The Social World

Tag: Politics

  • The theater of Washington

    The theater of Washington

    Suddenly it’s Ibsen season in Washington, DC. It’s true that only Shakespeare’s plays are performed worldwide more often than Henrik Ibsen’s. But to have two of the great 19th-century Norwegian playwright’s works running at once in the nation’s capital is unusual. And the works in question – An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck – deliver contradictory messages. Together they say something not only about the state of the arts in Washington, but also about the state of the liberal mind.

    Politics is very much a presence on the capital’s stages. The city’s two main Shakespeare organizations, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Folger Theatre, last year presented seasons heavily influenced by the presidential election. Folger’s Romeo and Juliet made the Montagues and Capulets representatives of rival political parties, though the point was rather lost in a messy production that also tried to be trendy.

    The STC was subtler, with a lineup that spoke to liberal electoral anxieties. Babbitt, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel, is partly the tale of a demagogue’s rise. Yet there was also a post-election production of Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s reflection on the lives of Viennese Jews as bourgeois anti-Semitism made way for Nazi violence, that spoke to the darkest fears, or the most overheated rhetoric, of theater-going liberals.

    Knowing the politics of the capital and its theaters, one isn’t surprised to see Enemy revived. On the surface, Ibsen’s play about a scientist who discovers an environmental hazard that threatens to upend the economy of a resort town – and is met with furious denunciations by the authorities for his discovery – seems like a parable flattering to many a crusading liberal. And sure enough, the program for this production drew a parallel between Ibsen’s protagonist, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, to liberals the hero (and to the right, the villain) of America’s Covid response. “At least one congressman has labeled Dr. Fauci an ‘enemy of the people’,” the program noted. It’s a phrase Trump bandied about, too.

    Yet Ibsen was no mere liberal, although the extent of his distrust for ideology is masked by Amy Herzog’s “new version” of Enemy, which debuted on Broadway last year and was staged in DC last month. The authentic Stockmann, as Ibsen wrote him, says near the play’s end: “I only want to knock a few ideas into the heads of these mongrels: that the so-called liberals are free men’s most dangerous enemies; that party platforms wring the necks of every young and promising truth; and that party-political-opportunism turns morality and justice upside down…”

    He adds: “We have to get rid of the party bosses – a party boss is just like a wolf – a ravenous wolf,” words that wouldn’t comfort an audience that might include Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. Ibsen’s Stockmann ends up something of a Nietzschean, declaring himself “one of the strongest men in the whole world,” an heroic individual standing against party and press, rejecting the hypocrisies of those who claim to be altruistic progressives or, in the case of radical newspapermen, revolutionaries.

    Herzog’s Stockmann, as presented in DC, is an altogether tamer animal whose concluding words instead hymn the power of imagination to lead us to a better world. Ibsen has been rewritten to sound like Kamala Harris – the party bosses have won. Do DC theater-goers appreciate the irony?

    The point in An Enemy of the People is to stand by the truth, no matter whom it offends or however great the suffering one endures on account of doing so. Stockmann loses his job and becomes the most hated man in his community rather than compromise his message. So what is the point of a theater company presenting the play in a compromised form? Ibsen was concerned about something more than the purity of a town’s water supply. Liberals of his own time were scandalized; it’s a testament to his genius that he remains ideologically indigestible.

    Something of his intended meaning does come through despite the censorship, however, and even a viewer less skeptical of progressive than myself might wonder, watching this Enemy, whether a figure as demonized by the political authorities and progressive journalists as Stockmann is better matches Fauci – a state employee – or the independent critics of government Covid policy who suffered for their skepticism, like the now-vindicated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

    Then there’s the other Ibsen lately on stage in Washington: STC’s production of The Wild Duck. For all that STC operates in keen awareness of the city’s politics, artistic director Simon Godwin clearly has an interest in art for its own sake, which is in evidence in productions of Chekhov and Ibsen he’s directed recently. The Wild Duck (1884) seems to have been Ibsen’s response to those who took the wrong lessons from Enemy (1882): the truth-telling radical who drives the action of The Wild Duck is a fanatic who brings ruin to his dearest friend. Gregers Werle is a man who sees it as his calling to liberate goldfish from their bowls, to borrow an image from G.K. Chesterton. But instead of allowing them to swim free, men like Werle only reveal that creatures accustomed to captivity cannot survive in an atmosphere of pure truth. They need what Werle’s philosophical opponent in the play, a doctor named Relling, calls “the life-lie.”

    A would-be savior can be a calamity for the very people he intends to save, and Werle is a man of purest enlightenment philosophy and romantic longing for authenticity – a liberal or progressive, in other words. His idealism is diabolical, leading an innocent to suicide and revealing the inability of ordinary people to live the lives an idealist thinks worth living. Ibsen and Nietzsche were contemporaries, and neither had much direct influence on the other. Yet Ibsen is Nietzsche on the stage – even the politically progressive stage of Washington, DC.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The jihadist I knew: my life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner

    The jihadist I knew: my life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner

    As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria.

    Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in doubt as to who was in charge. There were statues of al-Assad on roundabouts, billboards plastered with his face on the highways and pop hits on the radio (“O Bashar, the lofty brow, but who is like you?”). These weren’t masterpieces by any means, but they had a certain catchiness to them, and so, over time, they settled into everyone’s mental jukebox. The old power wished to govern a particular place, namely Syria, and to preside over a particular people, namely Arabs, as the national anthem, Protectors of the Realm, was at such pains to point out.

    The power looming over the nation’s minorities at the moment has no such properties. Many of the foreign fighters still in Syria drifted in at the beginning of the civil war, 14 years ago. Often enough, those fighters burned their passports on arrival. It is hard to know who they are.

    Whoever the culprits, the violence is unmistakable. The powers that have been coming for the Druze over the past few months have also been targeting the Christian community in Syria, which is living through a period of danger unlike anything that has befallen eastern Christianity for over a century. The worst of the anti-Christian violence occurred last June at the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, when an attacker opened fire on the congregation. He killed 25 people before killing himself.

    As I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe

    The Alawites are also in jeopardy. A mixture of government and civilian forces, amounting to some 200,000 fighters, descended on the Alawite homeland, along the Syrian coast, in March and April. The massacres there appear to have left at least 1,500 people dead. In July, when a similar mixture of government and irregular forces attacked the Druze capital, Sweyda, they killed some 1,400 people, of whom 765, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, were civilians “summarily executed by defense and interior ministry personnel.”

    Anyone who visited Syria before the war will be familiar with the spirit that animates this violence. In the time of al-Assad, whenever the propaganda division wanted to haunt the national imagination, it depicted sectarian strife as a big-bellied gourmand sitting down for a feast. The nation of Syria was laid out before this creature like a meat pie. The cartoons depicted him, bloody knife in hand, about to carve the country into bits. That dark prophecy is alive in al-Sharaa’s Syria.

    I happen to know something about what it’s like to live under the power of Islamist extremist rule. In the autumn of 2012, during an ill-fated reporting trip in Syria, a band of jihadis, led by Syria’s then al-Qaeda chief, Mohammed Jolani, now better known as al-Sharaa, took me prisoner. In those days, he and his deputy, Mohammed Adnani, presided over a caliphate-in-miniature which operated out of the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. Adnani subsequently became famous for his behead-the-journalists-in-the-desert videos, and for directing the November 2015 attacks in Paris.

    Almost right away, during the first hours after my arrest, I was told that Islam holds creation to be divided between the realm of the seen and that of the unseen. As Adnani was my first interrogator, I happened to hear his rantings about this important topic most often. In his view, ever since the arrival of the very first Alawite in Syria in the ninth century, the members of this only-in-Syria sect had been inflicting their barbarism and ignorance on the nation. Through the centuries, according to him, the Alawites had lied so subtly, sabotaged Islam so relentlessly and when all else failed, simply terrorized the people, that, eventually, those who truly loved Islam had been forced into hiding. Adnani and al-Sharaa were going to escort all of Syria out of its thousand years of darkness, into the light.

    As I was often held by myself in a windowless cell, I was never permitted out of it without a blindfold. And as I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe. After about 500 days, however, the effect wore off. By that point, I had been transferred to a prison somewhere on the banks of the Euphrates, in eastern Syria. By then, the little family of terrorists I had encountered at first in a warren of rooms beneath a ruined Aleppo hospital was no longer so little. Thanks to an ingenious social media footprint and a “cataract” of American weaponry, as this New York Times article (which I did not have occasion to read at the time) put it, the family now controlled an area the size of Texas.

    What does life inside an international terrorist organization feel like during its rapid growth phase? It feels like young men who’ve been shunted to the side since childhood – who’ve been poor and rootless and frightened of the police – are coming into their own at last. They are up to their ears in guns, combat vests, grenades, and two-way radios. Each one of these young men dreams of a little Playboy mansion in the desert: the four wives, the children underfoot, the loving community all around. In Syria, especially for the fighters who have access to money from Europe, it’s not so hard to make this particular dream come true.

    In a contemporary caliphate, among the fighters at least, much feasting goes on. There is singing. The happiness in the air, the resolve to do away with Syria’s three million Alawites once and for all, the high-tech western weapons, the half-suicidal, half-homicidal foreign fighters: when you live within these phenomena long enough, you will eventually feel that you have drifted away into a country which is just being born, which the outside world has never seen and cannot fathom. You will note how often the citizens here call up the old world on the phone, how they miss it and how much time everyone spends assembling improvised explosive devices.

    An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister

    Eventually, you will feel about this parallel world as you might feel about a novel in which a high school student – a clairvoyant, let’s say – is laughed at for some essential element of herself, and so withdraws into a netherworld of spirits and spells. The reader of a novel like this might not know how exactly the climactic scene will unfold but long before the spectacular bloodbath arrives, he will feel it coming. Life inside the growth phase of an international terrorist organization is like waking up to find that everyone you know is the lead character in such a novel.

    One night in July of 2014, I was let out of my cell. A kerfuffle over who was entitled to the revenue from Syria’s oil fields had broken out. During the subsequent forced march out of eastern Syria, we drove through the desert, always at night, and always without lights. Just before dawn, we would stop at the mouth of a cave or at the base of a sand dune in order to drink tea and catch a few hours of kip.

    At least a few of the pick-up drivers who escorted us have since become generals occupying plush offices in downtown Damascus. An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister. On the surface of things, it would appear that the revolution has turned everything in Syria on its head. But have things really changed all that much? I, for one, am skeptical.

    Looking back, I suspect that in the summer of 2014, when I was traveling through the desert, the nation had already slipped from al-Assad’s grasp. During the day, his men controlled certain checkpoints. But at night, bands of clairvoyants in pickup trucks roamed the countryside. Somewhere, far away, in a palace on a bluff overlooking Damascus, a president who liked to play both sides off against the middle received foreign dignitaries. He smiled for the cameras. Did he know what was going on in his own backyard? Did he care? It wasn’t clear. Meanwhile, every day, a stream of young Europeans keen on guns, pick ups and being married to four women at once was trickling into the country.

    The old stream has begun to flow again, according to a report in Le Figaro. In 2014, some of the men with whom I traveled through the desert were keen on the idea of the slave girl. The markets which used to traffic in Yazidi women are now trafficking in Alawite women. “The matter of the kidnapped women is worrisome to everyone,” an activist, Ihan Mohammed, told France 24. “Every day, two or three women disappear.”

    One of the most vexing issues in Syria in 2014 was the Europeans’ tendency to summon their friends back home into the jihad. A few weeks ago, a British TikTokker, standing at the site of an Israeli bombing in downtown Damascus, issued a general appeal. Evidently, he had seen into a nefarious plot. Israel was planning to pave a highway through Syria, into Iran, his visions told him. “It’s some crazy shit,” he says in his video. “My brothers and sisters, it seems that this is just the beginning of the war with Israel. What are you guys doing? Are you just sitting there? All of you can get on a plane right now…”

    In Syria, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Syria has a new president who is warmly welcomed in western capitals. But on his watch, the blood continued to spill.

  • What the UK can learn from Trump’s second term

    What the UK can learn from Trump’s second term

    When John Swinney, the Scottish National Party leader, and former ambassador Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. “If you’re going to do it,” Scotland’s First Minister suggested, “you might as well go big.”

    This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers, the British Prime Minister’s country residence, on his state visit to the United Kingdom in September, one senior official told him: “You’re the most consequential president of my lifetime.”

    It has not all been decorous. Convention, tradition and the law have been subordinated to delivery. The East Wing redevelopment is a case in point. “When they were bulldozing, they came across some Jefferson-era brick,” explains one White House watcher. “They kept going.” Why tiptoe around the author of the Declaration of Independence when there is a real estate deal to complete?

    And yet the Trumpites see themselves as like the founding fathers, forging a new nation. “The bricks have become trophies,” says one Washingtonian. “It’s like people keeping chunks of the Berlin Wall.” Just as that was torn down, so Trump’s second term, much more radical and (so far) successful than the first, has been one of discontinuity and disruption.

    After speaking to more than a dozen British and American officials, aides to the President and the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, civil servants, former diplomats in both countries, pollsters and political strategists, it is clear there is much that Trump II can teach Britain. In his first term, Trump was held back by staff who didn’t share his world view and the claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This year, he issued hundreds of executive orders and successfully brought migration to a halt at the Mexican border. Private polling circulating in the highest reaches of the Republican party shows that even 22 percent of those who voted for Kamala Harris a year ago support what Trump is doing on immigration.

    Those who helped him triumph say Trump II is very different from Trump I, in that he “brought in a team which supports his agenda” and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, enforced a rigorous policy of loyalty to the President. “In this administration everyone has to be loyal to everyone,” a Washington-based diplomat observes. “There is no infighting, it’s simply not allowed.”

    This unity of purpose and direction has given Trump the ability to “move fast and break things” – and even the British in Washington, who were horrified in 2016, seem energized by his example this time around.

    “Think about the speed at which we’ve been able to move,” says one White House official. “We’ve cut out so much infighting and been able to execute. In the first term a lot of cabinet members thought they should be president. We also found there were a lot of unnecessary layers in the bureaucracy. Now the President gets the right people in the room, and if we need to move fast we will. We didn’t want to be Tony Blair, after a long campaign saying, ‘What do we do now?’ on day one. The President said he wanted the ‘big beautiful bill’ passed by July 4. There was a mentality to get things done. That was very different this time.”

    These are lessons that it is now too late for Labour to learn, after 16 months in power. This is a government that never seemed clear on what it wanted to achieve at the beginning, nor, as things have deteriorated, on what to do next. In Washington, every-one knows what Trump wants. Keir Starmer has been unable to provide similar clarity.

    However, Trump II is providing a blueprint for Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, another populist insurgent, on how to seize power and then use it effectively in the face of a hostile political establishment.

    Key players in the White House and the MAGA movement say that Farage must be ready on day one, as Trump was, to impose his power on the permanent civil service. That could mean ramming legislation through parliament in a single day to give Downing Street the ability to issue emergency orders as well as immediately publish bills on key issues.

    Dominic Cummings, a chief adviser to former prime minister Boris Johnson, who has discussed how to reshape Britain’s civil service with Farage, wrote on Sunday: “A true strategy needs defined goals, a plan for controlling the government and building a team… It should include writing key primary legislation well in advance of an election.”

    In Trump’s case, key policy proposals were worked up by the Heritage Foundation thinktank and the America First Policy Institute, who also identified people who could be drafted in to work on them in government. “They had hundreds of executive orders ready to go,” says one who admired Trump’s preparations. “Susie Wiles said, ‘The President wants to deliver on migration, tariffs and tech,’ and worked out who could deliver it. She sent Stephen Miller to go after woke stuff and [Robert] Lighthizer to work on tariffs. She sent the attorney general’s office to go after the people who tried to shaft Trump in the first term. The orders went out, the foot soldiers did their thing. It was a masterclass.”

    Asked how Reform UK could prepare for power, Sebastian Gorka, the White House head of counterterrorism, says: “That’s easy. Be even more like President Trump.”

    While curbing migration was a central election pledge, Trump’s more notable achievements have come in the international arena. From the once queasy Europeans there is mostly admiration for the ceasefire in Gaza, and for Trump’s decision to attack Iranian nuclear sites with bunker buster bombs.

    “What they’ve done in the Middle East with Netanyahu and Hamas is pretty impressive,” one British official says. Security sources say the attack did not destroy Iran’s nuclear program, as Trump has claimed, but he has “trimmed them” and delayed them by “a few years.” More importantly: “He’s demonstrated they can do it. The bottom line is that they can do it again – and they will.”

    After months of playing footsie with Vladimir Putin, Trump also seems to have finally lost patience with the Russian President and has moved to impose sanctions. “He’s genuinely putting pressure on Putin now,” a Foreign Office source says. “At Chequers he was so angry at him.”

    Trump told Starmer: “I thought he was a good guy, I thought I could do a deal with him, but every time we agree something his people then renege on it.”

    In many ways, the “special relationship” is in rude health. UK and American sources say Jonathan Powell, officially Starmer’s national security adviser and unofficially the head of UK foreign policy, helped with the substance of the Gaza deal, alongside his old boss Tony Blair, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

    When Trump hit Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, he did so just days after Britain sanctioned the same firms. “We were able to give Witkoff a palette of options when the President was deciding what to do,” a senior UK government source says. “And we’re prepared to talk Trump’s language on tariffs.”

    The proto-populist Trump and the cautious, legalistic Starmer are odd bedfellows, but insiders say the relationship is still strong. One witness to their exchanges says, “Keir agrees with him as far as he can and then he’ll say, ‘I disagree on that but let me explain why we see things differently.’ Trump looks at him and listens and says, ‘OK.’”

    Keeping a volatile President on side has been one of the signal successes, if not the signal success, of Starmer’s premiership, but there are some cracks in the paintwork. “President Trump likes winners,” says a Trump aide who follows British politics, “and Starmer is beginning to look like a loser.” On areas of domestic policy Trump has become more outspoken in recent months about what he sees as Britain’s sclerotic economic approach, as well as the failure to exploit energy resources in the North Sea. “The President tore him a new one on this stuff in private at Chequers,” a US official says.

    Among the MAGA fraternity in Trump’s team – including the Vice-President J.D. Vance, Miller and Gorka – there are also concerns that the UK has allowed mass migration to dilute its cultural heritage. All three have an Atlanticist Judeo-Christian concept of western civilization in which American democracy stands in a direct line of descent from Magna Carta, the rule of law and trial by jury.

    Vance has spoken about the erosion of free speech in Europe. Miller is urging British officials to limit migration, as America did between the 1920s and 1970s, to allow new arrivals to be properly integrated. He sees Islamist imports from the tribal areas of Pakistan as a cultural challenge Britain will need to deal with. They cite the fact that the FBI was set up to combat the Mafia, who along with millions of Italian migrants arrived in the US in the 19th century. This is uncomfortable territory for many in No. 10, but one senior figure says: “If your friends are telling you something out of concern, then perhaps we should listen.”

    On illegal migration in particular, the Americans find the inability of the government to prevent cross-Channel crossings inexplicable. Asked what Trump would do, one source suggests: “Tell the French that British intelligence officers and special forces will destroy the boats before they sail. Slash them with knives, use snipers. Burn down the warehouses of the gangs, use cyber to attack their communications.”

    The most acute source of tension was the forced departure of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington over his friendship with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. While Mandelson was an adept operator, some in the President’s circle never forgave his historic anti-Trump comments. Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita publicly condemned the appointment (and privately told British friends that Mandelson was doomed to fail because he had criticized Trump). US officials say White House aides boycotted dinners at Mandelson’s official residence at the instigation of Wiles, though some did meet him outside. “There was great irritation that Mandelson was rammed through in the dying days of the Biden administration,” a source close to the White House reveals.

    Mandelson was initially saved by Mark Burnett, the British-born Apprentice producer who is Trump’s envoy to the UK. He convinced Trump that Mandelson was contrite. A US diplomat says: “Mark knew a rejection would be awkward for Morgan McSweeney [Starmer’s chief of staff],” who had pushed Mandelson’s case. The episode suggests the Trump team, often depicted as a bull in a China shop with allies, actually has a sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of No. 10’s internal issues.

    Insiders say LaCivita will probably run “opposition research” on any new candidate for ambassador. “Do not pick someone who has, at any point, gone on the record to criticize Trump,” the US diplomat says. That rules out Mark Sedwill, the former cabinet secretary, who has denounced Trump publicly for “blundering” and “capriciousness with allies.” It is understood that he has not actually applied.

    Those with their hats in the ring include Christian Turner, the political director at the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and Simon Manley, who was ambassador to the World Trade Organization and the United Nations in Geneva until July, plus a British Ministry of Defence official. Oliver Robbins, the British Foreign Office permanent secretary, is expected to give Starmer a list of those who are “appointable” by the end of the month.

    Varun Chandra, Starmer’s business liaison man, who played a key role in ensuring that Britain got reduced tariffs, is widely seen as the frontrunner. The US diplomat says Chandra got his current role because Mark Burnett told Starmer’s team that “he knows how to talk to Americans.” A second source says: “Lutnick loves him, Bessent loves him, Susie Wiles loves him.” It is also said that James Roscoe, the acting ambassador, is well plugged in with the White House; US officials say Trump “likes him” and they hope he remains in some capacity.

    The final area of potential tension is China, where Trump is trying to neutralize Beijing’s control of the global market in rare earth minerals, while Starmer is desperate to go to China to secure investment. Labour is embroiled in the fallout from the recent collapse of the trial of two suspected Chinese spies and Beijing’s demand that it be allowed to build its vast new embassy in London, which many view as a security risk. “It’s been made clear by Beijing that Keir’s trip to China is contingent on them getting the embassy,” a government source says.

    Many in Washington are skeptical about whether the economic spoils of cozying up to Beijing will be worth the political costs. When UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited China she only secured investments worth £600 million ($785 million), a rounding error in government finances. By contrast, whoever becomes ambassador to the US will try to hurry into play the £150 billion ($196 billion) pledged by US companies as part of the recent UK-US tech deal, which Chandra and Mandelson helped secure.

    It is not all good news for Trump. On economic matters he has a lot of the same problems as Labour: stubbornly high inflation, a sluggish job market and (as the election of the socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City shows) facing a left-wing populist surge like the one fueling support for the Green party in Britain.

    Both Trump and Starmer face crunch elections next year: the Prime Minister in the Welsh, Scottish and council elections, the President in the midterms. A big defeat might cost Starmer his job. If the Republicans lose control of Congress, Trump might well face fresh indictments from his political opponents or another impeachment charge. The loss of the Virginia and New Jersey governor races on Tuesday night points to a tough road ahead. The polling circulating among Republicans shows the Democrats winning the House of Representatives by a single seat next year, but predicts Trump will hang on after redistricting electoral boundaries.

    On Tuesday, Rachel Reeves rolled the pitch for massive tax rises in the Budget, blaming her economic inheritance, but even Labour insiders found her unconvincing. A source close to Downing Street characterized the Chancellor’s argument as: “Don’t blame me, I’m just the Chancellor. We have no power, we are just the government.”

    Trump also has a big speech on the economy this week, and there are similar stirrings in MAGA world. “The numbers are shifting on the economy,” says a prominent Trump ally. “I think people are concerned. They’re not feeling like prices are much lower. We’ve done a lot of international stuff. We need a pivot to the economy.” However, the Republican pollster says Trump’s early success and his decisiveness mean that even those feeling the pinch are still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt: “People are feeling worse off but they think he has a plan.”

    The same, demonstrably, is not true of Labour, where Starmer’s failure to “go big,” as Trump has done, has left Labour vulnerable. Perhaps Starmer should draw up plans to bulldoze part of Downing Street.

  • The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

    The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

    New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order.

    We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

    The Bay Area’s age of AI and relentless innovation has revived the old romantic ideal of progress. The pioneer spirit of the West survives there in its purest form, fueling faith in optimization and rationality as solutions to every human problem. However, as much as San Francisco believes itself to be the city of the future, its techno-optimism is curdling into a kind of moral craft – a conviction that intelligence can solve even the problems of the soul; algorithms so attuned to latent desire they acquire a mystic shroud and supplant the idea of God.

    SF’s technocrats are superb builders, optimizers and brilliant problem-solvers, confident in the power of reason, even in their mimicry of human affect. Yet they forget that the simulacrum of the soul is not the soul itself. San Francisco’s intellectual life risks becoming a cult of cleverness, believing in nothing beyond the material. The city gamifies moral life, reducing virtue to interface and empathy to design. With success comes arrogance. Cults have always thrived in the American West, and the Bay is no exception.

    Washington, my city, deals in hard power. Operators and bureaucrats populate this thin place and attempt to drag nebulous ideas from the bowels of the internet into the real world. Procedural and strategic intelligence dominate. Intellect here, as in the Bay, is used to move things.

    Washington suffers the same sickness as San Francisco: the mechanization of intellect in service of power. The capital systematizes the world beneath the veneer of public interest until – behind closed doors – there is no room left for the human. It abolishes the soul by institutionalizing it, or tabling it until the votes are counted and victory assured. In both cities, inner life is replaced by mechanical operations, whether they are algorithmic optimization or political maneuvering.

    Humanity in both cases becomes a rounding error, nothing more than a variable to train the model or a complication to be managed after the election. Each city serves Power while sacrificing meaning. Between the West Coast’s delirious faith in innovation and the capital’s procedural worship of control lies the same threat of emptiness: the loss of interior life.

    I would be remiss not to mention Boston, which stands apart from this alliance. The third city of nerds, the home of the archetypal elite scholar holds perhaps the purest expression of American brainpower. Yet its fixation on scholarship sets it apart from the other two, making it more of a ceremonial old guard of the brain trust than a boundary-pushing force. Where San Francisco disrupts, Boston preserves. Where Washington dominates, Boston analyzes. For all its excellence, Boston feels more like a museum of thought than a battleground of it, at least in the public imagination.

    America’s brightest minds have turned thinking into machinery. Both believe intellect can redeem us, when in truth it is in danger of replacing us. Perhaps Boston’s sterility is preferable to this impotent brilliance, from a romantic perspective. Though the archetypal scholar may lose himself in theory, at least he knows the human joy of theorizing. We must watch our hearts, lest we forget what the thinking was ever for.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Javier Milei wins on chainsaw-slashing reforms

    Javier Milei wins on chainsaw-slashing reforms

    Javier Milei, Argentina’s self styled “anarcho-capitalist” President, defied pessimistic poll predictions on Sunday to win in the midterm elections and save his radical economic reforms.

    With almost all the votes counted, Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party had won nearly 41 percent of the national vote, while the main left-wing Peronist opposition Fuerza Patria party netted just over 31 percent. 

    Up for grabs in the election were 127 of the 257 seats in the lower house of Congress, and 24 out of 72 seats in the upper house Senate. The LLA won 64 lower house seats and 12 in the Senate, enough for Milei to overcome an opposition veto against his most radical measures.

    Although the opposition retains ultimate congressional control, the triumph will come as a huge relief to the Trump administration in Washington, which had thrown a controversial $40 billion lifeline to Milei to prop up the falling Argentine peso and rescue Trump’s ideological soulmate. The US President congratulated Milei on Truth Social, writing that Milei was “doing a wonderful job” and that his “Landslide victory” justified his confidence in his Argentine ally.

    The chainsaw-wielding Argentine President, who once led a Rolling Stones tribute band, literally sang that he was “king of a lost world” at a victory rally in a Buenos Aires hotel, and vowed that his win would enable him to complete his mission to “make Argentina great again.”

    Using Trump’s favorite slogan underlines the debt that Milei owes to the American President, who had threatened to withdraw the aid package to Argentina if Milei lost the elections.

    Bond markets had piled pressure on the peso causing a run on the currency and forcing the country to dangerously dip into its dollar reserves after Milei lost local elections last month in Buenos Aires province – where 40 percent of the country’s population live.

    Milei’s cost- and job-cutting program has already succeeded in reducing Argentina’s inflation rate from 200 percent in 2023 when he took office, to around 30 percent in September. He had slashed tens of thousands of jobs in the country’s bloated state sector and merged overlapping ministries, but the cost of living remains high for ordinary poorer Argentines. The pain of his program, coupled with corruption allegations against Milei’s powerful sister Karina, had hit the President’s popularity. Investors feared that his reforms would be brought to a juddering halt.

    Now markets should feel reassured, especially as Milei has pledged that the most painful part of his program is over, and that the country will now begin to feel its benefits. Milei told supporters at his party HQ that Argentina had turned its back on “a century of decadence” and voted to continue along the path of “freedom, progress and growth.”

    Milei will still need the support of smaller conservative and centrist parties to push his reforms through Congress. Former President Mauricio Macri, the leader of the Republican Proposal party (PRO), said Milei could count on his backing.

    Another former president, the Peronist chief Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, appeared on the balcony of the apartment where she is under house arrest over corruption charges and blew kisses at her supporters. However, she stayed silent on her party’s loss in Buenos Aires last month.

    Observers await the markets’ verdict on Milei’s triumph when they open on Monday, though most analysts expect the peso to recover sharply and regain much of the ground lost in its recent falls.

  • Why is Stephen Miller so divisive?

    Why is Stephen Miller so divisive?

    One of the most striking things about Trump 2: The Trumpening is how few characters are still on board from the Donald’s first term. Other than the President himself, it’s almost a completely different cast. Even the First Lady only rarely appears, as though she’s contractually obliged as a guest star for the occasional episode.

    But there’s one very important exception: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And while Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts millions of Americans, Miller Derangement Syndrome is, as they used to say during Covid, a comorbidity.

    MDS may have reached its peak earlier this month when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to Miller as a “clown.” “I’ve never seen that guy in real life,” she said in an intimate Instagram Live video for her followers, “but he looks like he’s like 4’10”. And he looks like he is angry about the fact that he’s 4’10”. And he looks like he is so mad that he is 4’10” that he has taken that anger out on any other population possible.”

    The only problem with the insult is that Miller is, in fact, 5’10”, the average height for an American man. Appearing with Laura Ingraham on Fox News that week, Miller called AOC a “walking nightmare” whose eyes and brain “don’t work.” AOC had to go back on to Instagram Live to say she didn’t believe in “body-shaming.” “I want to express my love for the short king community,” she said. “I am talking about how big or small someone is on the inside.”

    ‘We are the storm,’ Miller said during Kirk’s memorial – and that storm is playing out as we watch

    Whatever his size, it’s no stretch to say that, other than Trump himself, Miller is the most important figure steering American politics today. You can trace many of the administration’s key priorities – a closed border, hardline illegal immigration enforcement, an unbending support for Israel and the utter dismantling and humiliation of the Obama-era woke social order – to Miller and his ideas. He’s divisive, dogged and nearly omnipresent. Appearing in October on the final episode of the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, which late in its existence turned into a lodestar for the permanently traumatized liberal establishment, Barack Obama excoriated American institutions for “bending the knee” to Miller’s policies. “We’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by Steve Miller,” he said. This, coming from a man who Miller referred to as “one of the worst presidents, if not the worst president, in US history,” felt extremely personal.

    But what exactly is this ideology that has Democrats shrieking in terror? Miller doesn’t like illegal immigration or DEI policies in the workplace or academia, but these days, that places him smack in the American mainstream. He’s certainly not a “white nationalist,” as many of his detractors claim: observant Jews tend to shy away from white nationalism as a rule.

    Miller grew up well-to-do in Santa Monica, California. His parents were conservatives, but they lived in one of the most liberal enclaves in America, which presented the illusion to him that he was a permanently oppressed underdog. As a high-school student, Miller called in to the conservative Larry Elder Show and brought Elder and conservative writer David Horowitz to speak at his school. Miller railed against fellow students and speakers who spoke Spanish and waged a successful campaign to get his school to institute a daily recital of the pledge of allegiance.

    At Duke University, Miller wrote a column for the conservative newspaper called “Miller Time” and introduced himself to his fellow students by saying “I’m from Santa Monica, California – and I like guns.” In many ways, he resembles the late Charlie Kirk, though he lacks Kirk’s easygoing charm and charisma. Both were white millennial men who came of age in Obama’s America, were shocked by the absence of patriotism, religion, and traditional values and brought about a change in that culture by sheer force of will.

    Miller’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial was one of the most divisive (to liberals) and welcome (to conservatives) pieces of rhetoric in recent memory. “To our enemies,” he said, “you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.” It was the rhetoric of an angry man grieving the loss of his friend, and of someone who was determined to press forward.

    Speaking on Kirk’s podcast with guest host and Vice-President J.D. Vance the week after Kirk’s assassination, Miller said he was going to use all his power to dismantle nongovernmental organizations that he says created the climate that led to Kirk’s murder. “The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that is designed to trigger [or] incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence,” Miller explained. “It is a vast domestic terror.”

    He’s certainly not wrong about that. The fact is that every single one of Miller’s policy priorities have come to fruition since January. From media to academia to entertainment, the liberal establishment is on the defensive, with a diminishing toolset with which to battle Miller’s tactics. The ongoing street fights over ICE, the attempts to root out antifa, even the rhetoric about restoring religion to American life, are thoroughly Miller’s doing, and the administration isn’t backing down. “We are the storm,” Miller said during Kirk’s memorial – and that storm is playing out as we watch. This is Trump’s America, and the Short King’s world. Good luck to anyone who tries to get in his way.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Is J.D. Vance really the president-in-waiting?

    Is J.D. Vance really the president-in-waiting?

    As Donald J. Trump flew to the Holy Land on October 12 to declare peace, his Vice-President took to the airwaves to address the rumbling civil conflict on the home front. J.D. Vance did not rule out invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act in order to quell the violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in several American cities. “The problem is the fact that the entire media in this country, cheered on by a few far-left lunatics, have made it OK to tee off on American law enforcement,” he told NBC News. “We cannot accept that in the United States of America.”

    This is now Vance’s familiar role. He’s not the bad cop to Trump’s good, exactly, more the administration’s favorite pitbull. Trump plays the grand old statesman, smiling benignly on a world that has learned to love him. Vance is his terrier, who jumps the fence to growl at the opposition on their turf. “Here’s, George, why fewer and fewer people watch your program and why you’re losing credibility,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in another interview on the same day. “Let’s talk about the real issues… I think the American people would benefit much more from that than from you going down some weird left-wing rabbit hole.”

    Trump fans lap up these controlled yet vicious performances from Vance. His ability to sound calm as he OWNS, DESTROYS, NUKES – choose your favorite viral-clip descriptor – the FAKE NEWS elevates him in the public eye. And his powerful media profile makes him stand out as the obvious president-in-waiting – more so, arguably, than any US politician in recent history. 

    “There is very little to be said about the vice-president,” observed Woodrow Wilson 140 years ago. “His importance consists in the fact that he may cease to be vice-president.” Yet Vance’s prominence is such that, as things stand, he defies hoary quips about the dispensability of a “veep.” Still only 41 years old, he now appears the natural successor to a 79-year-old, second-term Commander-in-Chief who, for all his strengths, does have a tendency to ramble.

    If Vance avoids a spectacular implosion, if he doesn’t fall out with Trump, it’s hard to see anybody successfully challenging him for the Republican nomination. And if the Trump presidency doesn’t end in disaster, it’s difficult to imagine Vance not going on to win the White House, given the disarray of the Democratic party.  

    The next presidential election is a long way away, of course, and those ifs are, as Trump would say, yuge. The President may not be entirely joking as he toys with the idea of overriding the 22nd Amendment and running for a third term. He enjoys handing out “Four More Years” caps to White House visitors and boasts to other world leaders that “everyone wants me to run.” Someone who knows the President well even tells me that he is “very focused on Trump 2028 – [he] hates even the mention of his successor.” 

    But in August, asked publicly if Vance was his “heir apparent,” Trump replied: “Most likely, in all fairness. He’s the Vice President… it’s too early to talk about it but certainly he’s doing a great job and he would be, er, probably be favorite at this point.” That’s a highly qualified endorsement. There are persistent whispers from the West Wing that even though Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., is an ardent Vance backer, his father has never been quite so keen. “There is zero chemistry between J.D. and Trump,” says one source. “Folks that know Trump talk about it all the time: J.D. is just not Trump’s type of guy.” 

    People who work for Vance scoff at such talk. “Their relationship is extremely strong on a personal level,” insists one. “The President likes him. He likes the President. D.J.T. appreciates talent. He recognizes that Vance is a really good communicator.” Vance has learned a lot from Trump, add his admirers – not least the art of being funny online. Earlier this month when Elizabeth Warren, or “Pocahontas” as Trump calls her, announced on social media her joy at the release of the Israeli hostages, Vance replied: “The President told me he did this on Indigenous Peoples Day in honor of you.” 

    Vance’s wit helps distinguish him from Mike Pence, Trump’s last vice president, who spent four years being dog-loyal to the Donald, at least in public, only to fall foul of him in the controversial wake of the 2020 presidential election. Compared to multimedia-savvy Vance, Pence is a political dinosaur, a plonking figure from the Grand Old Party which Trumpism left behind long ago. Yet Vance’s supporters also recognize that Pence’s failure provides a lesson in how to stay ahead in Trumpland. Never cross the boss. Never let your agenda depart from his. 

    The people most likely to run a Vance 2028 campaign understand these rules. That’s why they won’t talk about a Vance presidential bid, at least not on the record, until the 2026 midterm elections are out of the way. “What’s clear is that Vance’s ambition is best served by facilitating the success of the administration,” says one of his more forthcoming advisors. “If the President is successful, it’s very likely that J.D. will become president. If the President is not successful, he will not be elected president. Their interests are aligned.”

    Vance’s backers, who include some major party donors, are less reluctant when it comes to dismissing other 2028 Republican hopefuls. Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator and failed 2016 candidate, has been widely mocked for daring to put his name about. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia Governor, is considered far too conventional a politician for the age of Trump. Spencer Cox, the bald-headed Utah Governor, may be applauded in more liberal-minded journals as a good man who could “heal” a divided country – but that sort of praise is toxic to many Republican voters. 

    The most realistic post-Trump alternative to Vance is Marco Rubio, 13 years older and currently Trump’s “Secretary of Everything.” Rubio leads the State Department as well as serving as National Security Advisor, acting administrator of the US Agency for International Development and acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. Between them, Rubio and Vance do much of the administration’s high-level gruntwork, the complicated policy stuff that Trump prefers to avoid. 

    Both men were harsh Trump critics in 2016 who now assiduously display their fealty to him at every turn, even as they build their own power bases inside his administration. Yet their rivalry is softened by the fact that they work closely together. “When the time comes they’ll have an honest conversation,” says one source. “My sense is that if J.D. faceplanted and Rubio thought he [Vance] didn’t have a path, then he’d run.” Others suggest that if Trump’s domestic agenda thrives, he will endorse Vance, whereas if he enjoys more success on the international stage, he’ll elevate Rubio. In his speech to Israel’s Knesset after his peace deal was signed earlier this month, Trump predicted that the man he once dissed as “lil’ Marco” will “go down – I mean this – as the greatest secretary of state in the history of the United States.” 

    Yet Trump’s America First movement is by definition not internationalist. Rubio, for all his zealous disavowals of his earlier never-Trumpism, remains more of a neoconservative and globalist figure in the eyes of the most influential MAGA voices. Vance, by contrast, is somebody who became famous after Trump’s 2016 victory and has a more natural affinity with the nationalist and post-liberal consensus that increasingly dominates conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. For now, then, Rubio is usually talked about as Vance’s most likely running mate. The bigger threat to Vance’s ascendancy might come from the wilder fringes of Trumpism, which will start to assert themselves as it becomes clear that King Donald is on his way out. Vance has been careful in the past to applaud Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative, but she represents a part of the Trumpian coalition that is breaking away from the Trump-Vance agenda. MTG, as she is known, is increasingly outspoken in her criticism of Trump’s foreign policy, the impact of his tariff agenda on lower-income Americans and Team Trump’s subservience to the tech oligarchs and “crypto bro” donors. 

    Vance’s political career was first boosted by the support of Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, the data intelligence company, which is the subject of many dark conspiracy theories. Nick Fuentes, the loudest voice of the controversy-mad Gen-Z right, regularly attacks Vance as a shill for the Mossad-run “deep state” of Big Tech. The hard-right racialists are also preoccupied with the fact that Vance has an Indian wife, Usha, and three mixed-race kids. 

    For more “normie” Trump supporters, Vance remains a darling figure. He’s the man who overcame a barrage of negative publicity following his nomination in last year’s election. The Democrats castigated him for being “weird,” a suspiciously pious Catholic who insulted female cat-owners. Yet it turned out that Vance, who wrote Hillbilly Elegy about his difficult upbringing, had far more regular-guy appeal than Kamala Harris’s nominee, the erratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. In the vice-presidential debate, Vance won over independent voters by combining good manners and a firm grasp of detail when it came to complicated subjects such as immigration and healthcare. “J.D. has got this tremendous capacity to speak to normal people,” says one advisor. “That’s partly because he’s just a very normal person, like fundamentally. He comes from a very American tradition of intellectual pragmatism… for him it’s about what works and what doesn’t work.”

    A lot of senior Republicans wanted Trump to pick Rubio as his running mate. But Vance had the support of Don Jr., the TV star Tucker Carlson and, perhaps most importantly, the late Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point, the most powerful conservative youth organisation in the country. After Kirk was assassinated in Utah last month, Vance escorted his friend’s body home aboard Air Force Two. At Kirk’s memorial in a football stadium in Arizona, Vance seized on the evangelical passion of the moment. “Charlie would tell me to put on the full armor of God and get back to work,” he said. “For Charlie, we will remember that it’s better to stand on our feet defending the United States of America and defending the truth than it is to die on our knees.”

    Addressing the next generation of Trump revolutionaries, with tens of millions watching worldwide, he sounded more than ever like the next president of the United States.

  • Trump inherited a weaponized justice system

    Trump inherited a weaponized justice system

    Has Donald Trump “weaponized” the justice system to go after his political enemies? The answer is no.

    “What about former FBI director James Comey?” you ask. “What about New York Attorney General Letitia James?” Both went after Trump hammer and tongs. Now both have been indicted by the Trump Justice Department. Are those not textbook cases of “weaponization,” of “retribution,” of using the power of the system to punish people who have punished you?

    Hold on. I write this in mid-October. By the time you read it, I suspect that the list of indictments will be much longer. Candidates for inclusion on this Ko-Ko-like “little list” include John Bolton, national security advisor during Trump’s first term; Jack Smith, the special counsel who managed to rack up 37 indictments against Trump in two criminal cases; and sundry other former intelligence officers and DoJ officials. The dragnet will be large; it will be relentless.

    So haven’t I just admitted that Trump weaponized the justice system?

    No. Trump didn’t weaponize the justice system. He inherited a weaponized justice system.

    More on that shortly. First, here’s another little list. Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Jeffrey Clark and George Papadopoulos.

    That’s a very incomplete roster of Trump aides and supporters who were indicted, prosecuted, disbarred and/or jailed. The list does not include the more than 1,200 people convicted over the January 6 protest at the Capitol. Nor does it capture a contrast that Navarro describes in a post on X: “I was dragged through Reagan Airport in leg irons, mug shot, handcuffs, jail cell, the full circus. Meanwhile, Comey faces felonies up to 10 years for the worst political conspiracy in modern history, and he slips quietly through a side door.”

    Responding to demands that Comey be subjected to the humiliation of a “perp walk,” Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel said there would be “no drama.” But the FBI that Trump inherited specialized in such drama. Remember their guns-drawn, dawn raid to arrest his confidant Roger Stone? The tipped-off media were there in force to lap up and regurgitate the entertainment.

    That’s one element of the system Trump inherited. Another has to do with the courts. Trump and his allies faced kangaroo courts, kangaroo juries and a kangaroo media. All are Democrat specialties. There are certainly places in the US where judges, or at least juries, favor Conservatives. But is there any analogue to Manhattan or Washington, DC, where the name “Trump” guarantees conviction and hectoring media obloquy?

    There is not. The cases that Letitia James and Alvin Bragg brought against Trump in New York were patently ridiculous. But had the President not won re-election he would be facing a $500 million fine, the destruction of his business empire and decades in jail, all to a hallelujah chorus of media self-congratulation.

    At the moment, that media has shifted into a minor key, not crowing but spewing threnodies about “selective prosecution,” “lawfare,” “retribution” and of course “weaponization.” Yet Trump could never deploy the sort of judicial and media vendetta that had been organized against him. Republicans lack the kangaroos.

    In March, I wrote here about deterrence, not as a feature of military strategy but as a part of political wisdom more generally. The attack on Trump and his allies, I noted, was only incidentally directed at those individuals. Writ large, it was aimed at undermining the very things they claimed to be supporting: “our democracy” and the rule of law. From that perspective, I said:

    The Trump administration’s efforts to restore fiscal sanity, accountability, and common sense to the workings of government will seem like retaliation or retribution only to those who have betrayed those values. For them, the closure of redundant or malevolent agencies, the exposure of financial wrongdoing and incompetence, the revocation of tolerance for illegal migrants who prey on US citizens will seem simply punitive. It is punitive, because it is in response to egregious wrongdoing. But in the long term, such masculine policies will function less as a punitive expedient than as a deterrent.

    The press is full of caterwauling headlines about Trump’s “vindictive,” “weaponized” prosecutions. But if you step back, such imprecations ring hollow. For one thing, as the commentator “Cynical Publius” noted: “James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.” The same is true of Comey. The same will be true of the rogues’ gallery of anti-Trumpists destined for the courts.

    After she got done running for office on a platform of suing Trump and calling him “illegitimate,” James dusted off her oratory. “When powerful people cheat to get better loans,” she intoned, “it comes at the expense of hardworking people. Everyday Americans cannot lie to a bank to get a mortgage, and if they did, our government would throw the book at them. There simply cannot be different rules for different people.”

    That was before it was revealed that James lied to a bank to get a lower interest rate on a mortgage.

    Here is the moral of the story. Deterrence works only because there lurks in the background a credible threat of retaliation. Before Trump, Republicans were too lily-livered to mount any such threat. Would it be better if an incoming administration did not set about indicting its predecessors? Yes. Which is why the President’s vigorous effort to call to account those who waged lawfare against him is a necessary purgative. If vigorously pursued, it may just reset the conventions and courtesies of our political life.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • The Clinton curse

    The Clinton curse

    Democrats have almost lost hope. Nearly a year after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, the party is rudderless. It opposes Trump, of course, but it can’t afford to oppose Trumpism. Denouncing the President for a short war against Iran’s nuclear program or for negotiating a Gaza ceasefire wouldn’t be smart. Criticizing his tariffs is safer – yet Democrats don’t want to be branded the party of free trade. Likewise, while they’re prepared to condemn the way the President is getting immigration under control, they know it would be suicidal for them to campaign for more immigration.

    Even on cultural questions, Democrats are Trump’s prisoners. They remain devoted to the idea that men can be women, and vice versa, if only they want to be, but the public backlash against what that means for women’s sports and their safety in private places has forced Democrats into hypocritically insisting on transgenderism in principle while saying they’re prepared to curb its practical applications.

    The party has no policies to sell and fears its own ideologues. What could possibly overcome these debilities?

    The answer, say pragmatic Democrats and some Trump-averse Republicans, is simple: the party needs another Bill Clinton, a charismatic leader to move it back to the political middle. Clinton copied Republicans and rebuked progressives whenever he thought it expedient, and by doing so he delivered Democrats from the wilderness in which they had wandered during the 12-year tenure of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

    The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies

    The 1980s saw Democrats in doldrums not unlike today’s. Then, they were captive of left-wing economic orthodoxies that compelled them to be the party of higher taxes. Even as Reagan revived American confidence in the final phase of the Cold War, his opponents, like Trump’s today, could only carp about his actions. And then, too, Democrats appeared unable to get their coalition’s left wing, epitomized by Jesse Jackson and radical feminists, under control. The trouble with this view of Clinton as his party’s centrist savior is that he was the opposite – Clinton inaugurated today’s Democratic woes by shunting the party to the left. By doing so, he brought an end to 40 years of Democratic control in the House of Representatives. Never in history had a party enjoyed such a long run in national power. Clinton destroyed the most successful political coalition America has ever known, and the Democrats have never recovered. The New Deal coalition that Clinton wrecked was even more successful than a glance at its hold on Congress suggests. Although Democrats had an interrupted run in control of the House from 1955 to 1995, their dominance actually began in 1931 and was only interrupted briefly for two discrete two-year intervals during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. What was fatal about the Clinton years wasn’t just that Democrats lost the House but that, for the first time in 64 years, they couldn’t win it back.

    Clinton attacked the left in the 1992 Democratic primaries, but he was no centrist. In his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, he signed into law a flurry of progressive legislation expanding government, raising taxes, circumscribing the rights of abortion-clinic protesters, banning firearms deemed “assault weapons” for purely cosmetic reasons and much more. He pushed for homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces – the first major engagement of the culture war that would ultimately lead to same-sex marriage and, subsequently, the Democrats’ transgender quagmire. The result of all this was that Clinton alienated key parts of the New Deal coalition while polarizing many constituencies that had previously been content to be represented by pro-gun or culturally conservative Democrats. The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies.

    “A true revolution should be seeking a minimum of 12 years in power,” the New York Times’s Ross Douthat recently wrote. He’s wrong. The last “true revolution” in American politics was the creation of what was effectively a new regime in the 1930s. Democratic presidents – Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – held power without interruption for 20 years, but again the actual magnitude of Democratic political success was much greater. There was only one Republican president between 1933 and 1968 and that single exception, president Eisenhower, was hardly a Republican at all.

    What ended the Democrats’ lock on the White House was the rise of a radical young New Left, which would ultimately bring leaders like Clinton to the fore. The ideology of today’s Democratic party was already hatched, if not fully grown, in the late 1960s. Clinton brought that ideology to power and thereby cost the Democrats the second of the bastions of government they had controlled for decades: Congress. Nor did he succeed in getting another Democrat elected as his presidential successor.

    Since the Clinton era, Democrats have typically needed the aid of a crisis to reclaim power from the Republicans: during the Iraq War in 2006, the financial meltdown in 2008, Covid in 2020. Voters have rejected such Clintonite Democrats as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris time and again. There simply is no national constituency for the party whose identity Clinton redefined in the 1990s – a party of ever more radically progressive cultural attitudes and an economic agenda keyed to urban professionals. Combine this disastrous record with the stagnation and depopulation of blue states relative to the booming demographics of red states such as Texas and Florida, and Democrats have cause for despair. Republicans can still lose elections, but Democrats don’t really win them.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Trump, the foreign policy president?

    Trump, the foreign policy president?

    President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine continued his excellent sartorial adventure at the White House, appearing in an elegantly cut black suit and shirt on Friday as he met with President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room. But while they may have helped avoid any emanations of wrath from his host, his habiliments did not appear to prompt Trump to approve the dispatch of Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, a coveted item indeed. “We’d much rather not need Tomahawks,” Trump said. “We’d much rather get the war over. It could mean a big escalation. It could mean a lot of bad things could happen.” 

    Back to square one, in other words. In August, Trump had claimed that his summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin would lead to a breakthrough. It never happened. Instead, the Russian President made Trump look like a patsy. Now he’s trying to play the same game.  

    Trump acknowledged that Putin might be trying to string him along once more. Was he concerned? “Yeah, I am, but I’ve been played all my life by the best of them,” he said. “I’m pretty good at this stuff. I think that he wants to make a deal.” So far, his optimism has proven unwarranted. 

    For his part, Zelensky played his cards, the ones that Trump previously claimed he did not possess before reversing that judgment, very well. He did not provoke Trump. Instead, he said it was important to maintain pressure on Putin and ensure that Ukraine receives real security guarantees. Zelensky also held out the possibility of Ukrainian cooperation with America on advanced drone technology in exchange for long-range missiles. 

    The question for Trump is simple: does he want to up the pressure on Putin before he enters negotiations in Budapest? Or does he want to try and placate the Russian tyrant in the coming weeks? Trump’s very avidity for a deal is what has made him such a pliant object in the hands of Putin, a former KGB agent who has a shrewd understanding of his counterparts. Few, if any, American presidents have been able to come out ahead in dealing with him, whether it was Bush, Obama or Biden. Instead, Putin has outmaneuvered them while steadily increasing his reach and power, both at home and abroad. A bad hombre, to use Trump’s phrase. 

    The person that really seems to have incurred Trump’s ire is another dictator. “He doesn’t want to fuck with the US,” Trump announced during lunch with Zelensky. He was referring to Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro who has been a thorn in the side of Trump.  

    In what he regards as his sphere of influence, Trump wants to dictate the terms of surrender to pesky fellows like Maduro. Elsewhere, he wants to preside over ceasefires and peace agreements. The main thing is that Trump, and Trump alone, is at the center of events. 

    A summit in Budapest, where he is supposed to meet Putin, will once more allow Trump to seize the spotlight, at least for a few days. It may also provide a fillip to Trump’s ally, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who faces a tough election in April. The government shutdown in Washington may not have ended by then, but this prospect does not appear to trouble Trump unduly. He’s too busy becoming a foreign policy president to preoccupy himself with domestic matters.