Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

November 18, 2025

China has quietly taken over America’s food supply

For all the talk about artificial intelligence and quantum supremacy, the fate of civilizations still depends on breakfast. ChatGPT can’t grow corn. Empires rise on stomachs as much as on silicon. And America’s food system – long dismissed as safe and self-sufficient – has quietly become a front line in the US-China rivalry. We act as if lunch is inevitable, but Beijing knows that food is power. A new report from the America First Policy Institute should wake us up. Washington long treated agriculture as a post-political space where globalization could do no harm, and was therefore happy to let much of the nation ship its growth to China. As Ambassador Kip Tom and Royce Hood argue, China has thus taken over critical pieces of the US agricultural system and food supply.

Spectator Editorial

Can Trump control inflation?

Notionally, Americans have never been better off. The ructions in tech stocks over the past few weeks cannot detract from the fact that the US economy has been outgunning other developed economies all century. The overall graph of real disposable income for Americans continues to trend upward, almost as if the sharp dip during the pandemic had not happened. That is certainly not true everywhere: in many countries, Covid has been followed by stagnation in GDP and wages. Yet, for all the wealth generated, many Americans simply do not feel that they are living in a thriving country. On the things that really matter, such as basic living costs, citizens at the lower end of the income scale feel their wages are increasingly inadequate. They are not imagining it.

Neal Pollack

Trump’s Oddjob: the rise of Steven Cheung

Though reporters covering the Trump administration are very familiar with Steven Cheung, the Donald’s combative White House communications director, he’s not a recognizable face to the general public. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt plays good cop, deflecting questions; Cheung is bad cop, trolling the media on X. But Cheung had a moment in the spotlight early this month during a press conference in which Trump announced reduced prices for GLP-1 “fat drugs.” “Where’s Steve?” Trump said. “He’s taking it.” The press is very familiar with Cheung’s weight issues. When one media outlet compared him to the rather overweight Bond villain Oddjob, Cheung leaned into the racially tinged stereotype and posed for a photo while wearing a bowler hat.

Curtis Sliwa

Andrew Cuomo was the spoiler, not me

In the final weeks of the New York City mayoral campaign, there was heavy involvement from billionaires and masters of the universe. Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined the chorus of the Democratic Establishment. And the message was clear: a vote for me was a vote for Mamdani. There was a 72-hour barrage from super PACs running this message on conservative radio and news shows in an attempt to convince Republicans and conservatives to abandon their beliefs and principles and effectively join the Democratic party. No longer was the focus on what each candidate stood for. The point was to rewrite history and distance fact from reality. We had Andrew Cuomo – a failed governor who left office in disgrace – being presented to the public as NYC’s only savior.

Ben Domenech

Is MAGA cracking up?

In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced. His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was. Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats.

Freddy Gray

The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I writing this?

Daniel McCarthy

What would Buckley do?

When Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental biography Buckley was published in June, I began a review by noting that William F. Buckley Jr.’s memory is as ill-served by some of his admirers as it is by his critics. The two have in fact largely converged on a single characterization of National Review’s founder: Buckley as the patron saint of purges, who excommunicated anti-Semites and conspiracists (as one side emphasizes) or antiwar dissenters and populists (as the other sees it) from the conservative movement.

Bridget Phetasy

It’s the cost of living, stupid

Earlier this month, the Republicans lost their first set of elections after Donald Trump’s victory last year, proving once again that without Trump, the GOP is cooked. Because yes – it really is all about him. Are you a narcissist if the world actually does revolve around you? Or are you just right? The problem for the GOP is that they need Trump to win, but Trump loves watching them lose without him. OK, maybe he is a narcissist. What’s clear is that the 2024 election was not the final boss. It didn’t destroy wokeism. You have to picture the spider in The Lord of the Rings, Shelob, crawling back into her cave after being stabbed by Samwise. Is she injured? Yes. Dead? No. She will probably be back to kill you.

Travis Aaroe

Has QAnon been vindicated?

QAnon is the online movement spawned by Q, a poster on the anonymous message board 4chan. In October 2017, they began leaving a series of gnomic posts riven with strange imagery – “drops.” Claiming to be a US official with a high-level security clearance, Q informed fellow users that the United States was secretly controlled by a clique of pedophiles and traitors encompassing much of the Democratic party and the intelligence services. But Donald Trump, who had recently been elected president, was alive to the danger. With the aid of friendly “deep state” elements, Trump was working behind the scenes in a grand effort (“The Plan”) to expose the cabal that would culminate in a day of action (“The Storm”) in which its members would be arrested and executed.

Luke Lyman

How scientists misled the world about faith

Sometime in 1953, Dorothy Martin was contacted by aliens. They had bad news and they had good news. The bad: Earth was about to be swallowed up by floodwaters. The good: as the leader of a chosen few, Martin would be saved by flying saucers. Mankind had brought this calamity on itself by following Lucifer’s agents – scientists – and abandoning Christ. Over the next year or so, Martin assembled a little flock of disciples who believed their salvation, and the world’s end, would come on December 21, 1954. A team of psychologists caught wind of Martin’s prediction.

Margaret Mitchell

The battle for Anna Wintour’s Vogue empire

When Anna Wintour announced she was stepping down as editor-in-chief of Vogue in June, it appeared to be the end of the ice queen’s reign. Yet Wintour retained her large, chintzy corner office as well as her two other roles – as Condé Nast’s global chief content officer and Vogue’s global editorial director. If you looked closely, you might have seen a steely determination lurking behind her trademark sunglasses, the look of a generational editor intent on more power – and perhaps even revenge. The Condé Nast Union naively regarded Wintour’s move as that of a then 75-year-old drifting into quiet retirement, the old guard surrendering to youth.

James Tidmarsh

Why Trump is freezing out Five Eyes allies

The most powerful intelligence alliance in the world is breaking up. In January, Donald Trump restricted intelligence-sharing on Russia and Ukraine, cutting allies out of negotiations and freezing certain channels entirely. Then in March came the so-called “Ukraine intel blackout,” an unprecedented freeze that shut Britain and Australia out of updates on Russian troop movements. And last month, the Dutch said they were scaling back intelligence-sharing with America over fears of “politicization.” Trump tends to treat intelligence as leverage, a tool to reward countries that fall in line with Washington and punish those that don’t. In his hands, intelligence and secrets have become bargaining chips.

Owen Matthews

Why Europe can’t go it alone on Ukraine

Who will pay for Ukraine’s war effort now the Trump administration has turned off the financial taps? European leaders have expressed themselves ready and willing to take up the burden, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen affirming that “if we continue to believe that Ukraine is our first line of defense, we need to step up our assistance.” Individual countries have come up with generous funding packages – most open-handed of all being Germany, which has recently pledged more than €3 billion in direct funding. But that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to what Ukraine says it needs.

Anatoly Grablevsky

How the Ukrainian far right is preventing peace

Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, discussion of the Ukrainian far right has been verboten in western media, largely because one of Vladimir Putin’s stated war aims is the “denazification” of Ukraine. Putin’s claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state has been recycled by Russian propagandists and the western party line has consistently been that while the Ukrainian military does have far-right strains, they are marginal and inconsequential. This may have been true in 2022, but things have changed significantly after almost four years of war. Today, far-right figures control some of Ukraine’s strongest military units, and neo-Nazi ideology is displayed openly in the Ukrainian ranks.

Dallas Alexander (Dallas Alexander) canada

Jane Stannus

The unbearable wokeness of the Canadian military

“I think the question that needs to be asked is: what kind of military does Canada even want?” Dallas Alexander has been all country-star cool until I ask about his former employer. Now his voice takes on a more earnest tone. We’ve talked about the song the veteran-turned-singer considers his best – “Child of this Land,” a ballad about growing up in the remote Fishing Lake Métis Settlement in northern Alberta – and we’ve discussed which is the fan favorite: same, he says, or maybe the more upbeat “Can’t Blame My Bloodline.” To my mild surprise he doesn’t mention “Adios Amigo.” The song, with its catchy (and ominous) refrain, references the record-breaking sniper shot taken by Alexander’s team in 2017.

Leah McLaren

Beautiful interiors can’t guarantee a beautiful marriage

I remember poring over the photos when they first appeared in Architectural Digest in early 2023. Even back then, before Lily Allen wrote what Rolling Stone called “the most brutal album of the year,” I knew in my gut that her marriage to that actor guy she met on Raya – whatshisface? David Strangerbeard? – wouldn’t last. Because looking at the pictures of their house made me feel queasy. There was something off about it. It just wasn’t right. It didn’t bode well. It’s not that the house wasn’t gorgeous. It was – and still is – spectacular. A double-width brownstone in the slouchiest artisanal urban village on Earth: Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Kelly Chapman

The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types: Dr. Strangelove (The theorist) The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors.

Gavin Mortimer

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day. The robbery was initially dubbed the “heist of the century,” a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. There were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies. But soon details emerged that suggested the gang of four weren’t quite of the caliber of the thieves immortalized in the Hollywood movie Ocean’s Eleven.

Monday

November 17, 2025

Cockburn

Olivia Nuzzi tells all on RFK Jr.

Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir about her scandalous affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a presidential candidate and now the country’s leading health bureaucrat, comes out next month. She’s called it American Canto, not to be confused with the bestselling novel Bel Canto, about terrorists who occupy an opera-themed party at a South American mansion. Instead, Nuzzi has trapped us all in the opera of her mind, and there’s no escape. Nuzzi has the apparent ability to turn otherwise rational, educated men into blubbering masses of jelly.

Julie Burchill

Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be "the end of the world") refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: "Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for" – or as I wrote here: "How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?