Mallen Baker: Faultlines

Musk's time with DOGE is coming to an end - or at least will be massively dialled back. But the fact is that the exercise, which promised so much, seems to have ended up a failure on every measure. It failed to save the government money - indeed, it may have cost more than it saved. It failed to make government more efficient. It may have made government systems vulnerable to data theft, not least...

It's official. Trump's tariffs on the world, but especially on China, are making the whole world poorer. Trump wants China to make a deal - but he set the terms of the negotiation in such a way as to make it certain they won't respond. Meanwhile, the punitive tariffs Trump has imposed on China, and the corresponding equal tariffs placed by Beijing on the US, is starting to make itself felt. Major...

At the start of the day, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff were on their way to a top-level meeting in London to discuss President Trump's seven-point "peace" plan. But when the details of the plan were revealed, Ukraine immediately said that it was not acceptable - that it was not a peace plan, but a surrender plan. Cue meltdown. Trump pulled Rubio and Witkoff from the meeting, JD Vance took time out...

President Trump came out of the gates quickly in his second term, testing the limits of his power in all directions at once, and assaulting numerous institutions to show them that he could bully them into compliance with a radical change agenda. Initially, it looked like most of them would just cave in to his demands. But increasingly, from Harvard to numerous law firms and now even the Supreme Co...

Reports are coming into view about complete disarray at the Pentagon under Trump's controversial pick for secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth. He has fired all his senior advisors, he is isolated, unqualified and unexperienced. And this is damaging one of the most important departments of state, even as Trump defends him against any suggestion of media witch hunts. But if the chaos is real, how lon...

Answering a question from a Patreon supporter - Should Greenland kick the US out of its one remaining Greenland base, since - if Trump were to make good on his threat to take the island by force - it could be used as an entrance point? The sentiments are understandable, but the realpolitik of the situation really comes down to how Denmark and Greenland are most likely to be able to retrieve the op...

We've been witnessing something really strange over the last three weeks. Trump has been ... silent. OK, only about one thing, but even so. He's been wholly quiet on the subject of Canada, and his previous expressed desire that it should become the 51st state of the USA. The silence can mean only one thing - he actually really does understand how much he blew it with Canada - turning an entire nat...

The Supreme Court ruled decisively 9-0 that the man incorrectly removed from the USA to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia, that he should be returned to be afforded the due process any human being should expect. The Trump Administration has, instead claimed the ruling vindicated their position, and in a set-piece in front of the media with the El Salvador President ma...

The Trump / China Trade War enters its third week, and the stakes are only getting higher and the measures more intense. While Trump is busy pulling various other countries into the White House to beat them down in negotiations in the face of their tariffs, Xi Jinping is conducting a charm offensive to the countries he trades the most with, and with America's former allies who are now desperately...

If the Trump administration is taking the United States in the direction of autocracy, there are certain steps that you would commonly expect to see being taken, in common with other countries that have taken this journey over the last couple of decades. So what steps HAVE we been seeing that are compatible with the idea that future elections, though they are likely still to happen, may no longer...

Trump reversed course, and the stock market flowered in response, and everything's now OK, right? Well, except that a lot of damage has been done, most of the tariffs actually still remain, and there's no sign that the administration really has learnt the lessons of what just happened. As a result of that sinking in, the stock markets have been sliding again today. And the world is getting to grip...

The news is just in - after all the bluster and the boasting, Trump finally noticed that not all was going swimmingly with his tariffs on the entire world, and he has hit the pause button. For everyone save China, because he can't abide the idea of backing down. But this comes just a day after the full ugliness of this extortion attempt was on show for all to see - and the damage to the idea that...

When President Trump announced his tariffs to the world, China was right at the top of the list, and it was hit with one of the largest tariffs of the day. This was supposed to get Beijing to the negotiating table to beg for tariff relief, but instead Xi Jinping declared a trade war, and said that China would win this, and any other sort of war Trump wanted to fight with them. Why did it escalate...

Trump is at the centre of things - throwing the global economy into turmoil in the aim of reshaping everyone's relations with the US, as well as reshaping geopolitical alliances and introducing autocratic measures into the federal government. While all that is going on, the signs are being picked up of how GOP senators and others are preparing the ground for the moment Trump's grasp on power begin...

President Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act back in 2020, but he was prevented by the opposition of his then-defence secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But now those people have been replaced with loyalists, and there's nobody around him who is going to tell him it's a bad idea. On his first day, he inserted a ticking time bomb into one of his initial Executive Orders - a deadline...

I've been talking about the likelihood of the US heading towards a second civil war for some time on this channel. Patreon supporter Peter asked me if I still felt that to be the case, with everything that's been happening recently with the Trump 2.0 administration. It's a good question, and certainly bears some further exploration - so let's discuss.

The recent Signalgate text messages leak gave us a real insight into just how much JD Vance really actually hates and despises Europe - much more than had previously been stated in public. We'd seen him argue that Europeans should care more about free speech, and we'd seen him wish for more of the far-right populist parties on the Continent to be elected. So what is it about his own personal and p...

President Trump called it 'Liberation Day' - but that's not what many others were calling it. Instead, the wide-ranging raft of tariffs levied on imports to the US, which seemed based on wholly fictitious claims of how much other countries levied against the US, has thrown the stock markets, the leaders of all other nations, and even some Republicans (quietly) into turmoil. Most believe that Trump...

Health researchers, climate scientists, and more - they are finding significant projects being axed for what appear to be purely ideological grounds. This can include projects you would think would be immune to such factors, such as cancer research. The US has had the benefit of cutting edge research and technology for many decades - it has been one of the assets that has made it so successful. Bu...

Elon Musk has been all over the Federal Government for the last ten weeks. But his original term of office is coming to an end, and both Trump and Musk himself are now talking as though that will be it. He has to get back to his businesses, they say, which have been suffering. But he does not want to stop playing this fun political game - and so he is throwing his money into today's State Supreme...

The front-runner for the next French Presidential elections, according to current polls, Marine Le Pen has been sensationally barred from standing by a judge who was sentencing her in an embezzlement case. The verdict had expected to be less severe, and to be no block to her challenging the political establishment as the potential first far-right candidate to cross the finish line. But the State P...

In their book 'How Democracies Die', Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify the four tells for a despot-in-waiting, the democratic guardrails that all dictators-in-progress seek to dismantle, and how they go about it - and the two other essential ingredients that protect a system that people often underestimate, or even miss entirely. And it won't astonish you to learn that all of this is rea...

So the visit to Greenland of the Vice President JD Vance finally happened. Originally intended to be a 'charm offensive' to the population, eventually the Americans could find no Greenlanders who wanted to talk to them or who wanted them there at all, so they flew into the US base and stayed there. And slated Denmark for being a bad ally. And said that the wonderful people of Greenland would be mu...

In the immediate aftermath of the debacle in the Oval Office, it was reported that Trump wanted the minerals deal toughened up to 'punish' Ukraine. This week we got first news that this is exactly what has been done - the Ukrainians were presented with a full proposal that reportedly gives America 100% control of all of its resources in perpetuity! It is a ridiculous deal, one that Ukraine could s...

After various members of the senior Trump administration stated flatly that no classified information was revealed in the group chat on the bombing of Yemen, The Atlantic went ahead and published the entire chat thread, showing clearly the detail of attack plans, precise timings, weapons and systems to be used, that were added to the thread by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Various voices have...