Politics

Here is a fun one: what do Giorgia Meloni, Pope Leo XIV, Ed Miliband and the Cato Institute all have in common? The answer is that they have each been attacked in the past 24 hours on Donald Trump’s overactive Truth Social feed. The President’s erratic actions both online and off now seem to be exhausting the patience of even erstwhile allies. In the aftermath of the Iran crisis, Keir Starmer and his ministers appear to have had enough of pussyfooting and pandering to the whims of the Commander-In-Chief. Downing Street sees little benefit in indulging what one Labour MP calls ‘Trump’s imperial overreach’ This afternoon, Rachel Reeves publicly called

Mark Carney is swaggering about Canada with his new majority government, acting as if he’d just received a landslide mandate from the electorate. The truth is he acquired his precious majority not by climbing up on his soapbox and convincing voters, but by whispering sweet nothings to five MPs from other parties, upon which they mysteriously lost their political principles and crossed the floor. Does Carney believe in democracy? It’s hard to be sure. Yes, his party did just win three special elections. But only one of those counted (the other two were held by Liberals already and in safe Liberal ridings, so made no difference to the number of

Eric Swalwell’s fall from viable gubernatorial contender to political casualty was swift and surgical. He was among the frontrunners to replace Governor Gavin Newsom until allegations of sexual misconduct from years ago were published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The response from major Democratic operatives was immediate, with labor unions and party figures quickly withdrawing endorsements. Swalwell formally announced the suspension of his campaign two days later, followed by his resignation from Congress the following day. Some of the allegations are serious. In addition to claims of inappropriate and predatory sexual relationships with staffers, Swalwell has been accused of sexual assault. In a video statement, he denied any criminal wrongdoing.

Is it Swal-over for Swalwell? Congressman Eric Swalwell – the longtime anti-Trump crusader, MS Now and CNN mainstay, and a leading candidate in the California gubernatorial race – has now been accused by an anonymous ex-staffer of sexual assault. The allegations, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, turn mainly on inebriation and the so-called power imbalance between the two: Driving him to another event weeks later, she said Swalwell pulled out his penis in the car and asked her to perform oral sex on him. She said she did so in a parking lot. In September 2019, the woman said, Swalwell invited her out for drinks and she became so severely

A useful rule, when trying to understand current affairs, is AAL: Acronyms Always Lie. A case in point would be the acronym of the year so far: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). It means that Donald Trump is always bluffing and, when push finally comes to shove, he folds. TACO has caught on since Liberation Day and the onset of Trump 2.0’s tariff agenda, and is now deployed again and again to describe the President’s latest ceasefire with Iran.  Over free trade, Greenland, and the Middle East, he’s shown himself to be a playground bully who loves to intimidate adversaries only to cave whenever the going gets tough. Market analysts

America is having its Golden Age, Iran is about to get blasted into the Stone Age… and Elbridge Colby wants to go back to the Late Middle Ages? According to a Free Press report by Mattia Ferraresi, the Under Secretary of War for Policy summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s then-ambassador to the US, to a meeting in which the Avignon Papacy was invoked. (For those of you who didn’t go to Catholic school: in the 1300s the king of France had Pope Boniface VIII captured and beaten after the pope excommunicated him; a few years later the papacy moved to Avignon amid continued threats from the French crown and instability in Rome.)  During this meeting, Pentagon officials allegedly picked apart Pope Leo XIV’s “state of the world” address. This was the