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The “bawdy” birthday letter from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, which the Wall Street Journal reported the existence of in July, has been released for all to see. The bawdiness is somewhat wanting – the “small arcs” of the naked woman’s breasts which the Journal described are indeed very small. There’s nothing explicit in its imaginary dialogue between the two men, which begins with a pensive “voice over” saying “There must be more to life than having everything.” It’s creepily cryptic, at worst.  Trump said in July that the letter was a “fake thing’ and a “fake Wall Street Journal story.

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.

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.

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.

As President Trump’s Department of Justice deliberates over a gun ban on transgender people, we must stop and reflect on the environment we have created for our children and ask whether we are truly protecting them. Whenever tragedy strikes, progressives rush to the microphones to declare that the problem is “guns.” They insist that if only we banned this weapon or restricted that accessory, shootings would stop. They blame inanimate objects instead of focusing on the people who actually pull the trigger. The recent shootings in Nashville (2023) and Minneapolis (2025) should force us to confront uncomfortable truths – not about firearms, but about what is happening inside our culture and what our leaders are pushing on the next generation.

When Representative Jerry Nadler announced his retirement this week, Democrats in New York instantly began preparing for a political drama worthy of its stage. Nadler’s district – the 12th, which covers the Upper West and Upper East Sides, Midtown, Times Square and the United Nations – is the geographic heart of Manhattan. It’s also one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. Whoever wins the primary will not only control a powerful perch in Congress, but also inherit a stage in the very center of America’s media capital.That’s the problem. In New York’s 12th, politics isn’t about solving problems. It’s about performance.For decades, Nadler played the part of Manhattan’s liberal lion.

Maybe you heard that Donald Trump died over the weekend. First, the internet began to buzz over some bruising on the President’s hand during an executive-order signing ceremony. Then people started noticing that no one saw Trump on Friday, and that he didn’t have any events scheduled over the weekend. J.D. Vance gave an interview with USA Today in which he said, “if, God forbid, there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days.” Trump has become so ubiquitous in our lives that there was only one conclusion to reach from his temporary semi-absence: He is dead. A TikTok video making that claim got 600,000 likes. There were tens of thousands of Twitter posts on the topic, almost trying to will it into reality.