Donald trrump

Trump’s peace process pageantry

The US Institute of Peace was taken over by DoGE in January and now appears to have undergone a makeover both inside and out. Its new name is emblazoned on the front: “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.” The President loves deals and good branding, perhaps as much as he professes to love peace. On Thursday, in the high-ceilinged atrium of the building, he hosted a celebration of a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. The actual peace agreement in question was signed over the summer with shaky results. Nevertheless, leaders from several East African nations, as well as the UAE and Qatar turned up to bear witness to the ceremonial acknowledgement of the agreement.

donald trump peace

The desperation of the ‘Seditious Six’

Two weeks ago, six US lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, released a cryptic YouTube video where they spoke directly to American service members. They were Senators Mark Kelly (Arizona) and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), and Representatives Jason Crow (Colorado), Chris Deluzio (Pennsylvania), Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania) and Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire) “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” one of them said. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” said another. “You must refuse illegal orders,” said a third. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.

Donald Trump’s affordability blues

So President Donald Trump may have dozed off during his cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Who could blame him? Listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio drone on about Russia would prompt souls less hardy than Trump to catch some shuteye.  What should be keeping Trump awake, or at least uneasy, is the shaky state of the American economy. The federal government may not be releasing much data about the economy, but the payroll processing company ADP is reporting that private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were heavily concentrated among small employers who have been slammed by Trump’s capricious tariff policy.

donald trump affordability
Climate change

Climate doom is not science

The costs of not dealing with climate change are, of course, much higher than the costs of dealing with it. We know this because, as climate campaigners keep telling us, climate change is going to set the world alight and unleash mad tempests which are going to wreak destruction on the global economy. Not a few of them have been trying to prove this by parroting a paper by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published in the journal Nature in 2024 which concluded that a rise of 8.5 Celsius in global temperatures by 2100 will shrink the economy by 62 percent.

Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare

“Some people will correct me. They love to correct me. Even though I’m right about everything,” President Trump was saying, but no one was about to correct the President at this December cabinet meeting, the last in a series of extremely long such affairs that TV has carried this year. At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era. Trump is always with us, and talking at us. Before the roundtable of cabinet members listing their accomplishments and kissing the boss’s butt, Trump talked for nearly 30 minutes.

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Howard Lutnick

Howard’s beginning: the luck of Lutnick

With Elon Musk no longer sleeping in a cot in Washington, only one member of the White House inner circle comes close to matching Donald Trump’s net worth: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Commerce is usually a mid-tier cabinet post; even fervent political observers would be hard-pressed to name previous officeholders. But Lutnick has been one of Trump’s most impactful advisors in this second term. His ideas about tariffs have greatly affected the world’s economy, and have influenced Trump’s mercurial tariff pronouncements. Plus, he’s worth about $3 billion himself. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, himself a billionaire, is only worth about half as much. Lutnick made his name as CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a major New York financial services company.

judges supreme court

Federal judges crave the spotlight

In the great injunction sweepstakes that have followed Donald Trump’s second administration like a shadow, we have seen district court judges with a hankering for executive power attempt to play president in more than a hundred cases from immigration and tariffs to funding various executive branch agencies, so-called trans-rights, DEI and climate change. Some of these injunctions and temporary restraining orders are still pending. Many, perhaps most, have been resolved by the Supreme Court in ways that favor the Trump administration, not always categorically but usually by affirming the broad scope of executive power envisioned by Article II of the Constitution.

Dog Man Vs. Antifa and other kids’ books to ‘own the libs’ with

Liberals are in a tizzy as usual over Pete Hegseth, our slick-haired Secretary of War. And in particular over his nonchalant attitude toward blowing Venezuelan drug boats out of the water, acting like the US is attacking the Old Man and the Sea or some bachelorette party boat instead of some highly organized narcotraficantes. That said, Hegseth did issue a bizarrely immature meme yesterday, tweeting out a fake cover of the children’s book character Franklin the Turtle called “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.” In it, Franklin, wearing a helmet and a gunbelt in addition to his usual protective carapace, fires an RPG and blows up a drug boat near some sort of tropical shore.

kids books libs
ushakov russia ukraine putin

Inside the mind of Putin’s real hatchet man

As Moscow and Washington prepare for talks on the latest version of Donald Trump’s peace plan, leaked recordings of a conversation with US envoy Steve Witkoff have thrown a spotlight on to senior diplomat Yuri Ushakov. It seems he, not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position. The stature of Lavrov, once a legend in the diplomatic community, has steadily diminished since 2014, when he wasn’t even consulted before Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. Every year since then, the now-75-year-old minister has petitioned Putin to be allowed to retire; every year this is denied. Instead, Lavrov remains confined to a role of repeating threadbare talking points to audiences who frequently and openly disbelieve him.

south africa

Trump was right to snub Johannesburg’s G20 summit

The rule of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa since 1994 has been marked by a widening chasm between poor black people, the majority and a tiny black elite, who get richer and richer. A quarter of our children are so badly malnourished that their brains are stunted for life. Amid this terrible hunger, President Cyril Ramaphosa lives in fabulous splendor. He is said to be worth 6 billion rand (around $350 million). He has mansions in the rich parts of South Africa. He has a fleet of luxury cars. He owns a game farm of 11,120 acres. Yet before the G20 meeting of international leaders in Johannesburg, he wrote in his newsletter, “Inequality is one of the most pressing global issues of our time.

Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

In response to the attack on Thanksgiving eve by a suspected Afghan national upon two West Virginia National Guardsmen, President Trump demanded a renewed effort to expel illegal immigrants. During a brief and uncompromising address from West Palm Beach that bore the rhetorical fingerprints of White House advisor Stephen Miller, Trump ripped into illegal immigration and former president Joe Biden. The President deemed the influx of refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere the “single greatest national-security threats” facing America. Biden was a “disastrous president.” Trump reserved special scorn for his detractors who he said purport to protect constitutional liberties but are leaving America exposed to rampant criminality.

Fact-checking the Venezuela war hawks 

As the US Navy remains primed for action in the Southern Caribbean, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro prepares for what could be an American attempt to remove him. And as President Trump alternates between calling Maduro on the phone and authorizing air strikes, a bevy of misinformation is being peddled by public figures with an agenda. There are so many claims and counter-claims on the air waves right now that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. A sizable chunk of this disinformation is of course being sold by Maduro himself, a man who has learned from his predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chávez, that it’s easier to blame the United States for all of your problems than own up to your own catastrophic policy errors.

A poultry affair at the White House

The call sheet for this afternoon’s event at the White House was as imposing as ever: WHO: The President Mrs. Melania Trump, First Lady of the United States Gobble, Turkey Waddle, Turkey Putin at 10, turkeys at 12, home to Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving by nightfall. A typical day in the Trump presidency. This year’s birds, Gobble and Waddle, hail from Wayne County, North Carolina, and will return to live out their days at North Carolina State University. Luckily they aren’t from Venezuela, else Pete Hegseth would have turned them into a cloud of red vapor and feathers already. Cockburn helped himself to a cup of hot apple cider from the White House staff and settled in at the back of the press area.

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trump putin

Why would Putin sign Trump’s peace deal?

It was summer 2022. Ukraine had just taken back Kyiv, people were returning to the city, and the mood was one of euphoria, triumph and success. I was having dinner with a Ukrainian official in a neon-lit seafood restaurant in the center of the city, the curfew nearing. "If this ends like the West Germany or Korea scenario, that would be the best outcome," I said to him. He snapped at me: "You want me to tell my relatives in Kherson that they will never live in Ukraine?" Three years later, and even that unwelcome outcome is now far from what Kyiv is being offered by the Trump administration.

DoGE has had its day

DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib.  It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

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Why Iran needs the Maduro regime

The aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford and three warships have been sent to the Caribbean, where they are joining a dozen Navy warships already off the coast of Venezuela, in an unprecedented show of military force. President Trump and his administration are taking aim at the administration of Nicolas Maduro, over his alleged role in the drug trade which presents a national security threat to the United States. It’s clear that if the US succeeds in destabilizing and displacing President Maduro’s regime, it would be a blow to the region’s drug traffickers. What is less known is that it would also hit Iran. Venezuela has long served as a launchpad for Iranian operations to establish a foothold in South America.

When Donald met Zohran

“I’ll tell you,” the President was saying. “The press has eaten this thing up. I had a lot of meetings with world leaders, and the press didn’t care. The biggest people in the world come over and nobody cares. This one, they care about.”   President Trump sat at the Resolute Desk, wearing a red tie. Standing next to him was the Boy Wonder, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani of New York City, wearing a blue tie. Their hour-long meeting at the White House had just concluded. In recent weeks, Mamdani had called Trump a fascist. Trump had called Mamdani a communist and a “lunatic.”  Anyone expecting acrimony or fireworks, though, would have been disappointed by this joint press appearance. Cats and dogs, living together.

zohran mamdani

Zelensky risks coup or civil war

Kyiv When is the price of peace ever fair? War does not determine who is right, only who is left, Bertrand Russell wisely observed. Very often conflicts come down to a numbers game – and on the numbers Ukraine is losing. Despite losing more soldiers, Russia is winning on the battlefield and unlike Ukraine hasn’t even begun mass mobilization.  Donald Trump’s proposed peace deal won’t turn the clock back on Ukraine's borders, or compensate Ukraine for Russian aggression and war crimes, or even punish Putin personally for starting a horrific and needless war that has claimed as many as 500,000 lives. If anything, the deal rewards him.  But Trump hopes his proposal will draw a line in the sand to stop the relentless bloodshed.

volodymyr zelensky

Will Mamdani and Trump turn the volume up?

Donald Trump is famous for being willing to meet anyone – Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Syria’s al-Jolani – and even New York’s Zohran Mamdani.  The mayor-elect of the city of Trump’s birth will travel to Washington today for an audience with the Commander in Chief, and America’s journalists are furiously tapping away in anticipation of a big “showdown.” The two men have spent months insulting each other. Trump calls Mamdani a “communist” (which the New York Times factchecks as false, naturally, because Zohran identifies as a “democratic socialist”) and has suggested, to much liberal apoplexy, that he “may not be here legally.

Will the Russia peace deal backfire on Trump?

Kyiv The rumor reverberating around Kyiv is that the FBI has been leaning on Ukrainian anti-corruption police to investigate Zelensky’s inner circle in order to force him to swallow the bitter US peace deal. Trump, as they say, has put the screws, or the feds, on Zelensky. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau – which is unravelling a $100 million war-profiteering scandal that has implicated many of Zelensky’s closest political allies – has denied the accusation point blank, and there’s not a single shred of evidence that it is true.