Freddy Gray

One of Donald Trump’s greatest strengths is his ability to repeat himself endlessly. It takes some doing. At 9 p.m. tonight, he says, he’ll give the world a big primetime showstopper announcement. It’s expected that he will reveal something about foreign influence or operations in "the stolen election" of 2020.  Escalate, threaten, befuddle, try to find an off-ramp on more agreeable terms, and if necessary bore the enemy into submission We don’t know exactly what, but we can be sure Trump will reiterate that he actually won three presidential elections, not two, and that he’ll use this stunt to push The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act. That’s currently his pet obsession. And Trump just keeps going until he gets what he wants.

What do senior Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and Iran’s new Supreme Leader have in common? Not a lot, except that both men are currently being hidden from public view – and nobody seems to know for sure if either Mitch or Mojtaba Khamenei is alive or dead. Iran is a brutal theocratic regime where the truth tends to be suppressed. America is meant to be a free and democratic society. Yet the 84-year-old Senator for Kentucky has been in hospital since June 14 and rumors are spreading that he is brain-dead, on life-support, or possibly worse, and the party leadership appears to be covering up the facts about his health.

"You can do two things," Donald Trump told reporters as he stood beside the new retrofitted Air Force One on Wednesday. "You can low-key it, or you can show it." He always does the latter. The presidential plane is, as everyone knows, a $400 million present from Qatar. The famous light blue hull is gone. It is painted in Trump’s preferred color scheme – navy blue, red, gold stripes. The Air Force says it spent less than $400 million implementing "security upgrades." And the aircraft began active service this week and will be used by the President until the end of his second term at least. It’s hard to know if Americans really care about their Commander-in-Chief flying around in a jet given to him by a sheikh who didn’t need it.

After a week of international agonizing, it looks as if the first round of the latest peace talks between America and Iran will not begin today – at least, not formally. The Memorandum of Understanding has been signed – electronically by Iran and by Donald Trump’s hand in Versailles on Wednesday. But J.D. Vance’s big Switzerland trip, originally planned to kick off the talks, has been put on hold as the Lebanon issue reared its troublesome head overnight. Late yesterday afternoon, Hezbollah fired several salvoes of rockets at IDF targets, killing four soldiers. Israel responded with a wave of airstrikes in Southern Lebanon, killing 18 and wounding 33, according to the Lebanese ministry of health.

In recent months, America’s political rumor mills have been grinding out whispers about Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Maine. Platner, the military veteran turned oyster catcher turned left-wing populist, has somehow survived the story about having a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest – although he says he was unaware of its meaning and has since had it covered up. And he is still on course to beat Susan Collins, the long-serving Republican, in November. His is thought to be the most obvious – yet vital – win for the Democrats as they seek to win back the Senate.  But Platner has a colorful past – to put it mildly.

When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is: 'When they go low, we go high.' – Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2016  Shut up you ugly fuck. – The Democratic party’s official Twitter handle, replying to Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy, on May 27, 2026.  The most disturbing thing about that Democratic response to Stephen Miller is how unshocking it is. We’ve become inured to foul language, even from our political leaders and their social media channels. In our post-literate society, as words lose their power, swearing has become an idle form of punctuation. Donald Trump used to do most of his swearing in private.

"What to get someone who has everything, I thought," said Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday, as he handed Pope Leo a funny little crystal-football present. "Wow, OK," replied Leo, stiffly. It was a useful reminder that Rubio is not always a smooth operator. For all the articles suggesting he has now overtaken Vice President J.D. Vance as favorite to be the 2028 Republican nominee, for all the media gushing over the "Secretary of Everything" in the White House briefing room, Lil’ Marco can still be something of a robotic plonker on the big stage. Lil’ Marco can still be something of a robotic plonker on the big stage It was Rubio, after all, who was the first cabinet official to suggest in public that Israel had strong-armed America into attacking Iran.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, the UK's new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post three months, yet he’s already had to handle a string of bilateral crises – none his fault. US-UK relations are under intense strain over Iran, Ukraine and now the Falklands. And the Jeffrey Epstein stench still lingers thanks to his predecessor, Peter Mandelson. The King’s visit was meant to gloss over all that unpleasantness. Word went round last week that a grateful Donald Trump would pack King Charles and Camilla off and promptly declare the US-UK trade deal had been finalized. Then, on Tuesday, the first morning of the visit, news broke of a leaked tape.

As public messages of support go, it scored pretty low on the conviction-o-meter. ‘Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom acknowledged that he “exercised wrong judgement” when he chose his Ambassador to Washington,’ said President Donald Trump on Truth Social last night. ‘I agree, he was a really bad pick. Plenty of time to recover, however! President DJT.’ Uh oh. None of the trademark capitalisation, which suggests Donald’s heart isn’t really in it. Some aide must have just spoken to him about Keir Starmer’s Peter Mandelson crisis, or perhaps a news story came to his attention.

In America, important men don’t seem to suffer too much over their links to the late Jeffrey Epstein.Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick and Paolo Zampolli, among others, might regret their past friendships with the world’s most famous sex criminal. Certainly, they resent having to face pesky questions about it.But the story just rumbles on, darkly, a source of endless intrigue and gossip and conspiracy theories – sustained as it is by the occasional publicity jolt, such as last week when First Lady Melania Trump, apparently without the knowledge of her husband, decided to give a big public statement denying that she, er, something something Jeffrey Epstein.

A useful rule, when trying to understand current affairs, is AAL: Acronyms Always Lie.A case in point would be the acronym of the year so far: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). It means that Donald Trump is always bluffing and, when push finally comes to shove, he folds.TACO has caught on since Liberation Day and the onset of Trump 2.0’s tariff agenda, and is now deployed again and again to describe the President’s latest ceasefire with Iran. Over free trade, Greenland, and the Middle East, he’s shown himself to be a playground bully who loves to intimidate adversaries only to cave whenever the going gets tough.

Will America’s ground invasion of Iran begin in the early hours of tomorrow? Everybody knows, by now, that Trump likes to initiate action late on Fridays, after the markets close. And late last night, the so-called Pentagon Pizza Watch channel – which monitors late-night food orders from the Pentagon for evidence that something big is afoot – reported a surge of activity, leading to all sorts of prediction-market bets that a new military operation would start this weekend. Of course, with so much money to be made on war gambling – there’s now a Polymarket "situation room" bar in Washington, DC – the odds of someone trying to dupe the markets are short.