Donald trump

Obama late on the late Jesse Jackson

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 on Truth Social just before 8:30 a.m. “He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand.” In fact, at the time of writing, Obama still hadn’t posted about the Reverend (former presidents Biden and Clinton issued statements this morning). The 44th

Will Trump ‘totally obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear program – again?

Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s nuclear program, he assured the world, had been set back by “decades.” Yet yesterday, just six months on, there he was again – meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu once more to discuss the urgent need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer – that quick and spectacular bombing mission

Prince Andrew’s business blueprint for Trump 2.0

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 bothers me that they’re going after Bill Clinton,” he told Tom Llamas, referring to how the former president and his wife, Hillary, were being compelled to testify before Congress about Epstein. Cockburn wonders if that compassion extends to another figure he moved in the same circles as back in the early 2000s: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The former prince

andrew epstein trade business

How to lose friends and alienate people

After two deadly shootings in confrontations between Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the activists obstructing them, Minneapolis was starting to remind people of Kent State. By “people” we mean progressive baby boomers, inclined to make the Vietnam War the measure of all things. For them, the massacre of four student protesters by a nervous detachment of Ohio national guardsmen in 1970 alerted parents to the war’s inhumanity. It started the groundswell against Richard Nixon that would force him to exit the war three years later – and the White House the year after that. The analogy is a bad one. Trump’s position differs a lot from Nixon’s.

Trump’s legacy hinges on the midterms – and he knows it

“We gotta win the midterms,” President Donald Trump told the crowd in Iowa at the end of last month. “I’m here because we’re starting the campaign to win the midterms. That means Senate and it means House.” Trump is, by all accounts, obsessed with the upcoming elections in November. Having been distracted by various foreign dramas, and seeing his approval ratings dip, the President aims to pivot back to a domestic mission in 2026. If the Democrats capture the House, Trump will face noisy congressional battles and possibly impeachment Trump understands the stakes, hence choosing Iowa, the traditional starting place for presidential primaries, to launch this campaign. The final two

After Trump comes reform

America needs Donald Trump, badly. He is the bull in the china shop that every nation needs from time to time. He is testing his country’s constitution to destruction as well as its relations with the outside world. Such tests hasten the necessity of reform. The only question is how long will it take for reform to catch up and overcome him, as it surely will. Constitutional chaos may then break loose after midterms. This is America’s great opportunity In January alone Trump toppled the leader of Venezuela, mooted the conquest of Greenland and a 100 percent tariffs on Canada, insulted the British army and killed Americans protesting his immigration

What Trump told me in my hour of need

“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,” espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past two weeks in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add “shame” to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-meter Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying. If I had a plan how

Will Trump bring about World War Three?

One of the enduring myths about Donald Trump is that he is an isolationist: a president bent on dismantling alliances and hauling up the drawbridge on America’s engagement with the world. The reality is more unsettling. Trump’s instincts may incline toward retrenchment, but they coexist with a pugnacious temperament and a visceral conception of American honor. Given that volatile combination, it is easy to imagine an adversary taunting him out of restraint – or a well-meaning but insufficiently sensitive ally, or even an unprovoked emotional spasm, producing the same effect. After that, who knows where events might lead? Over the past year of his second presidency, Trump has authorised the

Prince Andrew asked Ghislaine for ‘bed for the night’ – on week of alleged Virginia Roberts Giuffre sexual encounter: emails

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 encounters with a teenage Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Specifically, Andrew denied ever having stayed at Epstein’s house on New York’s Upper East Side on April 11, 2001 – during the trip when Roberts Giuffre says she had sex with the prince for a second time, when she was aged 17. “I wasn’t staying there. I may

The predictable politics of the 2026 Grammys

When Billie Eilish declared, during her acceptance speech for song of the year with “Wildflower” at last night’s Grammy awards, that “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter,” she was speaking in the approved register. “Fuck ICE,” she added but it was more of the same. In contrast to the Golden Globes, where the neutral tenor of the event was made up of tame jokes about the age of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, the Grammys have turned into an opportunity for musicians to express political outrage. The awards themselves went as expected last night. Kendrick Lamar and Bad

What to make of Kevin Warsh

The news broke this morning that Donald Trump has, after considerable deliberation, settled on Kevin Warsh as his nominee to replace Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. “I have known Kevin for a long period of time,” said Trump, on Truth Social. “There’s no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best.” “On top of everything else,” added the Commander-in-Chief, “he is ‘central casting’ and he will never let you down.” The use of the phrase “central casting” shows Trump’s reality TV brain at work. The President likes people in major government positions who look the part on screen. Inevitably,

Does America want to re-litigate 2020?

The collective memory of Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen has, for most Americans, been buried if not entirely forgotten.  Donald Trump, however, is not the sort of man who moves on from such matters. In his mind, Crooked Joe Biden stole the election from him through widespread voter fraud, at the heart of which was Fulton County, Georgia. And now a succession of court battles that started with him in the dock is ending with Team Trump doing the prosecuting.  The FBI and his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, have raided a warehouse in Fulton stuffed with 2020 votes and taken them away in trucks.

The unspoken logic of the anti-ICE mob

A basic question all Americans should ask themselves before they draw any other conclusions about events in Minneapolis is this: when is it right to interfere with law enforcement? The consequences of doing so are, obviously, potentially grave, even fatal. Obstructing or harassing officers of the law could put their lives in danger as well as yours, and bystanders’ as well. Law enforcement, of necessity, involves risks and the potential for violence, which officers are authorized to use and criminals – or third parties – are not. One side in the Minneapolis turmoil does not accept these premises, or at least doesn’t accept they apply when the laws to be

anti-ICE

Melania the movie will send Bluesky ballistic

As America stayed inside at the weekend, terrified and frozen, the White House hosted its own movie night: the first-ever screening of Melania, an insider-access documentary about the First Lady, directed by the disgraced Brett Ratner. This film that old-school Hollywood wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole is coming to theaters everywhere on Friday, whether you see it or not. The Hollywood Reporter, which met the devil at a crossroads in exchange for access, posted exclusive photos of the event, which included “black-tied VIPs, monogrammed popcorn tubs and a military band playing movie tunes”, as well as bespoke black-and-white cookies bearing Melania’s name. The band actually played “Melania’s Waltz,” a special

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MINNEAPOLIS

A conservative in the chaos of Minnesota

If you live in Minnesota, as I do, don’t turn on your TV. Don’t log on to social media. Don’t turn on the radio, pick up a newspaper or drive under an overpass. We are approaching a zombie apocalypse in Gotham City level of breakdown. And all indications point to more of the same – or worse. Rioters are rushing to make this the Winter of Despair, modeled after 2020’s BLM Summer of Love. There wasn’t much in terms of consequences for those responsible for Minneapolis’s devastation by fire and looting, so this winter, the activists have reconvened for an epic reunion of riff-raff hell-bent on destroying whatever respectability (and

The fight over the future of the Chagos Islands

Westminster, London Donald Trump might be determined to acquire more US land – here in Britain, however, our leaders are determined to give it away. A deal to hand over control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is in the final stages of parliamentary approval. Trump initially backed the deal, yet U-turned after his Greenland overtures were spurned. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY,” he declared online. “NO REASON WHATSOEVER.” Bemused, he later asked a British reporter in the Oval Office: “I don’t know why they’re doing it. Do they need money?” Keir Starmer chose to make the fate of the islands a

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Will the FBI burn through Kash?

FBI Director Kash Patel popped up in several news stories on Friday. He does this periodically, like a skin or glandular disorder – a Kash Rash, as it were. Looking as though he’d spent last night consuming the contents of the FBI’s seized-drug storeroom, Patel announced at an airport presser that the FBI had seized former Canadian snowboarder Ryan Wedding, a “modern-day El Chapo” or Pablo Escobar who was running a multinational drug ring out of Mexico City. That seemed like good news, as did the fact that Patel said that there had been a 210 percent increase in gang takedowns and a reduction in FBI operational expenses in his

Kash Patel

The odious attempt to compare Trump’s health to Biden’s

Trump Derangement Syndrome has become horribly over-diagnosed. Now, anyone who expresses doubts about his wondrous abilities – or just fails to repeat the White House’s preferred talking points – risks being branded a “TDS” sufferer. It’s boring. Still, there remains a large faction of elite journalists, social-media influencers and political actors who loathe Donald Trump with a pathological intensity and who feel their mission in life must be to undermine him by whatever means necessary. They have spent the last decade condemning Trump and his supporters as conspiracy loons even as they leap from one dark theory to the next – Trump is a Russian asset! A closet Nazi! An

trump

How Trump’s Greenland strategy could imperil his legacy

President Trump has returned home from Davos, Switzerland, basking in the glow of his latest diplomatic Houdini act. For weeks, the President made Europe shudder with fear and sputter with rage as he abruptly escalated his demand for a total US takeover of Greenland. He said he was ready to launch an invasion or reignite a trade war to do it, even in the face of threats that such an act would destroy NATO. On Truth Social, the President shared a post suggesting NATO was a greater threat to America than Russia or China, along with AI slop depicting not just Greenland but also Canada under US dominion. To pick

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Are you long on America?

Donald Trump has completed the first year of his second presidency – and remains a truly divisive figure. He may have pulled back, after an absurd escalation, from his apparent threat to annex Greenland by force. But European leaders continue to berate him for his turbulent behavior in international affairs, and a growing number of Republicans are turning against his erratic foreign policy. Last week, the cry on global markets was “Sell America,” after the President ratcheted up trade hostilities with long-standing US allies by announcing yet another round of punitive tariffs on several European countries for refusing to agree that America should own Greenland outright. The US is a