donald trrump Archives

Thursday

April 10, 2025

Trump’s ‘on-again, off-again’ presidency

To win elections in a two-party system, the victor needs to erect a big tent. He needs to persuade all kinds of voters in the general election, including many who disagree with each other (but disagree with the other party even more), to vote for him. Experienced politicians call it, “the politics of addition, not subtraction.” The rest of us call it “big tent politics.” What can poke holes in that tent? What will allow the rain to come pouring in? Those questions loom over Republicans, looking for an umbrella amid tariff disagreement, a volatile market and whispers of a possible recession. The skies were clear when the big issue was illegal immigration. The party base loved it and so did voters.

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

Spectator Editorial

The 👊🇺🇸🔥 presidency

Much has been said and written about the Trump administration’s leaked Signal discussion on bombing Houthis in Yemen, most of it forgettable. Virtually all attention has focused on dull questions of competence and whether any heads should roll for communicating sensitive US matters through a private company’s platform, then ineptly letting a reporter in on the chat. The debate is largely news-cycle fodder. The new administration will not succeed or fail based on what phone apps its members use. Yet the Signal debate has entirely overshadowed what should be a major discussion in its own right. Is the new administration quietly sleepwalking the country back into a costly, dangerous policy of Middle East military meddling?

Curtis Yarvin

My DC bunker

Washington, DC My office this week has been the Starbucks on Capitol Hill. Any random subscriber to my Substack can get a half-hour with me if they book a slot. I do this a lot when I travel and oddly, given the rot of this rotting world, I rarely come away with the feeling that here were 30 precious minutes I’ll never see again. I often want to spend an hour or two. And no one yet has killed or even attacked me. A leftist policy wonk did show up without an appointment, but he just wanted to talk about Ezra Klein. One of this week’s characters was a Russia expert at a foreign policy thinktank, who seems to really know his stuff. He filled in important nuances ofthe Prigozhin coup. Yevgeny Prigozhin never meant to overthrow Vladimir Putin, he said.

The Spectator

Where did Kamala most underperform in 2024?

Kamala’s car crash By how much did Kamala Harris underperform – and Trump gain – in different county types compared with the 2020 presidential election? County typeHarrisTrumpMajority Hispanic-18%+7%Majority black-12%-4%Urban-12%+3%High-income -9%+3%Highly educated -9%+3%Retirement areas-2%+8% Source: New York Times Minority report Kamala Harris lost important votes from ethnic minority voters in the 2024 presidential election. What was each cohort’s approval of Joe Biden’s actions while in the White House? Black.................................................66% Hispanic............................................42% Asian and Pacific Islanders...............42% White.................................................

Peter Pomerantsev

Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

Christopher Caldwell

How DEI destroyed itself

Those who wonder why more Americans haven’t risen up in rebellion against the Trump administration’s assault on affirmative action, its gutting of university departments, its violation of the neutrality of the American legal profession, should keep in mind the epigraph from the 20th-century philosopher Will Durant that appears in the opening moments of Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” As he promised to do, Donald Trump is dismantling large parts of the government he conquered at the ballot box last November. You don’t have to approve. Roughly half of Americans do not. But the regime he is undoing has yielded diminishing returns for most of this century.

Kara Kennedy

The life of Karoline Leavitt

When Karoline Leavitt, the buxom blonde 27-year-old White House press secretary landed the gig, not everybody was convinced. Scott Jennings, the Bush speechwriter turned TV star, had the resume. Megyn Kelly had the fire. But Leavitt? She was a gamble, at best. But Donald Trump wasn’t concerned about her youth and inexperience. “When I was 21, I was building buildings in Manhattan,” he told her. “I believe you can have this job.” He has been vindicated. Since taking the podium, Leavitt has quieted some of her detractors with a performance that’s part combat sport, part masterclass in messaging. Like her boss, she is combative and spunky. Sometimes she mocks the legacy news reporters she feels are asking particularly bad questions.

Roger Kimball

‘Signalgate’ is another nothingburger

I predict that by the time you read this, the press-fabricated entertainment known as “Signalgate” will be but a memory – a fond memory for those addicted to round-the-clock media frenzy, department of anti-Trump shenanigans. For the more responsible members of the populace, it will seem like an overheard squabble among angry children in some forlorn government-funded schoolyard. What, after all, was “Signalgate?” From one perspective, it was like a piranha-infested pool into which chunks of meat or perhaps a hapless Bond villain had been tossed. The resulting frothy tumult made it impossible to see what was happening. You only knew that the fish were frantic and the half-eaten protein shredded. Such things happen from time to time in America.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why are Europeans so untroubled by their ignorance of America?

Laramie, Wyoming Americans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964. Much less widely recognized is how little Europeans know about America, Americans and their own civilization – an ignorance that troubles them not at all, perhaps because they seem to be unaware of the fact.

Tuesday

April 8, 2025

Teresa Mull

Tariff haters don’t live in the Rust Belt

There is a vacant lot at the edge of downtown Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, my hometown. Three years ago, a handsome, sturdy brick factory building stood in that lot, albeit most of the windows were broken, as it had been abandoned for years. After it closed, the building became a favorite hangout for ne’er-do-wells, whose act of arson forced its recent demolition. For decades, though, the clothing factory employed thousands of people and made downtown hum, as workers crowded the restaurants and took care of errands on their lunchbreaks. They – along with the hundreds of people employed by a cigar plant on the outskirts of town – also bought houses and rented properties here and supported locally owned pharmacies, barbers, hardware stores, grocery stores, and the hospital.

Cockburn

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s foreign reporter crackdown

The British aren’t coming Congresswoman requires US ID to cover her panel Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene chaired a meeting of the House DoGE committee this morning, with the express purpose of cracking down on unused government buildings. “Federal agencies shouldn’t be maintaining empires at taxpayers’ expense,” she said in her opening statement. But Cockburn’s curiosity was piqued by the new wording at the bottom of her office’s media advisory ahead of the event, which specified that journalists seeking to cover it required American documentation: “Media and the public entering the building will need a valid U.S. passport or driver’s license and will need to be escorted to the auditorium.

Ben Domenech

The Everything, Everywhere All at Once presidency

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling lifting the order blocking the deportation of accused members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a significant legal victory for the Trump administration. More importantly, it's also a policy vindication for those within this White House whose approach to government upon their return to Washington was to do everything, everywhere, all at once. The legal victory itself was hailed by every prominent member of the President's deportation team, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing she’d redouble her efforts, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declaring that all those here illegally must “LEAVE NOW” and Stephen Miller practically ebullient in his interview last night with Sean Hannity.

Monday

April 7, 2025

Kate Andrews

Trump loves chaos. What happens when he loses control?

“Don’t be a PANICAN,” the President shared on his Truth Social account this morning, as the Dow was dropping 900 points. This is Donald Trump’s new word for his tariff critics, who he has grouped together as the “new party based on Weak and Stupid people!” There is another way, the President insists: “Be Strong, Courageous, and Patient, and GREATNESS will be the result!” It’s another post in a long line of all-caps messages shared by the President over the weekend. “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” was Friday’s update. “WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH,” was Saturday’s inspirational message.

Travis Aaroe

Who did Bill Ackman think he was electing?

To take on America’s entire governing class and win, Donald Trump proved that he had an inhuman level of willfulness and sangfroid. Those are qualities that cut both ways, however, as the investor Bill Ackman is now discovering. Wall Street has lost more than $5 trillion in value since the announcement of the new tariff regime last week, but Mr. Trump, speaking on Sunday on Air Force One, appeared deaf to all appeals. How big of a sell-off would the President be willing to endure, a member of the press pool asked. “I think your question is so stupid,” he replied. Many of Trump’s newfound admirers are panicking. Among them is Bill Ackman, manager of the hedge fund Pershing Square and a prominent Democrat defector in last year’s election.

Sunday

April 6, 2025

Tim Rice

Trump’s ‘move fast and break things’ approach to crime could finally make DC safer

A lot can change in a year. We have a new president, a new congressional majority, a new season of The White Lotus. But what about crime in Washington, DC, the subject of my last piece for this magazine back in April 2024? Is our nation’s capital still racked with carjackings and homicides – or have we begun inching our way back to some form of public order? In 2023, Washington saw 274 reported homicides, making it the district’s deadliest year in two decades. There were also 959 carjackings and 3,470 robberies. Overall, violent crime was up 39 percent. We did a lot better in 2024. There were just 187 murders, a 32 percent reduction, while robberies dropped 39 percent.

Friday

April 4, 2025

John Steele Gordon

Trump is playing a high-stakes game of international poker

On what he called “Liberation Day,” President Trump announced a new tariff schedule. While the markets had been up in anticipation, they are down sharply, with the Dow dropping 2,200 points, perhaps surprised by the extent of them. Basically, Trump has laid tariffs equal to about half what other countries charge on US exports, inviting them to lower theirs in exchange for reciprocity. What the final result will be is anyone’s guess, for the Trump tariffs are chips in a high-stakes game of international poker. They have already had an effect. Canada has promised retaliatory tariffs while Israel has dropped all tariffs on US goods. A tariff is a tax laid on goods passing through a port.

Bethany Mandel

Proxy voting for new moms makes motherhood look like weakness

In recent days, babies have taken center stage at the US Capitol, carried by their congresswoman mothers advocating for a rule change to allow proxy voting for new parents. Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Republican from Florida, and Brittany Pettersen, Democrat from Colorado, crossed the aisle to propose that House members be allowed twelve weeks to delegate their votes after childbirth. This effort, while well-intentioned, ignores the historical and practical significance of in-person voting in Congress. Article I, Section 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution states: “The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year.

Kara Kennedy

Has King Trump lost his jester?

The most important man in the palace of King Donald Trump looks set to leave the court. According to several media outlets, the President has told both his inner circle and the wider cabinet that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his role in dismantling major parts of the federal government. There were obvious difficulties and time constraints from the outset when Musk started running the new Department for Government Efficiency. A person can only serve as a “special government employee” for a period of 130 days each year – time that is dwindling fast, as we approach the 100-day mark of Trump’s second term. There are also strict rules around conflicts of interests, of which Musk risks having many given all his business operations.

Thursday

April 3, 2025

Stephen L. Miller

Book deals for those who hid Biden’s decline

The parade of books about the behind-the-scenes palace intrigue of Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical decline is in full-swing. And most are being written by journalists from the very news outlets who helped cover it all up – or at least didn’t go out of their way to question Biden’s obvious decline before the June 27 debate made it impossible for them to do so. Excerpts of a new book by the Hill correspondent Amie Barnes and NBC political reporter Jonathan Allen were released this week. The upcoming tell-all titled Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House has further details about Biden missing briefings after sitting through cosmetic make-up sessions to Michael-Jacksonize his appearance.

Freddy Gray

So long, Elon?

What with all the Rose Garden theatrics of “Liberation Day” and Donald Trump’s wild decision to tariff most of Planet Earth at once, Politico’s big “Musk will leave” scoop quickly sank down the news agenda. That’s partly because it wasn’t really a scoop at all. Elon Musk has said repeatedly that his role in the White House is only temporary. His status as a “special government employee,” which exempts him from some ethics and conflict-of-interest rules, is only meant to last 130 days and so his contract, such as it is, is likely to expire in late May or early June. Musk confirmed to Fox News last week that he was not in government for the long term while President Trump told reporters on Monday: “I think he’s amazing, but he’s got a big company to run...