Donald trump

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Can Trump sink the UK’s Chagos Islands handover?

"Better late than never." That’s how Reform party leader Nigel Farage has described Donald Trump’s sudden and dramatic repudiation of the United Kingdom’s Chagos handover. "This should be enough to sink just about the worst deal in history." Early this morning, Trump used his Truth Social account to lay into "our 'brilliant' NATO ally, the United Kingdom, over Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to "give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital military base, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.

chagos islands
chavismo
Catherine Ellis

Venezuela’s chavista elite is clinging on – but only just

Hugo Chávez’s eyes are everywhere across parts of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. In stark black and white, his gaze is stamped onto government buildings, public housing blocks and murals. But if the late socialist president could truly see what has become of the movement he founded, he would likely be dismayed. Most Venezuelans have abandoned chavismo. His protégé Nicolás Maduro – who had led the government since 2013 – has been captured by the US, while many Venezuelans cheered his exit. What remains is a thin but loyal chavista base – and a leadership operating firmly in survival mode.

Wednesday

Charlie Gammell

The rule of the Ayatollahs is broken. What happens now?

‘Help is on the way,’ promised Donald Trump to the people of Iran defying the Islamic Republic. In the same social media post, the US President, characteristically light on detail, also urged Iranian protestors to take over the institutions of the Islamic Republic (presumably by force) and to keep a note of the names and numbers of their oppressors for retribution’s sake. Whatever these words presage – be it air strikes on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij facilities, or cyberattacks on Iran’s intelligence agencies, to blind the regime as the regime has blinded protestors by shutting down the internet – it remains to be seen if such an intervention will tip the balance in favour of the regime, the protestors, or simply chaos.

Lionel Shriver

There should be no ‘sanctuary’ from ICE

After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ ‘sanctuary cities’ unconstitutional. A sanctuary city instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents. The constitution’s supremacy clause dictates that federal law overrules local law, just as rock crushes scissors in the hand game. For sub-jurisdictions to offer refuge from big meanie federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the aptly cold-hearted sounding ICE) should not, legally, be possible. It’s possible.

Martin Vander Weyer

Trump’s attack on the Fed is a pivotal moment of hubris

From our UK edition

The phrase ‘trumped-up charges’ dates from the 18th century, I learn, and derives from the Old French tromper, to deceive. It has certainly acquired new resonance with the threat of criminal indictment against US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, somehow relating to the cost of Fed building renovations. The President says this Department of Justice action has nowt to do with him, but it’s plainly another exercise of what some commentators are calling ‘the Maduro option’: sod constitutional niceties, just drag your opponent into the dock. For all his foreign-policy fireworks, Donald Trump knows November’s US midterm elections will largely be driven by domestic cost-of-living concerns.

Luke Lyman

Remembering Scott Adams

Dilbert taught me how to read. Stacked perilously high – between Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side – in my childhood home’s bathroom, Scott Adams’s cartoon provided the perfect reading material for the porcelain throne. Even before I knew what most of the words meant, I’d belly laugh at page after page of banal workplace humor. This is bizarre: why, as a preschooler, was I so tickled by these jokes about human-resources departments and fax machines? Adams, who died in the night, enjoyed more than a three-decade run as honcho of the funny pages, starting in 1989.

Monday

Ben Clerkin

The trouble with Jerome Powell

Lost in the hysterical media bleating about a new criminal investigation into Jerome Powell is any attempt to report fairly on his alleged transgressions. The singular lens through which the investigation is being reported in many openly and not-so-openly left leaning outlets is that it is Donald Trump's revenge after Powell refused to do as instructed and lower interest rates But the aperture needs to be widened to see the full picture: the case is about more than the Chair of the Federal Reserve not bending the knee. It is about Powell's competency as the nation’s chief money man after presiding over the central bank’s vast and scandalous renovation project – that started at $1.9 billion, now stands at $2.

Powell

Friday

Justin Marozzi

What Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with Christ during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chávez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad Mughniyeh, a founder of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and number two in Hezbollah until his assassination in 2008.

Marla Maples

Marla Maples’s divine purpose

The White House Christmas party really was beautiful this year. A very special festive night with beautiful friends and family. Don Jr. and Bettina got engaged at Camp David just before it and the party wasn’t supposed to be a celebration for them – but Donald decided to announce it to the world. I was so happy the official announcement was made while we were all there with them. It was a special night. Then the following night I attended the White House Hanukkah party because I believe we have to bring people of all religions together especially at difficult times. The cold and hustle of Washington, DC was a far cry from my normal routine.

Freddy Gray

Stormy seas, Trump’s revolution & Gen Z’s sex recession

From our UK edition

43 min listen

Can Farage plot a route to Number 10, asks Tim Shipman in our cover article this week. He might be flanked by heavyweights – such as his head of policy Zia Yusuf and Conservative Party defector Danny Kruger MP – but he will need a lot more people to pull off his biggest upset for British politics yet. Where will they come from? And what’s the balance he needs to strike between being radical enough to win power but also without alienating significant chunks of the electorate? Plus, as former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson breaks his silence – in this week's Spectator – to argue that Europe needs to adapt to a new reality, Freddy Gray ponders what Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is actually all about. Immigration? Drugs? Oil? Or just plain chaos?

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will Trump back down in Minnesota?

So much for Minnesota nice, the phrase that Midwesterners like to use to describe their calm dispositions. Three gunshots – fired pointblank in the gelid snows of Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer at Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old white woman and American citizen – have plunged the North Star State into renewed political turmoil. The fatal shooting took place only a few blocks from where George Floyd was killed in May 2020. In responding to the tragedy, President Trump proceeded on his favorite premise: the best defense is a good offense.

Daniel McCarthy

The plot against J.D. Vance

The Republican establishment is on the verge of extinction. Donald Trump’s first term wasn’t enough to kill it off: Trump came into office in 2017 with establishment figures such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan leading the party in Congress, and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, had been chosen for that role as a reassurance to the old guard. Trump made some efforts to staff his administration with outsiders, but the likes of Steve Bannon or the ill-fated Rex Tillerson were heavily outnumbered by Republicans who would have been just as happy – or a great deal happier – to serve in another Bush administration.  This time, though, things are very different.

Wednesday

Peter Mandelson

Peter Mandelson: Trump’s lessons for Europe

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolás Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this brutal reality. The future of Greenland is being misunderstood.

mandelson
Freddy Gray

Immigration is foreign policy now

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer, to mock the then bipartisan consensus which supported George W. Bush’s war on terror abroad while pushing open borders at home. Or, as Sailer also put it: "Bomb them over there and indulge them over here." Back then, such analysis was generally dismissed as the preserve of white supremacist cranks. Now, it’s fair to say that Sailerite thinking animates the spirit of the second Donald Trump administration. Disrupt the world, deport the world. That’s the order of the day. Since America’s stunning attack on Venezuela last weekend, almost everybody has had a stab at revealing Trump’s real intentions – including, naturally, Trump and his talking heads.

immigration
The Spectator

Donald Trump is confronting a reality that Europe has ignored

From our UK edition

Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolas Maduro was a brilliantly executed coup. It was also an exhibition of America’s hard power, power that has underpinned the rules-based international order that protected America’s allies for decades. Now those allies fear that the rules-based order is as much a smoking ruin as Maduro’s Caracas compound. European hysteria is, however, misplaced. President Trump has not inaugurated a new era of disorder, he has responded to realities about which European elites have been in denial. The post-war international order has been crumbling for more than a decade. And British governments have been enablers of that process. One of the most determined users of hard power in subverting every restraint has been communist China.

Justin Marozzi

What Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with him during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chavez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad Mughniyeh, a founder of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and number two in Hezbollah until his assassination in 2008.

Rod Liddle

Has Trump gone mad?

I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolas Maduro and she replied: ‘I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?’ This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about seeing her panties. I dunno, perhaps I should accede in case there is some hidden wisdom written on them, possibly in code.

Freddy Gray

Disrupt the world, deport the world – the ‘Donroe doctrine’ is about immigration

From our UK edition

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer, to mock the then bipartisan consensus which supported George W. Bush’s war on terror abroad while pushing open borders at home. Or, as Sailer also put it: ‘Bomb them over there and indulge them over here.’ Back then, such analysis was generally dismissed as the preserve of white supremacist cranks. Now, it’s fair to say that Sailerite thinking animates the spirit of the second Donald Trump administration. Disrupt the world, deport the world. That’s the order of the day. Since America’s stunning attack on Venezuela last weekend, almost everybody has had a stab at revealing Trump’s real intentions – including, naturally, Trump and his talking heads.

James Tidmarsh

Europe’s self-deception over Greenland

As Donald Trump weighs up taking control of Greenland, Britain and the EU has fallen back on a familiar strategy: talk tough, and do nothing. The UK joined France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Denmark yesterday in making a joint statement affirming that "Greenland belongs to its people." Arctic security, it said, must respect "sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders." Invoking it Article 5 the United States would expose NATO’s limits rather than overcome them If Donald Trump decides to take Greenland, Europe’s initial response would be loud, formal and legally impeccable. Europe and the UK would protest loudly, threaten, – and then do almost nothing at all.

Tuesday

Cockburn

WATCH: Trump imitates trans weightlifter for House Republicans

President Trump offered Republican members of Congress a stand-up routine involving an imitation of transgender athletes lifting weights at the House GOP Member retreat earlier today. The President said that his wife “hates” when he does this and considers it “unpresidential.” "She said, 'darling please, the weightlifting is terrible'," the President recounts, before launching into his impersonation, replete with sound effects. The impression has been a regular feature of Trump's rally speeches over the last year or so. Melania, he claimed, also said that his audiences didn't like his dancing, pointing out that FDR would never dance as a counter-example.

donald trump trans weightlifter impression