Donald trrump

Mount Ararat rises over Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, its peak often lost in clouds. It is the country’s national symbol, yet it stands across the border in Turkey. That border has been closed since the early 1990s, when Turkey sided with Azerbaijan against Armenia – cutting Armenia off from its largest western neighbor and leaving it dependent on narrow trade corridors through Georgia and Iran. For three decades, the conflict shaped the politics of the South Caucasus, drawing in Russia, Turkey and Iran. The peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, signed today in Washington, represents more than the end of a long-standing territorial dispute.

Already the Kremlin is setting the terms of the forthcoming summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff, Trump's emissary, set the meeting in motion with his mission to Moscow on Wednesday, which Trump called “highly productive.” But productive of what? Putin’s foreign-policy adviser Yuri Ushakov stated today that it was the White House, not the Kremlin, that wanted the meeting. He went on to dismiss Trump's proposal that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could take part in a tripartite negotiation, noting that “for this to happen, certain conditions must be created. Unfortunately, such conditions are far away yet.” Those conditions remain the complete surrender of Ukraine.  The Kremlin, in other words, has a strategic plan.

El Salvador’s young and telegenic president, Nayib Bukele, has rewritten the rules. Term limits? Scrapped. Presidential terms? Extended. Runoff elections? Abolished. If all goes according to the script – penned and passed by his party in the legislature – Bukele will remain in power well into the 2030s, if not beyond. A decade ago, such a move might have sparked bipartisan alarm in Washington. Today, reactions are mixed – with many in the growing MAGA wing cheering El Salvador’s constitutional shake-up as a win of their own. This shift is a window into a deeper realignment in conservative foreign policy: one that moves closer to the unapologetic defense of national interest and drifts further from the spread-democracy-everywhere consensus.

The second coming of President Trump has brought an invigorated commander-in-chief asserting broad authority over the executive branch, reigniting debate over how much power the president has over his own subordinates, including US Attorneys. At present, the battle has focused on one US Attorney in particular. On March 24, 2025, the President named Alina Habba, his former personal attorney, the Interim US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. There’s a catch: Interim US Attorneys may serve only 120 days. On July 1, the President nominated Habba for Senate confirmation as New Jersey’s US Attorney; if confirmed, Habba could have served permanently at the pleasure of the President. Neither of her home state’s senators (both Democrats) supported Habba.

Readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter entertainments will recall that the number-one bad hat, Tom Marvolo Riddle, AKA Voldemort, had a clever way of preserving himself. Rightly worried that the forces of good might try to destroy him, the Dark Lord devised a way of infusing living bits of himself into various objects and people. The resulting magical charm was called a “Horcrux.”   “If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed,” we read in a Potter gloss, “that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.” Nice work if you can get it.

On Monday night, New York City golden boy Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, tweeted, after the terrifying gun attack on Park Avenue, “I’m heartbroken to learn of the horrific shooting in midtown and I am holding the victims, their families, and the [New York Police Department] officer in critical condition in my thoughts. Grateful for all of our first responders on the ground.” He also sent special condolences to the families of Didarul Islam, the Bangladeshi immigrant and NYPD officer who died in the attack. But there’s a reason Mamdani was holding NYC in his thoughts and not giving a press conference on the ground: He’s at his family’s luxury compound in Uganda, where he’s summering after getting married there a couple of weeks ago.