Donald trump

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

Learning from history requires sophistication and skill

If you reckon you have an understanding of international politics today, you probably haven’t been listening properly. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are making history too fast for most of us to keep up. Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm seeks to make sense of the current geopolitical chaos by drawing parallels between now and the years before 1914. If you don’t find those comparisons reassuring, you aren’t supposed to. The point being stressed is that, unless we are careful, we risk sleepwalking into a Great Power conflict as terrible as, or worse than, the first world war. Westad is a leading Cold War historian from Yale and his comparisons are always thought-provoking and often accurate.

Wednesday

Sam Kriss

The art of conspiracy

If you lived anywhere near Kilburn half a decade ago, you might have noticed the messages one of our neighbours kept spray-painting over our walls and bridges. They’d appear overnight across a fairly wide swathe of north-west London, always in an immediately recognisable loopy handwriting, and the content was always recognisably loopy too. This person was trying to communicate something, but it was hard to tell exactly what. The messages said things like ‘STAND UP TO BLACK MASSES’ and ‘MERCY FROM DR HACK’ and ‘TAKE MERCY UNTO ME TAKE IT OUT OF IT’. Every few days for about a year, I would come across another one of these messages, and try to piece together exactly what the author was trying to tell me. There was something going on in the world, something bad.

Wednesday

Piers Morgan

What Trump told me in my hour of need

‘The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,’ espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past fortnight in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add ‘shame’ to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying.

Tuesday

Ian Thomson

Forgetting was the best defence for the Kindertransport refugees

Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!’ at a torchlit rally in Virginia. Understandably, Moritz is alarmed by the tide of anti-Semitism today. His Jewish parents narrowly escaped death in Hitler’s Germany when they came to the UK on the Kindertransport. The 71-year-old Moritz now asks the question: how long before the iron-studded jackboot returns to Europe?

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Where have all the graduate jobs gone?

It’s a relief not to have been pressganged into joining the Prime Minister’s plane-load of business chiefs and reporters bound for Beijing this week. With Sir Keir Starmer are leaders of the likes of Astra-Zeneca, BP, HSBC, JLR and Rolls-Royce, and some billion-pound deals will no doubt be announced while they’re there – agreed in advance on the condition that Downing Street gave the green light for China’s Royal Mint Court mega-embassy-cum-listening-post on the edge of the City. The Chancellor is on the trip too, perhaps carrying a nice set of hunting prints as a housewarming gift for London ambassador Zheng Zeguang’s new office.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Jenrick sacked, Chinese super-embassy approved and Trump makes a grab for Greenland

Home President Donald Trump of the United States made Britain and other countries dance to his tune. Sir Keir Starmer, telephoning him about Greenland, said: ‘Applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of Nato allies is wrong.’ Mr Trump had said he would impose tariffs on Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden until ‘such time as a Deal is reached for [the US’s] Complete and Total purchase of Greenland’. Then Mr Trump posted remarks on social media saying Britain’s gift to Mauritius of the Chagos Islands, including the base at Diego Garcia, was ‘an act of GREAT STUPIDITY’. He added: ‘China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness.

Paul Wood

Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?

Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland.  Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in front of them at a lectern. ‘Good-looking people, young, beautiful people, I hate them. You hate standing here with all this power behind you.

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

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.

Friday

Freddy Gray

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

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?

Wednesday

The Spectator

Donald Trump is confronting a reality that Europe has ignored

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

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.

Saturday

Michael Gove

From Porn Britannia to Political Chaos: The Spectator’s Year in Review

31 min listen

The Spectator’s senior editorial team – Michael Gove, Freddy Gray, Lara Prendergast and William Moore – sit down to reflect on 2025. From Trump’s inauguration to the calamitous year for Labour, a new Pope and a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the year has not been short of things to write about. The team take us through their favourite political and cultural topics highlighted in the magazine this year, from the Assisted Dying debate, the ongoing feud over Your Party and Reform’s plan for power, to Scuzz Nation, Broke Britain – and Porn Britannia. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

What’s Trump got to do with the price of turkey?

During last week’s excruciating Oval Office make-nice between an insultingly buddy-buddy American President and a fraudulently obsequious New York City mayor-elect, the contest was over which pol was the more patronising. At one point Trump graciously granted his petitioner permission to call him a ‘fascist’ while clearly implying the guy’s OTT campaign rhetoric had been embarrassing. Donald Trump sat regally on his throne, patting Zohran Mamdani’s arm while commending ‘Attaboy!’ as if petting a golden retriever that had fetched a ball. For his part, Mamdani stood mutely by the Resolute desk with cartoonish humility, hands over crotch. This cowed performance of beta-male submission was meant to disguise who’d got a leg over whom.

Owen Matthews

The path to peace in Ukraine will be tortuous

In order to impose peace terms, you first need to win the war. That fundamental principle seems, for the moment, to elude Ukraine’s European allies. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has taken the more pragmatic – some would say more cynical – view that Ukraine will never defeat Russia and therefore needs to make the best of a bad lot. Trump’s strategy for peace in Ukraine has been to browbeat Volodymyr Zelensky into approving a deal acceptable to Vladimir Putin. In fairness, Trump has also gone some way to putting the squeeze on the Kremlin too, by sanctioning the oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, authorising the Ukrainians to use US--provided long-range weapons against Russian targets, and threatening to provide Kyiv with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Was the BBC’s Trump edit outrageously wrong?

I should begin by making something clear. Splicing together two parts of a speech to give the impression they were one unbroken excerpt is a grave professional error, and would be viewed as such by any broadcaster in the business. The error would be egregious even if there were no suggestion it reinforced the accusation that Donald Trump was inciting riotous behaviour, simply because what viewers thought they witnessed did not occur. There is no excusing what Panorama did to Donald Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech. Nobody in the senior ranks of the BBC is to blame for not knowing about this at the time; but once it did become known, an immediate and unconditional apology should have been made.

Douglas Murray

Trump’s Epstein gamble

It is always interesting to see who the American left claims are the leaders of the American right. There was a time during President Trump’s first term when Steve Bannon fitted the role – and relished playing it. Back then most days brought another media profile of the dark genius of the MAGA movement. The Guardian, New York Times and others were obsessed. Vanity Fair would send reporters to follow Bannon as he conquered America and, er, Europe. Documentary crews were perennially in tow. Indeed one documentary following Bannon around included a scene in which they followed him to the showing of another documentary about him from a crew who had similarly followed him around. At which point you felt that we might fall into some kind of vortex.