Donald trump

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

Santa Trump’s Christmas economy cheer

I hate to be the bearer of good news, but the US economy is doing quite well. A delayed government report shows that third-quarter GDP grew at 4.3 percent, hardly a record, but still healthy, the highest growth rate in two years. Last week’s inflation report showed a lower-than-expected number, and wage growth is exceeding inflation. Consumer spending is up, and, yes, the stock market is booming. Happy days are here again. The sky above is clear again. Many accounts on my X feed, which are either run by Democratic partisans or Iranian trolls or both, say that food-pantry lines are reaching record numbers this holiday season, and that poverty

Trump

Saturday

Neal Pollack

Welcome to another episode of the Epstein Files

When I was a boy, Friday nights were time for a new episode of The Rockford Files, a show about a hapless ex con PI, played by James Garner, who lived on a boat in a California marina. Fifty years later, Friday nights are for a different kind of files: the Epstein Files. Usually, government saves Friday evenings for the kinds of things it doesn’t want the news to cover, and the Friday before Christmas is generally a good place to hide. But in the age of the instantaneous news cycle in a world without a Santa Claus, they’re not going to get their holiday wish. This week’s episode of

Epstein

Thursday

Vance Ginn

Trump should replace Obamacare with personal accounts

President Donald Trump has reopened the healthcare debate with a mix of ideas that do not align. He has pledged to “terminate” Obamacare, then signaled openness to extending ACA subsidies, then endorsed personal freedom accounts that would send money directly to individuals. These proposals represent very different diagnoses of what is wrong with American health care. No serious reform effort can point in contradictory directions. But this problem extends far beyond Trump. Republicans have offered inconsistent signals, with some now willing to extend ACA subsidies again despite a decade of arguing – correctly – that these subsidies inflate premiums and entrench insurer dominance. Others want to preserve zero premium plans

Trump healthcare
Alan Dershowitz

How Donald Trump could serve a third term

The 22nd Amendment leaves open several possible ways a two-term president could serve all or part of a third term without being elected. The text of that amendment, as ratified, prohibits a two-term president from “being elected” to a third term, but it doesn’t prohibit him from “serving,” “acting” or “holding” that office. Indeed, the framers explicitly rejected broader exclusionary language that would have made it constitutionally impossible for a two-term president to get anywhere near the Oval Office. Instead they accepted a compromise that created a loophole bigger than the new ballroom in the East Wing of the White House. This doesn’t mean that President Trump will actually run

Donald Trump
Roger Kimball

Donald Trump’s end-of-year victory lap

As a mighty US armada bobs in the Caribbean off the shores of Venezuela, President Trump just addressed the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. With characteristic delicacy and understatement, he outlined the accomplishments of the first 11 months of his second term in office, lightly criticized his predecessor and cautiously opined about what the future held in store for the United States of America in the coming semiquincentennial year.  Well, some viewers may wish to dispute my emphases and assessments of tone. But let’s just say that the President’s short speech was vintage Trump. It was hyperbolic, yes, over the top, indubitably, but in essence 100 percent true.

trump 2025 achievements

Wednesday

Ani Chkhikvadze

Boris Johnson: will cowardly Europe betray Ukraine again?

Boris Johnson has urged European leaders to hand $247 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to Ukraine – but says he fears they “lack the courage” to do so, in an interview with The Spectator. The former British prime minister also warned that Trump is at risk of “morally polluting” himself if he caves to Putin’s demands in peace negotiations and encouraged his negotiating team to stop the “nauseating deals” they are discussing about joint business ventures. “I think Europe is at a very difficult point because Europe has got to do the reparations alone,” Johnson said. “And I’m worried that they lack the courage. They must do it.

Boris Johnson
Peter Watson

The no-fly zone over Mar-a-Lago annoys locals

Whether President Trump really has solved six, seven or even eight wars, one conflict he can’t do anything about, for now at least, is the one in his hometown, Palm Beach, where he is partly responsible for tempers that are beginning to fray. This is all down not so much to Trump himself but to the Secret Service. Following their embarrassing failure to stop the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, when Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to nick the President’s right ear with a bullet, the Secret Service has doubled down on security and established a one-nautical-mile flight-free exclusion zone around Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mansion to the south of

mar-a-lago
Rod Liddle

The West has become ungovernable

My favorite opinion poll of recent times was the one which showed that Donald Trump is disliked by more than 90 percent of Danes. This is a glorious achievement and one of which the President should be proud, and perhaps boast about from time to time – averse though he may be to boasting, of course. This was the lowest favorability rating for Trump anywhere in Yerp and I suppose is partly occasioned by his determination to pry Greenland from the grasp of these ineffably smug Scandis because they have no idea what to do with it and have mismanaged its meager affairs for decades. A personal admission: I cannot

Michael Wolff

Why I corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein

Olivia Nuzzi, the young and talented Trump reporter, committed the apparently cardinal sin of becoming romantically entangled with a subject. And, worse than that, the subject was widely reviled, particularly among journalists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-Kennedy. And then it turned out –her jilted fiancé, another journalist, was telling all – that there were other politicians she’d been involved with, too. This scandal, which has consumed the journalism world, was good for me because it forced the heaps of opprobrium I was getting from other journalists for my emails with the reviled Jeffrey Epstein off the front page. I had interacted with Nuzzi a few times shortly after my

Ann Coulter

Will we ever know the truth about Epstein?

Now that Congress has passed a law – not a flimsy resolution, but a law – mandating that the Trump administration release all its files on Jeffrey Epstein, here’s what we know, and what we still need to know. The basic elements of Epstein’s crimes were established back in 2006 by the Palm Beach Police, who began investigating the previous year after a woman reported that he had paid her 14-year-old stepdaughter for a massage. Over the next 13 months, the police gathered sworn statements from dozens of witnesses, including five underage girls who said they’d been paid $200 to $1,000 to engage in sex acts with Epstein. “The more

Paul Wood

Jared Kushner’s international friendships with benefits

In 1998, the conservative intellectual and moralist Bill Bennett published a book, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. Bennett had to rush the book out after “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” changed to: “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” But the Death of Outrage is almost too quaint a title to capture the age of Donald Trump, especially now that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is back as his closest foreign policy advisor. Trump told reporters who questioned Kushner’s role: “I have Jared. Find anybody more capable.” Perhaps there really is no one better at diplomacy in

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

America’s free-speech war on the EU

If I were a bookie, I would be making odds now about when the European Union will finally unravel and die. Unless there is an imminent and drastic course correction, the blessed event cannot be far off.  I might need a Doomsday Clock akin to the one publicized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their clock hovers near midnight, which signifies nuclear Armageddon, the minute hand pushed closer or farther away from the blast depending on minatory world events. My clock would measure the EU’s proximity to implosion. Its recent decision to fine Elon Musk and his company X €120 million for “non-compliance with transparency obligations” has me nudging

William Atkinson, Lara Brown and John Power

Peter Thiel predicts the future

Peter Thiel has been described variously as “America’s leading public intellectual,” the “architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos” or as an “incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic” malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern has always been the future, so when The Spectator asked to interview him, he wanted to talk to young people. To that effect, three young members of the editorial team were sent to Los Angeles to meet him. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. WILLIAM ATKINSON: Following Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New

Daniel McCarthy

Epstein, like Russiagate, damns the elite

As President Trump’s first year back in office drew to a close, his enemies had high hopes they’d hit on a scandal that could do to his second term what the “Russian collusion” story had done to his first. Donald Trump didn’t have to be found guilty of any wrongdoing tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s sleaze. All that was necessary was to stain his reputation indelibly and distract his administration from its work. The Epstein weapon even had an advantage over the Russia allegations of yesteryear – it resonated with much of Trump’s own MAGA base. Trump campaigned in 2024 on releasing the Epstein files, and many in MAGA considered it

Monday