Ceasefire

Donald Trump is on a roll. He not only wrangled Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu into submission, but also the terrorist organization Hamas, which has apparently agreed to release all remaining hostages. The war in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of at least 67,000 Palestinians, looks to be coming to an end. On Thursday evening, Trump took a victory lap as Israel and Hamas, who have been negotiating in Egypt, assented to the first phase of his 20-point peace plan. “I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan.

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

With all the good news coming out of the Jeddah talks about a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, there’s only one question that needs to be answered: Will President Putin be interested in any kind of deal right now? President Trump is convinced that Putin wants peace. But if the Russian leader truly wants to end his war, will he do so on America’s terms, or will he wait until he achieves one of his main objectives — the total subjugation of the four provinces in eastern Ukraine that he claimed to have annexed in the first seven months of the invasion? At a ceremony in St. George’s Hall at the Kremlin in September 2022, Putin declared that Russia now had four new regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

TikTok is hoping that 2025 can be its year — but what comes next for the social media company is truly anyone’s guess. Will someone buy it? Will it divest from its Chinese Communist Party ownership? Will it exist in America next week (the app is fully banned in China as is)? Stay tuned.The social-media app is seeking yet another revival at the eleventh hour. Despite a bipartisan bill signed by President Joe Biden that restricts the ability for foreign adversaries to run social-media companies in the United States, TikTok is activating its army of supporters once more (the app is presumably hoping that its child soldiers will not threaten to kill themselves or lawmakers this time)... and it just might work.

President Joe Biden has taken actions that will make former and President-elect Donald Trump’s transition into the White House difficult, slowing him down with federal rules and other roadblocks, according to inside sources and Trump himself.  Last week, Trump talked to reporters outside of Mar-a-Lago about the departing Biden administration.  “They’re trying everything they can to make things more difficult,” Trump said.  He also told reporters that Biden was being “sneaky,” despite the current president’s public pledge to cooperate with the incoming administration’s transition into the White House.  “They try to be sneaky,” Trump said at a press conference.

Donald Trump doesn’t take office for another week, but the Trump show starts in earnest this week with a confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, followed shortly by Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Doug Burgum, Doug Collins and others. While some drama is to be expected, Trump’s current nominees have mostly run the gauntlet unscathed. Not all were so lucky, however. Former congressman Matt Gaetz quickly withdrew his name from consideration to be attorney general once he felt that he no longer had a foreseeable path forward; another Florida man, Hillsborough County sheriff Chad Chronister, withdrew his name from consideration due to concerns from the right about his record during Covid-era lockdowns.

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat of 25 percent, across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada has already shocked the system. The US dollar rose against its neighbors’ currencies, as stocks dropped and rose.Floating an additional tariff on China is one thing, but adding America’s two neighbors makes the move especially ambitious. If implemented, the US would effectively levy tariffs against its top three trading partners, which together make up around 40 to 50 percent of total trade between America and the world. That’s revolutionary.One thing that’s for certain is that tariffs would hurt the countries they target more than they hurt the US. More than 75 percent of Mexican and Canadian exports are to the Land of the Free.

President Joe Biden only has a few more months before he steps out of the White House, hands over the keys to his successor and spends his remaining days soaking in the Delaware sun. But before he enjoys retirement, the lifelong public servant has a big piece of unfinished business: scoring a major foreign policy win that will secure his place in the history books. Unfortunately, dreaming about being a statesman is one thing; being one is quite another. The two conflicts that would give the president that coveted status — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — aren’t presently amenable to diplomatic resolution. And while Biden and his advisors may be committed to doing the impossible, all the commitment in the world won’t do much if the combatants are intent on slugging it out.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin The Spectator is on the ground in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where the big story of the day is Donald Trump’s pick for vice president: Ohio senator J.D. Vance.  Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier this morning that he would be making the announcement at the convention Monday. Later reports indicated that it would take place around 4:35 p.m. Eastern Time. Trump then blasted out the news on his site Truth Social minutes ago. Of no surprise to anyone is that Trump treated the spectacle like an episode of The Apprentice. A couple of days ago he listed out four finalists for the VP nod: GOP senators Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Tim Scott and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum.

President Joe Biden offered his detractors, many of whom reside within the progressive activist wing of the Democratic Party (the former Bernie Bros are having a field day with the eighty-one-year-old’s mental decline), an attractive looking carrot this week.Biden made several notable gaffes during the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, DC, referring to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as his enemy of war “President Putin” and mixing up Vice President Kamala Harris with former president Donald Trump during his “big-boy” press conference. But as more Democratic elected officials and commentators admit that Biden ought not to finish out his re-election campaign, the nation’s long-in-the-tooth leader proved he’s still got some political fight left in him.

The Biden White House had a difficult weekend as pro-Palestinian protesters continue to be a thorn in the side of the administration and the Democratic Party. Thousands arrived outside of the White House on Saturday to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and for Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel. Police erected additional fencing around the White House in anticipation of the protests and deployed pepper spray against at least one demonstrator, but no arrests were made. Instead, the pro-Palestinian activists left graffiti on statues in Lafayette Square and trash strewn around the perimeter of the White House complex.

Why apologize when you can just wait and hope people forget what you did wrong? As we enter the season of goodwill and gratitude, that’s the question posed by disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who this year is thankful for the complicity of his allies as he attempts to stage a comeback.While New York City mayor Eric Adams chokes on a different kind of Turkey, Politico writes that Cuomo has “begun in recent days to gauge the viability of a potential mayoral bid.”Cuomo resigned as governor in ignominy back in August 2021 after an investigation by New York attorney general Leticia James claimed that he had sexually harassed as many as eleven women.

We’re almost exactly one year out from what increasingly looks like another Trump v. Biden showdown. Former president Donald Trump leads his second-place opponent by more than forty percentage points nationally, and has a thirty-point advantage in Iowa. President Joe Biden avoided a primary challenge from RFK Jr., who is now running as an Independent, and no one thinks Representative Dean Phillips’s campaign is serious, especially considering his refusal to acknowledge the objective reality that he’s even running against Biden. Although Phillips doesn’t seem to be the guy for the job, more Democrats are waking up to the idea that Biden doesn’t have what it takes to win a second term. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again.