation was still being picked over in the Senate as this magazine went to press. But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has calculated that the bill will add $2.5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade – and that estimate is far more likely to go up than down. The President’s opponents have characterized the Big, Beautiful Bill as a swindle that steals from the poor to give to the rich. That may be true to some extent, in that it could become harder for some people to qualify for Medicaid, while wealthy Americans will enjoy the extension of lower tax rates.

To enrich or not enrich? This seems to have been the question dividing Iranian and American negotiators, and there are swelling choruses in Tehran and Washington who hold strong views on the matter. In a report leaked to Axios, it appears that during the last round of talks, the US gave Iran a proposal that would allow limited low-level uranium enrichment for a specified period. The proposal suggested that Iran would be forbidden from building new enrichment facilities and must dismantle “critical infrastructure for conversion and processing of uranium,” adding that research and development on centrifuges would also have to stop. Sanctions relief will only come once Iran is demonstrably adhering to the terms of the deal and has clearly paused its underground enrichment activities.