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31 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks with Spectator columnist Christopher Caldwell about the ten-year legacy of Donald Trump since his 2016 election victory, assessing his second administration's high-water marks alongside the recent political and personal controversies that Caldwell argues have eroded voter trust, unraveled his populist appeal, and raised sharp questions about the future of the conservative movement.
There is a boring, snooty, self-righteous school of thought that the judicial killing of a human being is a grave and dignified sacrament of the state. It says that where the law provides for the government to take a life, that is about as serious a decision as, in peacetime, it gets. This school of thought has it that the preceding judicial process must be exhaustive; that the condemned, no matter how repulsive their crimes, should be treated with respect by virtue of their status as human beings; that the whole punitive apparatus must see the process through with the sort of impersonal solemnity appropriate to its momentous arrogation of the right to take a life. Black caps, drawn curtains, ceremonious and exact procedures, shuffling clergymen…all that stuffy malarkey.
Donald Trump has opened up the prospect of America being drawn into a wider Middle East conflict, effectively a second front in the ongoing war with Iran. The US president said he is “going to look at” joining Saudi Arabia in the battle against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. It follows the Houthi missile attack on the King Khalid international airport in Riyadh which killed 12 people and injured 309 others. One of the 12 dead is known to be an American. There may be more US casualties among the severely injured. The attack on the airport has reignited fears of a wider regional escalation. The Saudis, despite their enormous oil wealth, cannot fight, let alone win, their war against one militia force “We may.
Donald Trump has called for President Zelensky to be removed from office. The US President is furious following a series of drone strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries, which came hours after Trump has signed a deal with Vladimir Putin lifting sanctions on millions of tons of Russian diesel fuel. Trump told reporters last night about a conversation he’d had with Zelensky. “I said to him, ‘Do what you want. Don’t hit refineries. There’s plenty of targets, don’t hit refineries...’ I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.
"Deus Vult." That, famously, is what the large tattoo on Pete Hegseth’s right bicep says. The phrase, which means "God Wills It," is a Crusader reference. Critics suggest the words have white supremacist connotations; Hegseth, formerly a major in the Army National Guard, believes it means fulfilling the Almighty’s plan to defeat America’s enemies. But what does God want? That’s a difficult question for mere mortals to answer. Does He want to see terrorists executed by firing squad on video livestreams for all the world to see? Because that’s what Secretary of War Pete desires.
In the midst of the most contentious Texas US Senate race in a generation, Democratic nominee James Talarico suddenly and mysteriously dropped off the campaign trail on September 29, and has yet to return, though his campaign claims a resurrection is coming tomorrow. Talarico last appeared in public at a fundraiser alongside Robert DeNiro in New York City, which isn’t in Texas. On September 30, he showed his face on Zoom at a forum for the Hispanic Business Council, and said he had the flu. “I was ready to eat my favorite quesadilla tacos, but I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago, and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas,” he said.
This is not an edifying election. That’s putting it delicately. Any honest survey of the quality of the candidates and the arguments they are making will leave you deeply depressed. All across the country, voters are being asked to choose among truly dreadful candidates, whose main argument is that “the other guy is much worse.” Both parties do it. They do it because it works. Unfortunately, the candidates don’t have to exaggerate to underscore how bad their opponents are. That doesn’t stop them from making it their battle cry. “My opponent is more corrupt than Tony Soprano.” “My opponent believes transgenders should play in your kid’s sport. After he’s rammed that outrage down your throat, he’ll force your kid to marry one.
The Pnyx is a scrubby hill west of the Acropolis where Athenian citizens once crammed together to argue, vote and, now and then, talk themselves into disaster. On Wednesday, as the sun went down behind the Parthenon, Marco Rubio stood there and told the West to rediscover its nerve. It was the best speech a western statesman has given in years, and its diagnosis is right. Europe did spend decades outsourcing its defense and much of its self-respect, and Rubio’s hymn to thumos – “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” – revived an oft-neglected idea. But listen to the virtues he chose. The Greeks, he said, prized “relentless ambition,” “risk and glory” and “an impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits.
Jeffrey Archer was my closest and dearest friend for 40 years. I first met him in 1986 when we were invited to be judges for a Royal Watercolor Society Open Exhibition. We hit it off immediately. There was an ebullience and lightness in him that I warmed to. We met up later for dinner and carried on meeting once or twice a week ever since. Yesterday, I went to the restaurant where we used to have breakfast and I almost ordered eggs benedict in his memory – he was always the one for the unhealthy option – but I just couldn’t bear to. He never talked about his own death, though he sometimes joked about what he’d say at my funeral; he was all about life and the immediate future. He was, in fact, talking about the future up to the time he died, about his plans for writing.
Once upon a time Democrats used to ask, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Now it’s Republicans who may be tempted to adopt the phrase. For almost a century – 94 years, to be exact – Democrats have not won a senatorial seat in the sunflower state. But what’s rapidly developing is a red undertow, thanks to President Trump’s mounting unpopularity. The widely respected Cook Report has just announced that a Senate majority is squarely in the sights of the Democrats – and moved Kansas from “lean Republican” to a toss-up state. Blimey! It’s no wonder that Trump has been barnstorming in deep red America to try and rescue the midterm elections.
It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling hole. In theory, anyway. Trump has been rallying through red states – Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas – to try and secure existing Senate seats. But today’s Democratic pile-on concerns a throwaway comment he made last night in Nebraska. Mid-weave, of course. The President said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city... ‘let ’em, let ’em take Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego, that’s...’ this is a very small price to pay... and it’s gonna be over with very soon, it's essentially almost over with.
On the evening of Friday October 2, Daria Shipilova, an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died in a district hospital in the Russian city of Shelekhov. Her place of work, and the rumored circumstances of her death, have triggered a public health emergency in the region and a slew of questions: did the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, kill Shipilova? Could this metastasize into a plague epidemic in Russia? Should we – abroad – be worried? The Russian authorities have done their best to play down the link between the plague and Shipilova’s death. According to Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, Shipilova had been diagnosed with pneumonia of “unknown etiology” – i.e. of unknown origin.
For decades, we on the liberal right have been sold the fiction that Republican lawmakers are fighting for small government. There are many reasons why the state seems to relentlessly expand no matter who is in office; an important, though overlooked, one is that it is incredibly difficult to persuade voters that smaller budgets and reduced employee counts can achieve equal or superior results. Voters might dislike bureaucracy, but they fear what happens when the machinery behind it is dismantled – what if the alternative is worse? One needs look no further than the backlash against DOGE to see that the right needs to prove a smaller government can improve citizens’ experience in dealing with it.
Once upon a time, the export crop of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was whale oil. Nowadays it is money, harpooned by visiting campaigns from deep-pocketed donors at anchor in their summer seaside retreats. In the peak season of July and August, the islands’ social rhythms are dictated by money-harvesting events, wrangled by local hosts jostling for the social éclat that comes from securing a high-profile honoree. By late August this year, the territory had already been worked over by a series of hopeful visitors with hands outstretched, such as the rising Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, Hakeem Jeffries in eager pursuit of the House Speakership that is almost in his grasp, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and others questing the donor dollar.
Peter Thiel, as is his wont, caused a stir last week when he expressed doubts that a Republican could win the White House in 2028. In an interview in Berlin on the MD Meets podcast, the billionaire cofounder of Palantir said he was still a “Vance partisan,” but he cautioned that a debate over whether Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance would be the better nominee was less important than the threat of socialism. “If Democratic Socialists take over the Democratic party that’s a much bigger deal,” Thiel said. “That is the end of America.” The PayPal godfather has already packed for the Pampas Thiel, who is a friend of mine, foresees parallels between the dynamics of right-wing populism and left-wing socialism.
On Wednesday night, The Spectator welcomed readers and guests to our new home in NoMad for our first New York event, The Nixon Revival: why he matters again. US editor Freddy Gray chaired a lively discussion between Conrad Black, Daniel McCarthy and former Nixon staffer Geoff Shepard on the legacy of America’s 37th president — and why, more than half a century since Watergate, "Tricky Dick" is finding admirers on the American right. The discussion was livestreamed on the night and has now been edited to watch on demand, exclusively for Spectator subscribers. Watch it in full here. Before and after the conversation, readers mingled over drinks and rosé courtesy of Château Léoube, with the party spilling out on to The Spectator’s rooftop terrace overlooking Manhattan.
45 min listen
In this episode of Americano, Freddy hosts a debate between Daniel McCarthy of the Heritage Foundation and Robby Soave of Reason magazine to examine whether libertarianism has effectively died as a vital political force or remains quietly triumphant through tech deregulation, AI innovation and unprecedented levels of individual freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The right has its own unwritten rules of political correctness. There are forbidden words, and while they might not be met with censorship, they do elicit eye rolls. One proscribed term is “misogyny.” It also happens to be the most accurate description of the right’s mood and trajectory these days. The right’s response to this trend has been to downplay it, or even deny that it is happening at all. But ignoring it will not make it go away. Political discourse often operates like a ratchet: the intensity around a given topic is constantly turned up, but the mechanism is not designed to dial back.
Donald Trump’s greatest strength is his indefatigability. The grumblings within his administration grow louder. Inflation is stubborn, the price of oil too high, the Democrats ahead in the polls for all the key Senate election races. Yet the President is out and about, doing what he perhaps does best, which is campaigning. "Pretend I’m running, please. If we don’t win, they’ll end up impeaching me," Trump told a rally in Oklahoma yesterday. His aim is to turn the midterms into another presidential-style contest, and he’s right that the name Trump continues to be the key factor in American politics, something far more potent than the Republican party brand. As ever, though, the Donald divides opinions – and according to some surveys, his net approval rating is -23.
In July 2014, three aspiring entrepreneurs – Reeve Collins, Craig Sellars and Brock Pierce – launched a startup from a Santa Monica bungalow. Its product, Realcoin, was a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency: a digital token that, unlike volatile Bitcoin, could be used for everyday transactions. When the trio pitched it to Silicon Valley’s big investors, they were laughed out of the room. This could have made for a classic startup origin story, were it not for the cast behind it. Their résumés betray the whole venture as a pipe dream.
In Trumpworld, there are whispers that one of the boss's biggest failings is his choice of personnel. Some claim that Donald Trump's appointees are toadies, disasters or novices, and that they drag down the effectiveness of policies that make sense for America. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech chairman of Palantir, has criticized Trump's ill-chosen apprentices. In a podcast interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Thiel laid out a harsh view of Trump’s second term compared to his first: I think the two administrations made opposite mistakes. The first administration brought in all these people who couldn’t agree, and it was just all this internal fighting. The second administration, I think overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests.
The past year has turned out to be the most important of Donald Trump’s political life. It loosened the ties that had constrained his character – and Trump’s character is the key to his political project. There is no sillier exercise than trying to sum Trump up in ideological terms – calling him a conservative, say, or a fascist. Whatever you think conservatism is, it does not involve using the South Lawn of the White House for mixed-martial-arts fights, as Trump did in June. As for fascism, none of the conditions that made it possible a century ago exist today: there is no rising communist movement, no large pool of recently demobilized soldiers, no military humiliation, no manufacturing sector organized on military lines.
The past two centuries have been the era of mass production, of people as well as things. To a degree unimaginable before the Industrial Revolution, all of life has become standardized. Politics is no exception. It has come to be characterized by one set of rules piled atop another, positive law on top of the Constitution, an ever-increasing body of regulations on top of the laws, all couched within quite formal rhetorical and moral norms. There are rules governing elections, rules governing how parties nominate candidates and playbook rules for conducting a winning campaign. The candidate is really just a product, as is the elected official. They’re products manufactured according to standardized procedures. But Donald Trump isn’t. This enrages and frightens his critics.
I suppose you could say that the Trump decade began on June 16, 2015, when Donald and Melania Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency and the birth of MAGA, the “Make America Great Again” movement. There are, however, a few problems with that start date. For one thing, the Trump decade, which may have started then, did not stop when Trump took an extended vacation from the White House beginning on January 20, 2021. It continued running, like a television set blaring in another room, all through the Biden presidency. And now, in October 2026, the Trump decade has lasted more than a decade. Really, we are talking about the Trump era.