BASTON HERALD POST

  Donald Trump has alienated a good number of his MAGA supporters by seeking to suppress the full disclosure of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Are his supporters angry because they think he is guilty of having sex with underaged girls, or because he is using his office to control information and limit what the public can know? Many of the most fervent Trump supporters subscribe to conspiracy theories, believing that a ‘deep state’ runs their lives and that Democrats either built that state or protected its clandestine operations. For Trump to conceal the disclosure of a file that might contain details about powerful people implicated in a sex trafficking network is to act like one of those politicians who profit from lying and keep ordinary people in the dark. Alex Jones, the far-right radio host, told Trump: “You’re not the pope, bro!” Steve Bannon predicts that 10 per cent of Trump’s loyalists will turn away (they will still be Trumpists, but against Trump). It would be a better worl...

I n a move that shocked absolutely no one with a passing familiarity with American foreign policy, President Donald Trump has thrown a tariff tantrum aimed at India. The crime? Daring to buy oil from Russia to, you know, power our economy and keep the lights on for 1.4 billion people. On August 4, Trump declared that India buying Russian oil was a grave sin. This pearl clutching comes from the same United States that was happily importing Russian oil itself until February 2022. But why let a little hypocrisy get in the way of a good headline? In Washington, that’s not a contradiction; it’s just called a Tuesday. So, here comes the hammer. A 25 percent tariff on Indian goods, designed to cost our exporters $7 billion a year and threaten 87 percent of our exports. The goal is presumably to get American companies to cheer for “Made in America” products that are, of course, mostly assembled from parts made somewhere else. This is a spectacular U-turn from February 2025, when Trump and Prim...