donald trrump Archives

Thursday

May 8, 2025

The unforgiving history of student loans

Republicans in the House are considering a bill to make major changes in federal student loans for college, and President Trump is floating the idea of making colleges responsible for borrowers who fail to repay. For decades student loans and their repayment are never far the center of controversy, but it wasn’t always that way. I grew up in the era before massive student debt. Student loans were available in 1971 when I went off to college, but they didn’t dominate the terrain like a Tyrannosaurus rex. They were more like Barney, the joyful purple denizen of PBS, who had a ferocious appetite for public funds but had not yet evolved into the carnivore who preys on the livelihoods of college graduates. But the student-loan monster had already been born.

Wednesday

May 7, 2025

Daniel DePetris

Biden has learned nothing from his foreign-policy experience

Historically, ex-presidents spend their golden years on the speaking circuit, writing their memoirs or planning for the inauguration of their presidential libraries. What they don’t do is lash out at their successors when they disagree with a policy or decision. Joe Biden, however, has no intention of keeping quiet. A little more than three months after vacating the White House, Biden is unencumbered from conventional decorum and feels free to speak his mind. Last month, he gave his first post-presidency speech in Chicago, where he blasted the Trump administration for taking a sharp hatchet to the federal workforce, including the Social Security Administration.

John Mac Ghlionn

Who is funding Trump’s billion-dollar crypto empire?

By one recent estimate, Trump’s foray into crypto has made his family almost $3 billion in six months and now accounts for up to 40 percent of his wealth.At the same time, his administration has been quietly dismantling guardrails around the crypto industry. Trump has slashed funding for key Treasury initiatives, scrapped proposed anti-fraud rules, and even pardoned crypto felons. Much of the hype – and money – comes from $TRUMP and $MELANIA, two so-called meme coins: cryptocurrencies driven by branding, jokes, or online fandom rather than real-world use. Yet despite having little practical function, the pair has already generated over $140 million in trading volume in just four months.

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

Neal Pollack

Mark Carney rebuffs Trump’s marriage proposal

The White House press conference between President Trump and newly-elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shows that every generation gets the summit it deserves. World War Two had Yalta, the 1970s the Camp David Accords. Barack Obama had a beer with the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And Trump bragged about the new 24-karat White House gold décor and said, about Canada, “I think we have a lot of things in common.” The half-hour press scrum veered between mutual respect and Trumpian disdain, while Carney struggled to get a word in, flopping his hands in his lap like fish on a deck. He called Trump a “transformational President” and said, “We’re stronger when we’re together.” Trump said, “I have a lot of respect for this man.

Cockburn

Did Kamala Harris ‘stun’ at the Met Gala?

Met Gala turns @TheDemocrats into @PopCrave Celebrities from the music industry, the NFL and Hollywood joined Kamala Harris at the annual Met Gala fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. In an embarrassing tweet emulating viral celebrity accounts such as @PopCrave, @TheDemocrats (yes, the official social media account for the entire Democratic party) wrote, “Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala.” The defeated presidential candidate wore a black and white dress in a possible homage to Cruella de Vil. Despite the online slavering at DNC HQ, Emily Smith notes elsewhere in The Spectator that Harris’s audience might have been on the other coast.

Ben Domenech

NFL in DC is the ultimate lefty YIMBY-NIMBY showdown

A pair of announcements by the National Football League in collaboration with Washington, DC has local citizens more excited than ever about football’s future in the capital city – but it’s also attracting opposition that stands to create a YIMBY versus NIMBY showdown on the left on the biggest national stage. For YIMBY futurists on the left, whether you’re talking about Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda or Matt Yglesias’s dreams of a billion Americans, the possibility on offer by the NFL and the Washington Commanders seems ideal to achieve great things for the city.

Emily Smith

Kamala chooses the Met Gala over the presidency

It was typical Kamala. Did she really want to be at the Met Gala or not? She couldn’t seem to make up her mind. So the candidate that the Democratic party thought could beat Donald Trump in the race to be US president skipped the red carpet, slipped in a backdoor of the Metropolitan Museum and posted a photo of herself in a black and white silk gown on social mediaThe look in her eye as she stared at the camera was pure uncertainty. Had she just stepped on another landmine, obvious to everyone else but her? The caption on the photo tweeted from the Democrats account may have read, “Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala,” but that is not how most Americans will view it.

Spectator Editorial

The reviving of the American mind

In his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that higher education no longer taught US citizens how to think. “We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished,” he wrote. “The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.” Now, almost 40 years later, we’re even more clueless. The rot in academia has spread throughout the education system and can be found all over American life. Rational thinking has now been almost entirely usurped by the baser passions of anger and grievance, as we saw all too clearly in the collective insanity of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Peter Wood

The Trump administration is giving us excellence, not equity

Americans are not a naturally gloomy people. We don’t necessarily expect things to go our way, but when they don’t, we can laugh it off. In my part of Vermont there’s a place called Hateful Hill, for example, so-named by stagecoach drivers who had a tough time with the steep road. But Hateful Hill is also a beautiful elevation. Today, even those who don’t “get” Donald Trump need to start seeing the upside. He doesn’t always get his way, which is probably a good thing, but he is leading a long-overdue revival of the American spirit and allowing for the return of optimism and the pursuit of excellence.

Christopher Caldwell

The real battle for Europe

Donald Trump hates Europe – that suspicion had grown so widespread by mid-April that J.D. Vance was moved to declare in an interview: “I love Europe.” Even its people, he claims. Of course, Americans have taken sides in European rivalries from the outset: Thomas Jefferson was a France man after the French Revolution, while John Adams preferred England. FDR preferred Pétain, while Eisenhower preferred de Gaulle. But hate Europe outright? The idea is absurd. Though our ancestors are not 100 percent European, our country is. You can imagine President Trump calling for a Wienerschnitzel and a tub of mayonnaise more easily than you can imagine him calling for a bowl of hủ tiều nam vang and a bottle of nưởc mắm.

Kara Kennedy

Has Trump’s Kennedy Center overhaul worked?

When Donald Trump installed himself as chairman of Washington’s Kennedy Center, the progressive arts community reacted with predictable hysteria. Artists threatened boycotts and donors withdrew their support. The Guardian reported the news as “anti-woke MAGA populism on a collision course with America’s progressive cultural scene,” while the usual suspects emerged from their Brooklyn brownstones and Malibu beach houses to decry the “assault on democracy” and predict the death of artistic expression as we know it. But as with most things Trump, the reality has proven far more interesting. Since opening in 1971 as a memorial to John F.

John R. MacArthur

Why Trumpism won’t fix Clintonomics

As a longtime critic of the Clinton administration’s “free trade” agreements, I’ve lately been mocked by liberal friends who suspect I’m sympathetic to the “plan” hatched by Donald Trump and his senior advisor on trade, Peter Navarro, to “ruin” the country with indiscriminate import tariffs. This sort of jokey ridicule goes with the territory when you jab at neoliberalism from the left. Bill Clinton still has legions of fans among the Democratic party establishment and its media acolytes, and it’s hard for them to face up to the fact that the former president’s economic policies have led directly to Trump’s election as president not just once, but twice.

Daniel McCarthy

Why Trump should put himself on the Supreme Court

Legend has it that after subduing Greece, Egypt, Persia, wide swaths of India and what’s now Afghanistan, Alexander the Great wept, lamenting “there are no worlds left to conquer.” Donald Trump is close to knowing how that feels. “I run the country and the world,” he declared in a recent Atlantic interview. Trump’s second term has barely begun, but already the thought must cross his mind: “What next?” Alexander was lucky to die young, at 32 and at the peak of his power. The President is in rude health and leads a charmed life. The grim reaper missed him last year when an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. As it stands, Trump can look forward to leaving office, aged 82, in January 2029. He’s conquered the world only to lose it to term limits.

Ross Clark

Is the AI boom already over?

Is artificial intelligence a flash in the pan? Is the boom in tech shares, which exploded with the rise in public awareness of AI, doomed to go the way of other investment bubbles over the centuries? The answer to the first question is almost certainly no, and the answer to the second very likely yes. Investment bubbles do sometimes involve assets which have little intrinsic value, yet it is remarkable how often they begin as an entirely rational reaction to some new invention or development – an invention which outlasts the collapse of the speculative bubble, as if nothing had happened. You only have to look at a share chart and you would assume that railways went out of fashion in the 1840s, when a mad speculative umbrella collapsed.

Peter Watson

The rise of millionaires, valet parking and facelifts in Palm Beach

The two favored topics of conversation in Palm Beach are money and the place itself, so the latest survey by Henley & Partners, a specialist service which advises wealthy clients where to live, is doubly welcome. It shows that Palm Beach County is among the top five fastest-growing “wealth hubs” in the world, outpacing even Dubai and Silicon Valley. This latest report shows that Palm Beach County cities (that is, Palm Beach, the island off the mainland, and West Palm Beach, on the mainland, separated only by three drawbridges) experienced a 112 percent increase in millionaire residents between 2014 and 2024.

Jonathan Miller

Why western Canada should join the US

I was born in Saskatchewan and have no intention of returning. It’s the Siberia of Canada, an area bigger than France – where I now live – with the population of Buffalo, New York. It’s sucked dry by Ottawa. Elon Musk was here, and left. And it has winter temperatures of -40 degrees. Alberta has slightly more going for it: skiing, bears. But Albertans aren’t gruntled, either. The last time I was in Calgary I had lunch at the elite Ranchmen’s Club and the chatter was seditious. The talk was of Wexit – the separation of western Canada from the bloodsucking east. Then there’s Plan B. While it’s possible that western Canada could go it alone – seceding from the dominion and declaring independence – it’s hardly the only option.

Monday

May 5, 2025

Neal Pollack

A Big, Beautiful Alcatraz is only the beginning

Among the Sunday night demands from King Donald came this bizarre proclamation: “REBUILD AND REOPEN ALCATRAZ!” The latest Trumpian nocturnal emission evoked a time when America was a more “serious Nation…No longer will we tolerate these serious offenders who spread filth, blood, and mayhem on our streets.” Apparently, to return to law and order, all we need to do is restore the glory days of The Rock, which has been closed for 60 years and is currently a museum operated by the National Park Service. To be charitable, our prison system is cruelly overcrowded, and under Trump’s rule, it is fixing to be even more so. We’re going to need facilities to house “America’s most ruthless and violent offenders,” and Arkham Asylum only exists in the imagination.

Alexander Larman

The problem with Trump’s plan to make American movies great again

Donald Trump is a cinephile, of sorts. Not since Ronald Reagan has there been a US President so visible in theater, with Trump making cameos in everything from Home Alone 2 to Zoolander. Yet just as Trump has been steadfast in his determination to Make America Great Again, so he has been equally keen to Make Hollywood Great Again, too. Initially, he appointed Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as “Special Ambassadors” to “a great but very troubled place.” Gibson and Stallone appear to have taken the honor on the chin, but Voight has been diligently organizing meetings and has now fed back his thoughts to the President. As a result, Trump has declared that he has his own, unorthodox plans to save the American motion-picture industry.

Sunday

May 4, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump rules out a third term

Is Donald Trump forsaking four more years? In an interview today with NBC’s Kristen Welker, Trump indicated that while his MAGA faithful may be hawking hats in support of a 2028 run, he’s not keen on the idea. “I’ll be an eight-year president,” he said. “I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important.” His current term, he added, was more than adequate to accomplish something “really spectacular.” The interest that Trump’s declaration of non-intention is receiving offers a reminder that he stirs up as much news with what he doesn’t do as with what he does. The only president to smash the barrier was, of course, Franklin D.

Friday

May 2, 2025

Cockburn

How do you get fired from the Trump administration?

Lateral moves instead of scalps in Trump 2.0 “You’re fired” is the phrase that catapulted Donald Trump into the public imagination two decades ago – but it’s something that he seems reticent to tell the people who work in his administration. Trump briefly set the world on fire (again!) after everyone learned that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was… leaving. One Trumpworld veteran told Cockburn that Waltz’s departure was a “disaster.” While the specifics remain murky, Trump gave Waltz what one administration insider called a “golden parachute” by announcing that Waltz is shipping up to Turtle Bay as America’s next ambassador to the United Nations, nomination pending. The writing was on the wall for Waltz as soon as the Signalgate scandal blew up.