The Social World

Tag: MAGA

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene: anti-Trump resistance hero?

    Marjorie Taylor Greene: anti-Trump resistance hero?

    It is always interesting to see who the American left claims are the leaders of the American right.

    There was a time during President Trump’s first term when Steve Bannon fit the role – and relished playing it. Back then most days brought another media profile of the dark genius of the MAGA movement. The Guardian, New York Times and others were obsessed. Vanity Fair would send reporters to follow Bannon as he conquered America and, er, Europe. Documentary crews were perennially in tow. Indeed one documentary following Bannon around included a scene in which they followed him to the showing of another documentary about him from a crew who had similarly followed him around. At which point you felt that we might fall into some kind of vortex.

    The point is that Bannon was useful for the left. And he in turn found the left useful.

    Around the same time there was a less savory figure called Richard Spencer. The self-professed white nationalist was portrayed as being close to the center of power on the right. After he led a motley band of supporters in a farcical “Hail Trump” session, the left became especially obsessed. But Spencer was never important on the American right, let alone anywhere close to power. It merely suited a section of the media to present him as a bigger presence than he was.

    In the recent furore over the avowedly racist and Holocaust-denying podcaster Nick Fuentes, a similar process seems to be taking place. Fuentes does in fact have some purchase on parts of the young American right – mainly, it seems, because of his delight in never seeing a taboo he does not wish to trample on. Still, it was striking that when the New York Times ran a piece about him earlier this month, it led with a black and white photograph that made him look positively James Dean-esque. Needless to say, Fuentes does not in any way resemble the late film heartthrob. But for some reason the Times decided to portray him in this light. While the American right is fighting to keep Fuentes out of their ranks, the Times seems keen on slipping him right in there.

    The latest person to enjoy a similar transmogrification is Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Until recently you would have been hard-pushed to find a kind word said on the American left about the blonde MAGA Congresswoman. Even most of the American right found her an embarrassment for her behavior on committees and on the floor of the House, as well as for some of her outlandish past social media posts. The kindest thing I ever heard a MAGA figure say about her was that she had a tendency “to get a little too far over her skis.”

    Now she is suddenly acceptable. She is on all the left-wing talk shows. CNN has interviewed MTG (as she is sometimes known) sympathetically, and listened with sincerity as she has decried the use of “toxic” rhetoric in politics. The fact that “toxic” was practically MTG’s only brand until yesterday would ordinarily lead to an outburst of skepticism on the US left. But MTG has become “acceptable” because of one thing and one thing alone – which is that the American left sees that she might just have become useful in their war to bring down President Trump.

    MTG has recently turned against Trump and the two have traded barbs. Which is quite the turnaround for MTG, who had previously been one of those MAGA loyalists who seemed to discern no clear water between Trump and their Lord and Savior.

    The apparent cause of MTG’s turn on the President is the Jeffrey Epstein case. Far be it from me to accuse MTG of being conspiracy-minded, but she is one of those people who believe that absent the release of every file and email that has ever existed relating to Epstein, we are all being lied to about some very major scandals.

    The whole Epstein thing is murky as hell, but it is a scandal which promises to deliver more than it actually does. The problem at the moment is that the controversy has once again focused on Trump. The President’s own friendship with Epstein pretty clearly ended some 20 years ago – long before Epstein’s criminal activity became fully known about. They mixed in the same circles, not least because Epstein mixed in just about every circle of the rich and famous.

    But ever since Trump returned to office a portion of the left and some Trump-haters on the right seem to have decided that Epstein is the most viable tool to take out the President. You might say that Epstein is for Trump’s second term what fake claims of Russian collusion were to his first.

    Yet in order to believe that the Epstein Files contain some smoking gun against the President, you have to believe a number of things. Not least that the Biden administration sat on the Epstein files for four years but didn’t bother to search the material for compromising material on Trump, or that they did search them, found compromising material and chose not to use it – none of which sounds remotely plausible.

    Facing a backlash from Greene and others, Trump has now turned from dismissing the whole Epstein furor as a “hoax” to urging Republicans to get behind calls for full transparency. Which they duly did: on Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted 427-1 to compel the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. Trump must be pretty confident that there is nothing especially compromising about him, and that other people will come out of the information worse.

    To some extent that is already happening. The latest release of emails include a number between Epstein and the Trump-hating author Michael Wolff. In the run-up to the 2016 election (years after Epstein’s conviction), Wolff offered Epstein PR advice and seemed to be trying to collude with him to take down Trump. Not that Wolff has faced much censure for this. It seems it is OK to offer PR advice to a convicted sex offender so long as the cause is a noble, anti-Trump one.

  • The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

    The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

    I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

    Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

    The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

    Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

    Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub – I mean, bar – and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

    Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

    Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

    President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

    Still believes in democracy and – bless his heart – due process. Reads the Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

    Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

    He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

    Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

    Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

    The War Room (The groupchat)

    Where all decisions are made – or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • How Dick Cheney made Donald Trump

    How Dick Cheney made Donald Trump

    Former vice president Dick Cheney, who died on Monday at age 84, loathed Donald Trump. In a 2022 election campaign ad for his daughter, Liz, a congresswoman from Wyoming, he declared: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” Yet Cheney was more responsible for Trump’s rise than almost anyone else in the Republican establishment. He helped to mastermind the calamitous Iraq War and preached the unitary executive theory of the presidency. Instead of vilifying Cheney, MAGA-world should offer him a bouquet of appreciation.

    Recall that it was during the 2016 South Carolina primary that Trump first showed his real independence from the folderol surrounding the Iraq War. Trump created shock and awe by denouncing it. “The war in Iraq,” he said, “was a big, fat mistake.” Until then, Republicans had marched in lockstep beneath the George W. Bush banner.

    After Trump’s abortive attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Liz Cheney headed a commission to expose his machinations. But it blew up in her face. The Cheney brood now became heroes to Democrats. During the 2024 election Kamala Harris was endorsed by Dick Cheney. Harris said that she was “honored” to have the backing of the “well-respected” Cheney. Well-respected? Harris was in essence effacing the true legacy of Cheney and the Iraq War. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole acutely notes that Trump had recognized that Americans had “soured on the extended occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan… It is quite extraordinary that the Democrats allowed Trump a virtual monopoly on the exploitation of this profound disillusionment, and that Harris never stopped to ask who, exactly, Dick Cheney remains “well-respected” by.

    Who indeed? The Cheney era has become synonymous with imperial overreach and disdain for constitutional safeguards. Cheney’s hubris had its sources in Watergate, when he served as a young aide in the Nixon administration. He rose seamlessly in Republican ranks, entering Congress in the 1978 election as a representative from Wyoming. His highpoint was serving as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War when America repelled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

    But Cheney and his aides, including Paul Wolfowitz, became obsessed with the idea of toppling Saddam himself from power. This idee fixe led Cheney to empower the neocons after 9/11, when America failed to capture Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora and instead focused its effort on concocting a fictitious case for war in Iraq. Cheney and his cohort succumbed to paranoia, seeking to tie Saddam by whatever means necessary to the attack on the Twin Towers. This was fantasy. But it issued in a war that turned into a debacle. At the summit of their power and influence the neocons were discredited by a bungled crusade to implant democracy in the arid soil of the Middle East.

    It wasn’t until the 2006 midterm elections, when the GOP suffered a brutal buffeting, that George W. Bush began to follow a more pragmatic approach, ousting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney’s influence had passed its high-water mark. Bush started to realize that he had been conned by the neocons. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” Cheney once remarked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” It was indeed. But the consequences of Cheney’s decisions continue to reverberate in insalubrious ways.

  • Donald Trump vs the First Amendment

    Donald Trump vs the First Amendment

    Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a tragedy. A young conservative voice was silenced by savagery, leaving behind grieving family, faithful friends and loyal supporters.

    But something deeply troubling is happening in the aftermath. The Trump administration isn’t just mourning Kirk or pursuing his killer. They’re using his death to justify an unprecedented crackdown on free speech that should alarm every American.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that visa holders are being deported for “celebrating” Kirk’s killing. The State Department warned immigrants against “making light” of his death. An anonymous group called the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation is building a database of social media users who criticized Kirk or his politics. Stephen Miller promised to “identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy” what he calls “terrorist networks” – apparently meaning anyone who expressed the wrong opinion online about Kirk’s death. And Pam Bondi has vowed to go after those espousing “hate speech”.

    Don’t mistake this for justice. It is pure opportunism.

    MAGA supporters need to see the danger clearly. A government that can revoke visas and punish people for social media posts today will have no problem turning the same power on citizens tomorrow. The surveillance tools now aimed at so-called left-wing extremists can just as easily be aimed at conservative voices when political winds shift. The databases being filled with the names of Kirk’s critics can just as easily be filled with the names of Trump’s supporters once Democrats take power again.

    The First Amendment was never meant to protect only comfortable or convenient speech. It was written to protect the difficult and divisive, the words that anger us, unsettle us, even repulse us. Freedom lives in that space. Once the government claims the power to decide which opinions are acceptable, freedom begins to die. What starts as punishment for enemies always ends as control over everyone.

    Every authoritarian government follows the same pattern. First, they identify a sympathetic victim. Then they claim extraordinary measures are needed to protect society. Finally, those “temporary” powers become permanent and expand far beyond their original purpose. The Patriot Act was sold as necessary to fight terrorists after 9/11. Twenty-three years later, those surveillance powers are still being used against ordinary Americans. The same tools meant to catch foreign enemies now monitor parents at school board meetings and peaceful protesters.

    Kirk’s assassination is becoming the Patriot Act for speech. A crackdown on so-called terrorist networks is the first step toward a crackdown on dissent itself.

    Look closely at who’s being targeted. Not just people celebrating murder – though that’s deplorable – but anyone who “criticized” Kirk or “made light” of his death. The definitions keep expanding. What counts as “criticism”? Disagreeing with Kirk’s politics? Questioning his methods? Making a sarcastic comment about conservative media? Who decides what crosses the line from protected speech to deportable offense?

    Anonymous groups are building lists of American citizens based on their social media activity. They openly state their goal is to “clear out Leftwing Radicals” from American institutions. What’s being sold as law enforcement is, in fact, political purging.

    The infrastructure for mass censorship is already being built. The administration is reviewing 55 million visa holders for “violations.” They’re monitoring college campuses, tracking online activity, and encouraging citizens to report on each other. These systems don’t disappear when administrations change. They get inherited and expanded. The Democrat who defeats Trump’s successor will have access to every database, every surveillance tool, every legal precedent being established today.

    Real patriots defend the Constitution when it is inconvenient. Especially when it is inconvenient. Supporting free speech for those you agree with is easy. Supporting it for those you despise is what separates America from authoritarian nations.

    Trump supporters should ask themselves: Do you want the federal government deciding which opinions are acceptable? Do you trust future Democratic administrations with such powers? Do you want your children growing up in a country where citizens spy on one another’s posts? The answer should be a resounding no.

    Charlie Kirk believed in conservative principles. Honor his memory by defending them. Limited government. Individual liberty. Constitutional rights that belong to all citizens, not just political allies. His assassination was devastating, and it calls for justice through lawful means. But using that tragedy to justify greater government control over speech betrays everything he stood for.

    The First Amendment has survived wars, depressions, and deadly terrorist attacks. It must also survive Trump’s assault. Charlie Kirk’s legacy should not signal the death of free speech in America. It should stand as its defense, carried proudly by citizens who refuse to surrender their most sacred right.

  • The case for MAGA imperialism

    Empire has always been part of the American tradition. We are a sequel state to the greatest empire in world history. Our period of colonial tutelage under that empire taught the lessons of legitimate territorial expansion against French and Spanish rivals. Our continental aggrandizement after independence was necessary. Later overseas expansion, including periods of imperial apprenticeship in places such as Liberia, the Philippines and Panama, was further evidence of our colonial métier. Like it or not, imperialism and colonialism are congenital to the American experiment. This has been the case since 1779, when the Continental Congress branded a proposal to limit westward expansion an “intolerable despotism.” Since then, our imperial project has experienced constant cycles of confidence and self-doubt. Fair-weather friends – such as Niall Ferguson and Max Boot – scamper for the exit when times are tough. But history shows the need to stay the course. Making America great again will require the United States to take up its old vocation.

    The Trump administration inherits two of the most critical imperial roles that we currently undertake: the defense of Taiwan and the defense of Israel, two countries that are, properly speaking, imperial dependents: without American support they would not exist. So far, the US has borne those responsibilities admirably. But the past six months have shown that a more avowedly imperial policy represents the best means of advancing the national interest. Donald Trump’s highlighting of the misgovernance of Greenland and the Panama Canal region has been energizing through its cold-blooded pragmatism. The US has had interests in these jurisdictions for decades, but it was only the credible threat of imperial annexation that could extract the concessions made by Panama and the Danish Crown.

    Similarly, the revival of the very old idea of a North American union with Canada has been a jolt in the arm to our listless northern neighbor. It has elected a conservative in all but name as prime minister, is boosting defense spending to bear its fair share of the NATO burden, and is reinforcing the porous border that it long ignored. Mass immigration is being checked and fiscal balance taken seriously. We could not suffer our northern border becoming some semi-failed European welfare state with colorful socks, and it was only our threat to revise the verdict of 1812 that has forestalled this.

    Still outstanding on the overseas front is how to reconstruct Gaza into a stable and humane enclave which has been fumigated of terrorists. Trump (and Israel) recognize that there is no going back to Palestinian self-governance. Much as 60,000 Lebanese demanded a restoration of French rule after a port explosion leveled Beirut in 2020, there is a case for a restored western mandate in Gaza led by the US. Making America great again requires the US to take up these new loads of the “enlightened man’s burden” (which is apparently what Rudyard Kipling meant when he spoke of “the white man’s burden”) lest we fail in our historic mission as provider of ordered rule to places of strategic significance. The US military has been quietly building up its ranks and training civil affairs officers since being caught with its domestic governance pants down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sooner the Trump administration initiates the project, the better. Lessons learned from the successful colonial occupation of Iraq and the failed one in Afghanistan can be applied. In time, a self-governing enclave could emerge.

    The other outstanding overseas imperial calling is in Yemen. The country has been a failed state since the British fled from their shrinking perimeter in Aden in 1967. The United Arab Emirates set up a de facto colonial regime in Aden in 2017, the Southern Transitional Council. It is now part of a larger, Saudi-orchestrated governing body for the non-Houthi areas of Yemen, the Presidential Leadership Council. Both are supported by the UN as well as the EU. Now that Iran’s ability to support the chaos in the rest of the country has been weakened, there is an opportunity for the US to form a governing coalition for the country as a whole with Abraham Accords partners. This would secure the maritime route through the Suez Canal and bring further security to both Saudi Arabia and Israel. That would be an imperial mission to applaud.

    Finally, there is the pressing question of restoring American rule in the US itself. The US-Mexico border that was delineated in 1848 never acted as a barrier to illegal immigration. Since then, tens of millions of people from around the world have used the southern border to colonize themselves as US subjects. But colonialism must be in the gift of the colonizer, not the colonized. Aside from a stronger border and an end to birthright citizenship, our growing imperial capacities must play a role here. The imperial waystation in South Sudan that the Supreme Court declared legal in early July, as well as our use of El Salvador for the same purpose, are examples of how our imperial network abroad can be used to protect our imperial gains at home.

    A more robust defense of our imperial story is also the best way to fight the “decolonizing” impulse at home. The great decolonizer Barack Obama represented a break with the long tradition of black patriotism since the American founding. The “return to Africa” neo-segregation of black communities that this encouraged could only be a farce since black people have no actual interest in decolonizing themselves from white communities.

    More serious was Obama’s encouragement of Native American separation and its entailed obliteration of American imperial history on the continent. Under the Obama and then Biden administrations, the entire Department of the Interior gave itself over to “decolonizing” American land management in favor of “Native American” groups. What is required now is to develop a robust legal strategy to combat this steady erosion of the republic.

    The US became an empire because most actual Indians, as with most California and Texas Mexicans, most Spanish Floridians and, later, most Filipinos and South Vietnamese and South Koreans, preferred American rule to the available “indigenous” alternatives. The Taiwanese prefer US suzerainty to rule by China and Israel certainly prefers it to erasure. The American experiment has been an imperial one from the very first; the sooner we affirm this – at home as well as abroad – the better.

  • Will one rotten rebrand spoil Cracker Barrel?

    Will one rotten rebrand spoil Cracker Barrel?

    No one thinks the Cracker Barrel rebrand is a particularly good idea. The entire charm of Cracker Barrel lay in the farmhouse attic vibe, the nana’s candy dish assortment in the gift shop and the menu, which served up the best chicken and dumplings or biscuits and gravy and sweet tea possible from a fast-casual chain with horrible wooden chairs. Still, the melodrama surrounding this story, the rising and falling stock prices, the online mocking and gloating, seems a little overblown. Not everything has to be political. Cracker Barrel certainly doesn’t.

    For those of you who’ve been wandering around the fields with a bucket on your head this week, Cracker Barrel has streamlined. They’ve decided to remove Old Man Joe or whatever his name is from the logo, though keeping the same basic font for the color scheme, and have retooled some store interiors, making it look less like a surreal Indiana BnB nightmare and more like something Chip and Joanna Gaines might have shiplapped together.

    The new Cracker Barrel vibe met with equal condemnation from online Red and Blue America. The Steak and Shake chain, which made news earlier this year for its brave MAHA decision to fry potatoes in beef tallow, tweeted out the old Cracker Barrel logo with a surprisingly long manifesto:

    “Sometimes, people want to change things just to put their own personality on things. At CB, their goal is to just delete the personality altogether. Hence, the elimination of the “old-timer” from the signage. Heritage is what got Cracker Barrel this far, and now the CEO wants to just scrape it all away… At Steak n Shake, we take pride in our history, our families, and American values. All are welcome. We will never market ourselves away from our past in a cheap effort to gain the approval of trend seekers.”

    Pretty catty, Steak and Shake, but maybe a little overboard. Cracker Barrel may be MAGA-coded, but Democrats enjoy a nice corporate meat-and-three sometimes, too, just like Trump supporters will sometimes go for an iced caramel macchiato at the heavily Dem-coded Starbucks. The last time I checked, collard greens in pot likker belonged to everyone.
    Unfortunately, the most godawful annoying people on the Democrat side of the ledger appear to agree with me. The horrifying new Trump-parodying social-media presence from California governor Gavin Newsom, which is like a monkey’s paw curse on the extremely online, tweeted out: “WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA ‘CHEESE’ FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR ‘GROCERIES’ (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!! ‘FIX IT’ ASAP! WOKE IS DEAD!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

    Then, to make matters worse, David Hogg came out of the Hogg Pen to say, about the Cracker Barrel rebrand, “Let’s bring the country together and all agree this is bad and needs to be reversed immediately. Not for the left or the right but for America.” And Hogg’s political opposite, Rep. Byron Donalds from Florida, tweeted out, “In college, I worked at @CrackerBarrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot,” which led Hogg to retweet someone who said “I gave my life to christ in a cracker barrel parking lot in Tallahassee” is a lana del rey lyric.”

    OK, have all the sincere people and ironic X hipsters had their say now? Are we done with Cracker Barrel jokes yet? Or are we going to have to endure weeks of memes like the ones I just saw with the old Cracker Barrel logo with the words “Release The Files” in the place of the company name?

    I don’t think the Cracker Barrel rebrand is a particularly good idea, but then again, maybe America has moved on from its self-conception as a continental extension of the Country Bear Jamboree. Middle America doesn’t look like the set of Hee Haw anymore. Not all change is good, but private equity doesn’t always get it wrong, either.

    Once again, Dems are misreading the cultural tea leaves and trying to appeal to a regular-guy demographic that no longer particularly exists. We live in Magnolia nation now; put that in your repurposed corncob pipe and smoke it. Anyone who doesn’t realize that is, in the words of the iconic Cracker Barrel peg game, just an “EG NOR A MOOSE.”

  • Between Trump and Zelensky, there was no breakthrough

    Between Trump and Zelensky, there was no breakthrough

    What a lovely meeting Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies had with Donald Trump. The US President complimented Zelensky on his outfit, German Chancellor Merz on his “great tan,” and said that Finnish President Alexander Stubb was “looking better than I’ve ever seen you look!” Everyone – especially Zelensky – laughed uproariously at all Trump’s jokes. And all eight leaders present were at great pains to pretend that they were on the same page when it came to achieving peace in Ukraine. 

    But there was one small thing missing from this White House festival of bonhomie and mutual flattery, and that was a substantive discussion of the actual nuts and bolts of a deal that Vladimir Putin would be prepared to accept. 

    One of the elephants in the room was the question of whether Zelensky would be prepared to cede more territory in the Donbas as the price of peace. Another was whether Zelensky was ready to recognize formally part or all of the territories occupied by Putin since 2014 as parts of Russia. Indeed any questions to which Zelensky would be likely to say “no way!” remained tactfully un-discussed. 

    Trump seemed to have taken a page from the great diplomatist Bing Crosby’s playbook – you’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and (preferably) not mess with Mr. In-Between. Which is preferable, all agreed, to the course Trump took during Zelensky’s last visit to the Oval Office in February where the Ukrainian president was browbeaten, talked over, insulted and then dismissed. So in that important sense relations have improved considerably. True, unlike Putin, Zelensky got no red carpet, nor a ride in Trump’s presidential limousine. But he did at least receive a warm welcome and immediate words of praise for having worn a suit this time. 

    Anyone who hoped that Monday’s meeting would achieve a major breakthrough was disappointed. Trump repeatedly made it clear that it was he and Putin who were the main deciders of the peace process, Europe’s leaders the subordinates. He told his European visitors that he had spoken to Putin just before their meeting and would be calling him again right after. Trump was in his element as he acted as master of ceremonies, treating the European leaders like a CEO consulting his board members before top-level negotiations with a rival company. 

    There was one clear signal, though, of the key issue which will be pivotal in the endgame of the war – security guarantees for Ukraine from its Western allies. Putin, in his remarks after his meeting with Trump in Alaska, mentioned that he was “naturally prepared to work on” security guarantees to Ukraine. Trump later claimed in calls to his European colleagues that Putin had “agreed” to such guarantees – and later leaks from the White House suggested that the US would also be amenable to signing up too. 

    In the White House on Monday Giorgia Meloni led the charge on trying to define what those guarantees would look like, suggesting that they should mirror NATO’s Article 5 that calls for (but, importantly, does not oblige) members to regard an attack on one as an attack on them all. Sir Keir Starmer suggested that “we’re talking about security not just of Ukraine, we’re talking about the security of Europe and the United Kingdom as well.”

    In TV appearances, both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s special envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff have emphasized the idea of security guarantees to Ukraine as a major breakthrough. In truth, such proposed covenants are nothing new. In Istanbul in April 2022 several draft agreements drawn up in the course of talks between Ukraine and Russia included detailed clauses on the scope and nature of possible Western security guarantees outside the framework of NATO. But those peace talks were abandoned in favor of isolating Russia and encouraging Ukraine to defeat Moscow’s forces in the field.  

    Crucially, in Istanbul the Russians had – absurdly – demanded to be a guarantor of Ukraine of future security, just as they had been in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, and to have a veto over any international intervention. That would obviously have rendered the whole idea of a security guarantee ridiculous. It remains to be seen if Putin chooses to reprise that extraordinary, deal-breaking demand. But more likely the Kremlin will suggest that China be one of the future guarantors of Ukraine’s security, which will pose a mind-bending new set of challenges for Ukraine’s allies. 

    Overall, though, all sides can be content with the Washington conference. There was no breakthrough, but neither was there a trainwreck. Importantly, Trump forbore from browbeating the Europeans for freeloading on US military budgets, for failing to pull their weight in arming Ukraine, or for failing to stop the war when they could have – all previous MAGA talking points. And Trump also did not push back on a single European argument, even when France’s Emmanuel Macron and Merz both spoke of returning to the idea of a ceasefire before final peace talks. That point had already been jettisoned by Trump at Anchorage when he bought into Putin’s new timetable, but he was tactful enough not to remind his guests of that. 

    The Europeans, for their part, did not blast Trump for abandoning Ukraine by cutting off weapons and money, nor accuse him of selling Kyiv’s interests down the river, nor did they denounce him for giving an indicted war criminal the red carpet treatment or demand why Putin had not been arrested on arrival in Anchorage. In short, everyone in the room – including Trump himself – was on best behavior.  

    Is best behavior the same as actual Western unity? It is as long as nobody raises the difficult questions such as land giveaways, Russian language rights, return of stolen children, payment of reparations, lifting of sanctions on Russia, unbanning pro-Russian political parties and TV stations, lifting Ukrainian sanctions on five thousand of Zelensky’s political opponents, or holding long overdue elections, to name just a few of the thorny issues that stand on the road from war to peace. 

    Trump’s next step, he says, will be to organize a trilateral meeting with himself, Putin and Zelensky. It’s a tall order – not least because Putin has made it clear that he doesn’t consider Zelensky a legitimate leader and Zelensky passed an actual law in 2022 forbidding negotiations with the Putin regime. And if it does happen, we can be sure that all the thorniest of questions will be asked right up front – and nobody will be on their best behavior. 

  • Sandwich arrest reveals lawless Justice Department

    Sandwich arrest reveals lawless Justice Department

    It’s one thing to hear about political radicals clashing with federal officers in the streets. It’s another thing entirely when one of those radicals is a Department of Justice employee.

    On August 10, in Washington, DC, 37-year-old Sean Charles Dunn – then working in the DoJ’s Criminal Division – hurled a Subway sandwich at a federal law enforcement officer during President Trump’s controversial federal crime crackdown in the city. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. Video shows Dunn yelling profanity-laced insults – “f– you! … I don’t want you in my city!”– before throwing the sandwich and running. When caught, Dunn admitted it outright: “I did it. I threw a sandwich.”

    The aftermath was swift. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced his immediate firing. US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro filed felony charges for assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer. Bondi didn’t mince words: “If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you. Not only is he fired, he’s been charged with a felony.”

    Here’s the part that should make every law-abiding American pause: this wasn’t just a rowdy college protester or a fringe activist. This was someone who worked inside the very department tasked with upholding the rule of law.

    When you sign on to serve in law enforcement – or even in its administrative ranks – you are pledging to respect the work of officers, even when you don’t like the political decisions guiding them. That doesn’t mean blind loyalty. It does mean you understand that the men and women in uniform are not your personal punching bags for political grievances.

    What’s most alarming is that Dunn’s outburst wasn’t just a lapse in judgment – it was a glimpse into how normalized political violence has become in certain quarters of the left. The progressive defense of “punch a Nazi” rhetoric, the romanticizing of “direct action,” the social media clout economy that rewards confrontation – all of it has made some people genuinely believe that expressing dissent through physical aggression is noble.

    It’s not.

    There are plenty of valid criticisms of Trump’s DC crackdown. You can argue, as many conservatives have, that deploying federal agents in local jurisdictions without consent is a serious violation of states’ rights and local governance. You can oppose the policy without ever laying a hand – or a sandwich – on the officers tasked with carrying it out. Those officers didn’t set the policy. They are doing their jobs.

    The problem here isn’t just Dunn’s personal anger – it’s the set of political values that make him think assault is a legitimate response to disagreement. When you believe that your cause is so righteous that the rules don’t apply to you, you’ve already abandoned the principles of a free society.

    Political violence doesn’t have to involve Molotov cocktails or deadly weapons. It can be a brick through a campaign office window, an activist spitting on a political opponent, or yes—a sandwich thrown at a federal agent. It’s all the same root: contempt for lawful, peaceful disagreement.

    The left loves to paint conservatives as the real threat to political stability – January 6, they remind us, is proof that right-wing political violence is the danger of our time. But you won’t hear them talk about their own side’s flirtations with it. From Antifa riots to congressional Democrats refusing to condemn attacks on pro-life centers, the double standard is glaring.

    If Dunn’s victim had been a progressive protester and Dunn a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump appointee, the media would be calling this an act of fascist intimidation. Instead, it’s treated as an oddball “sandwich story” with a bit of late-night comedy potential.

    But there’s nothing funny about it. It’s a reminder that the institutions we’re supposed to trust to uphold the law are not immune from harboring people who openly disrespect it. It’s a reminder that political tribalism can eat away at basic civic decency. And it’s a reminder that, increasingly, the left’s answer to disagreement isn’t persuasion – it’s escalation.

    Conservatives should be consistent here. We can criticize federal overreach while still defending the dignity of the people carrying out lawful orders. We can condemn both January 6 rioters and DoJ sandwich-throwers without hypocrisy, because our standard isn’t “my side, right or wrong.” It’s the rule of law.

    Dunn’s case will move through the courts. His career in government is over. But the deeper issue – an emerging culture where some Americans think they have moral permission to attack those they disagree with – is far from resolved.

    We have to start calling it out, no matter which political jersey the offender wears. Because if you’re willing to assault “the other side” today, you’re one step away from justifying something far worse tomorrow.

    It’s OK not to agree with what’s going on in your city. It’s OK to protest, to organize, to speak your mind. That’s America. But when you cross the line into physical confrontation, you’re not defending democracy – you’re corroding it. And if you work for the Department of Justice, you should know that better than anyone.

  • Jussie Smollett’s conspiracy theory

    Jussie Smollett’s conspiracy theory

    Like a cold sore that pops up when your immune system is busy elsewhere, or a text-thread chain that you thought had concluded, Jussie Smollett has returned to the conversation. He has a new single from Rowdy Records, a movie (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in) on Tubi, a role in the Fox reality series ‘Special Forces’ that airs in September and he features in a Netflix documentary, The Truth About Jussie Smollett? that airs later this month. Now he’s doing interviews as well.

    In a chat with Variety’s Tatiana Siegel this week, Smollett claims that the alleged hate-crime at the hands of two MAGA-hat wearing, noose-holding, bleach-splashing white guys he experienced in 2019, later revealed to the world as a hoax, was, in fact, not a hoax. Not only did it happen, he says, but it was part of a deeper conspiracy that involved the Chicago Police Department and then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.

    “I’m not an investigative reporter or a detective,” Smollett tells Siegel. “I can’t sit and tell you exactly, beat by beat, what happened. I can only tell you what did not happen. And what did not happen is the story that’s been out there for almost seven years, that somehow I would have even a reason to do something as egregious as this.”

    On the one hand, Smollett is small potatoes, a strange E! True Hollywood story sidebar to the era when woke peaked and everything was a hate crime. When the farce of his situation came to light, the bubble popped, the fever broke and we all had a nice laugh. Jussie got a (later-overturned) conviction for felony disorderly conduct, and the Nigerian brothers who he drew into his scheme wrote a book called Bigger Than Jussie: The Disturbing Need for a Modern-Day Lynching.

    But now he’s back, certainly not bigger than ever, but giving it another shot, and showing that, no matter how much someone disgraces themselves in American life, there’s always an avenue for a comeback, as long as people are willing to self-perpetuate myths and accept a little debasement. “Every single other person’s story has changed multiple times,” Smollett says in the interview. “Mine has never. I have nothing to gain from this.”

    In fact, he has everything to gain. He can gain money, a shred of his former stellar reputation, and, most importantly, publicity. “Every time I have to go do something now, I tell myself, ‘Time to be Whitney Houston,’” he tells Variety. “It’s like a role that you’re playing when you go out there, where it’s who you are, but it’s not really who you are.”

    It doesn’t matter who Jussie Smollett really is in private, or in his own mind. He could be the kindest and tenderest son, brother, friend, coworker and fiancé who ever lived. But to the public, he’s someone who tried to exploit a tense political climate around race for personal gain, and failed in the stupidest way possible. The grift is eternally real, and in his comeback apology tour he’s acting just as disingenuous as he did during his headline-grabbing moment. If he’s Whitney Houston, then I’m Charles Dickens.

    Smollett has got less juice than the average real housewife or B-tier podcaster. But in a world where Netflix has its own reality universe, and where reality stars and former A-list celebrities can endlessly compete for cash and publicity on various platforms, there may still be a path forward for Jussie. Bottom feeders can survive in a rich media ecosystem. Sometimes, they even rise to the top.

  • Is it safe to be conservative in Hollywood?

    Is it safe to be conservative in Hollywood?

    The news that the actress Gina Carano has secured a climbdown and undisclosed (but undoubtedly) generous settlement from Disney over her dismissal from The Mandalorian television series in 2021 is sure to have far-reaching consequences that stretch far beyond La La Land. Carano posted a triumphant statement on X, saying, “I hope this brings some healing to the force,” thanked Elon Musk for bankrolling her case and concluded by saying “Yes, I’m smiling.” Disney, meanwhile, released their own, terse assessment in which they announced, “We look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”

    It was a win for Carano on every level. She was humiliatingly dismissed from The Mandalorian after comparing her status as a Hollywood conservative to being a Jew during the Holocaust. While this might have had some hyperbole to it, the actress rightly pointed out that her co-star Pedro Pascal – an actor firmly to the Hollywood Left – made similarly emotive statements on social media, using the Holocaust comparison, and went undisciplined by the higher-ups at Disney. The question now is what the settlement means not just for Carano, but for conservatives in the industry more generally.

    It used to be that gay actors were advised to keep their sexuality to themselves, for fear of alienating their potential audience, but this has been soundly disproved thanks to the mainstream success of everyone from Jonathan Bailey and Luke Evans to Kate McKinnon and Ncuti Gatwa. However, Hollywood conservatives are still a rare breed. There are many leading actors, from Mel Gibson to Dennis Quaid, who have been vocal in their support of Donald Trump, but comparatively few younger A-listers who have dared to voice right-wing or Republican sympathies in public. The revelation that Sydney Sweeney was a registered Republican, and the subsequent anger – coupled with the storm-in-a-teacup American Eagle–jeans advert that she starred in – that this engendered in liberal circles would make you believe that she was a fully paid-up fascist, rather than simply a supporter of the current governing party in the United States.

    Still, Hollywood has always been a left-leaning industry, and while its most vocal practitioners may find that their invective damages their careers irreparably (step forward John Cusack, whose transformation from ’90s indie darling to furious keyboard warrior is now complete), the likes of Pascal and Mark Ruffalo can offer their unvarnished opinions without pushback from the executives who hire them. Still, a more intriguing subsection of the industry are those who are, in the words of Jon Voight’s clandestine dining society, “Friends of Abe”: actors or filmmakers who have right-wing or conservative views that they are unwilling to share in public for fear of jeopardizing their career. It is a long, long list – any reader of this could probably name a dozen leading figures who are likely to vote Republican, even if not all of them remain full MAGA supporters – but it has been, up until now, a kind of McCarthyite club in reverse. Nobody wants to lose a successful career because they have voted the wrong way.

    It therefore will be fascinating to see whether Carano’s victory leads to a permanent sea change in the industry, or whether it’s just a blip before business-as-usual resumes. Certainly, the success of faith-based films, often starring openly conservative actors such as Kelsey Grammer, indicates that there is a market for films that the American Right, in particular, will lap up, and the news that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ sequel, currently titled Resurrection, has begun filming for release in 2027 will be catnip for its considerable fanbase. Yet these might be isolated examples rather than a new trend. What will change the industry forever is when there are as many Sydney Sweeneys as Scarlett Johanssons, whose political views are regarded as unexceptional, and then – and only then – being a Hollywood conservative will no longer seem like an oxymoron, or worse.