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Biden catches Covid at the worst possible time
Talk about timing. Joe Biden has caught Covid, the White House has announced. The president, who was touring Las Vegas, “is experiencing mild symptoms,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. Biden “will be returning to Delaware where he will self-isolate and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time.” Biden has been vaccinated and boosted against Covid, Jean-Pierre added. Will Donald Trump call Joe Biden to wish him well?
Meeting the MAGA megafans of Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin If you want to see how Donald Trump has changed his party, look at what attendees wore to this week’s convention in Milwaukee. Gone are the days when Republicans plumped for preppy blazers and demure khakis; now the fashion is for ostentatious displays of red, white and blue. Even the red MAGA baseball caps of 2016 have been eclipsed, replaced by this year’s must-have accessory of the cowboy hat — a classic symbol of rugged individualism.
Abandon Schiff: Pelosi protégé latest to call for Biden to step aside
The blows keep coming. California congressman Adam Schiff, who was an impeachment manager during Donald Trump’s first Senate trial in 2020, is now targeting another president for destruction. He has now called upon Joe Biden to exit the presidential race, the twenty-third legislator to do so and definitely the most significant of the lot. Schiff, who is running for the Senate, was a protégé of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
On the ground at the RNC
It is day three of the Republican convention in Milwaukee and tonight Trump’s vice presidential pick J.D. Vance will take the stage. The reaction was muted in the arena when Trump anointed Vance on Monday, likely due to a combination of low name identification and concerns from the establishment that he is not helping Trump’s electability. This will therefore be an important moment for Vance to introduce himself to the broader Republican electorate.
Is the RNC about to back Trump?
A new report fromtheDispatch claimed that David Bossie, a Republican National Committee member and former advisor to the Trump campaign, had drafted a resolution that would effectively end the primary and put the RNC symbolically behind former president Donald Trump.
Will DeSantis’s influencers follow him onto the Trump train?
Ron DeSantis didn’t just drop out of the 2024 presidential race this Sunday — he also endorsed former president Donald Trump, the opponent who had bested him in Iowa. That pragmatic act makes sense for him in terms of self-preservation, but was sure to frustrate some of his supporters and “influencers,” who had been engaged in a lengthy online war with Trumpworld for months. Where will they turn now that the GOP primary is a two-horse race?
Will New Hampshire matter after this primary?
The big question that every New Hampshire personality is ready to answer, expecting it before each conversation with an out-of-state journalist, is some form of “will your state still matter after this?” The absence of a truly competitive primary nags at them, and local officials bristle at the notion that in this new era of celebrity politics, where approaches are measured in virality and meme potential, the old skills of glad-handing at small-town gatherings is declining into a memory.
Will Covid voting rules stay in place in 2024?
Wisconsin was the Democratic establishment’s Waterloo in 2020. Even with the field consolidated behind Joe Biden, liberal operatives couldn’t shake the memory of Senator Bernie Sanders’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton. They needn’t have worried. On April 7, Biden cruised to victory with two-thirds of the vote; Sanders exited the race the next day. But beating back one worst-case scenario revealed a second.
The chaos of Andy Warhol’s legacy
Andy Warhol’s legacy has been dogged by rows over authenticity more than that of any other modern artist. Warhol might well have predicted the chaos and even delighted in it. He once signed a fake painting at Christie’s — four silkscreened Jackie Kennedys — for the hell of it. “I don’t know why I ever did,” he wrote in his diary — and yet the confession makes clear that he maintained a distinction, in the end, between what was fraudulent and what was his. You can’t sign a fake if everything is real.
Is John Fetterman the new Kyrsten Sinema?
Few politicians have managed to surprise the country the way Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman has in the past few months. Fetterman proclaimed on the campaign trail, while running against Republican Mehmet Oz, that he is not just a Democrat, but a “proud progressive”. The junior senator, though, insisted in an NBC News interview on Friday that he is not a progressive and that voters shouldn’t be surprised when he breaks from the party line.
Is the FBI targeting MAGA?
As the 2024 presidential election approaches, a Newsweek exclusive claims that the FBI is targeting presidential candidate Donald Trump’s followers. As the agency believes that the election may elevate domestic terrorism among MAGA sympathizers. The report indicates that the Bureau has silently fixated on the former president’s followers by creating a new category of “anti-government” extremism.
How the Wagner rebellion threw Russia into a deep state of crisis
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, has taken control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of the Southern Miliary District, in the most serious challenge to Putin’s leadership to date. Prigozhin says that he has 25,000 troops available and is willing to march on Moscow. Back on May 9, when Prigozhin’s challenge to Vladimir Putin first became evident, I argued in The Spectator against the idea that Putin was “in charge” of the situation.
How the Ukraine war remade our world
War has a stronger appetite than any of the countries that wage it. Aggressors, defenders, small states and superpowers are all on the menu. Take the war in Ukraine, for example. The war really started in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented secession in the Donbas. America slapped Moscow back with sanctions. This was virtue-signaling. Sanctions might sting Vladimir Putin and his cronies, but how could they change Russia’s interest in Crimea?
Imran Khan on the conspiracy against him
Pakistan is familiar with political unrest. No prime minister in its independent history has completed a full term in power; some of its most popular leaders have been assassinated or executed. Even so, the events of last month were extraordinary. On May 9, in response to the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan on corruption charges, thousands of protesters stormed buildings belonging to the country’s all-powerful military and set the army headquarters alight.
Is this the answer to GOP’s abortion headache?
There was an evangelical beauty pageant in Washington, DC today. At Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, a major gathering of religious conservatives and campaigners, a procession of presidential candidates strutted their stuff in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton. Keen to see the contenders in action, I went along (Cockburn in tow).
The search for the next pope is turning ugly
The Portuguese poet José Tolentino Mendonça is a handsome man in his fifties with a shaved head and meticulously trimmed beard. In one photograph he’s wearing an ultramarine blue polo shirt; in another, a lovely beige cashmere sweater that matches his tan. His poems depict emotional pain in cryptic language.
My evening pretending to be a woman
I have a friend who describes me as an ‘“uptight boring old straight heterosexual” — simply because I don’t use porn or prostitutes, don’t swing both ways and have no interest in orgies and dogging, or any desire to be tied up and flogged by some fat dominatrix in a “torture den” in Pimlico. He is always on the lookout for a new kink or a fresh fetish to try, and one of his latest passions is autogynephilia — that is, experiencing sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman.
Is America apathetic enough for a third-party run?
This is said to be a uniquely angry time. Every third newspaper column is a riff on polarization and rage. Writers at serious outlets warn of civil war and even wonder about the merits of national divorce. And yet, for all the real-if-overstated divides in America, it’s increasingly clear that the prevailing mood as this presidential cycle kicks into gear isn’t anger but apathy.
Can the 2024 election save cable news?
No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners.
Is Elon Musk’s war on remote work moral?
Remote work isn’t just killing productivity, according to Elon Musk: it’s morally wrong. In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Musk accused at-home workers of hypocrisy for expecting those in service and manufacturing industries to go into work. The “laptop class” needs to get off its “moral high horse” with its “work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said. Sign up for Cockburn’s gossip column Mischief, mayhem and Washington gossip from The Spectator’s intrepid beat reporter.
Why China’s buying of American farmland must stop
China keeps buying property in the United States. Concern over this trend has been simmering for years, yet leading Democrats and left-wing media outlets dismiss it as harmless because, they say, China doesn’t own very much land in the grand scheme of things or compared to other nations. Also — racism.
Where’s the beef? Eric Adams wants to force New Yorkers to be vegetarian like him
New York City mayor Eric Adams is on a quest to cut the city’s “food-related emissions” by 33 percent by 2030, and not by making Gas-X free to residents. Adams, whom the New York Times reports is “a self-described vegan who sometimes eats fish,” has expressed support for the city reducing the amount of meat it serves at schools, hospitals and in other government-funded capacities.
Is Tim Scott in it to win it?
The Republican primary has kicked into a higher gear in recent days. Donald Trump terrified one half of the country (and delighted the other) in his dominant, unrepentant CNN town hall appearance last Wednesday. Ron DeSantis is spending a lot of time in Iowa and — in the surest sign yet that he really wants to be president — appearing jacket-less among normal people. (10/10 fake laugh, Governor.) The coming few weeks will see more candidates make it official.
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