Politics Archives

Thursday

May 22, 2025

Cockburn

The irony of Kim Kardashian and Ivanka Trump’s friendship

Cockburn was amused by the recent spectacle of Kim Kardashian’s law school triumph (after three “baby bar” exams and a grueling 5,184 hours of study) and the subsequent Instagram gushing from her BFF Ivanka Trump. “My favorite law school graduate!” the First Daughter cooed, cementing what must surely rank among Washington’s most peculiar alliances. This improbable friendship between America’s reality TV queen and Trump has flourished over a decade, evolving from perfunctory Met Gala pleasantries to intimate three-hour lunches at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge. The pair reportedly bond over “motherhood” and “shared experiences” – Cockburn assumes the shared experience of juggling billion-dollar empires while tolerating men with problematic Twitter feeds.

Alexander Larman

We’re finally allowed to say Biden was senile!

So, Joe Biden spent a great deal of his term in office suffering from what might politely be called senile dementia, and those who enabled him led the Democrats to one of their most humiliating electoral defeats off the back of this subterfuge. This cannot in all honesty be called a revelation.When I first read the breathless headlines that came about from the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s exposé of the Biden regime, Original Sin, I was reminded of Horatio’s words in Hamlet: “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave, to tell us this.” And although Biden himself may not be in the grave, the (suspiciously timed) announcement of his late-stage prostate cancer may mean that this book functions as an epitaph of sorts for him.

Charlie Gammell

Iran is feeling emboldened

After the cautious optimism of the early rounds of US-Iran talks, and Donald Trump’s Gulf roadshow, the US government has claimed that Israel is preparing for a possible strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, a parallel piece of political theatre to the ongoing talks between US and Iranian negotiators. This is nothing new. B-52 bombers and Israeli fighter jets have been rehearsing this for the past few months, and many years before that. This is some very public cold water being poured on the talks, just as they set to advance to the complicated bit. Aware that there is every chance the talks may not progress beyond these thorny rounds, both sides are preparing the ground for that failure.

Wednesday

May 21, 2025

Ben Clerkin

Exclusive: my son Elon and Trump are right about the ‘white genocide,’ says Errol Musk

Elon Musk stood silently in the Oval Office, eyeballing the South African President while Donald Trump tore into the ANC leader for permitting “white genocide.” The exiting Department for Government Efficiency (DoGE) chief said nothing as the President dimmed the lights and required an unsuspecting Cyril Ramaphosa to watch a short film about white farmers being targeted and South African politicians chanting “kill the farmer.”As Donald Trump berated Ramaphosa, Trump didn’t call on Musk, standing just a few feet away. He didn’t need to intervene: according to Elon’s father, Errol Musk, his son – an outspoken critic of Ramaphosa's government – had already briefed the President about what he agrees is “white genocide”.

Tuesday

May 20, 2025

Dr. Steven Quay

Why did Joe Biden stop testing for prostate cancer in 2014?

After speculating that President Biden’s medical team must have been aware of his prostate cancer at the time of his last physical examination in 2024, we are now learning from his spokesperson that he has not had a blood test for the prostate specific antigen or PSA since 2014. Let’s recall that year. It’s the summer of 2014. The West Wing is buzzing. Crises in Eastern Europe, unrest in the Middle East, and deep concern for a resurgent threat overseas. Joe Biden, then Vice President of the United States, is flying between continents, doing shuttle diplomacy, leading panels, briefing NATO.And quietly, behind the scenes, his medical chart records a final PSA test. A routine prostate-specific antigen screening. It would be his last.Why?The question isn’t rhetorical. It’s clinical.

Ben Domenech

Don’t let SALT levels bring down the BBB, says Trump

The reaction to President Trump’s meeting with GOP members on Capitol Hill today was decidedly mixed, especially for the so-called SALT Republicans, with leading voices like Representative Mike Lawler of New York saying, “I’m not going to budge” on the issue despite Trump’s demands. Used to the opposition from the chamber’s last remaining fiscal hawks, much of the focus to this point has been on the typical intransigent wing of the House Freedom Caucus, which still doesn’t like the overall fiscal impact and wanted more significant Medicaid reforms. For them, Trump’s message in the meeting was clear: “Don’t fuck around with Medicaid.

Kevin Cohen

Mark Carney is ignoring the cartels – and Donald Trump

Donald Trump has declared war on the cartels. The southern border is now patrolled by the military, the wall is rapidly expanding and US intelligence is helping to target crime bosses on Mexican soil. Illegal crossings and drug seizures at key points have dropped by more than 70 percent in the last year.But, contrary to appearances, the cartels have not surrendered – instead, they have pivoted, applying Sun Tzu’s principle: attack your enemy's weaknesses, not his strengths.Led by the blood-soaked and ultra violent Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartel they are exploiting the soft 5,525-mile long northern border with Canada and its sparse surveillance, dense forests, inadequately staffed crossings and neglected checkpoints.

Kara Kennedy

Don Jr.’s Gold Rush

On the ground floor of Georgetown Park, Donald Trump Jr. is putting the finishing touches on his invitation-only club, the Executive Branch. When the doors open, reportedly in the next few weeks, it will become Washington’s new power hangout. Cabinet secretaries will mingle with tech billionaires and foreign investors, each having parted with $500,000 for the privilege. The launch party last month included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson. David Sacks, the President's crypto and AI czar, proudly announced himself as member number one. This tableau – celebrity, politics, profit – perfectly captures the Trump dynasty’s particular brand.

Monday

May 19, 2025

Ben Domenech

Can Team Trump’s most MAGA members end Jeffrey Epstein talk?

Few people can claim the mantle of being more identified with the anti-Deep State MAGA movement than Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the Director and Deputy Director of the FBI, who sat down for a lengthy conversation with Maria Bartiromo this weekend. Yet they responded with surprisingly out of character language to the continued conspiracizing around the death of Jeffrey Epstein – the New York financier – and the possibility of a wider plot to assassinate Donald Trump. If anyone was going to reveal hidden secrets of the Deep State, it would be these two, who have railed against its excesses on media platforms for years before taking their posts.

Ben Domenech

Democrats should call for more honesty about Joe Biden’s health

The announcement of former president Joe Biden’s diagnosis for advanced prostate cancer is of course a sad event, as it would be with any president’s cancer diagnosis. For the human side, the prayers and sympathies of the nation should be with him and his family. But coming as it does after years of hiding the true nature of Biden’s health – including repeated lies told by his staff, family and those closest to him to the American people – it should lead to even more questions about the truth of his condition, and what we were not told as voters who deserve to trust our top institutions to be honest to us.

Sunday

May 18, 2025

Dr. Steven Quay

‘Highly likely’ Biden had prostate cancer diagnosis in the White House

How does metastatic prostate cancer “suddenly” appear in someone like Joe Biden? It doesn’t appear overnight, it festers. In rare but dangerous cases, prostate cancer bypasses the usual slow growth and strikes fast, especially in older men. If he wasn’t screened regularly, or had an aggressive subtype that evaded PSA detection, it could have advanced under the radar. But how can we imagine that a President was not screened properly? Prostate cancer is the easiest cancer to diagnose. The PSA blood test shows the rate of cancer cell growth. Even with the most aggressive form, it is a 5-7 year journey without treatment before it becomes metastatic. Meaning, it would be malpractice for this patient to show up and be first diagnosed with metastatic disease in May 2025.

Kate Andrews

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis is already being exploited

This afternoon Joe Biden’s private office announced that the former president has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “The cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to his team. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.” The details provided feel important. Most men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the United States – roughly one in eight over a lifetime – do not die from it. Yet Biden’s team specified in the release that the cancer has spread to other tissue in the body. This suggests the former president is battling a more aggressive form of cancer. So this release is not simply a health update: it is preparing the public for potentially worse updates in the future.

Saturday

May 17, 2025

Ben Domenech

James Comey just needs your attention

Let's sit down and have a talk about James Comey, America's tallest teenage girl. Typically the conversation around the nation's most famous former FBI director focuses on political gripes – whether his grandstanding, poorly timed announcements that Democrats still blame for Hillary Clinton's loss, or his back-channeling conniving debriefings Republicans still blame for Russiagate. But nowadays, whenever Comey pops up in the algorithm, it seems to be because he's just so deeply weird. His latest debacle: a social media posting of seashells spelling out "86 47", a threat which prompted immediate controversy which Comey attempted to brush off as naivete. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.

Matthew Foldi

When will Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ pass the House?

President Donald Trump is seeing a handful of House Republicans deal what he hopes is a temporary setback to his "Big, Beautiful Bill." Despite Trump’s repeated requests that House Republicans pass the gigantic reconciliation bill — which includes the codification of several of Trump’s executive orders, along with larger-than-expected spending cuts targeting across the board expenditures and a $4 trillion debt limit increase — several Republicans in the House tanked a critical vote in the Budget Committee, forcing Republicans to consider what comes next. While the specifics are uncertain, Republicans lack a plan B if they fail to pass some version of the bill. “It has to pass,” Congressman Glenn Grothman, a Budget Committee member, said.

Friday

May 16, 2025

Margaret Mitchell

Donald Trump’s papal style

The election of the first American pope, Leo XIV, comes at a strange time when a Catholic establishment is running the show in his home country: vice president J.D. Vance, of course, as well as health secretary RFK Jr., border czar Tom Homan, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, secretary of state Marco Rubio, to name the most prominent few. Melania is allegedly one as well. They are American exceptionalists who want to Make America Great Again and, in the process, Make Catholicism Great Again too. MAGA and Catholicism seem like strange bedfellows at first glance. Donald Trump has been divorced twice and married thrice. The rich may have a difficult time entering the kingdom of God, but they’ve had no trouble finding roles within Trump’s administration, which hosts 13 billionaires.

David Sypher Jr.

The Democrats’ trillion-dollar reparations racket

When politicians run out of solutions, they start offering symbolism – and this year, that symbolism comes in the form of a check. Representative Summer Lee’s “Reparations Now” resolution calls for trillions of dollars in payments to black Americans as compensation for slavery and its aftershocks. As a black man in America, this issue cuts close to home. My grandparents came from South Georgia, and their grandparents were born into slavery. That blood runs through me. The pain, the endurance, the quiet strength – it’s part of my inheritance. If reparations were handed out, I’d be one of the people eligible to receive them. But I couldn’t take the check in good conscience.

Kara Kennedy

The Ivanka Harvest

In Bentonville, Arkansas, far from the Beltway bubble, Ivanka Trump is talking about her latest venture. Her topic isn’t politics but produce – specifically, supply chain inefficiencies and supporting American farmers. “We launched Planet Harvest to reimagine how American produce moves,” she says, with her signature polished delivery. Gone are the West Wing offices and policy portfolios. Now it’s all about “reducing food waste, expanding access” and other wholesome buzzwords that perfectly capture the current moment in American food politics. This agricultural pivot isn’t just convenient timing, as Ivanka jumps on the MAHA bandwagon. It’s a masterclass in political repositioning.

Thursday

May 15, 2025

Peter Wood

Anna Peterson’s New York Times article has restored my faith

Are contemporary faculty members at risk from false accusations made by supporters of Governor DeSantis? Or more generally President Trump? Has a crackdown begun that instills fear into the hearts of classroom teachers? Is there an epidemic of self-censorship that has gripped the campus? Anna Peterson, professor of religion at the University of Florida, believes all this is true. She presented her testimony in a New York Times guest essay last Sunday, “Did One of My Students Hate Me Enough to Lie to Get Me in Trouble?” I am among those naturally disposed to doubt pretty much everything in the Times that has a political slant – and few of its articles don’t. Nonetheless, I’m an assiduous reader of the newspaper.

Freddy Gray

How Donald Trump will be impeached

From the election in November to the presidential inauguration in January, media commentators took turns to pronounce the Trump “Resistance” dead. I know I did. The line was too tempting. As Trump stormed back into the White House, his power looked irresistible. His enemies seemed so broken and defeated. We all spoke too soon. “NeverTrumpism” is a reaction to Trumpism, as natural as magnetic repulsion and the urge to defy and destroy his presidency hasn’t vanished. In fact, look closely and you can see a “Resistance 2.0” gathering momentum in response to the second Trump administration.

Travis Aaroe

The rise of the liberal Caesars

The triumph of Mark Carney in the Canadian election has turned what seemed like a series of local flukes into a global trend. The political mainstream has begun to despair of its own leaders, and now feels compelled to parachute in stately ex-mandarins of a slick, personalist style – figures who seem to stand above the factions. Call them "liberal Caesars." Carney is only the latest example.