Politics Archives

Tuesday

September 9, 2025

How the right learned to love the state

These are dark days for free-market conservatives. A socialist, Zohran Mamdani, leads most polls in the race to become the next mayor of New York. The Republican President, meanwhile, is not only a “tariff man,” he’s lately been directing the federal government to take a stake in ownership of companies such as US Steel and Intel. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, the Republicans were increasingly becoming the preferred party of America’s working class. But before Trump, the free-market right could imagine the GOP’s blue-collar voters were only interested in social conservatism and wouldn’t demand a change in the party’s economic orientation. Now, things look very different.

Owen Matthews

The West can’t afford to shun Russian oil

Donald Trump is a radical foreign-policy innovator. Over the past few decades, the US has tried a range of non-military means to nudge, squeeze and occasionally strangle its adversaries. These range from travel bans and banking restrictions, to export controls and trade limitations. But never has the US – or indeed anyone – tried to use import tariffs as a species of economic sanction. Trump has threatened Vladimir Putin with introducing “secondary sanctions” against countries that import Russian oil – a threat intended to strike at the heart of Russia’s war economy. And on August 4, Trump appeared, for the first time, to make good on that threat.

Tom Switzer

How powerful is the China-Russia alliance?

This summer’s big security summit in Tianjin, followed by the military parade in Beijing on September 3, has been widely interpreted as a sign of a new global realignment. At a time of growing friction within the US alliances in East Asia and Europe, President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and about 20 leaders mostly from Central Asia have not just reaffirmed their nations’ close ties. They sought to strengthen the emerging multipolar system, which they see as a rejection of the US-dominated global order. This idea is hardly new.

Ian Maxwell

How my sister Ghislaine beat the Epstein conspiracy theories

The nine-hour interview of my sister Ghislaine, conducted under limited immunity by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over two days in late July, generated an all-too predictable uproar. The reaction became still more intense following the release of the associated transcripts and audio late last month. Having held Ghislaine in torturous conditions of solitary confinement in the run-up to her trial – including waking her up every 15 minutes during the night for 30 months at the same time as they deliberately deprived her defense of exculpatory “Brady” material – prosecutors ensured both Ghislaine and her legal case were effectively hollowed out. Under the circumstances, she could not and did not take the stand. The rest is history.

Kate Andrews

Nationalizing America will cost us dearly

“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” Donald Trump told reporters in the White House cabinet room last month. “I’m the President of the United States.” Other branches of the federal government might disagree, but their representatives are strangely mute. “What Trump wants, Trump gets” is the motto that has defined the first eight months of the President’s second term. The overhaul of global trade? Sorted with an executive order and a pen. Poor job numbers? Fire the messenger, hire your own. Feeling the acute absence of a ballroom? Take “a little walk” on top of your White House, look out at your vast kingdom, and decide where the marble floor and golden beams will go. But domination of the federal government is simply not enough.

Monday

September 8, 2025

Nigel Jones

Is it all over for Milei?

A landslide election defeat for Argentine President Javier Milei’s Libertad Avanza party has made money markets doubt whether he will be able to push through his radical economic reforms.The Argentine peso lost 5.6 percent to the dollar and the Merval stock index plunged by 13 points on Monday after the flamboyant President’s party trailed the leftist opposition Peronist party of former President Cristina Kirchner by 13 points (47 percent to 34 percent) in local elections in Buenos Aires province – which, with 40 percent of the country’s voters, is the country’s biggest and most populous area.Bond markets also reacted negatively to the shock result, posting their biggest daily falls since they recommenced trading in 2021 after a debt reconstruction deal.

Sarah Idan

Will cops wearing Arabic badges serve and protect all?

Last week, the Dearborn Heights Police Department revealed the nation’s first-ever officer uniform patch featuring Arabic script. It was designed by a policewoman named Emily Murdoch, and on first glance it might look like a gesture of inclusivity. But is this really progress – or it it, in fact, a sign of cultural fragmentation?As an Iraqi-American Muslim, I feel compelled to answer. I came to the United States after Iraq was swallowed by Iranian-backed militias and sectarian violence. I know exactly what happens when identity politics becomes the organizing principle of civic life. And the last thing I ever wanted to see in America is the export of that same toxic culture – one that thrives on division, preferential treatment and symbolic displays of power.

Cockburn

Scott Bessent, future UFC fighter?

Plans have begun on constructing the Octagon on the White House lawn for a UFC fight to commemorate what President Trump is now calling the “Super Centennial,” the US’s 250th birthday next year. And it looks like we might have an undercard ready to go involving the Treasury Secretary. Last week, according to Politico, Scott Bessent got into it with top housing finance official Bill Pulte at a private dinner at Executive Branch, an “ultra-exclusive created by and for Trump world’s uberrich.” Cockburn didn’t receive an invite to this birthday party for podcaster Chamath Palihapitiya, even though he and Chamath go way back.

Bruce Gilley

The case for MAGA imperialism

Empire has always been part of the American tradition. We are a sequel state to the greatest empire in world history. Our period of colonial tutelage under that empire taught the lessons of legitimate territorial expansion against French and Spanish rivals. Our continental aggrandizement after independence was necessary. Later overseas expansion, including periods of imperial apprenticeship in places such as Liberia, the Philippines and Panama, was further evidence of our colonial métier. Like it or not, imperialism and colonialism are congenital to the American experiment. This has been the case since 1779, when the Continental Congress branded a proposal to limit westward expansion an “intolerable despotism.

Sunday

September 7, 2025

Edward Howell

As Trump wooed Kim Jong-un, he secretly unleashed Navy SEALs

Think of the first Trump administration’s North Korea policy, and the bright lights, photo ops and eventual lack of deals in Singapore and Hanoi come to mind. The first two years of Trump 1.0 saw the then-new US president fluctuate between threatening "fire and fury" on the hermit kingdom to calling Kim Jong-un a "great leader". Yet, the recent and as-of-yet unconfirmed revelations of an abortive US mission in early 2019 – wherein US Navy SEALs sought to intercept communications of Kim Jong-un – may seem to contradict the unusual bromance between Trump and Kim at the time. But in fact, they only emphasize Trump’s desperation for a deal with North Korea at the time.

Daniel J. Mahoney

Camus comes to America

The 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as absolute freedom, beholden to no limits and no enduring truths. In contrast, the author of The Stranger and The Plague rejected Sartre’s facile nihilism, as well as his repellant accommodation with murderous messianism, typically conveyed in fashionable leftist nostrums. The more hopeful side of Camus comes through in his recently re-released Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World.

Saturday

September 6, 2025

Richard M. Reinsch II

Will Trump’s stake sink Intel?

In a move supported by Vermont’s socialist champion, Senator Bernie Sanders, President Donald Trump has arranged for the federal government to become the single largest shareholder of Intel Corporation. All for national interest, according to the White House.Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced that the deal gives the government “a piece of the action.” Is it in fact a piece of the action, or a disaster to come for the American business community? Created in 1968, Intel is an American multinational technology company that designs, manufactures and sells semiconductor chips and related products. Following its early successes, it has been in decline as a result of bad management decisions for the last 20 years or so.

Rachel K. Paulose

Can Trump fire Lisa Cook for cooking the books?

President’s Trump’s efforts to reign in the administrative state and prod the Federal Reserve to adopt more Trumpian policies took a dramatic turn when he ousted Dr. Lisa D. Cook, an alleged miscreant, from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors last week. The drama, and there’s always high drama in Trump World, unfolded after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte made a criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice based on Cook’s apparently falsified mortgage documents for homes in both Ann Arbor, Michigan as well as Atlanta, Georgia. Cook claimed the Ann Arbor house as her primary residence, which would allow her to obtain more favorable financing terms. Just two weeks later, Cook claimed her Atlanta condominium as her primary residence as well.

Liv Hagye

Why America’s schools are failing

It seems that every few years America rediscovers that its children can’t read. In 2024, only 30-31 percent of eighth graders were deemed proficient in reading, and our numbers in history and math are even worse. Since 2020, no state has reported improvement across subject areas.It’s tempting to blame “the pandemic” for these declines, but in reality, Covid only accelerated trends that were already underway. For decades before 2020, US students were struggling to reach proficiency, and the truth is that the problem isn’t today’s culture-war skirmishes over pronouns, politics and school closures. It’s the more mundane question of how children are taught to read, to count and to remember.Let’s take phonics, for example.

Kate Andrews

Britain’s war on free speech is worse than you think

Where do you strike the balance between expression and security? It is a question Americans don’t need to ask. Our Constitution is plain and unambiguous about our fundamental rights to say what we want, write what we like, to gather in protest and – sweet relief – to mock our government. Not everyone is so lucky. Not even our friends. “It doesn’t give me any great joy to be sitting in America and describing the really awful, authoritarian situation that we have now sunk into,” Britain’s Nigel Farage told the House Judiciary Committee yesterday afternoon, as he detailed the speech crackdown being carried out in the UK. “At what point did we become North Korea?

Friday

September 5, 2025

Laura Powell

The Senator from Virginia vs. the Declaration of Independence

At a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia – Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate – decided to pick a fight not with the nominee before him so much with the American founding itself. In a remarkable four-minute speech, clips of which went viral, Kaine challenged the very idea of natural rights – that is, the belief that human beings possess fundamental freedoms simply by virtue of being human, not because government chooses to grant them. His lecture was provoked by a seemingly uncontroversial statement.

Juan P. Villasmil

Why Venezuelan F-16s buzzing US warships prove Trump right

First the boat, then the buzz. On Tuesday, an American strike in the Caribbean shredded a vessel ferrying narcotics out of Venezuela, killing eleven alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang – which Caracas, strategically, dismissed as an AI hallucination. Two days later, Nicolás Maduro tried his own spectacle, dispatching a pair of F-16s to roar over the USS Jason Dunham, one of the U.S. destroyers recently sent on a counter-narcotics patrol off Venezuela’s coast. The maneuvers – and the steady drumbeat of pressure that preceded them – have regime-changers daydreaming about intervention and restrainers losing sleep. But before mistaking the noise for reality, it’s worth asking: what is Washington trying to achieve?

Mike Coté

Why America needs the Department of War

Six months into President Trump’s second administration and there is perhaps no other government department that has been subject to more controversies than the Department of Defense. Brouhahas have ranged from the in-fact favorable (see the banning of affirmative action) to the admittedly concerning (see significant leaks of sensitive information). And now Trump has pulled the pin on possibly his most powerful grenade so far – and rolled it Pete Hegseth’s way. But after the smoke clears from this particular explosion, there is a real opportunity for the department to be born again, fighting fit, from the debris. President Trump has signed an executive order returning the Department of Defense to its original moniker, the Department of War.

Ben Domenech

By taking on the cartels, Trump is reasserting American authority

The reporting process on Donald Trump's war on the cartels for my latest cover story for The Spectator, published here today, mostly focused on the administration's theory of the case: what they intend to do about the challenge of the drug running, human trafficking and terrorist activity by the narco syndicates to America's south and why they believe a major escalation is necessary. In the intervening time between filing a piece and going to press, the theoretical became very real with the fiery destruction of a boat carrying drugs in international waters, allegedly steered by 11 now-dead members of Venezuela's Tren de Aragua cartel.

Paul Eckloff

Why California shouldn’t foot the bill for Kamala Harris’s protection

The first time I worked alongside the California Highway Patrol’s Dignitary Protection Section was in Beverly Hills in the late 1990s. Think swimming pools and movie stars. The setting could have been a Hollywood caricature of itself: manicured hedges, a mansion where priceless Old World paintings hung in the hallways, and a guest list that ran from President Clinton to Barbara Streisand. The rest is appropriately redacted. I was a new Secret Service agent then still learning the art of protection, but amid the clinking glasses and camera flashes, what struck me most wasn’t the celebrities. It was the calm professionalism of the CHP officers beside me.