Mallen Baker: Faultlines

We've known Elon Musk was on his way out for several weeks, but yesterday he added the final straw - he said he was going to cut any political spending right down. This is the final end of his political adventure, because it was only his potentially unlimited amounts of cash that gave him leverage over the GOP, and that kept him useful to the Trump team regardless of his personal unpopularity with...

US President Trump and Russian President Putin held their direct call - the one that was supposed to see Trump pushing Putin into embracing a 30-day ceasefire in the Ukraine war. The outcome seemed not to be much in doubt - it was pretty well known that Putin was not planning to cede to such demands. The only question was whether he could play Trump so well as not to lose his support and have him...

The UK and the EU announced a big post-Brexit trade deal today. For some, it was a common sense shift from the original terms of the Brexit deal to make trade a little easier, and to facilitate much needed defence co-operation in the face of Trump's disruption of European defence realities. For others, it was a total betrayal of Brexit, and the reason why Trump-lite Reform UK's Nigel Farage could...

Bridget Brink was the US Ambassador to Ukraine during the three years post-invasion where the United States was standing relatively firm alongside its allies. Supporting the invaded party, opposing the aggressor. A month ago, she stepped down - and now she has come out with a blistering attack on the Trump Administration's policies towards Ukraine. Siding with Russia. Putting all the pressure on U...

So Trump's attempted interference in Canada backfired, and the Liberals' Mark Carney won the recent election. The question is - now what? Can Canada negotiate down those tariffs and establish a relationship with the US that puts Trump's annexing ambitions out of contention? And can it do that while doing what Carney said it must - diversifying its trading base to become less vulnerable to the futu...

Every relevant senior member of the Trump cabinet has come out with an attack on former FBI Director James Comey - a truly astonishing exercise in gaslighting to swear that something nobody had previously suggested was the case, is self-evidently the case and it means that a pretty innocent social media post Comey put onto his Instagram feed was really a serious threat against the life of the Pres...

President Trump has had perhaps his best week so far of his second term, being hosted by some of the richest countries of the world. He has also been making jaws drop with bold moves, particularly in meeting the new leader of Syria Ahmed al-Sharaa, regardless of his recent status as a jihadist, and also announcing that he would be lifting sanctions against Syria, crediting as he did so the Crown P...

It used to be that the United States, as the dominant world power, was the most powerful driving force behind world events, for better or for worse. It made mistakes sometimes, but it was a player. Now, with Trump in charge, the world has been learning that it has to manipulate him in order to get what it wants. Through flattery, or offering a deal, or refusing to budge until he inevitably backs d...

We've been taking it as read that Trump's MAGA base would stay unquestioningly loyal to him no matter what. But that support is starting to splinter. One half are noticing the blatant corruption, and they aren't happy because they believed in 'draining the swamp'. The other half are caught in a purity spiral that nobody can survive, and they are most furious this week with RFK Jr's pick of Casey M...

Yes, yes, we all know Trump lies - so what? Well, the point is that since the US is now bullying the entire world on trade, as well as using its leverage over various countries in other ways - this has changed the entire dynamic. World leaders are starting to repeat Trump's lies back to him. They are starting to attest in public that his (highly unlikely) telling of major events is in fact accurat...

Trump only just completed his first hundred days, so it's a bit early to be thinking about it all ending, right? Except, by all reports, Trump is already obsessed about the looming midterm elections. Why? Because if he really HAS accepted that he can't run for a third term, which is what he says, then he sure wants to be able to make the most of his remaining full four years. The idea of reaching...

Having created a major impasse between the US and China with mutual tariff obliteration, Trump has been trying to work out how the US can extract itself from at least some of the self-inflicted harm. Since neither leader will call the other, second level executives from each side are meeting in Switzerland this weekend to conduct exploratory pre-negotiations. But Trump has already signalled he wou...

Trump may have (reluctantly) accepted that Canada is not going to fall into his embrace, but he is going full speed ahead in his quest to get Greenland. This was evident when he sent JD Vance to visit there, and it was evident this week when the Wall Street Journal revealed that US spies have been tasked with covert surveillance on the island. Their mission - to sniff out the independence movement...

On Trump's so-called 'Liberation Day', a number of countries suddenly discovered that they were to be whacked with massive tariffs from the United States - including some of the poorest countries in the world. They quickly set about trying to win favour with the Trump regime, to get to negotiate their way out of a hole they'd been thrust into for no fault of their own. Curiously, for a number of t...

Whether in his stated terms, the policy changes he aims to make, or in the Project 2025 actions he's taking to bring in an autocratic system to the US, there are a number of reasons why President Trump is almost sure to fail. Yes, he can do damage in the mean time, but he won't succeed. The real challenge will be what comes afterwards - either the next president or the one after that if Republican...

In elections in Canada and Australia, we saw figures who had been even lightly associated with Donald Trump's MAGA movement losing, whereas before Trump had returned to office, they had been leading. But in the UK, Nigel Farage's Reform UK did the exact opposite - dominating the local elections and Parliamentary by-election. His aim is to break the two-party system, and to get himself installed as...

How do we know if the economy is doing well? There are reliable statistics for that. How do we know what's happening with the climate? There is reliable data for that. How do we know what are the worldwide energy trends? That are analytical reports for that. What if all of those statistics, the data, the analyses, get wiped out and replaced by the "alternative facts" that Donald Trump, and others...

Russia's President Putin is gearing up for the annual grand military parade in Moscow. This year is a big one because it's the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, and bigger names from the subset of the geopolitical world prepared to be seen in Russia are going to be attending. But Ukraine has rejected Putin's offer of a 3-day ceasefire during the period of the parade, and has said that it...

On day one, he declared several emergencies. Later, he backed this up by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. This has been an ongoing and deliberate push by President Trump to extend the powers of the executive, to overcome the resistance of the courts, and hence to set up what is referred to as a legal abyss. A situation existing alongside the legal system as usual where some people can find themselv...

In some places, such as Canada and maybe this weekend Australia, populist-right politicians, although they clearly show the signs of being influenced by Trump's MAGA movement, have been disavowing the link as their populations turn against it. In other places, more established figures on the populist and far-right, are less mired by the association, even as MAGA influencers, and often even the top...

So Ukraine has finally signed the Minerals Deal with the Trump Administration. And news commentators are full of speculation about how much this deal now has changed Trump's orientation with the Ukraine war, how much it will translate into security guarantees for Ukraine in the future, and whether it means Trump is finally ready to get tough with Russia's President Putin. It's remarkable how much...

The news arrived today that the US economy has dramatically cratered - shrinking in the first quarter of the year, whereas it had been strongly growing before. It is fairly clear with the breakdown that this is due to the short-term impact of tariffs, and that it's just the first sign of the scale of the disruption being caused, which will turn into yet more problems down the line. And yet Preside...

Mark Carney's Liberal Party has won the Canadian election. It was close, but still extraordinary that he was able to turn around the massive deficit the party originally had with Pierre Poilièvre's Conservatives. And he did so facing a barrage of social media disinformation as we've seen in other MAGA-involved elections. Now, he faces a Trump who remains fixated on Canada becoming the 51st State....

The big story about the Pope's funeral - bigger than the event itself on some measures - was a 15 minute one-on-one conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky - captured in a photo that is already on its way to becoming one of those iconic images. Commentators have been speculating that maybe in that 15 minutes, Zelensky was able to turn Trump's perspective around, to persuade him that Put...

We're used to the idea that Trump lies a lot - I mean, even his supporters know this, although they will use euphemisms to make it sound ok. But WHY has Trump suddenly started telling people that Xi Jinping has called him to discuss a deal on tariffs? It's clearly not true. It's clearly infuriating the Chinese and making it less likely they give him the deal he actually does want. So is he just ma...