Jacob Heilbrunn

King Charles and Queen Camilla were at their most emollient in Washington, where they exchanged a flurry of presents with Donald and Melania Trump. The King’s gifts to President Trump included a framed copy of the design plans for the Resolute Desk, which was originally given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in

Has the dustup between Washington and Tehran come to an end? ‘They’ve agreed to give us back the nuclear dust that’s way underground because of the attack we made with the B-2 bombers,’ Donald Trump proclaimed on Thursday evening. ‘So we have a lot of agreement with Iran, and I think something’s going to happen,

Might Donald Trump travel to Tehran this spring to open an American embassy and declare that he’s fallen in love with the new Iranian leadership? His volte-face on Tuesday night – announcing a two-week ceasefire with Iran – suggests that Trump is embarking upon a new course in the Middle East. After threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, Trump announced that it’s time to call the

During his remarks in Budapest, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is trying prop up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as he runs for reelection, appeared to think the unthinkable. Vance, who has been a hero for MAGA anti-interventionists, went all-in on attacking Iran. He indicated that America might resort to “tools” in its arsenal that “we so far haven’t decided to use.” Now the White House is denying that

The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche her temporary successor. It’s that he waited as long as he did. After exercising what is for him unusual restraint – his cabinet was in a state of perpetual upheaval during his first term as

Donald Trump, who will deliver an address from the Oval Office tonight, isn’t giving up on his aims for his war in the Middle East. This time his target isn’t Iran but Nato. ‘You don’t even have a navy,’ he declared about Britain before going on to denounce the North Atlantic alliance. ‘I was never

Donald Trump likes to use the phrase ‘go big or go home’ to describe his political strategy. It looks as though the US President is about to stress test its efficacy as he weighs dispatching another 10,000 troops to the Middle East, a move that would further embroil him in the widely unpopular war in

Donald Trump thought it would be a cakewalk. Determined to oust his adversary almost overnight, the US President quickly discovered that he’s far more wily and tenacious than he had assumed. Far from capitulating, his nemesis seems to be on the comeback trail. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell thus announced yesterday that unless a successor is confirmed by

Donald Trump has become something of a sole man. His cabinet members and White House visitors report that the President has developed a penchant for handing out $145 (£108) Florsheim shoes in an effort to up their sartorial game. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell reported that Dr. Johnson recoiled at an ‘eleemosynary supply’ of charitably donated shoes as