donald trrump Archives

Saturday

June 14, 2025

On the ground at the President’s military parade

Washington, DC “Every other country celebrates their victories, it’s about time America did too,” Donald Trump told a whooping, albeit smaller-than-anticipated crowd on the National Mall tonight. “We’re the hottest country in the world right now,” the President boasted. Temperature-wise, that’s debatable. But he’s right that the whole world has been watching on, as the President turned his plans for a military parade from conception into reality. If you gave a 79-year-old man some say in what he did for his birthday, he’d choose one of two things: nap, or pay a laudatory tribute to the US military that everyone had to watch.

Roger Kimball

We should rejoice in Trump’s military parade

Today, you can choose to follow your inner adolescent and search for one of the Soros-funded “No Kings” protests cropping up wherever the number of Democrats is high and the collective IQ is low. Alternatively, you can pop down to the draining swamp of Washington, DC and watch the United States Army commemorate its 250th anniversary with a snazzy military parade among patriotically inclined Americans.If you think I have loaded the dice somewhat with charged rhetoric, you’re right. The whole “No Kings” wheeze is just anxious left-wing grandstanding that is as desperate as it is ineffectual. There is no Saint George Floyd around to act as a pretext this time.I have no doubt that those protests will be lavishly covered by the Irrelevant Media Complex.

Friday

June 13, 2025

Cockburn

Inside the April Ryan-John Fredericks Briefing Room brouhaha

Radio Ga Ga That’s it, yes, it’s war! Forget Israel and Iran’s back and forth, ignore the tanks on Constitution Avenue: the real conflict of the week was the heated Briefing Room scrap between two titans of radio, John Fredericks and April Ryan. It all kicked off on Wednesday afternoon ahead of the press briefing, when Trump-supporting call-in host Fredericks sidled in and started airing his grievances about how the briefings used to work under the previous Trump administration. He was moaning about how he never got to ask questions due to the focus-pulling antics of CNN’s Jim Acosta and April Ryan, who, sources tell Cockburn, he referred to as the “woman from urban radio.” Fredericks said this... while directly next to Ryan.

Saeid Golkar & Jason M. Brodsky

Will Israel kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

After Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei promised new retaliatory attacks against Israel following its unprecedented military operation, there has been considerable speculation about whether Israel will retaliate in the ongoing volley by killing Khamenei himself. Khamenei is the glue that holds the Islamic Republic together, having served as supreme leader since 1989. If he were to be killed by Israel, it would shock the Islamic Republic and could destabilize the regime. Targeting Khamenei via airstrikes or infiltrating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Vali Amr Protection Corps, which provides his personal protection, would be the two most probable modes to eliminate him. As he grows older, Khamenei's world has become smaller.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump has been outmaneuvered by Netanyahu

The surprising thing isn’t that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran. It’s that the current bombing campaign didn’t occur sooner. Netanyahu has been inveighing against the Iran threat for decades. The prospect that Trump might be prepared to cut a nuclear deal with the Iranian mullahs finally forced his hand. Trump, who based much of his MAGA movement around opposition to endless wars in the Middle East, has been outmaneuvered by Bibi. Intent on a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump proclaimed that he would secure an end to the Ukraine war within 24 hours. Then he focused his attentions on Iran. But his impulse to avoid war, any war, in the Middle East has been foiled.

Thursday

June 12, 2025

Freddy Gray

Trump’s birthday surprise – war with Iran?

The Trump presidency is giving us all a type of news-related diabetes. So much sensational information is spewing out of our screens all the time. There are so many stories, so much richness and history and irony, and so much silliness and seriousness entwined. We are dangerously overfed and now the lines of reality are blurring and people feel mad and sick. The Trump-Musk saga goes on, as Elon telephones Donald and shows his contrition on X. Trump sends in troops to control anti-ICE protests. Trump attends Les Miserables at his increasingly camp Kennedy Center.

Daniel McCarthy

The un-American revolution

The riots raging in Los Angeles are an unwelcome present ahead of America’s birthday, which is less than a month away. But they’re also a timely reminder of just what that birthday, the Fourth of July, is about. After all, American independence was conceived in rioting and brazen defiance of law enforcement. Some 250 years ago, Boston was aflame with the spirit of resistance. Then, too, as in LA today, soldiers had to be called out to quell the mobs. In 1770, that led to an incident known to history as the Boston massacre. Violently harassed by hundreds of protesters, seven British soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three people on the spot and wounding several more, two of whom later died.

Wednesday

June 11, 2025

Neal Pollack

Randi Weingarten’s anti-Trump national uprising sounds ‘mostly peaceful’

“Authoritarianism can be stopped,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was saying, even though Weingarten was a prime mover, if not the prime mover, behind years-long Covid-era school closures that crushed education opportunity for an entire generation. But we’ll stop this particular round of authoritarianism, she said, with our voices and our bodies: “We have to be on the streets in a very, very public way.” This was on an AFT organizing call yesterday evening for No Kings, a massive nationwide protest taking place this coming Saturday, which had been scheduled long before last weekend’s Battle of Los Angeles.

Cockburn

Elon Musk kisses the ring

"I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far," Elon Musk wrote on X at 3 a.m., after six days of soul-searching. Since this wee-hours confession from the onetime right-hand man of the President of the United States, several of Musk's most searing posts about Trump from last Thursday have vanished from the internet – though screenshots are forever. Looking for Musk's post alleging that the President was connected to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein? Now you'll see, "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist." Based on the X CEO's track record on the topic, Cockburn thinks "Godwin's Law" could use a variation.

Tuesday

June 10, 2025

Peter Wood

How Harvard lost America

President Trump’s proclamation, “Enhancing National Security by Addressing Risks at Harvard University,” pays a compliment to that crossroads of brilliance and turbidity. It treats Harvard as a serious educational institution, and one that in its misbehavior “presents an unacceptable risk to our Nation’s security.” Trump was not referring to the risk of immersing some of America’s brightest and most ambitious students in a toxic soup of anti-Semitism, DEI and disdain for our republic. Nor were the “risks” he had in mind “everybody-gets-an-A" grade inflation or a curriculum that wastes the students’ intellectual talents on courses that sound more like entertainment (e.g.

Laura Powell

Taxpayers subsidize LA unrest through California’s ‘protest-industrial complex’

Los Angeles has erupted into violence and at the center of it stands a cast of progressive activists and political operatives – some generously bankrolled by California taxpayers. One organization in particular has emerged as a key player: the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA. The LA-based nonprofit has long pushed radical positions on immigration – for example, in 2018, it spearheaded a campaign to abolish ICE. Its stated mission is to “build power, transform public opinion, and change policies” to achieve “full human, civil, and labor rights.” Critics might describe CHIRLA instead as a well-funded political engine for the open-borders left. And taxpayers might question the source of that funding.

Cockburn

J.D. Vance: deport Derek Guy

Forget the protesters versus police clash on the West Coast: this week's fiercest battle of wits is between a Vietnamese fashion critic and the Vice President of the United States. The man running an anonymous X account dedicated to critiquing politicians' attire, Derek Guy, may find himself America's next top deportee. Guy, who has criticized Pete Hegseth's USA socks and Sam Altman's strange trouser bagginess, took to X Sunday evening, to come clean about his own illegal residence and disgust with the Trump administration's deportation agenda. "My family escaped Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and went through an arduous journey that eventually landed them in the Canada," Guy wrote. From Canada, his dad went to the US to work, overstaying the legal timeframe.

Rachel K. Paulose

Can Trump have Newsom arrested for fiddling while LA burns?

A great American city is descending into chaos, and the leader most capable and concerned enough to save it is 2,500 miles away, sitting in the Oval Office. Meanwhile as they can see the smoke rise from their houses, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom are so desperate to see President Donald J. Trump fail, they would sacrifice their own constituents on the altar of political expediency rather than intervene to protect life and liberty.For his part, the President has suggested that border czar Tom Homan was right to threaten to arrest Newsom. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.

Monday

June 9, 2025

Joe Lonsdale

The tech right-MAGA alliance is far from over

In the aftermath of the Musk-Trump break-up, many are wondering about the future of the “tech right” and its relationship to the MAGA movement. In 2024, the two groups fought together and won. One definition of the tech right is simply “Technology people who aren’t crazy leftists.” Many in this group shifted right because of the excesses of wokeness and DEI within Silicon Valley. The dysfunction of far-left culture, which attacks merit and excellence, created a lot of apostates. Some were Democrats until quite recently! For my part, I was raised in the tradition of liberty, with an education that included not just Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, but also Edmund Burke and G.K. Chesterton. Not to insult my friends, but I am not a recent convert.

Freddy Gray

Bannon on LA riots: ‘We’re in World War Three’

It’s all war all the time inside Steve Bannon’s War Room in Capitol Hill. "We're in the Third World War," he tells me. "And it's a battlefield that's everywhere, including in downtown Los Angeles." The weekend’s riots in LA, he insists, are part of an orchestrated push by nefarious forces in America to stoke civil unrest in America. The Democrats, he says, "allowed in 10 to 13 million illegal alien invaders into this country. They all must go home. All. Not some. All must go home. They must be deported. They must go home or we don't have a country, OK?" We’re in for another of summer of riots, says Bannon. "They just kicked it off," he says.

Ben Domenech

Gavin Newsom blew his chance to stand for law and order

Gavin Newsom had a golden opportunity this week to prove that he’s learned something in the time since the summer of George Floyd. He had an opportunity to set himself up as a Democrat willing to take on the factions of his own coalition when their methods go from peaceful protest to setting fires in the streets, destroying property and all-out anti-cop violence. He could have taken a stand for law and order, taking flak from his own side for standing up for the law-abiding citizens of California. Instead, he blew it. He called the decision by President Trump to deploy the National Guard “an illegal act, an immoral act, an unconstitutional act,” and announced a lawsuit against the government over the issue.

Dan Grazier

America’s new stealth jets don’t need pilots

Donald Trump is presiding over an unprecedented boom in stealth jet production. He announced the F-47 in March and the F-55 in May – alongside upgrades to the F-22 Raptor. He inherited the B-21 Raider project and will make a decision about the Navy’s F/A-XX program. It promises to be a deadly stable of airborne thoroughbreds. But before the President and the rest of the national security apparatus commits future generations to paying for these programs, they should pause and consider a basic reality: in most cases, the military doesn’t need manned aircraft to fly over enemy territory anymore. Most of the functions of the four new, exquisite and very expensive, manned aircraft under development can already be performed by other, far less expensive systems.

Friday

June 6, 2025

Travis Aaroe

The strange futility of the Musk-Trump feud

The Trump-Musk spat is not the sign of a new split between oligarchs and populists, as some have claimed – but of the growing pains involved in reassembling this old coalition. Keeping capitalism going under mass suffrage is no small feat, and capitalists used to be much shrewder in how they went about it. Electorates wouldn’t reliably go for laissez-faire – except after a crisis – and so the only option for the capitalists was to hitch themselves to the wider lower-middle-class coalition for law and order, low taxes and national swagger. Musk’s attacks on Trump yesterday, which included a pitch for a new party “that actually represents the 80 percent in the middle,” represent something drawing to a close rather than being born.

Neal Pollack

After Elon Musk, America is never going to be the same

Only certain days qualify as the greatest days in American history: July 4, 1776 will always lead the way, as will the day the Constitution was ratified. So will the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, VE Day, the moon landing and a small handful of others. Yesterday, June 5, 2025, will join that select company, because yesterday was the day that the world’s richest man, on a media platform that he owns, accused the President of the United States of Jeffrey Epstein kinds of behavior. As I looked at my phone blowing up, I realized that America was never going to be the same. Elon Musk, as we all watched in real time over the last few months, made one of history’s most tragic miscalculations.

Teresa Mull

Trump’s pardon team is quietly working to restore gun rights to thousands of felons

President Donald Trump’s pardoning blitz has dominated the headlines with reality-TV stars, a rapper and political allies all walking free from prison after he granted them clemency. But quietly in the office of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney – where all of the above appeals were processed – a much more significant and wide-reaching process of forgiveness is taking shape. Ed Martin, Trump loyalist and new pardon attorney, is preparing his team to review applications from people – a lot of people – with criminal convictions to have their gun rights restored. “The pardon staff has already been working at it, because we anticipate hundreds and hundreds of thousands of applicants,” Martin told the Wall Street Journal.