Donald trump

Thursday

Sabrina Philip

Trump’s ‘greatest’ rally ever

Freedom 250’s “Great American State Fair” opened on the National Mall yesterday – just not with a concert, as initially planned. Instead, Donald Trump gave a half-hour speech, telling the crowd, “We have the greatest people on earth,” as fighter jets and B-2 bombers flew overhead. There was a lot of talk of “the greatest” from the President’s warm-up acts. The greatest firework celebration, the greatest state fair, the greatest kickoff, the greatest president, the greatest country. Speaker after speaker drummed that word into the heads of the few thousand-strong crowd. Trump danced his way off stage and the crowd stood up cheering Musicians sang about pride in the country and a commitment to God. With the Marine Corps band present on stage from 7 p.m.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Trump’s quest to make DC look nice is noble

As far as the controversy over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool goes, Donald Trump is reverting to type: like any other Florida man with a pool, he won’t admit that maintaining one is complicated and blames external factors when things go wrong. The President ordered that a new blue coating be applied to the pool’s base, which has already started flaking. In a testy exchange with CBS’s Ed O’Keefe yesterday, Trump said that the contractors who installed the new surface were not to blame. “We had vandalism,” he said. “Probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.” “Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” he wondered aloud. Quite.

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Monday

Catherine Ellis

How a Trump-loving lawyer nicknamed ‘The Tiger’ became Colombia’s president

Abelardo de la Espriella was never going to be a typical Colombian presidential candidate. Nicknamed "The Tiger," the defense lawyer who has represented a string of controversial clients is also a businessman and owns a number of clothing and alcohol brands, a Miami restaurant and even music albums. De la Espriella campaigned on a radical and robust security agenda, vowing to rid Colombia of its violent and criminal woes. “I will wipe out narco-terrorism..I will unleash the wrath of God upon them as never seen before,” de la Espriella said “I will wipe out narco-terrorism, those I have sentenced and declared military targets, like cockroaches, like rats. I will unleash the wrath of God upon them as never seen before,” de la Espriella said during his campaign.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Will Vance regret being the face of the Iran deal?

After a week of international agonizing, it looks as if the first round of the latest peace talks between America and Iran will not begin today – at least, not formally. The Memorandum of Understanding has been signed – electronically by Iran and by Donald Trump’s hand in Versailles on Wednesday. But J.D. Vance’s big Switzerland trip, originally planned to kick off the talks, has been put on hold as the Lebanon issue reared its troublesome head overnight. Late yesterday afternoon, Hezbollah fired several salvoes of rockets at IDF targets, killing four soldiers. Israel responded with a wave of airstrikes in Southern Lebanon, killing 18 and wounding 33, according to the Lebanese ministry of health.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Trump has been outplayed by Iran

From our UK edition

The Founding Fathers may have modelled America on Ancient Rome, but they would have found the ersatz gladiatorial spectacle Donald Trump mounted at the White House to mark his birthday a grotesque perversion of their dreams. An ‘ultimate fighting contest’, staged to pay homage to Trump’s rule (though dressed up as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations) was exactly the cult of one man the Founding Fathers most dreaded. The President is not an emperor unconstrained, however. A shellacking in November’s midterm elections will show how hemmed in he is. And nowhere is his weakness more apparent than in his so-called ‘peace agreement’ with Iran. It is the latest in a series of humiliations visited on the Great Republic by this tawdry tinsel Caesar.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Will peace be the perfect gift for the President?

Donald Trump’s 80th birthday is this weekend, and what better present for a struggling octogenarian Commander-in-Chief than a peace deal with Iran, signed if not quite yet sealed and delivered. There is, I’m told, some late scrambling over "semantics" in the so-called "memorandum of understanding" between America and Iran, and lingering issues over the language concerning the "nuclear dust" – i.e., Iran’s enriched uranium. But the rest is all but agreed. J.D. Vance could fly to Europe to sign a deal tomorrow – or if not it will be Trump as he attends the G7 in Evian near the Swiss Alps on Monday. Trump really wanted to stage a peace photo-op with Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei but had to be told that would not be possible.

donald trump peace

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Are hostilities in Iran really about to cease?

Donald Trump is trying to wriggle out of his self imposed Strait-jacket. After a renewed round of bombing Iran and bluster about seizing Kharg Island, he has now announced that is all over, including a planned attack tonight: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening.” Is it back to the future again? Or are hostilities really about to cease? Any cessation will incense the war hawks in Washington who helped propel Trump into this misbegotten conflict in the first place.

donald trump peace foreign policy cease iran
Francis Pike

The President is winning the geopolitical battle with China

Almost all media commentators seem convinced that Donald Trump’s foreign policy in his second term is a disaster. He is bogged down in Iran, snookered in Ukraine, his tariff agenda has failed and he has alienated his NATO allies. But this consensus has been too hastily formed. Looking at the bigger global picture, Trump’s foreign policy has been a spectacular success. Take the western hemisphere. We have the so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” the updated version of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.

paula white-cain
Sarah Beth Spraggins

How Paula White-Cain guides Trump through evangelical America

“I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into heaven,” Donald Trump told a group of journalists aboard Air Force One in October. “I think I’m not, maybe, heaven-bound.” “My phone started blowing up,” says Paula White-Cain, Trump’s senior advisor to the White House Faith Office. “I went and looked at it because I didn’t see it live and I knew he was joking. People critique him if he’s too prideful. And then if there’s a part of humility in him, they’re critiquing him for that.” Trump first called her in the early 2000s after seeing her preach on a Christian broadcast in Palm Beach. He thought she had the “It” factor. “It’s interesting because that’s what he called it,” she tells me.

Spectator Editorial

Trump has betrayed voters on inflation

“I love inflation,” said Donald Trump earlier this month, when asked about the latest increase in the Consumer Prices Index to an annualized 4.2 percent. But the power of the President’s positive thinking cannot overwhelm the enormous threat that rising prices pose to his legacy. The new figure is more than an inconvenience or a technicality. It could bring about a sharp change in the political order. Rising costs will likely prove to be Trump’s undoing and present the Democrats with a free hit for November’s midterms and beyond. There was one reason above all others why Trump returned to the White House in 2024: high inflation during the Biden years. His 2016 slogan, “Make America Great Again,” morphed into “Make America Affordable Again.

Simon Heffer

Trump has destroyed the special relationship

One of my earliest memories – I was not quite three and a half – is of being with my mother in a tea shop one Saturday morning. She had run into a friend, who used a word I had never heard before, and being a tiresome child I asked what it meant. The word was “assassination.” John F. Kennedy had been shot the previous day, and the talk, even in the English provinces, was of little else. In the 1960s one was assailed by American culture, but it was a form of imperialism that few found objectionable. America’s music bawled from radios. Its programs larded the schedules of our three television channels. Its films filled cinemas. Some of its usages were creeping into our language.

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

UFC Freedom 250 is straight from the ‘bread-and-circuses’ playbook

What can we expect from this weekend’s UFC event on the White House lawn? There is a more than good chance that this occasion, staged to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence, will climax with American headliner Justin Gaethje being knocked out all too quickly by the terrifying Georgian short-ass Ilia Topuria. Like everything to do with the UFC, the prospect is ludicrously exciting. If you are a sports fan – indeed, if you are merely interested in the colorful business of being alive – and you don’t follow the Ultimate Fighting Championship, you are missing out. With its incredible cast of outsized characters and mesmerizing subplots, it is ceaselessly and wonderfully entertaining.

ufc freedom 250
Charlie Methven

Might England just do it in the World Cup?

From our UK edition

The World Cup has never been just a football tournament. Even if we don’t realise it at the time, it tends to reveal something about us. In Germany 2006, it was all about Baden-Baden and the WAGs: the shallowest point of that celebrity-obsessed age. For more romance and happier memories, go back to Italia 90. Pavarotti bellowing ‘Nessun dorma’, Gazza blubbing, Maradona weaving his magic, Roger Milla hip-wiggling the corner flag. Italia 90 was the last gasp of the old order: modestly paid players with mullets and perms; heaving terraces; the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia playing their last tournaments.

Keith Kellogg

Trump’s ballroom drone port is no joke

When Donald Trump unveiled plans for a counter-drone installation on the roof of the new White House ballroom, critics called it theater. They may be right about the installation. But they are wrong about the threat.  I have watched the character of warfare change faster in the past four years than in the previous forty. In Ukraine, a one-way attack drone that costs a few hundred dollars routinely destroys Russian armored vehicles worth millions. Both sides now field these systems by the hundreds of thousands. Entire stretches of the front are governed not by artillery or air superiority in the traditional sense, but by small, expendable aircraft that soldiers can carry in rucksacks and launch from tree lines.

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine

Russia won’t give up Armenia without a fight

From our UK edition

Since January, Karapetyan, leader of the Strong Armenia party, has been unable to leave his hilltop mansion to campaign ahead of Armenia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. Last year, he waded into a fight between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the country’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, leader of the Civil Contract party. His call for Pashinyan to stop pursuing clergymen critical of Pashinyan’s efforts to establish peace with neighbouring Azerbaijan was interpreted as a call to overthrow the government. Karapetyan was arrested, interrogated and spent six months in pre-trial detention before his sentence was commuted to house arrest. He denies the charge. How do you fight an election if you’re under house arrest?

Ruaridh Nicoll

Cuba is next on Trump’s hit list

It’s hot in Havana. The summer’s electrical storms have arrived, lighting up the sky, while down on the ground we’ve been without power for 16 hours, meaning no sleep. The four-month-old US oil blockade is biting, but Cuba’s government still refuses to bend the knee to Washington, so surveillance aircraft are circling. An aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, has arrived in the neighbourhood. We expect an attack at any moment. Donald Trump has made it clear that after Venezuela and Iran, Cuba is next on his list for decapitation. His administration wants a change of government and the economy opened up. Cuba’s 95-year-old ex-president Raul Castro has been indicted for murder, opening the way for an abduction like the one in Caracas in January.

Peter Pomerantsev

How Iran turned Trump’s propaganda against him

From our UK edition

On 19 November 1941, King George and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Woburn Abbey, home of Britain’s covert propaganda war against the Nazis. Surrounded by a park full of rare monkeys, and among corridors bearing Old Masters, the King and Queen were presented with ‘Britain’s Secret Army’, a fleet of radio stations that broadcast subversive content deep into enemy territory. Sefton Delmer, who before the war had been a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, presented his new German station. While the officious BBC German Service was lecturing Germans about the virtues of democracy and the evils of fascism, Delmer was trying something different.

Friday

Rod Liddle

The secret shame of being ‘Reform-curious’

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single "My Life." The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular shtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights. What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them.

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Alex Diggins

Where did all the funny Republicans go?

When did Republican writers stop being funny? Look around at the landscape of contemporary American literature – and, for that matter, TV and film – and you’d be hard pressed to find a genuinely funny literary voice who doesn’t lean liberal, or at least purport to. This isn’t to say that individual right-wing writers aren’t amusing. Often found in these pages, Rod Liddle, for one, is very funny, though I suggest he’d balk at being called a conservative. And Donald Trump is hilarious on Truth Social – his posts may have the subtlety of a bullhorn, but they usually land with a satisfying thunk. During his 2016 campaign and well into his first term, Trump succeeded in part because he understood that politics and entertainment run in parallel.

Daniel McCarthy

Don’t bet on a blue wave

There are several reasons to think we won’t see a blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. A basic one is that the Democratic party simply isn’t very popular. In late May, Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the RealClear polling aggregate stood around 40 percent, which sounds bad. Yet Trump is more popular than his party – approval of the Republican brand was in the vicinity of 38 percent. And the Democrats’ ratings were even worse – standing, or one might say wilting, at about 36 percent. Those figures are not to be confused with “generic ballot” polling, which asks voters which party they would prefer in the forthcoming election. Democrats have lately enjoyed a lead of some seven points over the GOP in that category.