Latest from Coffee House

Monday

6 Jul 2026

The tragedy of Cristiano Ronaldo

At 41 years old, Cristiano Ronaldo is a shadow of the once brilliant player he was. Everyone can see it, except the great man himself. The five-time Ballon d’Or winner is now focused on chasing the stupendous milestone of 1,000 career goals, which would be yet another achievement for a footballer obsessed with breaking personal records in a team sport. The 2026 World Cup marks yet another milestone achievement – the sixth time he has played in the tournament. It is a lot of soccer, and at the highest level, yet Father Time waits for no one, not even someone as rich and famous as Ronaldo. Portugal’s manager Roberto Martinez must take a fair share of the blame. Why does he persist in picking Ronaldo? This once supreme athlete is now a drag on the Portugal team.

Klaus Dodds

Trump reveals the limits of American power

Donald Trump’s quest for regime change in Iran has backfired horribly. The President misunderstood the resilience of the 47-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran, the strategic calculations of one-time ally Israel and the physical and political geography of the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President J.D. Vance appears now to be positioned as the public face of failure. The decision to launch the assault on Iran was underpinned by Israeli confidence that Iran’s leadership could be toppled and that the United States’ overwhelming firepower would produce shock and awe. It came in the immediate aftermath of plans to acquire Greenland, incorporate Canada, assert dominance over the Panama Canal and topple the then Venezuelan government. Cuba is no doubt next on Trump's list.

Freddy Gray

Anthony Scaramucci on Trump, Corruption and America at 250

37 min listen

To mark the 250th anniversary of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Anthony Scaramucci joins The Spectator to provide his assessment of the health of the nation. As we approach the halfway point of the second Trump presidency, what's his impact been on America's reputation? Will the Democrats' attempts to emulate Trump help or hinder them? And why are American conservatives so obsessed with Britain – or rather, Britain's supposed decline? Declaring Trump "an aging queen" under whom "the spirit of hypocrisy lives on" in America, the former White House communications director joins Freddy Gray and Tim Shipman for this special Coffee House Shots/Americano crossover to mark the Fourth of July. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Natasha Feroze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Anthony Scaramucci on Trump, Corruption & America at 250

Henry Donovan

Germany is quietly falling apart

In Germany, the trains have stopped running on time, bridges have been shut over safety fears, and the country's largest carmaker, Volkswagen, is cutting a sixth of its workforce. The government's response amounts to a shrug, dressed up as reform. It seems like Germany is on a bad streak – and the AfD looks set to reap the rewards. Why does a country that still thinks of itself as Europe's engine room seem to have lost the ability to fix its own bridges? Take the railways, the infamous Deutsche Bahn. A few weeks ago, they ground to a total halt. Every train in the country stood still, because the radio system that lets drivers talk to signal boxes – a system that appears to date, in spirit if not in silicon, from the Kaiserreich – simply stopped working.

Sunday

5 Jul 2026

Matt McDonald

Trump brings the thunder for America’s 250th birthday

Who ever let a spot of rain get in the way of a good time? Donald Trump’s July 4 festivities were delayed by several hours due to the threat of thunderstorms. On the National Mall, Secret Service agents did their darnedest to urge some of the President’s more avid supporters toward shelter: in the Blacksonian, the Commerce Department, the IRS. Many were reluctant, despite the blackening skies and flashes of lightning in the distance. “It’s not a debate, keep moving,” agents said. Confusion filtered through the crowd as to whether the night’s celebrations were canceled or merely delayed. Attendees milled aimlessly around the Washington Monument grounds, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “The metric system can’t measure freedom.

Saturday

4 Jul 2026

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s America is losing its mojo

The heat is on. The R&B group Kool and the Gang may be co-headlining the historic "A Capitol Fourth 250th Weekend Celebration," but that isn’t doing anything to cool the flaring political tempers in Washington during a record heatwave. Instead, the two-week-long "Great American State Fair" on the National Mall to celebrate American emancipation from British tyranny has turned into the birthday party gone wrong. The first sign that things were going awry for the party planners came a few weeks ago with the clumps of algae that began clotting the reflecting pool in central DC, which President Trump had tasked a company called Green Water Solutions to renovate. The company was true to its name. Green Water produced green water.

Friday

3 Jul 2026

Freddy Gray

A golden age… for Trump

"You can do two things," Donald Trump told reporters as he stood beside the new retrofitted Air Force One on Wednesday. "You can low-key it, or you can show it." He always does the latter. The presidential plane is, as everyone knows, a $400 million present from Qatar. The famous light blue hull is gone. It is painted in Trump’s preferred color scheme – navy blue, red, gold stripes. The Air Force says it spent less than $400 million implementing "security upgrades." And the aircraft began active service this week and will be used by the President until the end of his second term at least. It’s hard to know if Americans really care about their Commander-in-Chief flying around in a jet given to him by a sheikh who didn’t need it.

Travis Aaroe

Are American workers just ‘settlers?’

Is the United States a capitalist country, where bosses exploit workers, or is it a great empire, where colonists exploit subject peoples? American socialists and social democrats were never quite able to decide. “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” Bernie Sanders told GQ magazine in 2019. Yet he would also say that: “When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto. You don't know what it's like to be poor. You don't know what it's like to be hassled when you walk down the street.” In 2026 Sanders is an emeritus figure, and the “imperial” idea has won out.

Cyril Davydenko

In praise of the American Loyalists

As the United States marks 250 years since the country's unilateral declaration of independence, most of the Fourth of July celebrations have focused on the rebels. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have hogged the limelight for too long. What about the American Loyalists, those who defied the intense social pressure and stayed loyal to the British Crown? Loyalists were often bad writers who simply lacked the flair of radicals such as Thomas Paine In popular imagination, the American Revolution was a contest between the Americans and the British. In reality, however, only about 40 percent to 45 percent of the colonial population joined the rebellion. Around a fifth stayed loyal. The rest backed neither side.

Thursday

2 Jul 2026

Sam McPhail

Is the World Cup ball rigged?

The World Cup’s new ball is the most technologically advanced ever, FIFA tells us. It has a 500Hz motion sensor chip, which lets VAR and analysts figure out precise positioning, speed and even the spin on the ball, for some weird reason. But former England goalkeeper Joe Hart says the Trionda ball is making life harder for goalkeepers trying to save shots. “It’s that kind of shoulder height,” he continued: As soon as [players] are not using the curling technique, as soon as that ball is not spinning, the goalkeepers are struggling.” Hart obviously has lots of experience in the area and was particularly known for his ability to deal with shots around the head and shoulders, but is he right?

David Shipley

Will there be justice for Henry Nowak?

Britain's Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) have announced they are investigating two officers who attended the scene of Henry Nowak’s death. This does not necessarily mean they will face disciplinary proceedings, merely that such proceedings are now possible. This was probably the only course of action open to the IOPC, particularly after last week’s release of a transcript and more video footage of the incident, seemingly with the consent of the Nowak family. They paint both the police and the Digwas in an even more damning light. The video shows Vickrum Digwa being questioned by police while Henry lay dying on the ground nearby. Henry was manhandled by police and cuffed behind his back.

Alexander Kolyandr

Can the Kremlin afford to fix Russia’s oil crisis?

For a country that pumps roughly nine million barrels of oil a day – the third highest of any country in the world – Russia has managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable: it cannot keep its own gas stations stocked. More than half of its regions are now reporting shortages, the consequence of a Ukrainian drone campaign that has struck with increasing frequency and precision at the refinery infrastructure on which the country's civilian economy depends. The sometimes hours-long lines that have appeared – even in Moscow, for what may be the first time in the war – carry a symbolic weight that no amount of official reassurance from the Kremlin has managed to dispel. How this has come about is obvious enough.

Jane Stannus

The brutal excommunication of the Society of Saint Pius X

On Wednesday, the largest traditional Catholic order of priests in the world, the Society of Saint Pius X, consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate. The Vatican’s response was swift and brutal. Today, it announced that not only have the four new bishops and the two consecrators been excommunicated but, shockingly, so will all the priests and faithful who continue to adhere to the Society’s work – an edict that will likely affect more than a million Catholics worldwide.

Lionel Shriver

The epic scale of American humiliation

You’d think when your country goes to war you’d want it to prevail, but these are topsy-turvy times. Thus the dominant American commentary on Donald Trump’s "excursion" in the Middle East – or should we call it a "special military operation?" – has come from pundits who yearn for Epic Fury to fail. Close-up and personal antipathy for their President far outweighs theoretical distaste for a tyrannical theocracy in another hemisphere. For these critics, the glaring deficiencies of the "Memorandum of Understanding," Trump’s already shaky negotiated peace deal, are gratifying. I’m not one of those people.

Douglas Murray

The confessions of J.D. Vance

There were many reasons why 2016 was a strange year. One of them was the halfhearted effort by people on both sides of the Atlantic to try to understand why voters had voted the "wrong" way in the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. The book that was touted as an explainer for all of this was Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by someone called J.D. Vance about his upbringing in rural Ohio. After the election of Donald Trump, Vance’s description of family breakdown, de-industrialization, poverty and drug abuse was said to explain why so many Americans had voted for Trump. There was much that was patronizing about all this – mirrored in France by the attention paid to Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims.

Wednesday

1 Jul 2026

Nigel Jones

Berlin should preserve, not destroy, its Nazi bunkers

Berlin is currently convulsed by a culture war – and one all too familiar in a country and capital which, nine decades after World War Two ended, can still never seem to escape the long shadow of its Nazi past. Just a few yards away from that bunker site stands another somber memorial to those evil days The German capital’s Housing Senator, Christian Gaebler, of the Social Democratic SPD party, has announced plans to demolish the last remnants of a bunker dug beneath Hitler’s long demolished Reich Chancellery building to make way for sorely needed modern apartments.

John Fund

Inside Trump’s brazen financial disclosures

Donald Trump has exposed a weak link in American democracy. It is dependent, as the Founders would put it, on its leaders having a modicum of good character. Benjamin Franklin warned that without strict character requirements, government roles would attract "the bold and the violent," rather than the wise and peaceful. Trump’s new financial disclosure forms, released Tuesday, provide only the latest confirmation that the President and his family has gotten richer while he has served as president, stemming from a set of actions that have been brazen, if not illegal.

Simon Diggins

Are we edging closer to peace in Ukraine?

When he came to write of 1942-3 in his magisterial, if idiosyncratic, "History of the Second World War," Winston Churchill called that period, "The Hinge of Fate": it was the turning of the tide, when from El Alamein, to Stalingrad, and to Midway in the Pacific, the Axis Alliance ground to a halt. There was much hard fighting to be done and the contours of victory were still unclear but as Churchill declared, in November ’42, “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” So too in Ukraine. Ukrainians have been able to reach-out beyond this extended ‘No-Mans Land’ The much vaunted Russian Spring Offensive has achieved nothing except thousands more Russian dead.

Ed West

How Brand Scotland conquered America

In his highly entertaining history of alcohol and the British, Empire of Booze, Henry Jeffreys observed how one effect of the Napoleonic Wars was to make Scotland a popular destination for English holiday makers. What with the continent being isolated and everything, there weren’t many more exotic places for the richer, more adventurous traveler to visit. I’m a huge admirer of how the Scots put national identity to its most benevolent and noble purpose: using it to milk wealthy Americans of their money The country was until then largely unknown to many people south of the border, something also true of its trademark drink.

Peter Wood

A full-throated endorsement of the Pelosi Center

Former speaker of the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi, who will retire from Congress this year is lending her name and her leadership to the University of California Berkeley to create the Nancy Pelosi Institute. She explains that it will help to “train leaders for our future.” The National Association of Scholars, being a non-partisan organization with a strong commitment to civic virtue, is delighted to see another prominent politician contribute to the realization of important principles in higher education. Admittedly, we have not always agreed with the former speaker on how best to advance the public good on campus, but Pelosi says she was drawn by the “notion of a bipartisan academic center” at Berkeley, “the epitome of public education.

Tuesday

30 Jun 2026

Chris Mondics

The Supreme Court is not in Trump’s thrall

The latest Supreme Court term, which ended on Tuesday, surely must have been a deep disappointment for those who argue the court is in the thrall of political puppet masters. In decision after decision in the term that began October 6, the high court asserted a degree of institutional independence that undercuts the idea its jurists are merely politicians in judicial robes. At bottom, the issues before the court were characterized by Trump’s attempts to vastly expand presidential authority and efforts by states, political opponents and others to rein him in. In the end, the match was a draw.

Freddy Gray

The truth about Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom has spent the last two years building a national profile for himself beyond his controversial governorship of California. But does he have what it takes for a presidential run in 2028, something that would take him far outside the left-wing political bubble of the Golden State? Freddy speaks to Christopher Rufo, author of the Christopher Rufo Substack and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about the real Gavin Newsom and the decay of California under his watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-gXQQfkqA&pp=0gcJCU4LAYcqIYzv Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano.

Gillian Philip

How ideology hollowed out children’s literature

Self-immolation is a horrible way to go, but no one seems to have told that to the children’s publishing industry. Driven by religious and ideological fervor, children’s literature has rushed to adopt "inclusivity" and progressivism at the cost of diversity of thought. The result is a stream of turgid books obsessed with trans. On June 17m the group SEEN in Publishing (SiP) launched its latest report in Britain's House of Lords. It’s a document that publishers should heed, though they have a history of sticking their fingers in their ears. That obtuseness is all part of their desperation to burnish their devotion to progressivism at all costs – even, in the case of transgenderism, at the cost of children’s wellbeing.

Monday

29 Jun 2026

Freddy Gray

Why is America’s radical left winning?

After success in the New York Democratic primaries for far-left candidates, President Trump says "the game is on. Enjoy Watching." Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist, Roger Kimball, about how Trump plans to deal with the radical left, the lawlessness of New York under Zohran Mamdani and how artificial intelligence is changing politics. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.

Maud Maron

E. Jean Carroll’s banana republic justice

E. Jean Carroll gets to keep her money. The Supreme Court has declined to review the $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict she won in federal court against Donald Trump. Carroll walks away enriched. Her financier – Reid Hoffman, a wealthy Democratic donor and LinkedIn co-founder who bankrolled the litigation – got his money’s worth too. But the rest of us are much poorer. We are left with a badly damaged legal system and a clarifying, disturbing lesson about American politics: lawfare works. Whether you love Donald Trump or loathe him, the wave of civil and criminal litigation targeting him over the past several years should alarm you.

Gavin Mortimer

Why is the New York Times celebrating the slave-trading Vikings?

Norway plays the Ivory Coast tomorrow afternoon in the first knockout phase of the soccer World Cup, and one suspects the New York Times will be backing the Norsemen. The Gray Lady has gone gaga for Norway’s "Viking Row," a synchronized routine where fans mime the rowing of a Viking longboat to the bang of a drum. It’s caught on among the Norwegian players as well as politicians back in Norway, who performed the row in parliament last week. For the last two weeks the NYT has been publishing breathless pieces about the zany Norwegians and their Viking antics. “The 'Viking Row' is in full flow” was one headline on June 18; five days later they described how it "has taken the World Cup by storm." And their editorial office from the sound of things.

Paul Wood

The Iran war is Trump’s Suez crisis

Clarissa Eden famously declared that "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room." Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined. In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s ideological war on air conditioning

America is to blame for the heatwave that has caused so much misery in France in the last fortnight. Audrey Pulvar, the Socialist deputy mayor of Paris, took to social media at the weekend, addressing a letter to "dear American journalists" who have been making fun of Paris because the city doesn’t have air conditioning. "This is so rich!” exclaimed Pulvar. "You bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing. Your cities, which are 90 percent air conditioned, are not unrelated to this." It sounds like Madame Pulvar is a little hot and bothered, which isn’t surprising given the furnace that France has become. In Chablis, a little south of where I live in Burgundy, the temperature hit 41.

Mike Pitts

It turns out being a hunter-gatherer wasn’t so great after all

The science writer Jared Diamond once called agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race." Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, dubbed it "history’s biggest fraud." Yet newly identified plague outbreaks among ancient hunter-gatherers in southeast Siberia question whether they were right to be so negative about the introduction of farming. A new study published in Nature looks at archaeological sites on the west side of Lake Baikal. The lake is the world’s largest freshwater body, arcing for 400 miles between forested snow-covered mountains. Winter temperatures can drop below -22F, with parts of the lake surface frozen for half the year. Hunters and gatherers and nomadic herders occupied this challenging environment for millennia.

Jawad Iqbal

Serena Williams no longer belongs at Wimbledon

Serena Williams is arguably the greatest female tennis player of all time – a seven-time Wimbledon champion and winner of an astonishing 23 Grand Slam titles in all. Even so, should she have been given a wild card to enter this year’s Wimbledon championship? No, not really: a player who has been out of competition for years should not receive a direct entry into a Grand Slam without even playing a proper warm-up tournament. It smacks of a decision based on nostalgia and a desire for cheap headlines on the part of the All England Club. Professional tennis should not be about rewarding superstars trying to relive past glories Wimbledon relies more than ever on marquee names to attract a global TV audience, and they don’t come much bigger than Williams.

Yossi Melman

Is the US-Israel special relationship over?

Until recently, the Israeli right regarded President Donald Trump as its greatest ally. He was often described in quasi-religious terms – as a savior, even a messiah sent to rescue Israel from international pressure and the constraints imposed by previous American administrations. According to several American media reports, Trump told Netanyahu: "You’re fucking crazy" and "All the Jews are sick of you" That admiration stemmed from Trump’s unwavering support during his first term. He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and adopted Netanyahu’s position that Washington should withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated in 2015 under president Barack Obama.

Saturday

27 Jun 2026

Catherine Ellis

Venezuela’s earthquake is the cruelest blow

Venezuela thought its luck was changing. Then the earthquakes stuck. For a country that's economy has long been in tatters, parts of Venezuela are now in ruins. The huge 7.2 of and 7.5 magnitude quakes have devastated pockets of Venezuela, with parts of the capital, Caracas, and the northern coast dotted with mounds of rubble. Rodriguez could also use this tragedy to argue an election is not what the country needs It's a cruel twist of fate the South American nation that was finally beginning to pull itself out of dismal abyss it had found itself in. Many Venezuelans, little by little, were allowing them to be more optimistic this year. Nicolás Maduro was out of the picture following his capture in January. Hundreds of political prisoners had been released.

Friday

26 Jun 2026

Freddy Gray

Is Trump’s quest for peace doomed?

J.D. Vance jokingly compared himself to Richard Nixon yesterday. "Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media... kinda sounds like J.D. Vance," he said at the Richard Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. "I’ve always liked Richard Nixon." At the same time, 8,000 miles away, in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian forces struck another ship, further undermining what critics have called "the Vance deal" – the "Memorandum of Understanding" between Tehran and Washington. And that suggests, at a foreign-policy level, the Nixon-Vance parallel is more apt than the 50th Vice President realizes. Of course, Nixon was Commander-in-Chief and Vance is not. And the Vietnam War is very different to America’s current fight with Iran.

Geoff Hill

South Africa now has its answer to ICE

A force of 10,000 inspectors is being recruited to weed out foreigners: door-to-door across the nation, they will check mines, factories and shops, rounding up those without papers for deportation. Oh, and the target will be black people! Trump madness? Marine le Pen? No, this is South Africa and a project launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa to expel millions of black migrants from across the rest of Africa who have jumped the border or overstayed their visa. It's Africa's answer to ICE, though you won't find many people protesting: quite the opposite. Government and the police are desperate to demonstrate they're on top of the problem; to assuage the rising rage of native South Africans, and try to stop them taking matters into their own hands.