Mischief, mayhem and Washington gossip. Send tips and party invites to cockburn@thespectator.com.
From our US edition
At a private dinner with two dozen donors, President Trump surveyed the room and asked which candidate they would choose to follow him in leading the MAGA movement. The vote was almost unanimously in favor of Marco Rubio over J.D. Vance. As the two men vie to be next-in-line to the throne, Trump seems to be enjoying
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It’s day seven of “Operation Epic Fury” – and the White House is posting through it. The war in Iran that Team Trump wants to show us is tailored for the short attention spans of the vertical video era. Consider this clip posted on X by the official White House account last night, which intersperses declassified footage
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How are you “monitoring the situation,” four days into the joint US-Israeli offensive against Iran? Our Commander-in-Chief has adopted an unorthodox approach: evading the press in person as the strikes and counterstrikes fall, while taking phone calls from basically any journalist with his personal number. By Cockburn’s count, President Trump has given at least 20
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani met Trump in the Oval Office yesterday to pitch a huge New York City housing initiative – and secure the release of a Columbia University student from ICE custody. Mamdani’s communications director said that Trump was “very enthusiastic” about the plan to build 12,000 new affordable homes in Sunnyside, Queens, by using
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Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill austerely complied with a House Oversight Committee subpoena in order to explain their ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Hillary’s testimony today didn’t exactly go to plan. Proceedings were halted after a breach of the hearing’s protocols – by a member of the committee. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert took
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President Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term tonight – and the White House social media team want to whet your appetite. “The White House digital team will transform all its social channels into ‘Trump TV’ – a 12-hour retrospective of the year since President Trump’s last address
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Underdog candidate for Florida governor James Fishback went face-to-camera to pitch his 50 percent income tax for OnlyFans creators last month. It would be called a “sin tax” meant to discourage “certain behaviors.” This came at around the time he got into an X spat with Sophie Rain, a Florida resident believed to be one
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So farewell then, Reverend Jesse Jackson. The civil-rights hero and two-time Democratic presidential candidate died this morning, aged 84. Given his titanic status as an African-American leader, the first living president, former or current, to issue a statement was, naturally… Donald Trump. “He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts,’” wrote Trump
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Usually, the panel section of a black-tie awards dinner is the least lively part of the evening. Honorees praise and agree with each other, soundtracked by the clinks of forks as guests cautiously push salad around their plates. Not so at RealClear’s third Samizdat Awards, AKA the Sammies, which took place at the Breakers in
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Turning Point USA’s political-action committee showed just how “family friendly” it is Monday – by endorsing serial adulterer Ken Paxton for Texas’s open Senate seat. Paxton, who’s battling Republican incumbent John Cornyn and Congressman Wesley Hunt for his party’s nomination, accepted the endorsement, saying, “I’m proud to be standing alongside Turning Point Action in carrying
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And now his watch is ended. Sir Will Lewis fell on his sword last night, resigning as CEO and publisher of the Washington Post. “After two years of transformation at the Post, now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis said in an email to staff. In his note, Lewis thanked only the Post’s proprietor Jeff
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The more salacious aspects of the Epstein files are well known – but what of the banal side of being a billionaire sex pest? It’s no secret Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were close friends with Epstein, as the trove of emails show. One food-obsessed friend of Cockburn alerted us to the non-stop
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President Trump has had a mixed reaction to the enormous document dump of “Epstein files” from the Department of Justice a week ago. The President had a terse exchange with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins when she asked about the files Tuesday – yet in his pre-Super Bowl NBC interview, Trump was empathetic toward one of his predecessors. “It
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Cockburn takes a keen interest in the correspondence between former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s ex and consigliere. Back in 2019, readers will no doubt recall, Andrew took part in a disastrous interview with the BBC’s Newsnight in an attempt to smooth over the reports of his ties to Epstein and his alleged sexual
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One of the many mysteries surrounding the Epstein saga is Jeffrey Epstein the man. Beyond simple hedonism, his motives seem inscrutable – and how did he make his money anyway? The latest cache of released Epstein files has shed new light on his character. Part of what emerges is Epstein the compulsive video gamer, who was banned from online
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Lemon squeezy Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor turned Substack influencer, was taken into custody by Homeland Security and FBI agents in Los Angeles last night. Lemon had previously covered an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month – though a federal judge in the state refused to
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As Gangs of New York showed us, those who’ve settled in America have a tendency to bring Old World grudges over with them. Judging by a recent video put out by Dr. Mehmet Oz – now serving as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services – one of these ancient feuds may now be playing
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Dairy dies in darkness The Washington Post finds itself making news more than reporting it of late. Stories swirled this weekend of looming cuts to the sports and foreign desks. The newsroom is on edge. Yet is it possible some “Posties” have been getting too comfortable? Cockburn hears of an email that went around the Post’s New York bureau last week, mentioning
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The White House and Department of Homeland Security are making hay out of the DHS “Worst of the Worst” database, posting links to it throughout the week as evidence that ICE’s actions in Minnesota are justified. President Trump also held up printouts from the database during his Tuesday marathon presser. But Cockburn has been playing a different game with
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Kat Abughazaleh is one of those influencers who – unnervingly – seem to pop out of nowhere fully formed. There was a stint at Media Matters – which in many ways pioneered the modern industry in “disinformation”-watchdogging, political fact-checking and “studying the far right” – where she made short-form videos taking the fight to people like
