Donald trump

Tuesday

James Heale

Iran: ‘what the f***’ is going on?

14 min listen

It is rare to see the President so visibly frustrated (see The Apprentice, circa 2004), but after Iran and Israel seemingly ignored his ceasefire announcement – and his plea on Truth Social, ‘PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!’ – Donald Trump has come down hard on both sides. In a clip taken this afternoon he exclaimed: ‘These are countries who have been fighting so long and so hard, that they don't know what the f*** they're doing.’ Succinctly put by the President. The exchange of fire could be the expected tit-for-tat seen after the announcement of ceasefires in other global conflicts, but it has dampened the mood at Nato, which world leaders were approaching with cautious optimism, believing the road to de-escalation was clearing. What happens next?

Thursday

Toby Young

Has Trump been taking inspiration from the royals?

One of the objections to the military parade in Washington, DC last Saturday – supposedly to mark the 250th birthday of the US Army – is that it was a breach of democratic norms. The real reason it took place, say Donald Trump’s critics, was because he wanted to celebrate his 79th birthday with a display of military might – which is ‘what dictators do’, according to a general who advised him against it. Trump’s opponents gleefully pointed out that the number of attendees – around 200,000 – was dwarfed by the millions who took part in simultaneous ‘No Kings’ protests in dozens of American cities, a reference to his habit of describing himself as a ‘King’.

Freddy Gray

Who’s pushing Trump to be an Iran hawk?

‘This never would have happened if I had been president,’ says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad to worse. It’s a line he uses a lot in relation to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which began in the interregnum between his first administration and his second. Yet the latest war, between Israel and Iran, is a different matter. Trump of course blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, who ‘made Iran rich’ with $300 billion for the evil regime’s dreaded nuclear weapons programme. It was Trump, though, who in 2018 tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and in 2020 killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force.

Wednesday

James Heale

Westminster waits for Donald’s decision

14 min listen

Westminster waits with bated breath to discover whether Donald Trump will ally with Israel in striking Iranian nuclear sites. The President called for ‘UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!’ from Tehran overnight. The day to day of domestic politics appears diminished by comparison with the ever-looming threat of an escalated conflict… But the show must go on: today’s PMQs saw Chris Philp (why not Robert Jenrick?) and Angela Rayner deputising for their absent leaders; Liz Kendall introduced legislation to enact cuts to personal independence payments for disabled people; the Commons voted to decriminalise abortion at any point until birth; and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is up to its old tricks, announcing that inflation has fallen when the reality is much more complicated.

Friday

Sean Thomas

Sean Thomas, John Power, Susie Mesure, Olivia Potts and Rory Sutherland

22 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Sean Thomas reflects on the era of lads mags (1:07); John Power reveals those unfairly gaming the social housing system (6:15); Susie Moss reviews Ripeness by Sarah Moss (11:31); Olivia Potts explains the importance of sausage rolls (14:21); and, Rory Sutherland speaks in defence of the Trump playbook (18:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Elon Musk and the art of flattery

Flattery will get you everywhere, as the sycophants that surround Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know. Which makes Elon Musk’s defection rather interesting. Trump’s policies meant that Musk simply could not flatter him any more just to satisfy his inexhaustible self-love, which, says the Greek essayist, biographer and diplomat Plutarch (d. c. ad 120), is what gives the kolax (‘flatterer’) his foothold: the person he wishes to flatter, his victim, will be only too happy for the kolax to endlessly proclaim his qualities and abilities. Naturally, the kolax does not pay attention to poor, obscure or unimportant persons – where is the gain in that? – but only to those with power, engaged in great affairs.

Rory Sutherland

In defence of the Trump playbook

The standard explanation for why charges for plastic bags reduced waste is economic. People were reluctant to pay 10p for a bag and so brought their own instead. This is partly true. But it would still be highly effective if the charge for a bag were merely 1p. That’s because charging any amount, however trifling, was sufficient to change the implicit assumptions about normal retail behaviour. Previously, if you went into Boots and bought, say, a toothbrush and a tube of Anusol, the default was for the cashier to put them in a new bag – it would have seemed rude not to do so. Suddenly, however, the imposition of a charge meant that shopkeepers had to ask whether you wanted a bag or not.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spending review, LA protests and Greta Thunberg deported

Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was the last minister to agree funding in the government spending review. Once the NHS and defence were settled there wasn’t enough to go round. The police wanted more. Everyone over the state pension age in England and Wales with an income of £35,000 or less will receive the winter fuel payment after all, at a cost of £1.25 billion, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced. Capital spending included £39 billion on social housing over the next ten years. The government also committed £14.2 billion for the new Sizewell C nuclear power station, but did not say where the money was coming from. Rolls-Royce was selected as the preferred bidder to build the country’s first small modular reactors. Unemployment rose to 4.

Monday

Freddy Gray

Left-wing violence is being normalised

19 min listen

In the new edition of Spectator World, author and anthropologist Max Horder argues the US is experiencing a change in its psyche, and left-wing violence is being normalised. He joins Freddy Gray on the Americano podcast to discuss the various examples attached to this, and what the dereliction of democratic disagreement means for us all.

Friday

Kate Andrews

Did the swamp drain Elon Musk?

23 min listen

Billionaire Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump have had a very public falling out. Musk, whose time running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came to an end last month, publicly criticised Trump’s spending bill (the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’). The row then erupted onto social media with Trump expressing his disappointment with Musk, Musk accusing Trump of ‘ingratitude’ – and even making insinuations about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Tesla’s stock has taken a hit, Trump and Musk are yet to speak and there could be implications for the government contracts that Musk’s companies have, but the full consequences are yet to be understood. What do this tell us about Trump 2.0, and American politics more generally?

Thursday

Toby Young

Should we be above cancelling the cancellers?

I’ve been mulling over Marco Rubio’s latest salvo in the Trump administration’s assault on the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The US Secretary of State has announced he’ll impose visa bans on foreign nationals judged to be censoring US citizens or US tech companies. And according to one news report, the ban will apply to their family members too. So who might be on this blacklist? Rubio hasn’t named names, but I can think of a few candidates. Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)would be hard-pressed to deny his pro-censorship lobby group targets US citizens and US tech companies, because ‘Centre’ is spelt C-E-N-T-E-R, though the company was set up in the UK.

Thursday

Bernard Cornwell

Is the Pope a Marxist?

Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard. Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill with which Robert Caro is describing the career of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Douglas Murray

The derangement of Harvard

It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today. Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: In praise of the post office

Reeves’s road sense Sir: Is it stubbornness, denial, inexperience or some other agenda that prevents Rachel Reeves changing course in the face of uncomfortable facts? A multitude of surveys have told her that punitively taxing the rich means they will leave (‘The great escape’, 17 May). Recently I had lunch at a fashionable London club that was half-empty. When asked why this was, our waiter commented that he now rarely sees his previous international regulars, and if he does, they are only in town for a short stay. Endless business surveys have also told Reeves that her employer taxes will cost jobs, close companies, weaken growth and raise inflation, yet she has continued with these too, despite evidence that those fears are now coming to pass as these taxes bite.

Tuesday

D.J. Taylor

Why are publishers such bad judges when it comes to their own memoirs?

‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond’s The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards’s Author Hunting (1934); and there is the emollient, if not absolutely vainglorious, reminiscence, most recently on display in Tom Maschler’s Publisher (2005).

Monday

Hamish McRae

Donald Trump can be sensible

We’ve learnt three things about the future of world trade from the temporary reprieve over tariffs that the US has given China – and China’s response to it.  One is the markets are now confident that both countries will be sensible. The massively negative reaction they gave to ‘liberation day’ on 2 April signalled their hatred of uncertainty but also of stupidity. Before Donald Trump’s arbitrary jacking up of tariffs to what were really absurd levels, they had assumed that he would ensure that there would be reasonable continuity of world trade. His plans, and China’s robust reaction, led to nagging doubts that their assumption might be wrong, there really would be a destructive trade war between the world’s two biggest economies. The S&P index duly plunged.

Thursday

The Spectator

What was the first cyber attack?

19th-century cyber crime M &S and the Co-op have suffered cyber attacks. Cyber crime didn’t quite begin with the internet. The first record of an attack on a communications network was in the city of Tours in 1834, where the Blanc brothers traded government bonds in Bordeaux and bribed the operator of the country’s telegraph system. He placed extra characters in the telegraphs before they were sent on to Bordeaux, providing secret messages that could be read by the Blancs watching the receiving station in Bordeaux. Unlike the M&S and Co-op attacks, however, the ‘hack’ went unnoticed for two years.  All change Friedrich Merz should become only the 11th Chancellor of Germany since 1945.  How does the turnover of leaders compare with other democracies?

Matthew Parris

Kemi shouldn’t play the Trump card

I doubt I’m alone among Spectator readers in feeling a certain slight but nagging discomfort when I hear those on the left in British politics tearing into the present President of the United States. Why so? one asks oneself. Have I a shred of sympathy with this monster? No. Can I do other than deplore the attitudes and personal behaviour of this moral toad? Of course not. Do I for a minute agree with the way he’s handling the presidency – that machine-gun fire of executive orders and constitutional improprieties?’ By no means. Could I by any stretch of the imagination endorse the preposterous policy goals Donald Trump is wont to shout at us in capital letters? Don’t be ridiculous. And yet.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The New York deli sandwich that changed history

There’s nothing new about bringing maverick businesspeople into government to give the bureaucratic blob what an unnamed ‘Trump adviser’ was recently quoted as calling ‘a swift kick in the ass’. After all, it was David Cameron who in 2010 hired the now all but unmentionable retail buccaneer Sir Philip Green to find ways to cut Whitehall waste. But Donald Trump’s conferment of the role of solo global peacemaker on his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff – who has no known foreign policy or government expertise – takes that idea to a scary new extreme. Take a look on X at a clip of him arriving alone to meet Vladimir Putin and a line-up of Kremlin heavies. When a woman, face unseen, takes the seat next to Witkoff, he turns to her and says: ‘Are you my translator?

Max Hastings

Bring on the Trump protests

The coming week will see the last major commemoration of a second world war anniversary – 80 years since VE-Day – which a handful of surviving veterans will attend. It is unjust that VJ-Day in August will attract much less attention, but so did the Far East campaigns, much to the contemporary chagrin of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma. One of Bill Slim’s soldiers was George MacDonald Fraser, whom I knew and adored, as did millions of fans of his Flashman books. In his fine memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George described how one May day in 1945, as his company lined out to attack a Japanese-held village, a green young officer ran out in front of them and cried ecstatically: ‘Men! The war in Europe is over!