Iran has become a “lose-lose issue” for Donald Trump, which is alienating his entire political base, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. When he attacked Iran, he infuriated the isolationist wing of his coalition, who believed his promise that he’d start “no new wars”. Now, his scramble to end the conflict “is alienating the hawkish sector of his party”, who believe it amounts to a humiliating surrender.

One Republican senator described the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Trump last week as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”. Texas senator Ted Cruz said Trump must be getting “very poor advice”. Critics are particularly outraged by the potential creation of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called the provision a “disaster”, likening it to offering the “Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power”.

Vance under fire

Furious as they are, many Republican hawks are still reluctant to criticise Trump directly, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. So they’re turning their fire instead on the vice-president, J.D. Vance. “Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” raged one unnamed congressman to a Washington correspondent.

The president has done nothing to discourage such talk. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said, half-jokingly, of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.” The irony, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, is that Vance opposed starting this war. Now it has fallen to him to sell the peace deal and serve as the fall guy when it goes sour. “You almost have to feel sorry for Vance. Almost.”

Face of peace

“Playing the part of Trump’s surrender monkey” will hurt Vance’s image in the short term, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark, but few Republican voters are likely to remember any of this stuff in two years’ time if petrol prices are back to normal and Iran hasn’t tested a nuclear device. Vance will just be the guy who helped bring an unpopular war to an end.

He has certainly been happy to serve as the face of this peace agreement, said Adam Cancryn on CNN. He asked to play a leading role in the talks, rather than being pushed into it. Vance may get the blame if the deal blows up, but he has no doubt concluded that if the two sides return to an intractable conflict, his hopes of becoming president are probably scuppered in any case.

Henry Nowak would “still be alive today” if Britain and Europe had “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants”, said J.D. Vance on X. The “proper response – the only response – is righteous anger”.

The “most outspoken member” of an “evangelistic” administration, Vance’s ire does seem to have a “particular focus on the UK”, said The Times. He has commented on protests around abortion clinics, and told Keir Starmer that there have been “infringements on free speech” in Britain.

Vance is now using the Nowak murder to “bolster” his narrative of Britain as a “once powerful nation” “pandering to liberalism”. This could just be a reminder for American voters that the Republican Party retains an “uncompromising approach to wokeism, borders and policing” in the upcoming mid-terms. But if Vance is anointed successor to the Maga movement, comments such as these could be a sign of things to come.

What did the commentators say?

“J.D. Vance is wrong to intervene in the controversy around the murder of Henry Nowak,” said The Telegraph in an editorial. That said, “there is a good deal of hypocrisy on show”: Labour Remainers had no issue with Barack Obama “intervening” in the Brexit debate, and have had “no compunction about condemning Donald Trump over domestic US policy. “Inevitably, politicians welcome foreign interference only if it suits their arguments”, when “it would be far better if each stayed out of the other’s business”.

Vance was “surely right” to call out the “politics of self-hatred” in the British justice system, said Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator. It is “perfectly legitimate” for the US to comment publicly on what is happening in the UK. The government’s reaction, arguing he has “crossed a red line of diplomatic protocol”, has been hypocritical and “frankly pathetic”.

Britain is just as guilty. For instance, the Labour Party sent 100 activists to campaign for Kamala Harris in 2024. “Rather than engage in shameless pearl-clutching, Starmer’s government should listen to what our closest ally is telling us.”

Interventions like Vance’s are “deepening the split between the Trump administration and Britain’s Labour government”, said Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal. The division is inherent. Where Vance sees a mission to “stabilise values and societies after decades of self-inflicted confusion”, Britain sees “Bible-bashing and race-baiting”, and hears “only atavistic calls to the wrong kind of identity politics”.

This “political opportunism” against Britain goes far deeper than the vice president, said James Schneider in The New Statesman. “The exploitation of Nowak’s death is of a piece with a clear US state strategy, one which turns Europe into a source for American rhetoric.” Vance talks about Britain “not as an equal, but as a provincial outpost of the imperial system, nominally independent and permanently available for correction”.

What next?

Vance’s stance could have implications for the next election on this side of the Atlantic, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. If Vance remains in the White House as vice president, “or even as Trump’s successor” after the US elections in 2028, it’s hard to imagine him “standing idly by” when the UK goes to the polls, likely in 2029.

At best, the reaction to the Nowak intervention shows us that “plenty of Britons still reflexively dislike being lectured by Americans”. Yet, it has also warned us “not to take our political sovereignty for granted. Sooner or later, we may need to defend it.”

The United States under President Donald Trump is, for the time being, the brightest star in a growing network of ultra-nationalist governments hoping to reshape the global order in their authoritarian mold. While MAGA America is the powerhouse, it’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary that has been the backbone of the worldwide lurch rightward. Yet as Hungarians prepare to vote on April 12, Orbán and his Fidesz party seem headed for an electoral upset that could send shock waves across hard-right spheres.

Government ‘revered by authoritarians everywhere’

A “pro-Kremlin, anti-EU strongman” who has spent nearly two decades “building a template for Christian nationalist rule,” Orbán is now the “cornerstone of President Trump’s vision for Europe,” Axios said. In the 16 years since he was first elected, Orbán forged a “state apparatus — courts, media, election administration — loyal to his party” and has “never lost under the system he built.”

As the “center of the Trump administration’s shifting policy toward Europe,” Orbán’s Hungary “firmly” aligned itself with “far-right parties and immigration restrictionists in countries such as France and Germany,” said Al Jazeera. While this has “mired relationships in Europe,” it has also been a “source of inspiration for the U.S.”

“Whatever Hungary decides will resonate throughout Europe,” said Argentine President Javier Milei, a South American nationalist, during his address at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. Orbán is a “beacon” for those who “refuse to accept that the West’s destiny is one of managed decline.”

CPAC-Hungary, where Milei spoke, has become an “important calendar event for Euro-Atlantic hard-right networking,” said Balkan Insight. The event hosted “667 foreign guests from 51 countries” who heard from “prominent European political figures” such as far-right Dutch PVV leader Geert Wilders and Alice Weidel of Germany’s ultra-nationalist AfD. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while initially scheduled to appear in person, instead sent a “warm message of support” in pretaped remarks played on the conference’s first day, Cleveland Jewish News said.

Orbán is “revered by authoritarians everywhere,” said Salon. But as a “path-breaking autocrat” who has demonstrated a “new soft fascism,” his potential loss is making many of those same authoritarians “nervous.”

Effects that would ‘reverberate well beyond Hungary’

Should Orbán’s government fall, the “dreams” of his authoritarian admirers in the MAGA movement “might be shattered” as well, said Vox. As a “close Russian ally,” Orbán’s loss would be a “considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.” Cumulatively, then, Hungary’s elections are “not just like any other vote,” and could end up as “one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade.”

An Orbán loss would prompt authoritarian allies to ask “what it could mean for them,” said Salon. “After all,” his “anti-democratic” domestic policies were designed to “not only prevent a defeat from happening” but to “keep people from ever wanting it to happen.” Such a defeat would “reverberate well beyond Hungary,” calling into question the “durability of a political system” marked by “hardline nationalism and an erosion of democratic checks” and “touted as a blueprint for reshaping Western democracy” by many conservatives, said Reuters.

“I am here for a simple reason,” Vice President JD Vance said at a pro-Orbán rally in Budapest this week: “I admire what you are fighting for.” But Vance’s visit may have ultimately done “more harm for Orbán than good,” The Guardian said. By asserting that the Trump administration would work with any eventual Hungarian elected leader, the vice president seemingly undercut Orbán’s campaign promise that “he — and his connections — were the only means of keeping Hungary safe in a volatile world.”

For some observers, Vance’s visit is unlikely to change the electoral calculus in Hungary, where “domestic issues such as the ⁠cost of living dominate the election,” said Reuters. No matter what happens in Hungary’s immediate future, Orbán’s global footprint will surely be felt for years to come.

From his podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump reminded his base how he differed from past presidents. “It turned out that I was able to stop wars from happening,” he said.

That was in 2024, said Natalie Allison at The Washington Post. A year later, the newly installed president was back at CPAC, boasting about being “a peacemaker, not a conqueror”.

Notable absences

This year, Trump skipped the jamboree for the first time in a decade: he was too busy managing the war with Iran he’d launched a month earlier. And he wasn’t the only high-profile no show, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. At the last event, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio spoke, and Elon Musk ramped up the carnival atmosphere by brandishing a chainsaw on stage; this time, one attendee noted that there were more journalists present than politicians. That the event was rather more subdued than usual was due to several factors – including its relocation from DC to Texas; but the lack of buzz was indicative of the troubled state of the GOP as it gears up for the midterms.

A little over a year into his second term, Trump is discovering that for all his efforts to extend his authority, there are still constraints on what he can do, said Gerard Baker in The Times. Public revulsion has forced him to temper his migrant deportation policy; the Supreme Court has struck out his signature tariffs policy; the markets are squealing about the war in Iran. And even in his own backyard, the voters are restive: in late March, a Florida Democrat seized a red seat that takes in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Base betrayal

The die-hards remain intensely loyal, said Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic, but polls show that Trump is losing support among the coalition of younger Americans and Latinos that gave him his victory in 2024. Many already felt betrayed by his attempt to block the Epstein files and by the impact of his Big Beautiful Bill on the deficit. Now, they’re furious that he has taken the US into a war that is costing billions and further driving up the cost of living.

In the manosphere, prominent voices who rallied behind his “anti-woke” rhetoric in 2024 are complaining that Americans were duped. The podcaster Joe Rogan has called the war “insane, based on what [Trump] ran on”. There is dissent within Maga too, some of which has veered into antisemitism: Tucker Carlson and others have been peddling the line that Israel manipulated Trump into the war. Disenchanted Trump fans are unlikely to vote Democrat in November; but they might easily just tune out of the election – and so inadvertently deliver a “blue wave”.

When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the case for Donald Trump’s war in Iran, there was an unexpected distraction: his shoes were “at least two sizes too big”, said Séamas O’Reilly in The New Statesman.

The shoes had been given to him by Trump. The president has gifted pairs of the same shoes to several colleagues who are reportedly too scared to not wear them, even if they don’t fit.

Dangling loose

Trump is handing out Florsheim Oxfords, which cost $145 (£109). This new “stylistic choice” has “caught the public’s eye”, said CNN, after Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance were pictured wearing “black dress shoes with visible gaps between the shoe’s collar and the wearer’s foot”, which leaves the ankle to “dangle loose in the opening like the clapper in a bell”.

The shoes are the “hottest and most exclusive MAGA status symbol”, said The Wall Street Journal. The president ordered the footwear for colleagues after telling them they had “s***ty shoes”, said the paper. According to Vance, he, Rubio and a third politician gave the president their shoe sizes: 13, 11.5 and 7, respectively. (The UK equivalents are 12, 10.5 and 6.)

But Trump has “taken to guessing people’s shoe size in front of them”, asking an aide to “put in an order” and then, a week later, a brown Florsheim box “arrives at the White House”, said the broadsheet. The president “sometimes signs the box or attaches a note of gratitude”, sources told the paper.

“You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,” said Trump, but the shoes he gave the men are “clearly too big”, menswear expert Josh Peskowitz told CNN. So perhaps Vance and Rubio “prefer the ideal of the feet they wish they had to the reality rattling around inside their new shoes”, said the broadcaster.

According to reports, the staff are now “reportedly so terrified of offending” Trump, that they “constantly wear these cheap, ill-fitting shoes any time they’re in his presence”, said The New Statesman. For Trump, the arrangement “seems to work out pretty well”, he told Fox News, adding that his colleagues now “look all spiffy and nice”.

Could this be “hazing”, an “expression of affection” or a “loyalty test”, said Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times. The “weird surface” conceals the “irony” that Florsheims are made in Cambodia, India and – mainly – China. The company has hiked prices after Trump’s tariffs.

Hidden lifts

Politicians and footwear have history. Napoleon Bonaparte, who was around 5ft 6in tall, wore shoes with “hidden lifts”, which “added a few extra inches to his stature”, helping him “reinforce his authority both on the battlefield and in political settings”, said Jennen.

If Trump believes you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size, he might find food for thought in the fact that Abraham Lincoln had the largest feet of any US president, wearing a size 14 shoe, while Rutherford B. Hayes, in office from 1877 to 1881, had the smallest feet of any US president – a size 7.

Theresa May, who was one of the first foreign leaders to visit Trump in his first term in the White House, was the subject of countless column inches about her choices of footwear. “Love them or loathe them”, it can’t be denied that May’s shoes were “something of a phenomenon”, said Woman & Home.

“Never before had a politician’s feet endured such scrutiny.” She “kickstarted a 60% rise” in sales of leopard-print shoes as home secretary, and as prime minister she was credited with “bringing back the kitten heel”.

Rishi Sunak followed in her footsteps by hitting the headlines for his footwear fashion: super-casual slides, pricey Prada loafers and, most famously, Adidas Sambas.

It was the year that Donald Trump caused chaos with tariffs, Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the US government, Angela Rayner was forced to resign, and Gary Lineker left the BBC. Here we take a look at some of the people who made the headlines in 2025.

January

Justin Trudeau bows to pressure to resign as Canadian PM, ending his nine-year stint in power. Tens of thousands of people flee their homes to escape surging wildfires in Pacific Palisades, in Los Angeles. Among the celebrities to lose their houses are Anthony Hopkins, Jeff Bridges and Paris Hilton. Seventeen-year-old Luke Littler becomes the youngest darts world champion in the history of the sport.

In an effort to drum up trade, Chancellor Rachel Reeves visits Beijing for the first high-level economic meeting between Britain and China since 2019: critics dub it “operation kowtow”. Tulip Siddiq resigns as a Treasury Minister over her links to her aunt’s ousted government in Bangladesh. A court in Dhaka later convicts her of corruption, in absentia. Two months after being criticised in an independent report for his handling of abuse allegations, Justin Welby steps down as Archbishop of Canterbury.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” declares Donald Trump as he is sworn in as the 47th US president in a ceremony attended by the Silicon Valley elite. He announces moves to boost fossil fuel production and close the US-Mexico border, and declares an ambition to “take back” the Panama Canal. In a frenetic first week, he signs a mass of executive orders and offers millions of federal employees eight months’ worth of pay to resign, as part of his efforts to shrink the state. Israel’s cabinet approves a ceasefire deal in Gaza, leading to the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

A previously obscure Chinese startup releases DeepSeek-R1, an AI chatbot that seemingly costs a fraction of the price of US rivals and can be downloaded for free. It shoots to the top of Apple’s charts and wipes $1 trillion (£742 billion) off the value of US tech stocks.

February

Keir Starmer launches a charm offensive in Brussels as he seeks to “reset” Britain’s relations with the EU. A panel of international medical experts claims that Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering seven babies, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice: her case is under assessment by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

As head of America’s new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Elon Musk starts purging the federal workforce. He dismantles the country’s main aid agency, USAID, and boasts of having fed it “into the woodchipper”. Days later, he wields a chainsaw on stage at an event in Washington DC. Germany turns to the right in its federal election, delivering victory to the conservative CDU and setting up its leader, Friedrich Merz, to become the nation’s next chancellor.

Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, is forced to deny that his government is planning to ban pet cats: a report had merely advised that cats might be contained in areas that are home to red-listed bird species. The Broccoli family yields creative control over the 007 franchise to Amazon MGM Studios. Beyoncé wins her first album-of-the-year Grammy for her country-inspired album, “Cowboy Carter”.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to sign a minerals deal, only for his Oval Office meeting to end in an undignified, televised row. Vice president J.D. Vance accuses him of disrespecting America, by seeking to “litigate” disagreements in front of the media, and suggests that he show gratitude to the president. “You don’t have the cards,” yells Trump.

March

Ukraine agrees in principle to a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire – if Russia follows suit – prompting Washington to announce that it’s restoring the flow of military aid and intelligence to Kyiv that was cut off after the Oval Office row. But Russia does not agree to US proposal.

The Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle series, “With Love, Meghan”, debuts on Netflix, to dire reviews. At the age of 69, Donatella Versace steps down as creative director of the Versace fashion empire. Uncollected rubbish starts piling up in Birmingham after the city’s refuse collectors embark on an indefinite strike.

Marine Le Pen (pictured, above) sees her hopes of becoming France’s next president dealt a major blow when she is convicted of embezzlement and banned from running for office for five years. Israel launches air strikes on Gaza, ending the ceasefire. It says that Hamas had breached its terms by failing to release hostages and had rejected proposals to extend the truce. Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, announces plans to splurge on defence spending to help with Europe’s rearmament.

Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth, is suspended by the party, amid claims that he’d made threats towards the party’s chairman, Zia Yusuf. Lowe, who had earlier described Nigel Farage as the “messianic” leader of a “protest party”, claims to be the victim of a smear campaign; the Crown Prosecution Service opts not to bring charges against him. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch formally abandons the net zero target set by Theresa May in 2019. A fire at an old substation near Heathrow brings Britain’s busiest airport to a shuddering halt for 24 hours.

April

On what he dubs “Liberation Day”, Donald Trump announces a slew of tariffs on countries and territories around the world, including two uninhabited islands near Antarctica. The price of US government bonds plummets, and he is forced to suspend most of the tariffs for 90 days.

An all-female crew, including the pop star Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez, the fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, fly to the edge of outer space in one of Bezos’ Blue Origin rockets. After the 11-minute flight, Perry, who had boasted of putting “the ass in astronaut”, kisses the Earth and declares that she’d not realised “how much love there was inside of you … how loved you are”. Tributes pour in from around the globe following the death of Pope Francis, at the age of 88.

Britain’s Supreme Court confers clear legal protection on single-sex services by ruling that the terms “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act 2010 refer only to a “biological woman” and a “biological man”. The government seizes control of the day-to-day running of British Steel following a breakdown in talks with the Chinese owner, Jingye, over the future of its Scunthorpe steelworks.

Former Bank of England boss Mark Carney leads his Liberal Party to a fourth consecutive election victory, less than two months after succeeding Justin Trudeau as Canada’s PM. The family of Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, announces that she has taken her own life, at the age of 41.

May

Nigel Farage declares “the end of two-party politics” after Reform UK makes sweeping gains in local elections in England. The Tories lose control of every local authority they were defending. A sustained cyberattack cripples the digital operations of Marks & Spencer. The retailer later estimates the direct costs of the attack at roughly £136 million.

The Court of Appeal rules that the decision to downgrade Prince Harry’s police protection after he stepped back from royal life in 2020 was legally justified. Harry responds angrily, describing the decision as a “good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up”. (The Home Office is now reviewing the situation.) The Belfast rappers Kneecap have gigs cancelled and are dropped by their US booking agent after videos emerge of them shouting “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” at one gig, and telling fans at another: “Kill your local MP. The only good Tory is a dead Tory.” They say their words were taken out of context.

Unveiling measures to strengthen Britain’s borders, Keir Starmer says the country risks becoming “an island of strangers”. His critics say this phrase echoes words used by Enoch Powell; he later apologises. On the second day of the conclave in Rome, Robert Prevost is elected pope. Pope Leo XIV is the first US-born leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

A jury in Newcastle finds Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, guilty of criminal damage – for cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree by Hadrian’s Wall. Gary Lineker leaves the BBC without a payoff, days after apologising for reposting an anti-Zionist video that included an emoji of a rat. Keir Starmer signs a controversial treaty that officially hands control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, releases a video of himself confronting fare dodgers at Stratford Tube station in east London.

June

In its most audacious operation of the war so far, Ukraine launches a series of remotely triggered drone attacks on airfields deep inside Russia. Operation Spiderweb is said to have caused $7 billion (£5.2 billion) of damage to Russia’s long-range strike fleet.

The bromance between Trump and Musk ends in bitter recriminations after Musk describes the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill as a “disgusting”, “pork-filled” abomination, and urges senators not to vote for it.

Israel mounts a surprise strike on Iran, launching a wave of bombing raids that eviscerate the top ranks of its armed forces and kill some of its leading nuclear experts. Iran responds by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, a few of which penetrate its Iron Dome defences, killing dozens of people. Blaise Metreweli (pictured, above) becomes the first woman to be appointed head of MI6. An Air India flight bound for London Gatwick crashes in Ahmedabad: the sole survivor is named as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, from Leicester, who’d been sitting in seat 11A, and who escaped with relatively minor injuries.

Riots break out in parts of Northern Ireland after two Romanian-speaking teenagers are charged with raping a teenage girl in Ballymena, County Antrim. The charges are later dropped. Tanks roll through Washington as Donald Trump hosts a military parade on his 79th birthday. He goes on to launch the largest-ever strike by B-2 stealth bombers: seven are sent to drop bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump claims the bombs “totally obliterated” the sites.

After an emotional debate in the Commons, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill passes by 314 to 291 votes. Another antisemitism row erupts after the BBC broadcasts footage of the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan leading the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival. Jeff Bezos marries Lauren Sánchez during a three-day multimillion-dollar shindig in Venice. Locals complain about the disruption; Greenpeace unveils a banner in St Mark’s Square reading: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax.”

July

On the first anniversary of his premiership, Keir Starmer is forced to gut his flagship welfare reform bill to stave off a full-scale Labour revolt. Government borrowing costs rise after Rachel Reeves is seen crying during a session of Prime Minister’s Questions, during which Starmer initially fails to guarantee that the Chancellor will keep her job. The PM subsequently insists that he is “in lockstep” with her; she explains that she had had a “tough day” and had been dealing with “a personal issue”. Firebrand Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announces that she is quitting Labour to co-lead a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn, a project that quickly descends into factional infighting.

Gregg Wallace is sacked as a “MasterChef” presenter over multiple claims of inappropriate behaviour. He is later criticised for seeming to blame his misconduct on his late-diagnosed autism – a condition that, he says, has left him unable to wear underpants owing to his hypersensitivity to labels and tight clothing. The reunion many fans feared would never happen finally comes to pass when, 16 years after last performing together, Noel and Liam Gallagher stride onto the stage at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium – and bring the house down.

An Observer article blows the whistle on Raynor Winn’s popular 2018 memoir, “The Salt Path”, picking holes in its claim to be the true story of a wronged couple’s triumph against the odds. Owing to drought conditions, eight million people in England face restrictions on water use. Britain joins 27 other countries in condemning the “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza by Israel, amid warnings that “mass starvation” is spreading across the Strip. Six people are arrested during violent protests outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, a hotel housing asylum seekers.

US tech boss Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot, are caught in a romantic embrace by a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert. Their guilty reaction goes viral; Byron, a married father of two, resigns from his job. Cheering fans line the streets of London to salute England’s women’s football team as it parades through the city to celebrate its victory in the Euro 2025 championship. Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney is caught up in a political row over an American Eagle advert that praises her “great jeans”; critics claim the ad has overtones of eugenics. Sacha Baron Cohen unveils his muscular new physique on the cover of Men’s Fitness. “This is not AI,” insists the “Ali G” star. “I really am egotistical enough to do this.”

August

After President Emmanuel Macron declares that France will formally recognise Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly in September, Keir Starmer says that Britain will do the same unless Israel allows more aid into Gaza, commits not to annex the West Bank and agrees to a ceasefire. Channel 4 causes a stir with its documentary about Bonnie Blue, a 26-year-old who has won a huge following by posting clips of her extreme pornographic stunts. The documentary focuses on one such stunt, in which she supposedly had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours.

In one of the largest mass arrests in modern British history, more than 500 people are arrested in Parliament Square for holding up placards declaring their support for the proscribed group Palestine Action. Parts of the Cotswolds are brought to a near standstill by the arrival of J.D. Vance for his summer holiday – along with his family and a huge security detail. Vance had earlier visited Foreign Secretary David Lammy at Chevening, where the pair went fishing (illegally, it turned out: Lammy had failed to get a rod licence).

Donald Trump hosts Vladimir Putin at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska, and offers the Russian leader a lift from the airport in his own presidential limousine. The three hours of talks fail to produce any breakthrough. In the year David Beckham celebrated turning 50 and was finally awarded a knighthood, there is gossip about a major rift in his family. The Beckhams’ eldest son, Brooklyn, and his wife the billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz, appear to confirm this when they post pictures of a “vow renewal” party to which his parents had seemingly not been invited.

Lucy Connolly, the childminder who became a right-wing cause célèbre after being jailed for posting inflammatory comments on social media during last year’s Southport riots, is released from HMP Peterborough. She strikes a defiant tone, promising to “continue to fight” for free speech. The pop star Taylor Swift lights up the internet when she posts a photo of boyfriend Travis Kelce on bended knee, in a garden bursting with roses, along with the caption: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”

September

Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un flank China’s Xi Jinping at a huge military parade in Tiananmen Square. “Phase two of my government starts today,” declares Keir Starmer as he unveils another Downing Street mini-reshuffle, appointing Darren Jones to be the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. In an immediate setback for the reset, Angela Rayner quits as deputy PM, housing secretary and deputy Labour leader after an investigation finds that she breached the ministerial code, by failing to get proper legal advice about the stamp duty due on the purchase of her flat in Hove. As a result, she had underpaid £40,000 in tax. Yvette Cooper is moved from the Home Office to the Foreign Office, and replaced in her old job by Shabana Mahmood, the former justice secretary.

After a summer of flag-waving, more than 100,000 people join Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom demonstration in central London; by video-link, Elon Musk urges the crowd to “fight back or die”. Israeli jets fire missiles into a compound in a residential district of Doha, the capital of Qatar, in a failed bid to eliminate the Hamas negotiating team. Zack Polanski is elected leader of the Green Party, with 85% of member votes. Melvyn Bragg bows out of presenting Radio 4’s “In Our Time”, the show he has hosted since its launch in 1998. Misha Glenny is later named as his successor.

“Folks, it’s happening,” declares a triumphant Nigel Farage at Reform UK’s conference. “We are all ships rising on a turquoise tide headed ever-closer towards winning the next general election.” Danny Kruger subsequently becomes the first sitting Tory MP to join Farage’s party. America reels in response to the assassination of the 31-year-old political influencer and free speech champion Charlie Kirk, shot dead while answering a question about mass shootings at a public event at Utah Valley University. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, hints at his leadership ambitions ahead of the Labour Party conference, sparking a backlash from MPs, closely followed by a backtrack.

The publication of a “birthday book” given to Jeffrey Epstein leads to the resignation of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington: it included a tribute from the Labour peer to his “best pal”, describing how much he looked forward to visiting Epstein at “one of his glorious homes he likes to share with his friends (yum yum)”. Sarah Ferguson is also caught up in the scandal when it emerges that she had described Epstein as her “supreme friend” in an email to him in April 2011, after she had publicly disowned him. Donald Trump is treated to the full array of pomp and pageantry on his second state visit to the UK.

October

An attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur leaves two people dead and three more seriously injured, prompting police to step up patrols in areas with large Jewish populations. President Macron faces growing pressure to step down following the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, France’s fifth PM in two years, after just 28 days in post; Lecornu is reappointed four days later. Sarah Mullally is appointed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury – the first woman to take the job in its 1,428-year history.

The world’s first 100% AI actor, Tilly Norwood, causes a stir when she is unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in a video that shows off her range in a series of clips. “That’s an AI?” exclaims actress Emily Blunt, when shown the video. “Good lord, we’re screwed.” Two weeks after unveiling his 20-point plan for peace in Gaza, Donald Trump declares that “the war is over”, and all the living hostages held in the Strip are released, along with some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. However, Trump is not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It goes to Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado, who then dedicates it to Trump.

Rumours of a romance between pop star Katy Perry and former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau are confirmed when a photo appears of the pair caught in a clinch on Perry’s yacht. In a statement from Buckingham Palace, Prince Andrew (pictured, above) says he will no longer be called the Duke of York, as Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoirs are published. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, voices his frustration over the collapse of the trial of two British men accused of spying for China between 2021 and 2023. The charges were dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service said it couldn’t get evidence from the government that it had viewed China as a national security threat.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, begins a five-year prison sentence for conspiring to raise campaign funds illegally; he is released three weeks later pending his appeal. In a bold daylight heist, thieves steal eight pieces of the French “crown jewels” from the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery in Paris. The jewellery – worth an estimated £77 million – hasn’t been recovered, but four suspects are in custody.

November

With public anger about the Epstein affair not abating, King Charles initiates moves to strip his younger brother of all his titles and evict him from his 30-room mansion in Windsor. Millions of people tune in to watch Alan Carr win the inaugural UK series of “The Celebrity Traitors”. The self-described “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani wins New York’s mayoral election.

Donald Trump threatens to sue the BBC for up to $10 billion (£7.4 billion) for “deceitfully” editing footage of a speech he gave on 6 January 2021, the day of the Capitol riot. The furore prompts the resignation of two of the BBC’s most senior figures: director-general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness. David Szalay wins the Booker Prize with his sixth novel, “Flesh”.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveils a string of tough measures, which she says amount to the most significant reform of the asylum system since the Second World War. After months of speculation, leaks and apparent U-turns – notably on raising income tax – Rachel Reeves finally delivers her second Budget. It is widely viewed as a failure, leading to renewed speculation about the Labour leadership. In her second report, Covid Inquiry chair Heather Hallett condemns the slow response of Boris Johnson’s government: had it imposed a national lockdown even one week earlier, the report states, 23,000 lives could have been saved.

December

Time names “The Architects of AI” as its “person” of the year. Justice Secretary David Lammy announces plans to curb jury trials in England and Wales. The Trump administration publishes a stark new National Security Strategy, warning that “decaying” European countries face the prospect of “civilizational erasure”. A terrorist attack on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, claims 15 lives. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, hits out at resident doctors for striking during a flu crisis. Film legend Dick Van Dyke celebrates his 100th birthday.

Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old activist and political commentator best known for his Christian nationalist and racist rhetoric. He first attracted attention as a teenager at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then, he has built up a large following as a social media influencer, particularly via his “America First” broadcasts, on which he airs white supremacist, antisemitic, misogynistic and authoritarian views.

On an episode of his show in March, he summarised his politics as: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” He has also repeatedly described Hitler as “cool”.

Where did Fuentes come from?

Fuentes was born and raised in La Grange Park, Illinois. He describes his childhood, in a largely white suburb near Chicago, with a home-maker mother, a breadwinner father of Mexican heritage, and a strong Catholic ethos, as idyllic. He thinks women should stay at home, and shouldn’t have the right to vote. He told Piers Morgan recently that he had never had sex with a woman; he said he was not gay, “but I will say that women are very difficult to be around.” He studied politics at Boston University, but dropped out after his first year to become an activist.

In some ways, Fuentes’s livestream show harks back to a traditional format: he wears a suit, sits behind a desk, and talks rapidly and fluently about current affairs, in a thick Chicago accent. The difference, says Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker, is that he inhabits a post-Trump, “post-woke” world, in which “all norms in political commentary have been destroyed”.

Why is he significant?

Because he has become disturbingly influential. His X/Twitter account, which Elon Musk reinstated in 2024, has 1.2 million followers; this month each of his “America First” livestreams have attracted around a million views each. On 27 October, the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson broadcast a sympathetic two-hour interview, which was watched by more than 6.5 million people. Carlson did not challenge Fuentes’s views, which precipitated a major ruction inside the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s Maga movement. Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist, warned that the party has a neo-Nazi problem: between 30% and 40% of Republican staffers in Washington under the age of 30, Dreher said, are “Groypers”.

What is a Groyper?

Fuentes’s fanbase call themselves Groypers, or the “Groyper Army” after their logo: an unwholesome-looking cartoon toad named Groyper, a variant on the “Pepe the Frog” meme that became popular with far-right activists in 2015. More a loose-knit network of internet trolls than an organised movement, they see themselves as Maga’s edgy youth wing, and like to mock right-wing figures who are (relatively) more moderate.

In 2019, Fuentes started to criticise the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, whom he saw as insufficiently right-wing and in the pay of corporate donors. (“Conservative Inc.” is his name for Kirk’s brand of activism.) Fuentes’s supporters often attended Kirk’s events to heckle, in a conflict later referred to as the “Groyper War”.

Unlike the Maga mainstream, Groypers favour Catholic ultra-traditionalism or Eastern Orthodoxy over Evangelical Protestantism, and they oppose US support for Israel. But they’re so steeped in social media in-jokes, memes and irony that it’s hard to know what they really believe.

So what does Fuentes believe?

Being more outrageous than his competitors while suggesting it’s all a big game is a part of Fuentes’s act. As well as praising Hitler and Stalin, he has coined the slogan “Your body, my choice” to needle women concerned about abortion rights after Trump’s second election victory. His irony gives plausible deniability, and helps confuse mainstream critics – but there’s no reason to think he isn’t sincere about his positions: support for an ethnic and religious hierarchy with white Christian men at the top; a belief that black people are inclined to criminality; opposition to legal as well as illegal immigration; vehement anti-feminism; respect for authoritarianism; disdain for democracy.

A former fan (and, in 2022, dinner guest) of Donald Trump, Fuentes now says that “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way”, while Trump himself is “incompetent, corrupt and compromised”. He sees the vice president, J.D. Vance, as a corporate stooge and “a fat, gay race traitor” (Vance’s wife is of Indian descent). He has particularly criticised the administration for its support of Israel.

What are his views on Israel?

He rails against US backing and funding for Israel, questioning the mainstream rationale for the alliance, and suggesting that it serves the interests of Jewish elites rather than the US itself. His thinking often tips over into conspiratorial antisemitic tropes. Central to Fuentes’s thinking is the belief that “organised Jewry” exerts a disproportionate control over US political, financial and media institutions – in ways that harm “traditional America”. He has also said “Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen.” Although he later claimed that this was a mere provocation, Fuentes has repeatedly said that the Holocaust is used to push a liberal, multicultural agenda – to “browbeat” whites and suppress white pride.

How is the Republican Party reacting?

Republican mainstays such as Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz have denounced Fuentes, and Carlson for giving him a platform. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, made clear his position by declaring: “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.” Elsewhere, the situation has not been so clearcut. After Carlson’s interview, Kevin Roberts, the director of The Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think-tank, put out a video describing Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” of “the globalist class”. (“Globalists” is often used as code for “Jews”.) This led to resignations at The Heritage Foundation; Roberts eventually had to apologise. However, neither Trump nor Vance has ever condemned Fuentes; presumably because they share some of his beliefs and don’t want to alienate the Groypers.

What does Fuentes want?

Apart from attention and money – his influencing operation is carefully monetised, from paid-for questions to branded merchandise – he has said for years that he wants the Groypers to infiltrate the US establishment and the Republican Party, and to displace traditional conservatism with his brand of far-right white nationalism. “Your job is to get into the Ivy League,” he told his followers. “Your job is to get into these offices and do what you need to do, say what you need to say.” He advises them to hide their views: “Hold it close to the chest.” Fuentes generally demurs when he’s asked if he wants to be president himself. But as the Maga movement begins to contemplate the post-Trump future, there are likely to be opportunities for a white nationalist influencer with a large, fervent online fanbase.

Donald Trump has repeatedly flirted with the idea that he could run for a third term in 2028. “There are methods which you could do it,” the president said in an interview with NBC News earlier in the year. He declined to elaborate further, but last month, during his Asia tour, he told reporters it was “too bad” he was not allowed to seek a third term, adding cryptically: "We'll see what happens”.

While mainstream Republican politicians have generally shied away from the idea of a third Trump term, several leading Maga figures have jumped on the bandwagon. Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist turned influential podcaster, insisted: “Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there is a plan.”

What does the constitution say?

The original text does not impose any limits on how long a president can remain in office, but the notion that the presidency should be limited to two terms dates back to the Founding Fathers. George Washington, the first US president, set the pattern by stepping aside after two terms despite clear popular support for him to continue to serve. Thomas Jefferson, who saw “little distinction between a long-serving executive in an elective position and a hereditary monarch”, followed suit, said political scientist and term-limit scholar Michael J. Korzi, so cementing the tradition.

Since 1951, however, presidents have been limited to two terms by the 22nd amendment of the constitution, which states: “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”.

Why was the amendment adopted?

Successive presidents continued to observe the two-term convention until Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to a third term in 1940 and had recently begun a fourth when he died in office in 1945.

When Congress convened for its 1947 session, imposing a constitutional term limit was high on the agenda. The debate was driven by the same “major concern” that motivated Jefferson: “to prevent a president from becoming a king”, said Mark Satta, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law, Wayne State University, on The Conversation. But the then-recent experience of the Second World War, which had made Americans acutely aware of the dangers of allowing a leader to concentrate their power over a long period, had turned the issue into a priority. One representative said that a presidential term limit would assure the electorate that “we shall never have a dictator in this land”.

Could it be changed?

Not without an extraordinary legislative effort. Amending the constitution would need the approval of two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by ratification by at least three-quarters of state legislatures. It is almost impossible to imagine a plan to scrap the two-term limit getting the necessary levels of support, particularly to facilitate a president as divisive as Trump.

That has left Trump supporters pinning their hopes on what they see as a loophole. Under the constitution, the vice-president automatically accedes to the top job in the event an incumbent president dies, resigns or becomes incapacitated.

Some have suggested that Trump could join the 2028 election ticket as the running partner to a presidential candidate, who would then immediately resign after being sworn in. Trump would then automatically step into the role of president.

Legal experts dispute this argument, however. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told the BBC that the 12th amendment, which states “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States”, closed off that technicality. “I don’t think there’s any ‘one weird trick’ to getting around presidential term limits,” he said.

Would Trump likely try?

If the Supreme Court ruled that the wording of the 12th amendment did not preclude a two-time president serving as vice president, Trump could, in theory, “be president for life”, said Paul Gowder, Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, on FactCheck.org. It would just be a case of “finding people to occupy the top of the ticket”.

But Trump has downplayed the idea of acceding to the presidency by the back door, saying: “I think people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It wouldn't be right”.

A more likely avenue for Trump to retain his power and influence – if not legally his office and title as president – would be to get one of his family members to get elected in their own name, “and then serve as a figurehead president while Mr Trump makes the key decisions”, said The Telegraph.

Donald Trump is alive – his appearance and insistence that he has "never felt better" rubbishing rampant online speculation alleging he was dead.

Rumours of his demise had been circling, and were boosted last week by an unusual lack of public presence by the limelight-seeking president for three consecutive days.

Flags at half-mast

The speculation appears to have begun when a photograph of what looked to be bruising on Trump's right hand went viral in June, sparking theories he had been on an IV drip. Weeks later, it was revealed he was being treated for a non-life-threatening condition causing poor circulation and swelling in his lower limbs, said Al Jazeera.

Vice President J.D. Vance unwittingly fanned the flames when he said that if a "terrible tragedy" were to occur, he was ready to step into the role of president, seen by the conspiracy-minded as "evidence that something was awry".

As social media accounts began to call attention to Trump's absence from public engagements, hashtags like #trumpisdead and #whereistrump started trending and users searched for evidence to support the theory that the president was dying or dead, such as flags flying at half-mast at the White House. (This was actually in response to a school shooting.)

The story got a tongue-in-cheek boost when "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening said the long-running cartoon would end only when "you-know-who dies", a reference to the show's "reputation for supposedly predicting real world events", said The Mirror.

This is not the first time Trump has been rumoured to have passed away, said The Tab. In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, social media was abuzz with hearsay that he'd died from an overdose of the virus treatment hydroxychloroquine. In 2022, a comedian sparked another Trump death hoax, and by 2023 it was enough of a trope that the president's son Donald Trump Jr. joked on Twitter that his father was no longer with us.

'Degree of plausibility'

For rumours to spread, they must "have some degree of plausibility", said Psychology Today, with advanced age adding credence to speculation over the health of leaders. During his presidency, Joe Biden was also the subject of death hoaxes, as well as frequent speculation on his health and mental competence. Trump's physical condition and mental cognition have been called into question repeatedly during both his first and current terms.

Such tales are not new, with historical conspiracies having alleged the premature death of leaders from Joseph Stalin to Fidel Castro. But while nearly every US president has "been the subject of death rumours", most presidents served before social media, where platforms are "notorious for amplifying unverified claims", which can then rapidly "spread in the digital echo chamber".

Continually repeating a claim gives it credibility in an effect known as the "illusion of truth", and it follows then that more people are likely to believe it. Accusations that Trump's alleged death had been covered up simply played into the "widespread distrust" we have of politicians and the media. And in this context, "even the flimsiest of claims" can be accepted.

Reform UK is on a "mission" that "boils down to bringing back British babies", said Politico. Nigel Farage's party "has started to see childbearing as fertile political territory" and is backing up the rhetoric with policy proposals.

We want a "shift in attitudes" to improve the country's birth rate, a spokesperson said. "We're trying to cut immigration drastically", so "to fix the population crisis", we need to "encourage British people already here to have kids".

What policies is Reform proposing?

In May, Farage said Reform would scrap the two-child benefit cap, which restricts the amount of means-tested state benefit a family can receive for their children. Last year, in its election manifesto, the party said, "Families are the bedrock of a thriving society," and pledged to "give parents back control" by extending the tax break for married couples to the first £25,000 of annual income for either spouse, and "front-loading the child benefit system" for parents with young children.

"The majority of mothers would choose to stay at home more if they could," the manifesto said. So "front-loading" child benefit for children aged one to four, would "give parents the choice to spend more time with their children".

Why is Reform focusing on babies?

It's not just about addressing the birth-rate figures; Farage believes his "family focus" will win him votes, said Politico. Reform's parenting policies are thought to be a factor that's "drawing in some of its youngest female recruits". The party's vote share among women aged 18 to 26 has "shot up", according to the More in Common think tank.

Reform also wants to target "voters switching from Labour to Reform", partly in protest at the government's failure to scrap the two-child benefit cap. While the two-child limit actually "polls well among voters, especially Reform voters", said social-policy professor Chris Grover on The Conversation, to get into government, Reform needs to "build a coalition of voters or split left-leaning voters". Its pledge to abolish the two-child limit "may be aimed at both".

Will it work in the UK?

A fixation on family and birth rates "echoes US-style conservatism", said Politico. But it might not work here because the UK is a "more secular society", said Patrick Brown, Republican family policy expert at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center. "Family" is considered "the F-word in British politics", said Joe Shalam, policy director at the UK's influential Centre for Social Justice think tank, as parties fear accusations of "moralising about what people should or shouldn't be doing".

The rhetoric is certainly "straight from the playbook of other right-leaning politicians", such as the US Vice President J.D. Vance, said Vicky Spratt in The i Paper. In Hungary, the right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán introduced free SUVs, generous tax breaks and subsidised mortgages for families under the age of 40 who have three or more children, but this "has not worked" and birth rates are "still falling".

Other countries, such as France and Sweden, offer "generous" support for parents but birth rates continue to fall there, too, so "it's going to take more than a free SUV or time off work to change this downward trajectory". One thing seems clear, though: if Labour fails to offer "progressive policies to support young families and those who would like to have children, other voices will fill the void".

When President Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his vice presidential pick, he hailed him as someone who would "do everything he can to help me make America great again." But while Vance played the well-established role of campaign pitbull during the race, he has since kept a comparatively lower public profile compared to the televised bombast of other Cabinet members or favored presidential advisers. When asked in February if Vance was his successor to lead the MAGA movement in 2028, Trump demurred, saying it was too early to speculate, while affirming his VP was "very capable."

This week, however, Trump was noticeably more enthusiastic about Vance's future. He called him "most likely, in all fairness," his MAGA successor and "probably favorite at this point."

In 'pole position' with the MAGA base

Trump's qualified endorsement of Vance "appeared to be his strongest public backing" for the vice president's "political future," The New York Times said. By suggesting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio "maybe would get together with JD" as well, Trump signaled a "shift in his thinking over time," after having previously "floated both Vance and Rubio as possible successors" in May. While Trump has "singled out" both men in the past, he has "mostly avoided choosing a favorite," said CBS News.

Vance has "increasingly become one of the president's chief problem solvers," said CNN, with the vice president often involving himself in the administration's "key priorities" right as they "reach their thorniest points." The role has placed Vance in "pole position with the MAGA base early on," even if it also risks "dooming his chances down the road" with a "broader electorate" growing frustrated with the Trump administration. Trump holds "considerable influence with the Republican base," and any signs that he's picked a successor "carries significant implications," said Reuters. That the president has "not hesitated to give Vance high-visibility assignments" is matched by Vance's eagerness to do Trump's "bidding" on everything from "his relationship with Ukraine" to the "fight over records related to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal," said The Associated Press.

'Thanking his lucky stars'

Vance's growing public profile comes as the Trump administration struggles to contain the spiraling fallout from the ongoing Epstein scandal, which has engulfed the Justice Department and piqued the furor of the party's MAGA base. Given Trump's well-documented relationship with Epstein, Vance is "playing the part of the good soldier" while observing how Trump's "bumbling" has pulled the president into the "conspiratorial narrative" surrounding the Epstein saga, said USA Today. The vice president is likely "thanking his lucky stars" for Trump's handling of the case as he watches the president dig his "Epstein hole deeper and deeper."

Opportunism and an increased profile aside, polling suggests Vance's popularity has "steadily declined" since he assumed office, Newsweek said. While his appeal is "hardening among conservatives," it has eroded among "moderates, liberals, younger voters and communities of color."

What happened

President Donald Trump said Sunday night that the U.S. bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday resulted in the "obliteration" of Tehran's nuclear program. The U.S. military and the United Nations said it was too soon to assess the damage. Vice President J.D. Vance insisted the U.S. was "not at war with Iran," just "Iran's nuclear program," and he and other Cabinet officials stated on TV that the Trump administration was not aiming for "regime change." But Trump Sunday night said toppling the "current Iranian regime" was certainly on the table.

Who said what

The Trump administration's "conflicting" messages about the scope of U.S. involvement "highlights the difficulty" it faces as it "tries to navigate the fallout" from "its massive strike on Iran" and "mollify the factions of the MAGA base" opposed to joining Israel's war, Politico said. This is a "risky moment for Trump," The Associated Press said, especially as he has long "belittled his predecessors for tying up America in 'stupid wars'" in the Middle East.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that initial assessments indicated "extremely severe damage and destruction" at the three nuclear facilities — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan — hit by 30,000-pound U.S. "bunker-buster" bombs and Tomahawk missiles. But Rafael Grossi, the head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, said that "at this time, no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to assess the underground damage" at the sites.

U.S. officials also "conceded they did not know the whereabouts of Iran's supply of near-bomb-grade uranium," The New York Times said. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that the highly enriched uranium had been moved to undisclosed locations before the attack, a claim deemed probably true by outside experts and Israeli officials and bolstered by satellite photos.

What next?

At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council Sunday, Iran's ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani said the U.S. had "recklessly chosen to sacrifice its own security merely to safeguard" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tehran's military will decide the "timing, nature and scale of Iran's proportionate response." U.S. intelligence officials had "already detected signs that Iran-backed militias were preparing to attack U.S. bases in Iraq, and possibly Syria," the Times said.

There is a "good chance" that the UK and the US could reach a "great" trade agreement, said US Vice President J.D. Vance in an interview with UnHerd. Donald Trump "really loves the United Kingdom".

Of course, the UK has heard this story before but there might be some substance to Vance's overtures, with a White House official telling The Telegraph that an agreement is expected "soon". "Two weeks," he said, before adding, "Or maybe three."

"While this would be a win" for Keir Starmer, said The Spectator, "questions remain over the substance". What would be included in the deal? And, perhaps most importantly, "can we really believe it will happen?"

What did the commentators say?

In this post-Brexit world, "an ambitious US-UK economic alliance would not only boost economic growth and prosperity, steering the economy away from recession; it would also be an almost unimaginable political prize for the prime minister himself," said The Independent. Starmer would "achieve what eluded all of his immediate Conservative predecessors". And, with only "the most modest" EU reset in sight, the US deal is "the best prospect available among major economies," especially as efforts with China have "yielded relatively little".

But what kind of "deal" is on the table? asked the BBC's Faisal Islam. Talks this time round have focused on science, tech, and AI cooperation, all "in return for avoiding tariffs". The US has also wanted to talk about the UK's "tech tax" on mainly US digital companies, and has raised issues about the Online Safety Act. Yet Britain faces a 10% "reciprocal tariff" and a 25% levy on cars, despite there being "no US trade deficit". The UK side, therefore, "has much to complain about".

Some sort of agreement may be "in the foothills" but to call this a "trade deal" would be "misleading", said Sky News' Mark Stone. It's more accurately "an 'economic deal' to reduce the tariffs". Still, any agreement would mark "a large step forward for the UK, which has been trying to engage America in closer trade alignment since Brexit".

But some in Westminster "are angsty about any compromises that may be offered up to Trump – or demanded by him" in return for a deal, said Politico's Andrew McDonald. Particularly worrisome is "any move to make it easier for US farmers to sell in the UK". That would be likely to anger British farmers, "who’ve already shown their willingness to storm Whitehall in their tractors".

What next?

Deal or not, let's not "lose sight of the big picture as Trump sees it", said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. Trump's tariff war "aims to obliterate" the global trade system and replace it with "a world trade order based on might is right, as represented by the US".

For Britain, therefore, "a free trade agreement with Trump's US can only be fundamentally defensive. It should be seen as a way of protecting British trade interests." And it is "not the key to unlocking UK prosperity".

Starmer will host an EU-UK summit in London on 19 May, as he "seeks to ease trade barriers with Brussels", said The Times. Experts have cautioned that, by aligning more closely with Brussels, Britain risks being drawn into Trump's trade war with the EU. In the meantime, negotiations with the US continue.

Vice President J.D. Vance went to Greenland last week to "make the case for a U.S. takeover," said Clarissa-Jan Lim in MSNBC.com, and was met with a "frosty reception." Vance joined his wife, Usha, for a daylong visit to a U.S. military base, which came amid President Trump's calls for the U.S. to annex the self-governing Danish territory. In a press conference there, Vance said Greenlanders would fare "a lot better" under "the United States' security umbrella" than under Denmark's, and admonished Denmark for "underinvesting" in the territory. But it was a message few seemed interested in hearing. What had been planned as a three-day trip by Usha Vance was dialed back after an "uproar among local officials" and residents; Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede called the visit a "provocation" and declined to meet with U.S. officials. But Trump only doubled down, saying "we have to have Greenland" and refusing to rule out the use of military force.

It's a remarkable turn of events, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. For anyone who believes U.S. foreign policy should be guided by partnerships with allies, "respect for international law, and due regard for ethics," Trump's threats toward a NATO ally are "a political absurdity and a moral monstrosity." He risks "blowing up" both NATO and the "framework of international laws and norms" that has guided the post-war era. And for what? Trump says U.S. control of Greenland is key to national security, but Denmark has made clear it is open to the U.S. basing additional forces there. The Vance visit, which included national security adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, underscored Trump's "territorial ambitions," said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. Over it hung a mystery: "How far Trump is willing to go to achieve his goal."

Don't underestimate the threat here, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. There's a temptation to believe Trump is making chess moves, and that his ulterior aim is to seek expanded access to the island, or signal to NATO that "limiting Russian and Chinese access to the Atlantic" must be a higher priority. But over and over we've seen that failing to take Trump at face value is a mistake. He's telling us that nothing short of annexing Greenland will do, and by now we should understand: "When he says he's going to do something crazy, believe him."

"I have never seen a breach quite like this". That was the damning assessment of Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, after he was accidentally added to a group chat on Signal where top US defence and intelligence officials were discussing confidential war plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen.

This major security "botch" will only further stoke concerns that have "repeatedly been raised about intelligence sharing with the US" under Donald Trump's administration, said Sam Blewett at Politico.

What did the commentators say?

Even before Trump's inauguration in January, Washington's intelligence-sharing partners had "began to assess the need to become more reserved about what they can risk sharing with US partners – and what to hold back", said Keir Giles and John Sipher at Foreign Policy. During Trump's first term, the partners had watched with "horror" when he "challenged his own intelligence services, posted a classified photo of an Iranian missile launch site, and eagerly shared secret intelligence with Russian officials".

With Trump's return to the White House, "fears of sharing sensitive information with Washington will have deepened radically" as it "became clear that the US now places a higher value on partnering with the Kremlin" than on the "concerns of its European allies".

Earlier this month, four former British ambassadors to the US voiced concern about the future of intelligence sharing, following Trump's re-election. One, Sir David Manning, who was ambassador between 2003 and 2007, told a parliamentary committee that some Trump appointees had "strange track records" which would create a "problem on the intelligence front".

In the US, Democrats and even some Republicans have expressed anger and outrage at the latest security breach but, for Keir Starmer, "concern may go deeper than the Signal conversation over the Houthi war plan", said Simon Marks in The i Paper. It is as yet "unknown how many similar conversations about classified operations may have already taken place via insecure technology that is not government-approved, and how many of the West's enemies may have found ways of snooping on them".

What next?

US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who invited Goldberg to join the Signal chat, "probably ought to resign", said Freddy Gray in The Spectator, and there is already a "furious discussion inside the White House" that he "may need to be forced out", said Politico.

But there remains the much bigger question about the future of Western intelligence sharing, particularly the "Five Eyes" arrangement that the US has with the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

It is "part of the web of cooperation among Washington and its friends that has long underpinned US and Western security", said Foreign Policy. But now, the other four nations would be "entirely justified to wonder just how secure their intelligence can be in the hands of US officials" who not only shared top-secret military plans on Signal but also included "one of America's leading journalists", said The i Paper.

The strongest relationship within Five Eyes has always been the one between the US and UK. The way that these long-standing allies help each other is "unique", Dame Karen Pierce, who stepped down as ambassador to the US in February, told the parliamentary committee last month. So, intelligence sharing would continue, "even if, at the top level, there might be things we might wish to be a bit circumspect about".

"Few public figures have exploded onto the world stage quite like US Vice-President J.D. Vance," said Dominic Sandbrook in The Times.

In his first major foreign speech, at the Munich Security Conference, he caused a stink by berating European leaders about free speech. After that, he laid into Ukraine's President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for supposedly showing insufficient gratitude to President Trump. And he then upset more people by dismissing talk of UK and French peacekeepers in Ukraine, saying a US mineral deal would protect the nation better than "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years". One assumes copies of Vance's misery memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy", aren't "flying off the shelves in Royal Wootton Bassett". Vance has swiftly established himself as a hate figure among critics of the Trump administration, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. The internet is so awash with parodies that he is now "more meme than man".

This mockery by progressives won't bother Vance, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He's used to being "the outlier in the room – whether as a conservative in liberal spaces" such as Yale Law School, or as a self-styled hillbilly "in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley". The vice-presidency has traditionally been the "booby prize" of US politics, but Vance has proved effective and versatile in the role so far. He has "played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage"; he also spends a lot of time on X/Twitter deftly skewering Trump's opponents. If the administration completes its term in decent shape, he'll be well-positioned to replace Trump in the White House.

I suspect Vance and his boss will fall out before then, said Alison Phillips in The i Paper. That partly comes from reading Vance's memoir, in which he angrily relates how, in his youth, he tried to ingratiate himself with his mother's successive boyfriends in a vain attempt to stop them leaving. He got his ear pierced to impress Steve, "a midlife-crisis sufferer", pretended to love police cars to please Chip, an alcoholic police officer, and was kind to the children of Ken, an odd-job man.

Reading this, one can't help but see Trump as just another "father figure" who is destined to let Vance down. The president is "the ultimate transactional politician" – for him, it's all about deals. Vance, at heart, is an "ideologue", with little interest in deals. Sooner or later, that difference in outlook will lead to a rupture.

How times change, said Pieter Haeck on Politico (Brussels). When world leaders gathered to discuss artificial intelligence at Bletchley Park a mere 15 months ago, their main preoccupation was with safety – with whether this rapidly developing technology could, you know, "make humanity extinct". Yet those worries are all terribly passé, apparently.

The declaration from last week's AI summit in Paris "mentioned safety only three times"; rather, it stated that AI development had to be "open" and "inclusive", resulting in the US and UK refusing to sign it altogether. With the new fixation on unlocking growth, politicians from around the globe loudly vowed to cut red tape, invest and innovate. "I'm not here to talk about AI safety," insisted US Vice-President J.D. Vance. "I'm here to talk about AI opportunity." "Europe is open for AI and for business," declared the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.

Rightly so, said Martin Ehl in Hospodárské noviny (Prague). The sudden emergence of China's DeepSeek shows the AI arms race is still wide open, which is why the Trump administration is rightly taking the brakes off its own projects. If Europe wants to compete, it can't keep focusing on regulating, or it will "miss the boat".

I'm sorry, said Laurent Duraisin in Le Quotidien (Eschsur-Alzette), but have we lost our minds? The AI revolution is still in its infancy and already is full of horrors – "infamous deepfakes", AI-generated fraud, you name it: each time this tech develops, so does its ability to wreak havoc. And it's not as if we can rely on the tech giants to protect us. "The geniuses of Silicon Valley", with their mammoth monopolies, find no trouble getting around any national laws that get in the way of their company's bottom line, even without legislators making it easy for them.

Europe faces a "devilish" conundrum, said Daniel Verdú in El País (Madrid). Its leaders have a duty to ensure AI benefits Europe's citizens and businesses, not least by looking to protect them from foreseeable harm. But as Vance warned at the summit, the Trump administration won't tolerate foreign governments "tightening the screws on US companies".

In short, the EU can try to regulate the potential dangers, but the world's largest AI power won't be participating – leaving the old continent at risk of falling even further behind. For its part, the Trump administration is clearly rattled by China, said the FT. But by boldly ripping the guardrails off AI, it's making "a potentially reckless bet – that it can master this game-changing technology first, without anything going wrong along the way".

The reliable pipeline from Ivy League law school to success and riches is well established in the U.S., and Vice President J.D. Vance is no exception. Despite the Trump administration's controversial efforts to undermine the independence and power of the country's most prestigious universities, the vice president would almost certainly not be a wealthy man one heartbeat away from the presidency without the ballast provided by his alma mater. Vance, who wrote in his bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" about how his childhood in Appalachian Ohio was scarred by his mother's struggles with addiction, parlayed his coveted Yale University legal education into a successful career as an author, lawyer, investor and politician whose rapid ascent from the Senate to the vice presidency is almost without parallel in American history.

Yet unlike President Trump, a billionaire who inherited millions from his father's real estate business, Vance's wealth was self-made through book royalties, investments and employment, leaving him and his wife Usha with a fortune that, while substantial in comparison to the net worth of most ordinary Americans, will not land him on lists of the world's wealthiest individuals anytime soon. Today, the Vances' combined income and investments, including real estate and crypto, is "estimated at between $4.8 million and $11.3 million, according to federal disclosure forms filed in August" of 2024, said CBS News. Forbes estimated the couple's net worth at $10 million in November 2024.

From a difficult childhood to Yale Law School

While the exact circumstances of Vance's childhood in Middletown, Ohio, are a matter of dispute and speculation, he certainly faced trying circumstances. His mother was addicted to painkillers and "raised her own children amid violence, chaos, drugs and strange men," said The New Yorker. But despite the vice president's frequent claims that he grew up in poverty, the Vances "never had to worry about money," said The Conversation. On the contrary, his parents, despite their troubles, made good money and "at one point enjoyed a six-figure income" in addition to being able to draw upon a reservoir of family wealth from Vance's grandfather, said Rolling Stone.

Vance attended Ohio State as an undergraduate and obtained his J.D. from prestigious Yale Law School in 2013. At Yale, he benefited from advice and guidance from "several prominent mentors who would help him move through the world of elite institutions and politics," including "Tiger Mom" author and Professor of Law Amy Chua, said The Guardian. His classmates at the renowned law school, which produced the second-largest number of current federal judges after Harvard University, also helped turn his ambitions into reality.

"In Vance's final year at Yale, he convened a reading group" to look at the lack of mobility and poor social outcomes for white working class Americans, said The Washington Post. The group was where Vance began working on the ideas that would become "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," a book that "gave a voice to millions of forgotten Americans across the heartland," said The White House.

The memoir that catapulted Vance to stardom

The book sold more than 1.6 million copies and brought in nearly $500,000 in royalties between its publication in 2016 and 2025. "Hillbilly Elegy" was "mostly a family story" whose key insights included "its challenges to the self-delusional and self-defeating aspects of hillbilly culture," and which was "not notably polemical," said Slate. Many copies were seemingly purchased by dispirited liberals hoping to understand how Donald Trump won the 2016 election. "Hillbilly Elegy" was a "compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump," said The New York Times. In 2019, Netflix "paid $45 million" to acquire the film rights to the book, "with Vance reaping some of that windfall," said Yahoo Finance. The film, directed by Ron Howard and released in 2020, was critically panned and felt "like a package of assorted chicken parts that can’t be assembled back into something approximating the shape of an actual animal," said Vulture. It currently has a critics' score of 24% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Vance's tome enjoyed another run of success and interest when he was selected to be President Trump's running mate during the summer of 2024. The book sold more than 750,000 copies just in the two weeks following Trump's decision, leading his publisher to print "hundreds of thousands of additional copies to keep up with demand," said The New York Times. The centrality of royalties to Vance's wealth is similar to the way that earnings from memoirs like "A Promised Land" are still a key part of former President Barack Obama's net worth.

How Vance's career built his fortune

After law school, Vance served as a clerk for a conservative judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in northern Kentucky. Federal clerkships are prestigious apprenticeships that typically go to high-performing graduates of top law schools and are used as a springboard to launch various kinds of legal careers. "Law clerks' salaries cannot match those of some private-sector lawyers," but they are "reasonable" and "adjusted to account for cost-of-living differences nationwide," said Cornell Law School. After the clerkship, Vance worked for Sidley Austin LLP, a law firm where "he focused on complex litigation and regulatory compliance matters, gaining exposure to high-stakes corporate legal issues," said LawFuel. Glassdoor estimates that attorneys at Sidley Austin make an average of $246,000 a year, although that figure was likely lower in 2014.

After his short tenure at Sidley Austin, Vance moved to a biotech startup and then to Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Mithril Capital, in 2015. He was reportedly rarely seen there, and one colleague "recalled sporadic sightings of Vance" but noted that Vance's "focus seemed to be promoting his book rather than engaging in the day-to-day operations of the VC firm," said Yahoo Finance. In 2017, Vance then moved to "Steve Case's Revolution venture firm," which invested "in companies outside major tech hubs," including in the Midwest, said Business Insider. Vance founded the venture capital firm Narya in 2019 and "still owns pieces of the funds that he helped advise." Narya was "one of the top 10 investors in the video platform Rumble," which "came to prominence as a haven for right-wing and conspiracy-minded users during 2020," said The Guardian.

Though he "made little mark on the tech scene," Vance's relatively brief time working in Silicon Valley "was crucial for forging connections with billionaire executives and investors" like Thiel and Elon Musk, said The New York Times. In 2022, Vance sought and got the Republican nomination for the Ohio Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Rob Portman and won both the GOP primary as well as the general election. Vance earned $174,000 a year as a U.S. Senator from 2023 to 2025. He now makes $235,100 as the vice president and, unlike President Trump, has yet to mint any meme coins or self-branded Bibles to capitalize on his new position.

In 2014, Vance married his law school classmate Usha Chilukuri (now Usha Vance), who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as well as for Brett Kavanaugh while Kavanaugh was an appellate court justice. Between 2018 and 2024, she worked as an attorney for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a San Francisco law firm specializing in "higher education, local government, entertainment and technology," said Vogue. The median pay at the firm today is $239,000, according to Glassdoor. Usha Vance resigned from her position at Munger, Tolles & Olson "to focus on caring for our family," said Vance in a statement to People.

A comfortable perch at the top for the Vances

In 2021, "taxpayers in the top 1% had adjusted gross incomes of at least $682,577," said Investopedia, meaning that the Vance's were likely among or near the top 1% of earners in the United States before he began his political career. They own two homes, one "east of the Capitol building" that is "worth about $850,000 today," as well as "a $1.4 million home in Cincinnati's left-leaning East Walnut Hills," said Forbes. The Cincinnati home is a "five-bedroom property" with "over 6,000 square feet set on 2.29 acres overlooking the Ohio River," said Business Insider.

Today, the Vances' combined income and investments, including real estate and crypto, is "estimated at between $4.8 million and $11.3 million, according to federal disclosure forms filed in August" of 2024, said CBS News. Forbes estimates the couple's net worth at $10 million.

A little bit of history came out of the presidential election. Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, will be the first Indian American second lady. And she'll be the first Hindu.

Vance, 38, took a "more behind-the-scenes role on the campaign trail," said ABC News. She did introduce her husband at the Republican National Convention in July, but that was the end of her public remarks in the runup to the election. "The thing that J.D. asked, and the thing that I certainly agreed to do, is to keep him company," she said to NBC News. Now the Vances and their three children will be moving to the Naval Observatory, the traditional vice presidential residence. Her intent? "Giving them a stable, normal, happy life and upbringing," she said.

Usha Vance has a "conspicuous resume" for a political spouse, said The New York Times. She was a law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., then went to work as a litigator for a "prestigious San Francisco law firm." She is the daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up near San Diego, eventually landing at Yale Law School, where she met her husband. But her own views on today's big issues are mostly unknown. Usha Vance is "something of a political cipher," said the Times.

A couple in 'lockstep,' moving right

Even at Yale, Usha Vance's politics were mostly a mystery, said Business Insider. "She was more tight-lipped, at least in my experience, with her political views," said Marvin Lim, a Yale Law School classmate who went into Democratic politics. Usha Vance was a registered Democrat until 2014 — and the law firm she worked for, Munger, Tolles & Olson, has been described as "woke" — but in 2021 she made a donation to conservative Arizona Republican Blake Masters. (She stepped away from the firm when her husband joined the Trump ticket.) The thread through it all? "Her devotion to her husband" since they met at Yale, said Business Insider.

J.D. Vance has "leaned heavily on his wife over the past decade-and-a-half" as he emerged into the national spotlight, said USA Today. Usha Vance's politics may make her an "enigma" in public, but friends and family of the couple say the pair have been in "lockstep" as her husband moved from the Never Trump camp to one of Donald Trump's most reliable allies in the U.S. Senate and eventually to his running mate. The Vances are "a team in every sense of the word," said Jai Chabria, a family friend.

'Some real good for the country'

Usha Vance has told interviewers that she and her husband "don't always agree politically," said Politico. But she told "Fox & Friends" that she's on board for another Trump presidency. "If I didn't feel that the ticket, the Trump-Vance ticket, was able to do some real good for the country, then I wouldn't be here supporting him and J.D. wouldn't have done this," she said. Even when the couple disagrees, she said, Usha Vance trusts her husband's intentions. "There's a nice give and take, but I think it's a pretty happy one."

What happened

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) faced off Tuesday night in their only scheduled vice-presidential debate. The 90-minute debate, hosted by CBS News in New York, was widely described as cordial and policy-focused, with substantive exchanges on abortion, immigration, housing, health care and democracy.

Who said what

The debate was "something that's become increasingly rare in modern American politics: normal," CNN said. Vance attacked Walz's running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Walz went after Donald Trump, but the two VP nominees disagreed with each other "the way typical Americans argue about contentious issues."

Walz's performance "wasn't great," especially at first, while Vance "appeared much more comfortable in his own skin," Aaron Blake said at The Washington Post. Walz's roughest moment was his rambling acknowledgment he "misspoke" about being in Hong Kong during China's Tiananmen Square massacre — he arrived two months afterward. He was, he said, a "knucklehead at times."

But toward the end of the night, "Walz delivered the argument that Democrats wanted" on abortion rights and Vance's fealty to Trump and his lie about winning the 2020 election, David Weigel said at Semafor. "Did he lose the 2020 election?" Walz asked Vance. "Tim, I'm focused on the future," Vance said, a reply Walz called a "damning non-answer." On Jan. 6, 2021, Walz told Vance, "when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that's why Mike Pence isn't on this stage."

A CBS News-YouGov snap poll of 1,630 likely voters who watched the debate found that 42% thought Vance won while 41% said Walz did, with 17% calling it a tie.

What next?

The debate, CNN said, is "unlikely to change the trajectory of the presidential race." Trump reiterated afterward that he wouldn't debate Harris again, despite her goading, and CBS News said he backed out of a scheduled "60 Minutes" interview with Scott Pelley next Monday; Harris will still participate in the long-running election special.

Last night's "showdown" between vice-presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance may have been the last significant campaign event before the US election, said Politico. 

Polls currently put Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in a "neck-and-neck race" for the White House in November. With no other debates scheduled, this was the last chance for "both men to pitch themselves and their party's vision for the next four years". The Republicans' Vance, in particular, needed to shake off a month of bad headlines and "make up for Trump's poor performance" debating Vice-President Harris last month. 

The stakes in vice-presidential debates are "typically low", said the BBC. But in a race that could be decided by "tens of thousands of votes", any opportunity for "positive attention and political momentum is precious".

What did the commentators say?

If there was "any conventional wisdom" beforehand, it was that both candidates would be "fiery and combative", said Ed Kilgore for New York Magazine's Intelligencer. But the debate was "strangely civil", filled with "small gestures of courtesy and agreement". In Walz's words, "I think there was a lot of commonality here." "Me too, man," agreed Vance.

Walz "wasn't as slick", but bested Vance on several topics – most notably reproductive rights, a crucial weakness for the GOP. But Vance was not "the base-pleasing demagogue" we've come to expect. You do have to wonder if the "temperamental difference" between this newly civil Vance and Trump will "reflect poorly on the latter" among undecided voters. 

Indeed, Walz and Vance spent most of the night "defending their running mates' records", said Politico's Myah Ward and Adam Cancryn. "They were less successful promoting their bosses' plans for the future", which afforded "little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters".

The "leitmotif " was essentially "two diametrically opposed candidates" that agree on a lot, wrote The Guardian US columnist Moustafa Bayoumi. But the debate "will be forgotten by next week, if only because the world is currently a powder keg". 

It's already been forgotten, "obscured" by the "far more dramatic news" of Iran's strikes on Israel, said The Spectator's deputy editor Freddy Gray. Walz "fumbled" on the big story, saying "Iran" when he meant "Israel", twice, "which hardly suggested a mastery of international affairs". Vance sounded "authoritative, composed, more professional", with a "tight grasp of details".

But Walz also performed "entirely adequately, reinforcing his steady, nice-guy image", said Emma Shortis on The Conversation. The "standout moment", near the end, came when Walz asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance "refused" to offer the "clear right answer", said Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. "Tim, I'm focussed on the future," he fudged. It was, as Walz said, "a damning non-answer". 

This was "the only truly important moment of the night" and the fact that there was "no clear winner" likely won't move the dial. 

What next?

The vice-presidential debate might not shift the needle, but the role of vice-president very much does. Soon either Vance or Walz will preside over the Senate and be "empowered to break ties, as Harris has done a record 33 times", said The Associated Press. It's also the VP's job to preside over the certification of electoral results and to take over if something happens to the president. 

If Trump wins, he will be the oldest president in history, and the two recent assassination attempts against him also raise "the saliency of succession", said vice presidential historian Joel K. Goldstein. Voters may not typically see vice-presidential candidates as potential presidents – but "this year could be different".

The debate could also affect the next election, too, said Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman. Political parties "remember past debates when choosing candidates". Vance got the space he needed to "push back against the perception that he's an angry, online poster who talks about women like a creepy anthropologist". His superior performance will "shore up his position" within the GOP, and even makes the prospect of him running for the party's nomination in 2028 more likely.

"The classic example of chutzpah," said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times, "is that of the child who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy as an orphan." The 2024 presidential election has given us a new version: the candidate who merrily stokes hatred and division, then turns around to condemn his opponents' harsh language.

Following the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, his running mate J.D. Vance took a break from spreading inflammatory lies about Haitian migrants eating pets to make a cynical plea for reasonable discourse. "Look," he declared, "we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and, if he's elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy." The Left needs to "tone down" its language, he said, or "somebody is gonna get hurt". Trump himself claimed that the Democrats' rhetoric "is causing me to be shot at". This is the man who told his supporters to "fight like hell" to regain the White House before the 6 January riots, and who has consistently abused his political rivals.

Typical of Trump to turn the violence against him "into fuel for more political hatred", said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. In 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a little over two weeks. He didn't blame his opponents, or seek to fundraise off the back of the attacks; he just started wearing a trench coat with a zip-in Kevlar vest.

There's hypocrisy on all sides here, said Robby Soave in Reason. Trump has called Kamala Harris a fascist, and Vance himself once described Trump as America's Hitler. In 2011, Republicans rightly criticised the Democrats for "lazily and falsely" seeking to blame them for the shooting of the Democrat congresswoman Gabby Giffords by a disturbed loner. We should be wary of attempts to "draw any causal line" between heated political language and real-world violence.

It would be nice, though, if public debate in the US could be a little less overwrought, said John Halpin on Substack. One problem is that presidential elections are just too long. Other nations, such as the UK, wrap up their campaigns in weeks. When the US votes in November, it will have been "waging presidential warfare for 700-plus days": two years of incessant arguing and hyperbole.

Every election is now "the most important election of our lifetime" as the two polarised parties and their media cheerleaders raise the stakes to absurd levels. If the other side wins it means "communism" or "fascism" and "civil war". It's enough to "drive decent people crazy – and crazy people even nuttier". In an ideal world, we'd simplify the process. But given all the money to be made selling chaos, rage and mutual loathing, "nothing much is likely to change".

You think you know the history of World War II: The Nazis were the bad guys and Adolf Hitler was probably the greatest villain the world has ever known — the author of a Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. End of story, right? Tucker Carlson isn't so sure.

The former Fox News host sparked a right-wing "media meltdown" after interviewing a Holocaust-denying podcaster on his new online platform, Axios said. Carlson called Darryl Cooper "the best and most honest popular historian" in America. Cooper in turn called Winston Churchill the "chief villain of the Second World War," said CNN. Cooper also suggested that the Holocaust was an inadvertent consequence of poor German war planning, in which "millions of people ended up dead." 

That false history prompted a backlash from the White House and Jewish groups. Elon Musk deleted an X post promoting the interview. And the controversy forced a "rare moment of introspection" among conservative media figures, Axios said.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump must "disavow" Carlson, conservative commentator William Galston said at The Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump Jr. and J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee, are both scheduled to join Carlson on tour later this month. That can't happen. Trump must "draw a bright line between what's acceptable and what isn't, Galston added." What isn't: "Blatant antisemitism."

'Whackadoo revisionism'

Tucker Carlson's journey into "whackadoo revisionism" has made a dent in his "last cadre of conservative defenders," said another conservative writer, Ben Domenech, at The Spectator. The question: "Why is Tucker doing this?" Carlson's motives are "unknown" but it's clear he's gone from his longtime practice of "skirting the edge of acceptable discourse" to "jumping over the edge." And it's in keeping with the view Carlson has espoused since his career as the "most influential media figure on the right" was cut short after being fired by Fox last year: "America, rather than being the greatest nation in the history of the world, is at home and abroad a force for evil," Domenech said.

"Dubious charges of Nazism are a dime a dozen in U.S. political rhetoric," Sohrab Ahmari said at The Free Press.  But there is no other way to describe Cooper's ideas, nor Carlson's promotion of them. The "obvious fact" is that the Nazis were evil — and that Cooper's casting of Churchill as the war's villain is a "perverse moral inversion." 

'We believe in free speech'

"Is Vance still going to hang out with Tucker Carlson, even now?" the conservative Jim Geraghty said at The Washington Post. Carlson has caused headaches for Vance before: The nominee's infamous "childless cat ladies" comment came on Carlson's Fox News show in 2021. The latest controversy is worse. An "ordinary campaign" would avoid sending its vice presidential candidate to hang out publicly with a "Putin-adoring nutjob conspiracy theorist" ahead of the election, but Trump and Vance aren't running an ordinary campaign. "Let's see whether Vance finally draws the line at hanging with the guy who hosts a revisionist historian with a blind spot for Adolf Hitler," Geraghty said.

It does not look like Vance will skip out on Carlson, said The New York Times. "We believe in free speech and debate," Vance said during a campaign stop. The campaign later issued a statement declaring that Vance "obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson" but that he also "doesn't believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture." Vance is scheduled to appear onstage with Carlson on September 21. 

What happened

Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance criticized the media yesterday for making a "national news story" out of the Trump campaign's "little disagreement" with Arlington National Cemetery staff earlier this week. Vance also said Vice President Kamala Harris "can go to hell" for criticizing "Donald Trump because he showed up" at the cemetery to commemorate the 2021 terrorist attack in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members as America withdrew from Afghanistan. Harris, campaigning in rural Georgia, had not mentioned the Arlington incident, though Trump faced ire from some veterans for campaigning among gravestones.

Who said what

Trump's team was told beforehand he could visit Section 60 of the cemetery, where Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are buried, in a personal capacity but with no campaign aides, as federal law prohibits election-related activity military cemeteries, The Washington Post said. Trump's team said it would release footage to refute reports that campaign staff pushed aside an Arlington official who tried to enforce the rules. It hasn't done so, the Post said, but the campaign did "post a TikTok of the event on Wednesday — exactly what military officials tried to prevent."

The family of a Green Beret whose gravestone is visible in the campaign video and a photo of a smiling Trump "giving a 'thumbs up'" to the camera "expressed concern" about Trump's lack of decorum at the "sacred site," The New York Times said. Trump released statements from a Gold Star family saying they had invited him to the grave and welcomed the photos. But it's hard to see Trump's visit as "anything but a campaign stop intended to court the military vote" and "clean up the mess he has created" by repeatedly "denigrating" military service, Charles Sykes said at The Atlantic. 

What next?

The unidentified Arlington official involved in the altercation filed an incident report with military authorities but "declined to press charges," the Times said.

For years, Democrats (and a small number of Republicans) have been working on how best to frame Donald Trump and his MAGA movement to persuadable voters. At various points over the past decade, Trump has been portrayed as a "threat to democracy," a "fraud," and a "con man," all in an attempt to impart a sense of looming and existential endangerment over his political ascendency. 

This year, however, as a reenergized Democratic party rallies around Vice President Kamala Harris as its new standard-bearer following President Joe Biden's decision to end his reelection campaign, a growing number of lawmakers have rolled out a new line of attack on Trump and his vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance: They're just weird. Although perhaps not the most sophisticated line of attack, it's a message that has nevertheless gained traction, first among campaign surrogates and potential vice presidential nominees like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and then Harris' own team and the Democratic party at large. 

It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can ride this "weird" wave all the way to an electoral victory, but it seems clear that the party sees this tonal shift as impactful — at least for now. 

'Weird people' was an online hit

While the trend arguably began with Minnesota's Walz, whose "description last week of 'weird people on the other side' was an online hit with Democrats," The New York Times said, the Harris campaign's embrace of that same framing should come as little surprise. Preparing for a one-on-one debate with Trump in 2018, Harris went so far as to tell aides that if he attempted to stalk behind her onstage as he did Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would turn and ask him "why are you being so weird?" CNN said. Recently, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg similarly described Trump as getting "older and stranger," and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Vance is "weird" and "erratic." Harris added her campaign's official seal of approval, writing in a memo of takeaways from a recent Trump interview that "Trump is old and quite weird?" 

The Democratic National Committee itself followed suit shortly thereafter.

Previous attempts by Democrats to use "high-minded defenses of our principles or elegant rhetorical phrases aren't doing the job," said The Bulwark. "Neither is existential dread." Labeling Trump and Vance as weird is "less lofty and more grounded in daily reality." The tactic "conspicuously stands apart from the Democrats' usual 'when they go low, we go high' modus operandi," ABC News said. Notably, the "weird" attacks make up a "unified Democratic firing line" that stands in "sharp contrast to the Republicans, who have yet to emerge with their own effective message to counter Harris' 'honeymoon' period," The Independent said. 

Biden couldn't "authentically call his opposition 'weird,'" said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive group Run for Something, to Politico. Harris' embrace of the term is in part "about being free from the obligation to speak in Biden's voice." The previous era of 'strained decorum is — or at least should be — over,' said Rolling Stone. 

'Cut the crap please'

To a lesser extent, Republicans have "also gotten in on the action," including releasing a campaign memo for Senate candidates highlighting Harris' "weird" behavior, such as loving Venn diagrams, Semafor said. 

The GOP's attempt to flip the "weird" attack back at Harris might be "one way to undermine Harris' personal appeal without getting into more sensitive territory" like race and gender, Semafor said. Not all Republicans seem to agree, however. Former GOP presidential candidate and fervent Trump backer Vivek Ramaswamy decried the Democrats as acting "dumb & juvenile" and urged them to "win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please" in a post on X. 

Vance, for his part, has denied being affected by the "weird" attacks. "It doesn't hurt my feelings," said Vance in a brief Fox News interview this week. Vance also called the "weird" label the "price of admission" for running for high office, and "ultimately an honor."

Donald Trump may have put the US-UK special relationship in jeopardy with his pick for vice-president, pundits are warning. 

Hours before the Republican National Convention kicked off in Milwaukee yesterday, the former president named Ohio's Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the November election. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said former venture capitalist Vance – a one-time "Never Trump" Republican who once dubbed him an "idiot" and suggested he could be "America's Hitler" – was "best suited" to the role of prospective VP. 

The UK may disagree. Last week, Vance described Britain under the new Labour government as "the world's first 'truly Islamist country' to have a nuclear weapon", said Politico. Speaking at the right-wing National Conservatism conference in Washington, the 39-year-old acknowledged that he was "beating up on the UK", but added: "To my Tory friends I have to say, you guys really gotta get a handle on this." 

What did the commentators say?

Trump has "sent a clear message to Britain" with his VP pick, said MailOnline, as the former US leader gets back on the campaign trail following Saturday's failed assassination attempt. Vance's claim about the UK being an "Islamist" country has added to existing fears that the UK's special relationship with the US could "decline sharply" if Trump returns to power. 

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said she "doesn't recognise" Vance's characterisation of the UK. "I think he's said quite a lot of fruity things in the past," Rayner told ITV's "Good Morning Britain". But the US is a "key ally of ours", and should Trump and Vance prove victorious "we'll work together constructively". 

Labour is "scrabbling to cement a better relationship with the Republicans", said The Telegraph. David Lammy, now foreign secretary, has been meeting senior Republicans for months to smooth relations between Labour and the GOP, which is in "pole position" to take power in the US in November. 

Having previously called Trump a "woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath" and a "profound threat", Lammy has since tempered his remarks. "It doesn't matter who is in Number 10, you work with the United States," he said. After meeting Vance in May, the foreign secretary described him as a "friend" and praised "Hillbilly Elegy", Vance's bestselling book about growing up in poverty-stricken Appalachia, with Lammy drawing parallels with his own upbringing.

All the same, Vance's latest comments could "complicate" Keir Starmer's relationship with a Trump administration. The "Islamist" barb could have also been aimed at Sadiq Khan, who has a long and contentious history with Trump. The London mayor called him a "racist, sexist homophobe"; Trump retaliated by describing Khan as a "stone cold loser" who had been "foolishly nasty".

Beyond "fruity" rhetoric, Vance is a champion of "America first" isolationist mentality on trade and foreign policy, said Euractiv. That could "cause trouble" for Europe and intensify fears that Trump would undermine Washington's commitment to Nato. Vance has echoed Trump's stance that Nato states have relied on the US for a "blanket of security" for "far too long" and should take more responsibility for their defence.

What next?

Diplomats expect Vance to "support a hawkish China policy, pushing Europeans even further on the confrontational path with Beijing", said Euractiv, amid "tit-for-tat probes into trade barriers over a series of products from electric vehicles to pork and brandy". "I'm much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now," said Vance earlier this year. East Asia will be "the future of American foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact".

But several commentators are "particularly worried" about Vance's "vocal opposition to US aid for Ukraine". Labour has reasserted its commitment to supporting the war-torn nation, but Vance has made his "disdain" for Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy "palpably clear", said Jacob Heilbrunn in The Spectator. Vance has also said he does not believe Vladimir Putin poses an existential threat to Europe. 

An increasingly tense world needs the special relationship "more than ever", said US ambassador to the UK Jane D. Hartley in The Times in January. The two militaries "underpin global security and defend democracy around the world". Amid spiralling violence in the Middle East, tensions with China, Russia and Iran, and issues such as AI safety and the climate crisis, maintaining the alliance is "vital".