Trump of Arabia

US President Donald Trump has pulled off a $142 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, with the Saudis promising eventual investments of up to $1 trillion. There will be a $1.2 trillion economic exchange with Qatar whose Emir is reportedly gifting a luxury jumbo jet meant to replace the current Air Force One even as Qatar Airways placed a “record order” with Boeing. Before congratulating Doha for World Cup 2022 and promising “We’ll bring peace, not only here,” Trump had seen a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy” in Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, once of Al Qaeda. Lost in the whirlwind was the lifting of US sanctions on Syria; the Syrians, of course, celebrated. Team Trump can point at the jobs that could come home but Democrats are complaining, not least about Family Trump’s business interests in the Gulf and Qatar’s proximity to Hamas. Ironic? Well, Benjamin Netanyahu does feel snubbed. And not even Trumpistas are comfortable with the jet. As Walter Russell Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal: “President Dwight D. Eisenhower wouldn’t have accepted a jet from the Qatari royal family, but he and his successors saw close relations with the Gulf Arabs as a key goal for American foreign policy.

How the American Campus Became a Warzone

At a time of war between the Ivy League and the White House, the origin story of the new American campus could be the starting point for a compromise. The campus is every faction’s fiefdom. Nobody cares about scholarship. Knowledge is not sought as an end in itself. The bureaucracy runs the place. Fund-raising has trumped teaching. Renowned speakers are cancelled. Sit-ins are the norm. If these capture the American campus circa 2025, Neil Rudenstine, who has spent most of his adult life inside, as Princeton’s dean and provost and then Harvard’s 26th president, traces the malaise to its roots in his recently published memoir Our Contentious Universities. The decline of the humanities also played a role and identity-focused programmes made matters worse, keeping students confined to their racial, ethnic, ideological groups. The days when Rudenstine could take his successor Larry Summers’ advice and disperse a group of protesting students by simply announcing a committee to “study” the problem are long gone. Rudenstine, unfortunately, also concludes that universities can no longer design and implement core curricula. Nobody leaves campus with a wealth of knowledge these days as some academics rue this age of the “illiterate” university graduate.

Diddy’s Horror Show

He is one the wealthiest musicians on the planet and evidently not an advertisement for the virtues of humankind. Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, rapper and record producer, formerly known as Puff Daddy and P. Diddy, currently held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn had settled with former partner Cassie Ventura in a sexual assault and abuse lawsuit in 2023 only to have many more cases filed against him. Ventura, et al are testifying against Combs again as he stands trial for sex trafficking and racketeering after Homeland Security raided his properties last year. His father, a US
Air Force veteran, was an associate of Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and shot dead when Diddy was only two.

Donald TrumpgeopliticsP. DiddyQatarSaudi ArabiaThe GlobetrotterWhite House