FRESH HELL Tina Brown's Diary

As many as 30,000 English language books have been written about Donald Trump since he first eyed the White House in 2016, but only one has managed to weave together his maniacal haphazard decision-making with the vaunting stream of consciousness that inflates his indefatigable will to power.

How did the 250th anniversary of America become a celebration so devoid of ideas? Thanks to Trump, who believes the whole of history is the prelude to him, the America semiquincentennial has been turned into an amalgam of the scavenged symbols and totems of American trash culture. The worship of aggression, dominance, and force, not the triumph of core principles, is the only ethos we are currently celebrating.

How much of the still raging dumpster fire at 60 Minutes is due to the billionaire Ellisons’ need to keep Trump onside to close their mastodonic media merger, and how much is it their editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss’s mind-boggling management ineptitude?

When Special Counsel Robert Hur interviewed Joe Biden in October 2023 about retaining classified documents in his Delaware home, Hur famously declined to indict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” After reading Jill Biden’s memoir View from the East Wing, Hur might well have come to the same conclusion about the former First Lady. There’s a great book to be written about the Biden story that needs to acknowledge all the rich strands you won’t find here.

Democrats are getting it wrong again. After Trump’s 11th-hour endorsement of Texas attorney general and all-in Trump sycophant Ken Paxton, who was impeached for multiple charges of abuse of office, investigated on felony security charges, and dogged by adulterous sexual imbroglios, the slippery MAGA sleazebag still went on to pulverize Senate old-timer John Cornyn in the Republican primary on Tuesday.

Alastair, Rory, and I mixed it up over how Trump has successfully colonized world news, and over who has done greater damage to journalism: Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Btw, our Rest is Politics conversation is #1 on the UK Apple charts!

It’s thanks to Andrew Lownie’s paperback update of Entitled, his Prince Andrew defenestration, that we now know that Sarah Ferguson—aside from her toxic association with Jeffrey Epstein—reportedly had regular sex trysts with baby-oil extortionist P. Diddy (which she denies). What’s left for Lownie’s third edition? Freak-offs at the Beirut Hilton with Bashar al-Assad?

It’s thanks to Andrew Lownie’s paperback update of Entitled, his Prince Andrew defenestration, that we now know that Sarah Ferguson—aside from her toxic association with Jeffrey Epstein—reportedly had regular sex trysts with baby-oil extortionist P. Diddy (which she denies). What’s left for Lownie’s third edition? Freak-offs at the Beirut Hilton with Bashar al-Assad?

Truth telling backstage: (clockwise from upper left) Leopoldo Lopez, Christiane Amanpour, Patrick Radden Keefe, Don Lemon, Kara Swisher, and Emma Tucker I’m still levitating from co-hosting the Truth Truth Summit and not just because Pope Leo XIV, such a steadfast supporter of freedom of the press, sent a personal message of solidarity to our holy moly media gathering.

Here comes the first Wednesday in May, and the annual Truth Tellers Investigative Journalism Summit in London shines on my calendar again. I co-founded this exhilarating event, now in its fourth year, to honor the editorial legacy of my late husband, Sir Harry Evans, the peerless editor of the Sunday Times, whose courage, tenacity, and integrity were the North Star of our profession.