Freddy Gray

Marco Rubio, the so-called "Secretary of Everything" in the Trump administration, has vigorously rejected the idea that he is about to resign. "I don’t know where these things come from, to be honest with you," he told the New York Times, following reports in the Independent and Bloomberg that, after the crushing midterms, he would be stepping down to work on his 2028 presidential bid. "I love the work I’m doing… And plus I always laugh when they say he’s going to leave his job. I go, 'Which one?'" But where did those reports come from? The Independent story, which came first, cited "senior party sources and senior figures in the UK government." The UK government? That seems a bit rum.

Well, the midterms are over, and the elections were indeed disastrous for Donald Trump’s Republican party. Commentators are now queuing up to declare MAGA dead – but they should all have read The Spectator back in March, when, at the start of the Iran War, Christopher Caldwell wrote a brilliant essay for us called "The End of Trumpism." "Trump is now carrying out the policy of the very think-tankers and democracy-spreaders he rose to power by promising to fight," wrote Chris. "And it has apparently been many months since the people in whose name he campaigned have even flitted across his mind." How true that was.    The war has been, as everyone now finally acknowledges, a colossal misstep by Donald Trump.

On the eve of the midterms, strange and dark events have been taking place in Trump’s America. Yesterday, a Learjet smashed like a scud missile into a road in Palm Beach, Florida, about eight miles from Trump’s mansion at Mar-a-Lago. The President had flown out of Palm Beach – from the now-renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport – about an hour earlier. Around the same time, reports confirmed that Chris Murphy, the Democratic Senator for Connecticut, had suffered a stroke. On Wednesday and Thursday last week, following a classified Senate briefing, Murphy had warned the world about the Trump administration’s “insane” plan to escalate the war in Iran in the wake of the midterms.

US technology shares have been sliding again today. The drop, as the Financial Times puts it, marks "a continuation of a volatile month for the sector as investors fret about the sustainability of the debt-fueled AI infrastructure boom." Elon Musk has been raising the alarm. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) has reported some disappointing news, as have Meta and Amazon. The great fear is that all the circular financing which has sustained the AI boom – tech companies lending money to themselves through various "vehicles" – is about to be exposed, and that institutional investors (pension funds and so on) will start to panic. The trillions spent on AI data centers and computing power could start to freeze up. All eyes turn, then, toward Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Russiagate was, famously, something of a damp squib. Donald Trump was never a secret Kremlin asset. Moscow did not internet-brainwash the American public into electing him. It was mostly mad bunkum, which the desperate and deluded media pushed relentlessly for months just because they could not accept the idea that a brash, rude real-estate television tycoon was now their Commander in Chief. But now, with the midterms upon us and a Democratic majority in Congress beckoning, we’re about to have what could be a far more explosive sequel. My working title is Gulfgate: This Time It’s Serious! Yesterday, Vanity Fair published what appears to be a huge story about Jared Kushner, the US President’s son-in-law.

We seem to be fast approaching the winter of Trumpian discontent. The midterms are just weeks away, the mood within the White House is strained, and knives are being drawn on Pennsylvania Avenue. There’s the fuss over Katie Zacharia, the somewhat verbally challenged White House press secretary, and the surprisingly tough treatment meted out to her by Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday night. There’s the apparent volte-face over the fate of Nidal Malik Hasan, as Donald Trump declared that Hasan’s execution will not in fact be live-streamed. "He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad," said the Commander-in-Chief. "But this event will not be streamed.