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If only TACO were true

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

Melissa Kite

What the hell is going on with Melania Trump?

Melania Trump’s bombshell statement yesterday on the Jeffrey Epstein affair needed subtitles. As she spoke it was all so odd. There had to be a subtext. Her choice of words and tone was so loaded it felt like there was another shadow statement underneath, and her shock appearance was just act one of this drama, prefiguring a much bigger statement to come. It was so astonishing for her to deny allegations that most of us had never heard about. We were left wondering what she was really trying to say. Her statement raised questions that hadn’t ever been asked before, and now we’re all wondering what the answers are When she

Brendan O’Neill

The lies about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah

Imagine there was a virulently Francophobic militia on the doorstep of the French Republic. Imagine it had fired nearly a hundred thousand missiles into France these past three years. Imagine if the France-loathing maniacs had caused the deaths of hundreds of French people and forced almost half a million to flee their towns in terror. France would respond, right? It would take action, no? Why, then, does President Macron not extend the same right to fight to his supposed ally of Israel? Hezbollah has inflicted every one of those bloody horrors on Israel since October 7, 2023. I’ve scaled up the numbers to account for France’s population of 70 million,

Damian Thompson

No, the US didn’t threaten to bomb the Vatican

The first American pope does not like the President of the United States. One of the few things we knew about the Chicago-born Robert Prevost when he was elected last May was that – despite having an older brother who supported MAGA – he detested the immigration policies of the Trump administration. His private X account, now deleted, made that clear. Pope Leo has rejected the President’s invitation to visit the United States to celebrate his own country’s 250th anniversary; instead, he will visit Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island collapsing under the strain of thousands of North African migrants who have risked their lives to get there. When President Trump issued

Margaret Mitchell

The Pentagon’s holy war with Rome

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