Trump

The celebrity circles surrounding the second Trump administration are pretty thin. Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, Adam Sandler’s close friend Rob Schneider and a scant few others support the President in ways loud and quiet. But other than pop star Nicki Minaj, whose residence in Trumpistan has caused a lot of head-scratching, no entertainment celebrity occupies a more prominent place in the MAGA firmament than the musician Robert Ritchie, better known to the world as Kid Rock. “I call him Bob,” Trump once said. Kid Rock, the second most famous white rapper from Detroit, has long been in Trump’s social circles. He was a guest at Mar-a-Lago before either he or Trump became political figures.

In the unforgiving arena of American politics, few patterns are as reliable as the midterm election bloodbath for the party holding the White House. And this year Democrats are trying to capitalize on the midterm curse by fielding 150 candidates from medical and scientific backgrounds. All have entered the fray since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services and are putting his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) on the ballot. In particular, his vaccine reform program. Yet, a major driver of the rise of MAHA can be directly attributed to the Biden administration's disastrous handling of Covid, when Democrats in power contorted science to fit political imperatives.

For someone who believes that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” it’s a surprise that Billie Eilish’s legal team may have blocked my entry to the US. My plan was to test her theory of land ownership, which she stated at the Grammys to great applause, and take over her LA mansion with the help of Native Americans. But, sadly, I was turned back at the border last weekend – my sacred and inalienable right to freedom of movement curtailed by border guards who were, I suspect, briefed about my arrival by Eilish’s team. I’m an Australian political activist, more usually focused on exposing the influence of the Chinese government in Australia. But I made an exception after Eilish made her ludicrous statement at the Grammys.

While all eyes and ears at the Munich security conference will be on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday, it was America’s Democrats who were able to enjoy their moment in the spotlight on Friday. The party was out in force: Californian governor Gavin Newsom, member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer were among the high-profile party delegates on panels at the Bayerischer Hof hotel, where the conference is held. Campaigning for the next Democratic party presidential primary isn’t expected to kick off in earnest for another year.

Remember the old quip about economists? “That’s all very in practice,” they say, “but how does it work out in theory?” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of the New York Times is a splendid example of that sort of folly. On the evening of November 9, 2016, Krugman skirled that the election of Donald Trump would precipitate economic Armageddon. “If the question is when markets will recover,” he said, “a first-pass answer is never.” How could they recover since the nation had just elected an “irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people,” that is to say, he didn’t take advice from people like Paul Krugman.Reality check: the day Krugman wrote that, the market closed at 18,589. In the last few days the Dow broke 50,000.

In announcing an end to the ICE surge in Minnesota, Tom Homan has become for Democrats an unlikely good cop to Kristi Noem’s bad. But the double-act might not last long – the person Homan truly wishes to bring to book is Noem. The White House Border Czar said this morning that the Trump administration was ending its aggressive operation and a significant draw down of 3,000 agents who flooded into the state last year was already underway. “As a result of our efforts here, Minnesota is now less of a sanctuary state for criminals," he told a press conference.

The real problem with US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attending the Grammys wasn’t that it revealed her true colors as a liberal, but that it showed the slow and steady erosion of the court’s institutional reserve.Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, demanded that Chief Justice John Roberts launch an investigation into Jackson alleging she breached ethics rules by appearing at the anti-ICE event.“Americans deserve a Supreme Court that is impartial and above political influence,” Blackburn gravely pronounced. “When a Justice participates in such a highly politicized event, it raises ethical questions. We need an investigation into Justice Jackson’s ability to remain impartial.

“I suspect that the FBI is going to find things missing.” As a member of the Georgia State Election Board, Salleigh Grubbs is an authority on the alleged 2020 election fraud that led to an FBI raid on an election center in Fulton County. “It could be ballots, it could be reconciliations, it could be poll tapes, it could be any number of things,” she told The Spectator. “They have been fighting to prevent anyone looking at this evidence and preventing investigations. If you don't have anything to hide, why do you care?” Fulton officials finally admitted in December – after being subpoenaed by the State Election Board – they had broken state regulations by failing to sign 2020 election tabulator tapes and that they had misplaced other tabulator tapes.

A wave of school protests sweeping the US in response to the fatal shooting of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota has revealed how teachers' unions have weaponized classrooms for their own left-wing agenda. The unions have revealed themselves as political operatives more concerned with indoctrinating kids than teaching them reading, writing and arithmetic. These disruptions didn't materialize out of thin air. The teachers' unions fired the starting gun by blasting out anti-ICE propaganda to teachers, urging them to rally against immigration enforcement and turn schools into battlegrounds for their partisan fights. The National Education Association is also pushing teachers to print out immigration-related political propaganda posters and put them in their classrooms.

At this year’s World Economic Forum America’s friends and enemies heard about what some are calling a new world order. In Davos, President Trump advanced his own version of Realpolitik. America has its particular interests and he doesn’t mind being fully transparent about them and the actions they portend.   He plainly said that NATO is not forever. His Board of Peace is described as a possible prototype that will displace the UN. Trump has no regard for Biden’s devotion to the “rules based world order” when it really means the US has to pay for everyone else to honor the rules.   This is the reason that while the good and great were chatting it up in Davos the US finalized its withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

Over the last week, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, additional F-15 fighter planes and naval vessels carrying sea-launched cruise missiles have been making their way to the Middle East in what can only be described as a bid by President Trump to squeeze Iran into submission. In case anybody doubted this is what Trump was after, he took to Truth Social early in the morning to send the Iranians a message: give me what I want or face bombing the likes of which you’ve never seen. "A massive Armada is heading to Iran. It is moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose,” Trump wrote. "Hopefully Iran will quickly “Come to the Table” and negotiate a fair and equitable deal – NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS – one that is good for all parties.”What deal is Trump referring to?

As the Potomac ices over for the first time in decades, Washington is in a deep freeze. Democrats are about to send it into an even deeper one. Intent on icing out ICE, they’re threatening to shutter the federal government over a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security and to impeach Kristi Noem. “Donald Trump must fire Kristi Noem immediately,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote Tuesday in a post on social media. “Or Democrats will initiate impeachment proceedings against her in the House. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”Ever since the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has been scrambling to recover its footing – and inadvertently helping the Democrats to get their groove back.