Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Why stop at Lake America?

The Irish Rovers sang about the biggest mixup that you have ever seen: he was christened David Anthony, but still in spite of that, his father called him William while his mother called him Pat. Picture the feelings of Lake Ontario this morning. It was christened Lac Saint-Louis by Samuel de Champlain, but it's woken up to Canada calling it William and the US calling it Pat – or rather, Lake America (without the “of,” as Trump helpfully specified in his video on Truth Social). Do you really need two Dakotas? Although Lac Saint-Louis is surely a better and more historically founded name than Lake America, one can sympathize with the American compulsion to rename things. After all, what would Texas be without a little American intervention? (Mexico, as it happens.

Mark Krikorian

Of course we need a crackdown on H-1B visas

The Trump administration has proposed a fee of more than $100,000 for most H-1B visas. The usual suspects have come out with the usual reactions. Doug Brand, a senior immigration official in the Biden administration, called the move “catastrophic,” and the libertarian Cato Institute has warned of “devastating” consequences. In lieu of abolishing the program altogether – my preference, but something only Congress can do – such a fee is long overdue. It’s chump change compared to the added value a truly exceptional foreign worker could generate, and at the same time would make the program less attractive as a means of importing cheap white-collar labor to undercut Americans.

Jonathan Spyer

Trump’s stalemate with Iran looks set to limp on

The standoff between Iran and the United States has currently reached stalemate. Iranian hopes to use control of the Strait of Hormuz as a lever to force an American climb-down show no sign of realization. The IRGC’s extension of its methods of asymmetrical warfare to the Strait was a creative and bold move. In the same way that terrorist movements seek to offset military inferiority by striking directly at an adversary’s civilian population, Iran tried to raise the costs for civilian ships seeking to transit the Strait to a level which companies and shipowners would find intolerable. In this way, Iran hoped to render US conventional naval ascendancy meaningless.

Daniel McCarthy

Darline against the machine

It’s poetic that the same day Darline Graham won her primary to seek a full term in the United States Senate, the Wall Street Journal admitted it had published an AI-written op-ed and, based on opinion page editor Paul Gigot’s remarks about it, would happily do so again. “AI is a fact of modern life. People will use it to assist in their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing and more.” On social media, journalists at the New York Times and elsewhere were quick to voice objections to Gigot’s leniency, but others, including one at the Washington Post, shot back at the critics: how was publishing an AI-written op-ed any different from publishing a ghost-written one? She’s gaffe-prone.

Monday

August 24, 2026

Charles Lipson

Can General Bessent win the war?

At a much-anticipated press conference Monday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent minced no words. The United States, he said, is now imposing unprecedented sanctions not only on Iran but on every country, corporation, bank, and shipping company that does business with that regime. Thanks to these US policies, Bessent said, all Iran’s facilitators must now choose between economic ties with the US and those with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Do business with Iran and you will be severed from the US market and the entire dollar-based trading system, the centerpoint of the world economy. That policy can be summed up in two words: “economic asphyxiation.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s tariff wars are a godsend to the Democrats

Donald Trump was revved up for his Freedom 250 Grand Prix auto race, which took place in downtown Washington yesterday. But even as the American President enjoyed the festivities, the mood elsewhere was distinctly less buoyant. With Democrats pounding away at voter concerns about affordability, Republican legislators are fretting that Trump might crash the party’s political fortunes with his costly tariff policies. If the President wanted to promote an economic program that was designed to bolster the political prospects of the Democrats in the impending November midterm elections, he could hardly do better than his institution of new duties of 50 percent against Canadian goods.

Saturday

August 22, 2026

Freddy Gray

Just how bad are the polls for the Republicans ?

Freddy Gray is joined by James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners, on why the midterms are looking increasingly grim for the Republicans. Trump's approval is trending down, the war is dragging on it, and James expects differential turnout to hand the Democrats the House, possibly with more than 230 seats. Freddy and James discuss why a Senate map that should have been safe for Republicans is now a toss-up, which six states will decide it, why prediction markets are not the answer, and why Michigan and its DSA-aligned candidate may be the one seat that saves Trump's majority. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.

Ed West

The Floydification of Jason Arday’s death

The Russian word pravda is often translated as “truth”, but it can also mean “justice”. The proto-Slavic prav had that latter meaning, pravo refers to a legal right, and the first law code in Kievan Rus’ was called the Russkaya Pravda. Over time the word has come to mean “truth”, but with strong connotations of “moral or spiritual truth”, or a just way to order human relations. Sometimes it is translated into English as “social justice”, whereas istina is the term for objective truth. In other Slavic languages, such as Serbo-Croatian, pravda has retained its meaning of “justice” or “fairness”.

Charles Cornish-Dale

The ‘paranoid style’ is back in American politics

Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely. In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood. With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish.

Friday

August 21, 2026

Gavin Mortimer

Will the heatwaves make this year’s French wines better?

It has been a punishing summer in France. Heatwaves, drought and forest fires have driven away tourists and made life hell for firefighters. The nation’s winemakers have also had an anxious time of it, but there is now cautious optimism that the exceptional weather may work in their favor. Since late May, France has been swept by a succession of heatwaves as well as a series of destructive wildfires. The worst of these was in the Gironde, west of Bordeaux, which lost 42,000 hectares to flames. Swathes of Provence have also been ravaged by fires in recent weeks. As a result of the fires and the heat, France’s Ministry of Agriculture decided to postpone its annual grape harvest forecast from early August to early September. The announcement was welcomed by the industry.

Tim Shipman

Revealed: the feuding at the heart of Reform

If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: “Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is unhappy in its own way.” Reform UK is beginning to resemble a laboratory test for the idea that every party run by Nigel Farage is unhappy in the same way. Just as in UKIP and the Brexit party, a highly dominant leader exists at the center of a court, with extreme tensions between loyalist long-marchers and arrivistes, between insurgency and respectability, between campaigning and preparing for government. A new round of bloodletting erupted on August 17, when the founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, who defected to Reform two years ago, was suspended following public criticism of Farage and the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf.

David Christopher Kaufman

The Obamas are to blame for the Sussexes’ failure in the US

You can blame the Obamas for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's ill-fated adventures in America. There they were, Barack and Michelle, with eight-figure book deals and a lucrative spin on the global keynote circuit after Donald Trump's triumph in 2016. Barely two years later, Mrs. Obama was filling major arenas on a rockstar-styled promo tour for her White House-memoir Becoming. I remember sitting up high at the Barclays Center in New York in 2018, when Sarah Jessica Parker interviewed Mrs. Obama with awkward sycophancy, clearly dazzled by the former First Lady’s sheer presence. Obama’s candor and intellect, no matter how commodified to maximize book sales, stood as a sharp contrast to the icy aloofness of her replacement, Melania Trump.

Freddy Gray

Have aircraft carriers had their day?

Freddy is joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper's magazine, to discuss the state of the US Navy as the USS George Washington arrives in the Arabian Sea to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose crew have sent home photographs of blocked lavatories, rotting rations and sailors who have lost a stone or more. Freddy and Andrew examine why the Iranian strike on the Navy's supply base in Bahrain has left the fleet resupplying from Diego Garcia, why Trump has ordered $50 billion of new launch systems ripped out and steam catapults put back, and whether Trump is now trapped in a war he can never admit he has not won. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Henry Lloyd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Freddy Gray

The mystery of Melania

Are Donald Trump and his wife secretly estranged – or is Melania just a bit strange? That somewhat grubby question cuts to the heart of one of the more mysterious subplots of the Great Trump Saga, the longest-running American tabloid show. One Trumpworld source told me that "Melania spends too much time online" Yesterday, the First Lady magically reappeared for a public event at the White House. "I heard you missed me," she began, before giving a speech about some goodly fostering initiative. "Here I am." It was a joke her husband might have composed. Melania hadn’t been spotted in public since the World Cup final a month ago, and the "Where’s Melania?

Toby Young

Ghent University shouldn’t have suspended Nathan Cofnas

It is ironic that the “be kind” brigade beating their breasts and wailing about the "lynching" and "assassination" of Jason Arday think the appropriate response is to whip up hatred against Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who exposed Arday's academic misconduct. At the vigil for Arday at Trafalgar Square in London, several speakers singled out Cofnas for blame, including Diane Abbott MP, who described him as a “racist.” Nathan contacted me shortly afterwards worried that he risked being murdered if he set foot in London.

Charles Lipson

How will harsh sanctions on Iran play out?

If you control the world’s largest economy, as the US does, and if your enemy depends on exports to the West, as Iran does, it should hardly be a surprise when the big economy decides to use its commercial and financial leverage.  That is exactly what the US is doing – and this week it announced it would ratchet up the pressure substantially. Some sanctions were already in place, most notably restrictions on Iran’s oil exports, enforced by the US Navy. What’s new is that those sanctions will be supplemented by a full range of additional sanctions on commercial and bank transactions routed through third countries.

Mathias Döpfner

There’s still time to save the West

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on “Why we need to strengthen the West,” I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this even up for debate? That we must explain and justify “the West” at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening but were simply strong. It is not. The West has become an invalid. What exactly, though, are we trying to strengthen? The West is an idea, not a location. It rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the center.

Thursday

August 20, 2026

Damian Thompson

Why don’t liberal Christians influence elections?

We’ve heard a lot about a “God gap” between Republican and Democratic voters in the United States – and for good reason. The gap between churchgoing conservatives and secular progressives, when measured by voting habits, has become conspicuously wide. In 1980, 40 percent of Democrats attended church regularly, with GOP voters a couple of points higher. Today, Republican church attendance is still in the low to mid-40s, while less than a quarter of Democrat voters are regular worshippers; only 17 percent of Harris voters in 2024 reported weekly attendance. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 40 percent of Democrat or Democrat-leaning voters are religiously unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics or “nones”) compared to only 21 percent of Republican voters.

Roger Kimball

It’s DSA vs ICE in the battle of the acronyms

In the Battle of the Acronyms, perhaps no contest is more ferocious than the slugfest between the DSA – that’s “D” for dumb and “S” for commie, I mean “socialist” – and ICE (always excepting TDS vs MAGA). A wacko woman steers her car into an ICE agent. He shoots her. The media calls make up and tries to turn the dead woman into the second coming of Saint George Floyd. There was a warehouse full of outrage just waiting to be paraded at prime time but somehow the entertainment fell flat. Renée Good, the woman in question, didn’t have what it takes to triumph in the victimology sweepstakes. The anti-Trump media wept for a week and then went on to other wheezes. Nevertheless the Democratic Socialists of America have kept an eye on ICE.

Daniel McCarthy

How capitalism subsidizes the DSA

What would Karl Marx think of his latter-day disciples in the Democratic Socialists of America? No doubt he would find their politics largely agreeable, but they would present him with a class conundrum. DSA is not a movement of workers but of people with intellectual credentials: some 80 percent of its members have college degrees and 35 percent have advanced degrees. Those credentials are all granted by the institutions that capitalists sustain – it’s not bricklayers who endow Harvard University. State colleges and universities depend on government funding, but government itself, under capitalism, is simply an instrument of business interests.

Matt McDonald

Lee Greenwood is Trump’s court bard

The stage lights flicker. The MAGA faithful whoop at the first tinkle of piano keys. They’ve been here a hundred times. They know what’s coming. If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life And I had to start again With just my children and my wife “God Bless the USA” has been through several iterations since it first appeared on Lee Greenwood’s third album, You’ve Got a Good Love Comin’. It was a Gold-certified single in May 1984 and the soundtrack for a short film about Ronald Reagan, which was shown at that summer’s Republican National Convention. Greenwood performed the song at the 1988 RNC – and it resurged in popularity after the First Gulf War and the 9/11 attacks.

Douglas Murray

Middle England is finally waking up to the migrant crisis

I don’t know how familiar readers are with the term “accelerationism.” It is generally used to describe a tendency on the left, though is increasingly heard on the right too. The basic idea of accelerationism is that there are certain flaws in the societal structure which if pushed could bring things to their inevitable conclusion more quickly. It is why there are so many people on the left of politics who say that sustainable government spending should be discouraged. It is not just because they are economically illiterate. What they really hope is that a speeded-up financial disaster will expose the “underlying contradictions of capitalism,” and we’ll all realize that Karl Marx was right and promptly vote for Zack Polanski or similar at the next election.

Wednesday

August 19, 2026

John Fund

The disappointing Darline Graham

When Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly last month from a heart condition, official Washington paused its partisan spitting contests to honor a Master of the Beltway. Not since John McCain’s funeral in 2018 had there been such a high display of institutional respect for a senator – complete with eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda and an invitation-only funeral at the National Cathedral attended by foreign leaders. But now South Carolina has to decide who replaces the Great Man. We are used to a political climate dominated by candidates who embrace egotistical posturing and exaggerate their qualifications. So on one level it was refreshing to see the South Carolina debate last night.

Edward Howell

Kim Jong-un has everything to gain from a meeting with Trump

Will Trump and Kim Jong-un meet again? This is the million-dollar question after President Trump lauded his “very good relationship” with Kim and ordered a scaling back of US-South Korean military exercises earlier this week. Hours later, Trump elusively mentioned that the North Korean despot had responded “positively” to his overtures. Another rendezvous between the two leaders cannot be dismissed, especially with Kim Jong-un in a stronger position now than during the first Trump administration. But unlike during the Trump 1.0 years, which saw three meetings between Kim and the President, things are different now. Back then, neither leader had met the other before; kindling a bromance was a novelty. Now, however, it will be a case of déjà vu.