Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Cockburn

Watch: First Lady releases trailer for MELANIA

“Here ve go again” says Melania Trump to the camera at the start of the new trailer for MELANIA – a feature documentary on the First Lady from Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Studios. This House of Cards-style breaking of the fourth wall seems to promise a certain intrigue in the movie to come.  The trailer, which is soundtracked an Amadeus-esque orchestral score, has a few eyebrow-raising moments, like when the First Lady interrupts her husband’s rehearsal for a speech. “My proudest legacy will be that of peacemaker” says Trump. “Peacemaker and unifier,” she corrects him. She also teases Trump (who she calls “Mr. President”) about not having watched one of his broadcasts. “Ya, I will watch it on

Melania
trump 2025 achievements
Roger Kimball

Donald Trump's end-of-year victory lap

As a mighty US armada bobs in the Caribbean off the shores of Venezuela, President Trump just addressed the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. With characteristic delicacy and understatement, he outlined the accomplishments of the first 11 months of his second term in office, lightly criticized his predecessor and cautiously opined about what the future held in store for the United States of America in the coming semiquincentennial year.  Well, some viewers may wish to dispute my emphases and assessments of tone. But let’s just say that the President’s short speech was vintage Trump. It was hyperbolic, yes, over the top, indubitably, but in essence 100 percent true.

Wednesday

Ani Chkhikvadze

Boris Johnson: will cowardly Europe betray Ukraine again?

Boris Johnson has urged European leaders to hand $247 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to Ukraine – but says he fears they “lack the courage” to do so, in an interview with The Spectator. The former British prime minister also warned that Trump is at risk of “morally polluting” himself if he caves to Putin’s demands in peace negotiations and encouraged his negotiating team to stop the “nauseating deals” they are discussing about joint business ventures. “I think Europe is at a very difficult point because Europe has got to do the reparations alone,” Johnson said. “And I’m worried that they lack the courage. They must do it.

Boris Johnson
Rod Liddle

The West has become ungovernable

My favorite opinion poll of recent times was the one which showed that Donald Trump is disliked by more than 90 percent of Danes. This is a glorious achievement and one of which the President should be proud, and perhaps boast about from time to time – averse though he may be to boasting, of course. This was the lowest favorability rating for Trump anywhere in Yerp and I suppose is partly occasioned by his determination to pry Greenland from the grasp of these ineffably smug Scandis because they have no idea what to do with it and have mismanaged its meager affairs for decades. A personal admission: I cannot

Michael Wolff

Why I corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein

Olivia Nuzzi, the young and talented Trump reporter, committed the apparently cardinal sin of becoming romantically entangled with a subject. And, worse than that, the subject was widely reviled, particularly among journalists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-Kennedy. And then it turned out –her jilted fiancé, another journalist, was telling all – that there were other politicians she’d been involved with, too. This scandal, which has consumed the journalism world, was good for me because it forced the heaps of opprobrium I was getting from other journalists for my emails with the reviled Jeffrey Epstein off the front page. I had interacted with Nuzzi a few times shortly after my

Ann Coulter

Will we ever know the truth about Epstein?

Now that Congress has passed a law – not a flimsy resolution, but a law – mandating that the Trump administration release all its files on Jeffrey Epstein, here’s what we know, and what we still need to know. The basic elements of Epstein’s crimes were established back in 2006 by the Palm Beach Police, who began investigating the previous year after a woman reported that he had paid her 14-year-old stepdaughter for a massage. Over the next 13 months, the police gathered sworn statements from dozens of witnesses, including five underage girls who said they’d been paid $200 to $1,000 to engage in sex acts with Epstein. “The more

Paul Wood

Jared Kushner’s international friendships with benefits

In 1998, the conservative intellectual and moralist Bill Bennett published a book, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. Bennett had to rush the book out after “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” changed to: “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” But the Death of Outrage is almost too quaint a title to capture the age of Donald Trump, especially now that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is back as his closest foreign policy advisor. Trump told reporters who questioned Kushner’s role: “I have Jared. Find anybody more capable.” Perhaps there really is no one better at diplomacy in

Ben Clerkin

A chief White House usher of 21 years is the ultimate insider

Gary J. Walters knows where a lot of the bodies are buried in the White House. He was chief usher for 21 years, worked there for 16 years before that, and has served and come to know intimately seven presidents and their families. Now he has written a book about his extraordinary career, White House Memories 1970-2007: Recollections of the Longest-Serving Chief Usher. Think what he must know of the skulduggery (Nixon), the marital strife (the Clintons), the chastising of children (the alcohol-inclined Bush daughters) and the shouting matches (doubtless all of them). As I gently prod Gary for gossip, he smiles mischievously – at 79, he still looks smart and

The Spectator

Portrait of the year

January For three weeks wildfires raged around Los Angeles. Perhaps 30 people were killed but 200,000 were evacuated, 18,000 homes and structures destroyed and 57,529 acres burnt. Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President. On his first day he issued about 1,500 pardons for people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol in 2021; he created the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), led by Elon Musk; he signed executive orders on gender and immigration and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. The state funeral of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, was held in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire and the

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Pete Hegseth is a polarizing figure who doesn’t quit

Pete Hegseth’s Saturday begins with personal training. The Secretary of War, @SecWar on your socials, is very fond of working out with the troops – something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram. Then he heads off to the Reagan National Defense Forum, the annual gathering of war hawks, policy nerds and defense contractors in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth, the veteran of the Global War on Terror, is there to fulfill his mission of denouncing the neocons. “Out with idealistic utopianism, in with hard-nosed realism,” he declares, insisting the United States will no longer be “distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate

Daniel McCarthy

Epstein, like Russiagate, damns the elite

As President Trump’s first year back in office drew to a close, his enemies had high hopes they’d hit on a scandal that could do to his second term what the “Russian collusion” story had done to his first. Donald Trump didn’t have to be found guilty of any wrongdoing tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s sleaze. All that was necessary was to stain his reputation indelibly and distract his administration from its work. The Epstein weapon even had an advantage over the Russia allegations of yesteryear – it resonated with much of Trump’s own MAGA base. Trump campaigned in 2024 on releasing the Epstein files, and many in MAGA considered it

Monday

Sunday

Saturday

Travis Aaroe

How the ‘deep state’ enabled Epstein to operate

How do characters like Jeffrey Epstein come about, really? One way to find out is to read his emails, 20,000 of which were released by the House Oversight Committee in November. What they show us is that people like Epstein were a product of the second half of the 20th century, their existence more or less impossible outside this era and its conditions. After World War Two it was decided that majoritarian democracy was too dangerous and had to be replaced by international law, human rights and expanded bureaucracies. Epstein took this state of affairs for granted. In a 2016 email to the New York Times journalist Landon Thomas Jr.,

Jeffrey Epstein
Ben Shapiro

No, America isn’t fundamentally flawed

What has gone wrong for Americans? To listen to an increasing number of politicians and pundits on both sides, from Tucker Carlson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Nick Fuentes to Zohran Mamdani, the answer seems to be: everything. Americans are unable to get a job; to afford the necessities of life; to get married or have children; to find religious meaning or form friendships. And all of this can be laid at the feet of corrupt institutions and a corrupt system. This conspiracy-tinged, vitriolic take on the American system is a lie. Yet it contains a grain of truth. Our institutions have been led self-servingly by a coterie who disdain American