The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Jared Kushner, the real estate failson who once pitched peace in the Middle East as a kind of zoning variance, has resurfaced as Trump's "Middle East envoy" to personally fix Gaza. This time he's doing it under the banner of Trump's self-appointed "Board of Peace" — an "international organisation" that appears to consist of Trump, some letterhead, and whoever still answers Kushner's texts. The Board claims it has an agreement for the "complete disarmament" of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, plus an Israeli troop withdrawal and a shiny new civilian Palestinian administration, which is a lot of words for a plan Israel has already publicly torched.

Undeterred by reality, Kushner held rare talks in Egypt with Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, alongside Nickolai Mladenov and, because we apparently live in a cursed reboot of 2005, Tony Blair. They reportedly discussed how to actually dismantle Hamas's arsenal, get Israeli forces out, and rebuild a strip of land that has already seen more than 73,000 people killed and 1.9 million displaced. Israel's answer remains: no withdrawal until full disarmament first — and also a flat rejection of Trump's 15-point plan, just to really underline how much respect they have for America's new freelance peace corporation.

Meanwhile, eight Muslim-majority countries — Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia — issued a joint statement saying Israel's rejection threatens Trump's peace efforts, which is a polite diplomatic way of saying, "We are all pretending this Board of Peace is a real thing now, apparently." Trump, naturally, chairs this pseudo-institution himself, having expanded it from a Gaza project to a global conflict fixer, because when you've already broken American democracy, why not cosplay as the UN too? The ceasefire technically still exists, the IDF is still conducting strikes, Hamas is still accused of violations, and into this meat grinder strolls Jared Kushner, armed with vibes, spreadsheets, and his father-in-law's delusions of imperial grandeur.

The Trump administration has decided that if executive privilege is good, infinite executive privilege must be even better. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel coughed up a memo saying Trump can now cloak not just his aides, but also outside private advisers in presidential secrecy, as long as they’re whispering sweet policy suggestions into the White House’s ear. Senator Adam Schiff calls it what it is: a preemptive shield to hide Trump’s "corrupt activities" from congressional subpoenas when Democrats likely take back a chamber.

Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to remember that Congress is technically a coequal branch and not just the comment section to Trump’s X account. They’re gearing up to dig into the unfinished Epstein files, which DOJ seems to be slow-walking so hard a federal judge is openly annoyed, and they’re eyeing Trump’s personal investments in companies with major business before his own government—because why merely serve as president when you can also day-trade off your own regulatory power?

Oversight capacity, of course, has been hollowed out. Inspectors general have been fired, key watchdog jobs sit empty, and Trump just nominated Dennis Kirk—an architect of the authoritarian Project 2025 wish list—to be inspector general at Interior, the office that’s supposed to investigate waste and abuse. So the new model is: sabotage the referees, declare all your friends "privileged," and then insist the real problem is partisan oversight. Democrats talk about rebuilding Congress’s watchdog muscles; Trump is already busy defunding the gym and padlocking the doors.

Donald Trump, self-proclaimed galaxy-brain dealmaker, has managed to turn his second term into a live-action demonstration of why you don’t let a reality TV landlord run an empire. He was re-elected on the promise that "I alone can fix it", then promptly got bored by economic policy and wandered off to start a disastrous war with Iran instead. The result: inflation higher than when he beat Biden, petrol prices spiking, and his approval rating face-planting to 34%. Truly, the businessman president is once again proving that bankruptcy is not just a financial strategy, it’s a governing philosophy.

The Iran adventure is going about as well as his casinos. No regime change, no checked nuclear threat, Iran’s missiles still flying, and Tehran now holding the world economy by the throat via the Strait of Hormuz. Trump ignored his own generals’ warnings about dwindling munitions because his gut told him it would be "fast and easy" – the same gut that thought COVID would disappear and that Mexico was going to pay for a wall. He keeps announcing phantom peace deals and fake breakthroughs that evaporate within days, because the only part of foreign policy he’s interested in is the headline and the camera angle.

Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage is running the same nationalist-populist software, just on a smaller, stickier keyboard. He quit his Clacton seat in a tantrum over a standards probe, then immediately re-ran for it as a performative grievance circus – and even then refused to show up to his own victory announcement, allegedly over a "credible threat" that the police say doesn’t exist. This is the same Farage who claims he needed an undeclared £5m gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne for "security", yet somehow still couldn’t manage to feel safe standing next to a man dressed as a bin. Now that he’s back in parliament, the investigation into his murky finances has resumed, including gifts linked to convicted fraudster George Cottrell. Another byelection is on the horizon, this time with real parties running – not just aristocrats in trash costumes.

Strip away the flags, the shouting about elites, and the cosplay patriotism, and the common thread is obvious: these guys are unbeatable at performance politics and utterly useless at governing. Trump can’t win his own war, Farage can barely win a by-election without fleeing the stage, and both are staring down investigations and public backlash. The populist strongman project keeps promising history-shaping victories and keeps delivering… higher fuel prices, endless conflict, and a couple of fragile egos hiding from a standards committee and a bloke in a novelty bin suit. Turns out the real "deep state" problem is that none of these people knows how to do the job they fought so hard to steal.