Donald trump

Wednesday

Ben Clerkin

Will Alberta become the 51st state?

Albertans are very good at keeping things that damage their prosperity out of their province. Take rats, for instance. The vermin were designated an agricultural menace in the1950s and after 18 months of chemical warfare Alberta – which is the same size as Texas – was declared rat-free. Today a poison-laced buffer zone with Saskatchewan province and a vigilant population stops their return. The leaders of the resurgent Alberta independence campaign have identified a new set of damaging pests to keep out: the federal government in Ottawa and its new ally the Chinese government. While they believe that Ottawa is taking too much of their money – Alberta is by

Alberta

Tuesday

Cockburn

Is Trump turning GOP succession into The Apprentice?

At a private dinner with two dozen donors, President Trump surveyed the room and asked which candidate they would choose to follow him in leading the MAGA movement. The vote was almost unanimously in favor of Marco Rubio over J.D. Vance. As the two men vie to be next-in-line to the throne, Trump seems to be enjoying the spectacle. If Rubio was indeed preferred in this (albeit skewed) environment, it is not much of a surprise to Cockburn. Vance has appealed strongly to an online contingency which is… overrepresented online. Remember when Rubio fell on his sword because he wanted to keep Trump out of office? Of course not; that was over

Owen Matthews

Putin is enjoying the Iran war

After Iran unleashed a torrent of missiles against its neighbors – including those with whom it had enjoyed friendly relations such as Turkey and Azerbaijan – few regional leaders are in the mood to congratulate the new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. Few, but not none. “At a time when Iran is confronting armed aggression, your work in this high office will undoubtedly require great courage and dedication,” wrote Vladimir Putin in an official message of congratulation to Khamenei Junior. “I am confident that you will honorably continue your father’s legacy and unite the Iranian people in the face of these severe trials.” Putin was also at pains to “reaffirm our

Friday

Carson Becker

Gavin Newsom, the everyman elitist

Young Man in a Hurry is California Governor Gavin Newsom’s attempt to explain himself to a divided country that may soon find him vying for its presidency. He alternates between candor and wile in answering the book’s central question: who is Gavin Newsom? In these pages he constructs a striking hero’s journey, illuminating an insular world of inherited wealth, hereditary political power and ideological contradiction that few Americans will have been exposed to. But he also casts himself as a struggling underdog, a folksy type whose patrician image belies a life of perseverance and a unique set of emotional and psychological deprivations. Growing up, Newsom would often board the Gettys’

Jim Lawley

Is it wise for Spain to goad Donald Trump?

Spain’s refusal to allow the United States to use its military bases at Morón de la Frontera (Seville) and Rota (Cádiz) for its war on Iran, arguing that the US-Israeli attacks are “unilateral military actions outside the United Nations charter” has brought the simmering conflict between Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister and President Trump to a head.   Sanchez’s carefully calculated strategy has been to position himself as one of Trump’s leading opponents on the world stage On Wednesday Sanchez followed up by delivering a stunning rebuke to Trump. Speaking for ten minutes on national television, he said that his government’s position could be summed up in four words:

Thursday

Peter Watson

An ambassador is the American version of a nobleman

America is, famously and proudly, a republic. Everyone is equal before the law. No earls or dukes or even knights of the realm. And a good thing, too. Er… not so fast. As one of the magazines devoted to Palm Beach life recently pointed out, there is one honor available to citizens of the United States that is much coveted because, as with princes, dukes and earls, the honorific comes before the recipient’s full name – and, like nobility (but not in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s case), it is conferred for life. That title is “ambassador.” While Palm Beach residents agonize over the status of dogs, they are losing their love for

Katherine Dee

Conspiracy culture will never be satisfied

American conspiracy culture is a tradition with a long lineage, though not a simple one. It runs through the John Birch Society and Mae Brussell, through Bill Cooper and Alex Jones, into QAnon and beyond. There are other tributaries – black nationalist suspicion of COINTELPRO, evangelical end-times theology, militia movements, UFO subcultures – but one dominant current exists in every conspiracy: it speaks from below. The conspirators operate as the hidden orchestrators of surface reality. The deep state, the intelligence agencies, the Fed, the media – at worst, Jews – all sit above normal people, controlling their world. The people telling these stories understand themselves as excluded from power. For

David Whitehouse

Are aliens really out there?

We have all wondered if we are alone in the cosmos; if beings born under the light of another star embark on fabulous voyages between the stars to reach us – their cosmic cousins. Those who believe the Earth has been visited by aliens must think all their dreams are coming true. The recent rumors are that Donald Trump will break the “truth embargo” and make an alien disclosure speech on May 1. Then there is Steven Spielberg’s film about aliens, Disclosure Day, due out in the summer. This is surely no coincidence. The UFO community is a money-making juggernaut that cannot change direction YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen recently interviewed

Wednesday

John Jenkins

Iranian attacks aren’t worrying Washington

Many commentators are already claiming that the war with Iran is “spiraling out of control.” I try not to be uncharitable: I am a Catholic, after all, and the Church tells me it is a sin. But if I were tempted, I should say that the only thing spiraling out of control is cliché. You could argue that drone attacks are a sign that Iran’s ballistic and cruise missiles aren’t actually proving that effective Iran said it would hit out wildly if it were attacked. It also made clear that direct attacks on the leadership of the Islamic Republic would be treated as an existential threat. So why anyone is

Monday

Roger Kimball

When will Kash Patel unleash epic fury on the FBI?

As I write, the Washington Post is carrying an obituary about the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – or maybe it is about Santa Claus? You tell me. “With his bushy white beard and easy smile,” the Democracy Dies in Darkness paper told its readers,  “Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor [Khomenei], and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables… Some Iranians who knew Ayatollah Khamenei before he became supreme leader described him as a ‘closet moderate.’” Did they now? Many other Iranians, some say about 250,000, did not have a chance

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is this Trump’s Sarajevo moment?

Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment? With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked

iran
Freddy Gray

Trump launches a remote-control regime-change war on Iran

“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” said Donald Trump, as he stood at the lectern in his white USA cap and announced the launch of a “massive and ongoing” military operation against Iran.  “It will be totally, again, obliterated.” He had to say “again” because he has insisted over and over that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “utterly obliterated” last summer, after Operation Midnight Hammer.  But the objective of these latest midnight or very early morning strikes, conducted again by US and Israeli forces working together, is already far broader than the wiping out of weapons of mass destruction – whether that

Friday

Cockburn

Why does Trump love Zohran so much?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani met Trump in the Oval Office yesterday to pitch a huge New York City housing initiative – and secure the release of a Columbia University student from ICE custody. Mamdani’s communications director said that Trump was “very enthusiastic” about the plan to build 12,000 new affordable homes in Sunnyside, Queens, by using over $21 billion in federal grants. What’s more, the student, who happens to be a photogenic young woman, was freed. Results all around. Zohran and his team gave Trump a prop newspaper with the headline “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD,” a play on the 1975 New York Daily News cover – “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” The headlines

zohran trump

Thursday

Jason M. Brodsky

Iran is ready for war – is America?

In 2001, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met privately with Spain’s then-prime minister Jose Maria Aznar. Aznar recounted how Khamenei dubbed Israel a “cancer condemned to disappear” and said that an open confrontation with Israel and the United States was inevitable. Iran, the Supreme Leader insisted, would prevail. Fast forward to 2026, and the war that Khamenei prophesied is getting closer by the day. The Islamic Republic is already operating under the assumption of a US military operation For decades, durable diplomacy between America and Iran has failed because of the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. It makes its decisions based on a mix of ideology and a desire for

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Donald Trump may have celebrated Team USA for winning the gold at the Olympics in hockey, but he was not in a puckish mood during his State of the Union speech. Instead, Trump stuck to his tried-and-true script of denouncing Democrats as “sick,” mocking concerns about affordability and cooing over Melania as a great new movie star. Far from nobody ever seeing anything like it, Trump delivered what everybody has already seen. Ever the salesman, he was not shy with the superlatives, declaring that America is the “hottest” country in the world – “bigger, better, richer, stronger than ever before.” If there was one thing that was longer than ever,

Trump

Tuesday

Cockburn

Donald Trump is the original Kick streamer

President Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term tonight – and the White House social media team want to whet your appetite. “The White House digital team will transform all its social channels into ‘Trump TV’ – a 12-hour retrospective of the year since President Trump’s last address to Congress,” Axios reports. Your correspondent can’t help but feel Team Trump is missing a trick. The most transfixing thing to show the American people before the address isn’t “Trump of the last 12 months,” it’s “Trump live.” Cockburn has observed with intrigue how his younger relatives watch streamers’ content, from IShowSpeed traipsing across Africa to

nixon
Christopher Caldwell

The deep state vs Nixon

Americans took a break from their partisan vituperation in February to mull over newly revealed testimony that Richard Nixon gave to grand jury investigators in 1975, a year after the Watergate scandal drove him from power. James Rosen, a veteran Washington journalist and the biographer of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, revealed the episode in the New York Times. Nixon had argued that his program of wiretaps had been made necessary by another spying operation that senior American military commanders were carrying out against him and his top aides. The outline of this story has been known to historians since James Hougan laid it out in Secret Agenda (1984): a

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Supreme Court is right to reject Trump’s tariffs

At a rally in Georgia on Thursday night, President Trump declared that he couldn’t wait “forever” for the Supreme Court to rule on the legitimacy of his sweeping tariff policy. Whether or not the court was listening to his complaint, forever arrived today as it handed Trump a thumping defeat. It struck a blow not only for fiscal but also political sanity. Government intrusion upon the free enterprise system is bound to prove inimical to prosperity and liberty The language of the ruling was as lapidary as it was persuasive. “President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the

Thursday

Conrad Black

The redemption of Richard Nixon

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public

Tuesday

Cockburn

Obama late on the late Jesse Jackson

So farewell then, Reverend Jesse Jackson. The civil-rights hero and two-time Democratic presidential candidate died this morning, aged 84. Given his titanic status as an African-American leader, the first living president, former or current, to issue a statement was, naturally… Donald Trump. “He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts,’” wrote Trump on Truth Social just before 8:30 a.m. “He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand.” In fact, at the time of writing, Obama still hadn’t posted about the Reverend (former presidents Biden and Clinton issued statements this morning). The 44th