Ronald reagan

Wednesday

Stephen Bayley

Trump’s presidential library is predictably crass

Maybe a tad prematurely for a term that ends only in 2029, the Trump Organization has released a short video on Truth Social revealing, with a dizzying CGI fly-throughs, proposals for the Donald J. Trump presidential library. Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design It’s not about Making America Literate Again: there’s not a book in sight. I could not even see a reference to Trump’s own great contribution to world literature: The Art of the Deal. By contrast, the Ptolemies’ great library in Alexandria had perhaps 700,000 papyrus rolls. But that was there-and-then and POTUS 47 is nothing if not here-and-now.

library

Tuesday

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.

Saturday

Ben Shapiro

No, America isn’t fundamentally flawed

What has gone wrong for Americans? To listen to an increasing number of politicians and pundits on both sides, from Tucker Carlson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Nick Fuentes to Zohran Mamdani, the answer seems to be: everything. Americans are unable to get a job; to afford the necessities of life; to get married or have children; to find religious meaning or form friendships. And all of this can be laid at the feet of corrupt institutions and a corrupt system. This conspiracy-tinged, vitriolic take on the American system is a lie. Yet it contains a grain of truth. Our institutions have been led self-servingly by a coterie who disdain American values.

douglas knowing
Douglas Murray

The pleasure in not knowing

A few years ago, the podcaster Lex Fridman published a list of books that he was hoping to read in the year ahead. It included works by George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse and others. If he had published this in the world of print media he might have got back some encouraging noises. But because he put the list online – worse, on the platform then still known as Twitter – he received mostly mockery. “Who hasn’t read Animal Farm?” was the general tenor of the blowback, as though a man who had been a researcher at MIT was next to being a Neanderthal.

Monday

Neal Pollack

The Trump-Kennedy Center?

“I have a good memory, so I can remember things, which is very fortunate,” a tuxedo-clad President Trump said on the red carpet before hosting the Kennedy Center Honors. “But just, I wanted to just be myself. You have to be yourself.” To open the show, Trump stood behind the presidential lectern and invoked the name of Johnny Carson, who, he said, was a master improviser like him. Trump hadn’t prepared much. He didn’t need to. "This is the first time a president of the United States has ever hosted the event. I don't know why.” It’s actually kind of an interesting question. Ronald Reagan, of course, would have made an excellent Kennedy Center honors host. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enjoyed a stage and an audience in their primetime years, and George W.

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Who will replace Pelosi in Republican demonology?

Nancy Pelosi’s career is ending as it began. She entered Congress in 1986 during the Reagan administration and is ending it under the most influential Republican president since the Gipper. On Thursday she released a six-minute video announcing her retirement in 2027 from Congress, the latest octogenarian to depart it. No sooner did this contagonist announce that she would not seek reelection, than Donald Trump crowed that he had outlasted her. Old age, it seems, is no barrier to a slanging match. A few days ago the 85-year old Pelosi called him an “evil creature.” Now Trump, on the verge of becoming an octogenarian himself, returned the favor. She was evil, corrupt and only focused on bad things for our country,” Trump said.

Pelosi

Friday

Mike Coté

Oliver North was ahead of his time

In a fascinating blast from the past, two of the main figures in the biggest political scandal of the 1980s, Iran-Contra, have now married. Former National Security Council member Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his ex-secretary Fawn Hall tied the knot privately last month in Virginia, after it was reported they reconnected at the funeral of North’s late wife in 2024. The pair were key figures in the Reagan-era scandal, with North running the arms-for-hostages operation and Hall providing assistance in smuggling documents, avoiding public scrutiny, and shredding evidence. Hall was granted immunity for her testimony, while North was convicted of three criminal offenses before they were overturned on appeal.

Oliver North

Monday

Alexander Larman

The problem with Trump’s plan to make American movies great again

Donald Trump is a cinephile, of sorts. Not since Ronald Reagan has there been a US President so visible in theater, with Trump making cameos in everything from Home Alone 2 to Zoolander. Yet just as Trump has been steadfast in his determination to Make America Great Again, so he has been equally keen to Make Hollywood Great Again, too. Initially, he appointed Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as “Special Ambassadors” to “a great but very troubled place.” Gibson and Stallone appear to have taken the honor on the chin, but Voight has been diligently organizing meetings and has now fed back his thoughts to the President. As a result, Trump has declared that he has his own, unorthodox plans to save the American motion-picture industry.

jon voight movies

Friday

Teresa Mull

Eliminating the Education Department is the key to restoring American culture

Since the US Department of Education’s inception in 1980, the agency has proven itself to be incompetent at its principal task: teaching American children. Adding insult to injury, the agency has also earned a big, fat F when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Despite this reality, headlines announcing the Trump administration’s newly streamlined Department of Education cast a somber tone. Layoffs “gutted” the Education Department, reports the AP. Democratic attorneys general are suing over “gutting of Education Department,” echoes the New York Times. The cuts will “decimate” the agency that “compiles ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and measures student performance,” laments ABC News. Cutting, gutting, decimating.

putin
Charles Lipson

Will Putin give peace a chance?

At a summit meeting in Moscow, Ronald Reagan was asked about his basic approach. He famously answered, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.” Vladimir Putin has the same strategy for Ukraine. That is certainly his first response to President Trump’s offer to mediate an end to the war and bring a reluctant Ukraine to the negotiating table. If “we win, they lose” is Putin’s final response, then the war cannot end without Ukraine’s surrender or Russia’s collapse. Putin’s initial reply, filled with his maximalist demands, indicates he is still committed to the conquest of his neighbor, whose independence and sovereignty he has long rejected.

Thursday

Taylor Millard

DoGE hasn’t been the success supporters initially believed

There were high hopes when Donald Trump announced plans for a Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) in mid-November. Led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, DoGE was portrayed as a gift to smaller, more efficient government advocates through fewer regulations and a restructured government. “It will become, potentially, the Manhattan Project of our time,” boasted Trump at the time. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of DoGE for a very long time.” Trump seemed to picture Musk and Ramaswamy as a two-headed monster, ripping to shreds bureaucracy through “advice and guidance” along with an “entrepreneurial approach to government.

DOGE

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

A consequential, divisive, troubling election about big issues

Republicans and Democrats, who disagree so virulently on so much, at least agree on two things. Both say it is the most consequential election in US history. (They might want to check on 1860.) And both believe the other side’s triumph would be catastrophic. It would have dangerous consequences for decades, they say, and might be impossible to correct. They are half right, perhaps more, and what they are right about is scary. This election is the most consequential since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression. That election was consequential because it and the following one, in 1936, locked in the Democratic Party coalition that effectively governed the country for the next seventy-five years.

e pluribus unum election

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Are politician films really such a good idea, after all?

The news that Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice has flopped in its first weekend at the US box office, taking in a mere $1.6 million from 1,740 locations across the country, may not be as surprising as liberal critics might suspect. The film received decent rather than adulatory reviews, many of which suggested that its portrayal of the young Donald Trump and his relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn was either too generous or unfairly maligned the younger Trump, depending on where your individual politics stood.

apprentice politician films
press fake news media consultancy journalism
John R. MacArthur

The age of consultancy journalism

In a presidential campaign notable for its lack of substantive debate, a serious citizen needs to look far and wide to pierce Donald Trump’s blather and Kamala Harris’s bromides — or to find anything that might resemble real political information. So I quickly reached for my wallet last week when I happened upon the New Yorker’s newsstand edition. The first cover line and subhead caught my eye: “The Democrats’ Left Flank: in the swing state of Michigan, antiwar voters want a commitment from Kamala Harris on Gaza. Are their tactics a gift to Trump?” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been top of mind in the campaign press corps all year.

Sunday

Ruchir Sharma

Why America has more lawyers per capita than any other country

Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.” The problem: this narrative is wrong on the facts.

lawyers

Thursday

The Spectator

This month in culture: August 2024

The Instigators In theaters August 2, Apple TV+ August 9 Boston crime movies are back! Starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck — and produced by Ben Affleck, of course — The Instigators is a heist comedy-thriller about a robbery that goes wrong, causing Damon’s therapist to get dragged along for the ride. Affleck/Damon productions have consistently been solid — from the ultimate Boston crime movie The Town to last year’s Jordan 1 sneaker-origin story Air — and this is directed by one of the best working action directors around, Doug Liman, who was responsible for The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Edge of Tomorrow and (the underrated) American Made.

culture

Thursday

Geoff Hill

How the Special Relationship could be renewed after US-UK elections

A record number of countries will hold elections this, including Britain on July 4 and the United States on November 5. These two great powers — each with a veto at the UN — have enjoyed a bond that has survived for so long, is it known on both sides of the Atlantic as “the Special Relationship.” There have been stand-offs: Britain refused to join the war in Vietnam, and when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, the US did not intervene. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher worked in tandem to bring down the Berlin Wall. And if the view on Ukraine and Gaza is not always the same, there is a shared commitment to the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors and to a peace in the Middle East that secures the rights of Jews and Palestinians alike.

special relationship

Friday

Cockburn

Candace Owens out at the Daily Wire

Candace Owens’s watch at the Daily Wire has ended. The news came in the form of an X post from Wire CEO and Lady Ballers star Jeremy Boreing this morning: “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship.”  “The rumors are true — I am finally free,” Owens tweeted shortly after, along with a plug for her Locals page, a link to a site where you can donate her money and a pledge of more to come.  The separation comes shortly after Owens said she’d “stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” making her exit a big win for trans rights. As they say en France, quand on vient pour la reine, il ne faut pas la manquer.

candace owens

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

The man who made Reagan

Ronald Reagan has been dead for nearly twenty years, but sometimes it still feels like he’s still the head of the Republican Party. The fortieth US president has been etched in American folklore as one of the country’s most effective and historic statesman, the man who stared down the Soviet Union and pursued policies that ultimately brought down the so-called “Evil Empire” in December 1991. Republican politicians of all stripes, from presidential aspirants to local councilmembers, utter his name at every opportunity. The first GOP presidential debate took place at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, where multiple candidates looked back at the 1980s as a time when the mighty US shook off the cobwebs from the Vietnam War and rediscovered its self-confidence.

President Reagan walking with George P. Shultz outside the Oval Office (Wikimedia Commons)

Friday

Cockburn

Greta Thunberg, milkshake duck

Is Peter Thiel a fed? Peter Thiel made billions of dollars working closely with the federal government, selling technologies like Palantir at massive profits. Now, there’s the suggestion that Thiel’s ties to the government may be a lot closer than previously thought — a bombshell report in Business Insider alleges that Thiel has worked as a confidential human source for the FBI starting in 2021, likely about foreign involvement in Silicon Valley. Per Insider, Thiel was recruited by controversial far-right activist Charles Johnson.Thiel’s political involvement has scaled back in recent months; in 2022, he batted 0.500 in getting his former employees elected to the United States Senate, helping get J.D.