Mallen Baker: Faultlines

Many Republicans blame President Donald Trump as the obvious cause for the rout of the GOP in the latest midterm elections. But such comments are largely being made in private. In public, the top target for their ire and desire for accountability is Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is, however, the cabinet member Trump most likes, and he seems torn between standing by his man, or alterna...

President Donald Trump approached the midterm elections with optimism that the results would be close enough that the administration could deflect, deny, seek to put its toe on the scale, anything to keep control of Congress. In the event, the vote was such a massive repudiation of Trump and his activities for the last two years, there was simply nothing that could have been done to hide the bruta...

Unless a massive surprise unfolds over the next two days, Republicans are expecting a poor set of results from the imminent election. A muttering campaign has already started amongst GOP politicians and candidates to the effect that the bad outlook is very much down to just one man - President Donald Trump. Obviously, that's not how Trump sees it at all, so he is also casting around for someone to...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday October 30th 2026: Ukraine ends its unofficial pause on striking Russian oil refineries, in spite of Trump's demand that it doesn't before the US midterm elections; In those elections, Democrats continue to advance in the polling even though they score one self-inflicted own goal; And from Brazil to Israel via Serbia - right wing populists in the style...

It is entirely natural that the Trump team, facing desperately poor polling right up to the last days before the mid-term elections, are feeling grim. But the interesting part is that corporate America, which for the last two years has been queuing up to give President Donald Trump much of what he wants, taking advantage of the culture of impunity and even corruption he has brought about - are sud...

What was carefully unspoken (but patently obvious) since the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, has finally been acknowledged by the Russian leadership. And that only because Trump has now succeeded in destroying the majority of leverage the United States had in the Ukraine war - so Russia is signalling a shift in the power dynamics of how it expects the end game...

US President Donald Trump has said that the whole of the Western hemisphere is his backyard, and he will behave accordingly. So far, it seemed to be working out for him, with a number of South American countries electing Trump-friendly candidates that he could work with. But, just as he thought he would see the same in the biggest beast of them all, Brazil - with the son of Jair Bolsonaro ready to...

President Donald Trump is cancelling the tariffs on a number of Canadian goods as some of his candidates in the mid-term elections have sounded the alarm for how badly they have impacted their own communities. It's just one reflection of how reality is coming back to bite him where it hurts, and how he, and his team, are now panicking at the increasingly visible consequences on the horizon. And it...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday October 23rd 2026: The question of who interfered with Ukraine's Starlink connection has continued - and it looks like it could have been the biggest mistake of Elon Musk's entire career; Protests erupt in Venezuela demanding a return to democracy, in the same week as the details of Trump's Venezuelan oil deal have leaked out. And it's not happy reading...

Two things are going to explode after the mid-term elections have finally taken place - assuming that the results are anything like what the polls are predicting. One - President Donald Trump will launch a wide array of attempts to block, deny, obfuscate and overturn the result. And two - Trump administration members will escalate a period of savage infighting that, to all reports, has already sta...

The weekend saw an intensity of rioting that shocked even a French public that is very used to street protests as a way of life. President Donald Trump said that it was all about immigration - but then that's what he says about any problem on the continent of Europe. The reality is that it's a combination of popular discontent, a hard crash of public expectations versus massive government debt, an...

Two stories show how the imperial Trump presidency is going to continue to shake the world over the next two years, regardless of what happens in the coming mid-term elections. One - his attack on Europe for working to reduce its dependency on the US. He wants to use leverage as a weapon, and he will fight hard to prevent his victims from reducing his leverage. And two - his wish to achieve a gran...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday October 16th 2026: President Trump responds to Ukraine's defiance of his demand for them to stop bombing Russian oil - and it's rather tame. For now; Indications are growing that corporate CEOs are gearing up for the moment where they can declare to the world that they never supported Trump, and they just wanted to get back to business as usual; India i...

President Donald Trump came out this week as an agent of Putin's Russia, and adversary of Ukraine, and did so while demanding that Ukraine stop hitting Russian oil refineries. If it didn't, the US would likely withdraw all support. And it paused support for long enough to show what that would feel like. President Zelensky and Ukraine stared that possibility in the face - and went back to bombing r...

Having threatened dire consequences if Ukraine didn't agree to President Donald Trump's demand that they stop attacked Russian oil refineries, over the last couple of days we've seen signs that those threats have turned into some action - maybe just temporary, to demonstrate to the Ukrainians what they stand to lose - maybe the beginning of a permanent withdrawal. This development, following Trump...

The top military leader of NATO just openly explained the alliance's strategy for dealing with possible Russian incursions into the territory of a NATO member. It's a construct that has obviously been carefully put together - but maybe not solely as the best military strategy for dealing with Putin. More like, the most that could have the faintest chance of sticking given that squatting at the hea...

Following his shock deal with Russia on diesel, President Donald Trump followed up by making it starkly clear that he is going to use that deal to try to force Ukraine to give up its most powerful weapon against Russia. Ostensibly, it's to lower world diesel prices (which it won't) and it serves the convenient purpose of seeking to deflect blame for high gas prices from Trump's war on Iran. But lo...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday October 9th 2026. President Trump acts tough on Iran, but can't cover the fact that the US has been mostly running away from them in the last couple of weeks. The US finds itself similarly in retreat over the one-sided deals it tried to force African countries into in return for health aid. And the protests in France this week highlight the huge crisis...

The polls continue to give worse and worse news for Trump and the GOP over the coming mid-term elections, and now the signs are all over the place that panic is setting in. This involves President Trump posting constantly on social media, firing off in all directions, picking absurd fights, focusing on everything except the issues that seem to matter most for Americans. But in the course of all th...

One woman died from an unspecified illness in Russia - which wouldn't be a point of concern except that she worked in a laboratory that deals with the plague, and post-Covid there are concerns about just what sort of work might be being done, by a Russian state known to be involved with bioweapons research, to modify such bacteria - maybe into a form that could shape a new global pandemic. The odd...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday October 2nd 2026. The G20 trade ministers revolt against the Trump administration's demands that they line up behind America's trade agenda. It turns out that abusing allies turns them into ex-allies. Britain's new prime minister has electrified the political climate in the United Kingdom with just a speech - but what's really changed, and why might wid...

NATO members have just discovered that the Trump administration has set up a meeting to discuss the future of the alliance, and has pointedly NOT invited some of its key members, including the United Kingdom and France. This seems to be the latest move in President Trump's plan to punish any allies who refuse to behave as vassal states, while rewarding those that have been more compliant. Alongsid...

Recently, President Donald Trump has increased the pace of his attempt to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin's Russia in the world community. To all appearances, this seems driven by an increasingly urgent wish to strike lucrative deals with it, perhaps recognising that the options will narrow after a mid-term election setback, should that be imminent. So all the talk about needing to get peace with Ukra...

Two things in one week. One - European countries have been meeting together to look at how they respond - outside of NATO - to Russia's increasing hybrid warfare against them. And two - a leaked report from the Belgian Foreign Ministry reveals how they see, and are responding to, US President Donald Trump internally. Saying the things that they really don't want to go public on, and which give the...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday September 25th, 2026: China's Xi Jinping has his big state visit hosted by President Trump. Almost none of the important things were said out loud. Trump invites Vladimir Putin to the G20 meeting in November, setting up a unintended opportunity for President Zelensky to exploit. And Trump calls on the world to abandon the International Criminal Court as...