Trump administration

Operation Absolute Resolve, Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, was a brilliantly executed coup. The audacious raid did not undermine international law, as many European and Democratic politicians have said. But it did expose the weakness and pomposity of the world’s multilateral bodies. Maduro traded oil for loans with China while helping Moscow avoid sanctions. He permitted the terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran to operate and build drones within his jurisdiction. He rigged elections and had opposition activists shot in the street. He allowed and enabled weapons, fentanyl and illegal migrants to flood towards America’s southern border. Yet it wasn’t the International Criminal Court that arrested Maduro to bring him to justice in a New York court.

On New Year’s Eve a few years ago, I was in Medellín, Colombia, the city that gave its name to one of the world’s most notorious drugs cartels. Our taxi driver offered us some cocaine to fuel the party we were heading to: $10 for a gram; $15 for the “luxury” product. Our group decided to splash out and get a gram of the really good stuff. I’d tried coke a couple of times in London. It was like snorting drain cleaner. Whoosh… I found that half a line of Medellín’s best was enough to keep you going until sunrise. But the next day it was difficult to be within six feet of another human being, the coke having burned up all the dopamine in my brain. Coke is evil. I imagine a lot of other people were feeling the same in Medellín that New Year.

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.

As stock markets wobble over fears of AI hype and the overvaluation of tech shares, it seems an unfortunate time for Donald Trump to launch an initiative boosting America’s artificial intelligence capabilities. But the White House sees matters differently. Its new “Genesis Mission,” which commits government departments to make sure adequate energy and computing power are available, has been purposely launched to remind the world that AI is not all froth – or “slop” to use the popular term. Team Trump likens Genesis to the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb during World War Two faster than the other side. For all the typically Trumpian bombast, that’s not a foolish way of thinking about the subject.

DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib.  It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Notionally, Americans have never been better off. The ructions in tech stocks over the past few weeks cannot detract from the fact that the US economy has been outgunning other developed economies all century. The overall graph of real disposable income for Americans continues to trend upward, almost as if the sharp dip during the pandemic had not happened. That is certainly not true everywhere: in many countries, Covid has been followed by stagnation in GDP and wages. Yet, for all the wealth generated, many Americans simply do not feel that they are living in a thriving country. On the things that really matter, such as basic living costs, citizens at the lower end of the income scale feel their wages are increasingly inadequate. They are not imagining it.

President Trump is waging war on the great British disinformation complex. The White House is gearing up to revoke the visa of British citizen and chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed, amid the Trump administration's greater battle against the BBC. By “countering digital hate,” the CCDH means censoring speech it disagrees with. The British campaign group, which has an office in Washington, has pushed for the deplatforming of Trump officials from social media and for greater restrictions on speech online generally. The CCDH advocated that Twitter/X remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Is Donald Trump a more sophisticated mathematical thinker than we give him credit for? The other day, on one of the Sunday talk shows, a lawyer named Sarah Isgur explained the logic Trump was following in throwing the book at those who had once done the same to him. Isgur, who served in the first Trump administration, sees in the President’s actions something more sophisticated than mere revenge: “What you will hear from those people in the Department of Justice is: this is what deterrence theory is about. When you’re playing a cooperative game and the other side defects,” Isgur said, “then you hit them back disproportionately to create that deterrence.

In May 1801, Thomas Jefferson wrote a complaining letter to a friend. “There is nothing I am so anxious about as making the best possible appointments.” Donald Trump would appreciate Jefferson’s anxiety. “Personnel is policy.” As far as I have been able to discover, that slogan gained currency in the Reagan administration. But it articulates a truth that political thinkers from Aristotle to Machiavelli to James Madison appreciated. The first line of Article II of the Constitution reads: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That’s “a President.” Only one. Not “a President and a bunch of district court judges.” Not “a President and sundry federal agencies staffed by unaccountable bureaucrats.

Good morning Britain. Donald Trump is flying to the United Kingdom today for his big state visit. Yet his Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to be going one step further. She appears to think that America, like Britain, ought to now be a country where you can go to jail for posting memes on Facebook.  Katie Miller, hosting Bondi on the Katie Miller Pod, said that Kirk’s murder last week was what happened when college campuses don’t take action against or expel students who harass conservative speakers. Using anti-Semitism as an example of left-wing campus “hate speech,” Bondi claimed in reply: “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.