Donald trrump

Will Omar Fateh become America’s most radical mayor?

American politics is often reactionary. Barack Obama rode the dip of the 2007-2008 financial crash, but after eight years of neoliberal slog Middle America chose Donald Trump to extract the globalist cancer from their venerated land. The Democrats staged a counterattack in the 2018 midterms, thrusting names like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the spotlight. A reaction to a reaction to a reaction. And right on time, now that Trump has returned to office, a new breed of even more radical young Democrats is on the ascent. Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is committed to radical socialism and will likely be enthroned as America’s most powerful local executive in November thanks to a tide of support from the young, wealthy and highly educated.

Omar Fateh

Can tariffs replace income taxes?

Can tariffs replace income taxes paid by Americans earning an income under $200,000 annually, as President Trump has suggested? We seem to have entered a new world in 2025, or rather, reincarnated an older America whose tax receipts were heavily built on tariff payments. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recently stated that tariffs could replace income taxes paid by Americans making up to $150,000 per year. And certain economic nationalists have urged that there is a vital causal connection here worth recalling in an “American system” of tariffs and protectionism, and the growth of American industry. They argue that America’s Gilded Age wasn’t regressive economically; in fact, the country exploded in growth, commerce and inventions.

Tariffs

Donald Trump saved the UFC 

A new bombshell has fallen on the sports-media villa: Dana White cloaked in the glory of a whopping seven-year, $7.7 billion media-rights deal with Paramount to stream all UFC fights on Paramount+ in the United States and select simulcast events on CBS. For the love of everyone’s wallets, goodbye Pay Per View and hello to a new right-wing cultural shift in mainstream sports coverage.  Why is this new deal so relevant? Since the UFC’s inception in 1993, mixed martial arts existed as its own niche category. Critics openly said it wasn’t a real sport. They lampooned the more brutal style of MMA as less skilled and artistic than boxing, once a more revered American pastime.

Gavin Newsom

Newsom rigs California

Judging from how much Gavin Newsom talks about Donald Trump these days, the governor’s real project isn’t governing California – it’s raising his national profile ahead of an inevitable presidential run. He’s found an issue that lets him pit himself against Trump and gain coveted national media attention: reconfiguring California’s congressional districts to put more Democrats in Congress. He’s pitching it as a way to “fight fire with fire” after Texas Republicans passed their own partisan maps. In reality, it’s a political power grab dressed up as righteous urgency. The problem is that in 2010, Californians voted to take redistricting away from politicians and hand it to an independent citizen commission – a reform meant to end gerrymandering.

What will happen in Alaska?

"Alaska," said the mountaineer Jon Krakauer, "is a place that constantly reminds you of just how small you are in the grand scheme of things." I doubt somehow that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will echo that sentiment when they meet tomorrow in the Last Frontier to carve up the future between themselves – Plumb-Pudding-in-Danger-style. The two leaders will have each traveled some eight hours over their own mighty lands to see each other. It will be a case of today, Ukraine; tomorrow, ze world.  Yesterday, the Trump administration went to great lengths to assure nervous European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump would not, in their absence, simply roll over for Putin.

Sandwich arrest reveals lawless Justice Department

It’s one thing to hear about political radicals clashing with federal officers in the streets. It’s another thing entirely when one of those radicals is a Department of Justice employee. On August 10, in Washington, DC, 37-year-old Sean Charles Dunn – then working in the DoJ’s Criminal Division – hurled a Subway sandwich at a federal law enforcement officer during President Trump’s controversial federal crime crackdown in the city. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. Video shows Dunn yelling profanity-laced insults – “f– you! … I don’t want you in my city!”– before throwing the sandwich and running. When caught, Dunn admitted it outright: “I did it. I threw a sandwich.” https://twitter.

Washington DC justice

Melania’s $1 billion defamation suit won’t keep Hunter Biden quiet

Hunter Biden re-entered the political limelight last month on 28-year-old Andrew Callaghan's podcast, filling three hours with stories from his life, including his battle with drug addiction. Those three hours were apparently not enough. In a subsequent episode last week, Biden spent another hour giving his two cents about Jeffrey Epstein. That video has wracked up 1.3 million views and has landed him a $1 billion lawsuit from the First Lady. Melania is kindly asking Hunter to apologize for and retract the following statements: "Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep" and "Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania, that’s how Melania and the First Lady and the President met... Yeah, according to Michael Wolff.

hunter biden

What’s the beef with Laura Loomer?

Just when you thought American political discourse couldn’t possibly sink any lower, along comes Laura Loomer’s deposition in her defamation of character case against Bill Maher. Last year, Maher made a joke/spread a rumor/talked trash about Loomer having sexual relations with Donald Trump (the comic used the F-word). Loomer filed suit – and somehow that suit has made it to the deposition stage. Cockburn feels a bit soiled at having read the whole 226-page document, but you can say this about Laura Loomer: She’s never dull. Loomer claims she’s never been in room alone with Donald Trump, much less had sex with him, and that all of her contacts with him occur via text messages to his aides.

Laura Loomer (Getty)

Trump is liberating the Smithsonians from ‘Woke’

Back in March, Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.” Its aim was to counter the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”   Exhibit number one was the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks and assorted educational centers in and around Washington DC with affiliate institutions in 47 states.  Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian was the culmination of an earlier movement, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.

Smithsonian (Getty)
Trump at the Kennedy Center (Getty)

Wow! The Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever

In the most-hyped announcement of Kennedy Center Honor nominees ever, President Trump appeared this morning at the Kennedy Center, or, as he put it on Truth Social last night, the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops.” Now all the teasing is done, and the nominees stand revealed as: country superstar George Strait, the original Broadway Phantom of the Opera Michael Crawford, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor and, yes, KISS. It’s 2025 and Donald Trump is enshrining KISS at the Kennedy Center. We live in the greatest timeline. While there will certainly be objections, this isn’t a particularly objectionable list. But it is the Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever. Last year, the Biden administration honored the Apollo Theater and the Grateful Dead, among others.

Is Trump DC’s Batman?

What is Washington to make of the President’s efforts to “make DC safe again?” If you’re only capable of measuring Trump’s actions by how authoritarian they appear, then, sure, his declaration of a state of emergency, seizure of control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilization of the National Guard must seem scary. Cockburn empathizes with the small number of DC residents – and larger cohort in other cities and around the world – who see Trump’s use of the powers granted him by the Home Rule Act as concerning. On his Monday evening constitutional around Northwest DC, Cockburn saw a number of arrests taking place, more MPD cars on the street than usual and heard a chorus of sirens cascading into the night.

Trump as Batman (Grok)
Dana White

The White House UFC cage fight

When President Trump said in July that he planned to host a Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn next year as part of the U.S.A.’s 250th birthday celebrations, people dismissed it as a typical piece of hyperbole and bluster. “We have a lot of land there,” Trump said, which is somewhat true, but that doesn’t mean that you can plop down an Octagon, right? Well, as it turns out, that’s exactly what it means. Trump is like that boy in the old Twilight Zone episode. Whatever he wishes, comes true. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, UFC boss Dana White, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said that the UFC 250th anniversary (of the U.S.) is definitely going to happen. “Fighters will be warming up in the White House,” White said.

WATCH: DHS tries to make ICE cool again

Cockburn and his colleagues are currently obsessed with the new ICE recruitment video that’s gone viral online. “Allow me to introduce myself, my name is HO HO H to the O V,” Jay-Z, who currently lives comfortably in a Tribeca penthouse with Beyonce, raps over grainy footage of camo-clad soldiers busting open shipping containers, riding rough in the backs of open trucks, and flying in helicopters. It all takes place in dark warehouses or under a dusty, cloudless skies, until the scene shifts to nighttime, and the soldiers raise their hands, getting ready to do violence while lit up in dystopian reds and blues. Denis Villeneuve, who made Sicario, couldn’t have directed it any better.  https://twitter.com/dhsgov/status/1954556388522291682?

ICE
Donald Trump on DC crime (Getty)

Why Trump is right to take over DC

Donald Trump's press conference announcing a federal takeover of Washington, DC's police force was packed to the gills with White House reporters – many of whom live in DC and the surrounding area, and are more than familiar with the degradation of law and order in the region. But just because they know it's bad doesn't mean they want to give Trump any credit for trying to clean up the city – in fact, they're likely to attack the move from both sides. The ramifications of Trump's takeover, under Section 740's emergency rule, will have undetermined ripple effects in the capital city, but the initial reaction to it illustrates the difficult position in which it puts the president's critics.

Washington DC (Getty)

Congress should seize control of DC

The world judges a country by its capital. Paris, London and Rome are showcases of national ambition and a source of pride. How might one judge the United States after visiting Washington, DC? Corrupt, lawless and increasingly unsafe after dark? In a city meant to project strength and stability, one finds instead great domes and marble colonnades sharing the streets with open-air crime scenes. This July, a 21-year-old congressional intern, Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, was shot to death after being caught in an ongoing dispute between two rival groups. In 2023, Phillip Todd, a staffer for Senator Rand Paul took a knife to the chest.

Donald Trump

Trump’s shrewd move in DC will resonate across the US

President Trump’s initiative to restore law and order to the streets of the nation’s capital is a smart political move. All Americans consider Washington “our city,” and we want it safe. We can see on the nightly news that it is not, and we’re not happy about it. If Trump can turn that around, he will get well-deserved credit, not from the legacy media but from the public.Trump and his party will reap a second major benefit, as well. If he can lessen the muggings, car jackings and armed robberies, if he can move the homeless off downtown streets, he will highlight the difference between his approach and the painful failures in Chicago, New York, Los Angles and other major cities, all of them governed by Democrats. That’s a huge political benefit, if he can secure it.

Epstein

President and prince differ over exorcism of Epstein’s ghost

Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost, a specter of elite scandal, continues to haunt both the American presidency and British monarchy. Donald Trump, embodying the presidency’s assertive role, and Prince Andrew, entangled by Epstein ties, face persistent scrutiny. Court documents from Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s 2015 lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, unsealed in 2024, name both amongst Epstein’s associates, fuelling public demands for clarity. A 2025 poll shows 58 percent of Americans follow the saga, with bipartisan calls for document releases reflecting a quest for justice. Trump’s confrontational playbook and the monarchy’s reserved silence, though starkly different, are each tailored to their institutional contexts, proving appropriate despite Epstein’s lingering shadow.

Why Trump must build a nuclear reactor on the Moon

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation whom President Trump appointed last month as temporary leader of NASA, has issued a directive to fast-track efforts to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. “To properly advance this critical technology to be able to support a future lunar economy, high power energy generation on Mars, and to strengthen our national security in space,” he says.A small nuclear reactor on the moon is a good idea, but the directive is about more than that: it is about renewing America’s leadership in space exploration that, with its magnificent achievements receding into the past, looks vulnerable. Bill Nelson, NASA’s last leader, didn't mince his words when it came to the new rivals, China. “It is a fact: we’re in a space race.

The Moon

How to jail the Russian hoax colluders

Now comes word that Attorney General Pam Bondi is opening a grand jury investigation into the attempt to falsely dragoon President Donald J. Trump with criminal Russian meddlers during the 2016 presidential election. In attempting to direct some measure of sunlight to ground that has been well trod and littered with distracting debris, the US Department of Justice will be facing a significant uphill battle. First, various government officials planted seeds of disinformation and sowed misdirection during the first Trump administration, aided and abetted by the Biden administration in subsequent years. Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017 to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and purported ties to the Trump campaign.

Russia