Donald Trump has demolished an old office wing attached to the White House and begun building a large new ballroom, big enough to accommodate state dinners and other major events. Currently, those have to be held outdoors, under a temporary tent, because the White House lacks a large, permanent space.

Democrats are outraged by Trump’s move. They have filled social media with pictures of the demolition. Oh, the humanity. Tearing down any part of the White House is a travesty, they say, and an assault on one of our cherished national landmarks. They are so enraged that at least one Democrat lawmaker has made tearing down the new ballroom – after it is built and paid for – a litmus test for his party’s 2028 presidential candidates.

Call it  BDS – Ballroom Derangement Syndrome.  To explain it, we’re going to take a look at Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.

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In the whimsical yet cautionary world of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca Salt storms through Willy Wonka’s factory like a spoiled brat on steroids, demanding golden geese, trained squirrels, and every shiny trinket that catches her eye. “I want it now!” she screeches, her petulance sealing her fate down the garbage chute.

Fast-forward to 2025 Washington, and one can’t help but see echoes of Veruca in Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG)—once the bleach-blonde firebrand of MAGA, now morphing into the “Blonde AOC,” trading principled conservatism for performative tantrums because President Trump didn’t hand her a Senate endorsement on a silver platter.

What followed wasn't quiet reflection or a pivot back to her House duties—no, it was a full-throated Veruca meltdown. This pattern of petulance isn’t new in GOP annals—it’s the ghost of Paul Ryan haunting Capitol Hill. In Trump’s first term, the Wisconsin “Young Gun” pledged fiscal conservatism but worked overtime to undermine the MAGA agenda.

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[I have known Ambrose since the early i990s, when he was the London Telegraph’s US correspondent based in DC. Now he is the Telegraph’s World Economy Editor. Ambrose is at the top of his game in this analysis. –JW]

Vladimir Putin’s predicament is deteriorating fast across every front of the global energy war.  Western sanctions are at last going for the jugular, and Donald Trump has finally thrown American power behind the blockade.

The Saudis are flooding the world oil market in a ruthless drive to regain lost share. A glut of historic proportions is building and is likely to last deep into 2027. Goldman Sachs has told clients that Brent crude prices could drop to the low $40s.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has drastically revised its global supply and demand forecasts. China has filled its strategic petroleum reserve to near bursting point and can no longer keep mopping up the surplus. Excess crude is now being stored on water in a giant global armada of floating tankers.

The math is brutal. The IEA expects a jumbo global surplus of four million b/d in 2026. “It is increasingly clear that something has to give,” said Toril Bosoni, head of the agency’s oil and markets division.

That something is the Russian war economy.

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Amid an orgy of executions and the accelerating collapse of its economy, the mullahs' regime has driven the Iranian people to unprecedented levels of hardship.

The latest plunge of the national currency to a historic low is not an accident of market forces, nor the consequence of global instability. It is the inevitable result of decades of plunder, corruption, and ideological fanaticism by a ruling clerical mafia whose survival depends on bleeding the nation dry.

In recent days, the U.S. dollar smashed through the 1,250,000-rial threshold (yes, 1.25 million to one dollar)* for the first time (the open market rate everyone pays, the “official” everyone ignores) shattering all previous records. At the time of the anti-Shah revolution in 1979, there were 74 rials to the U.S. dollar. State media declared that the rial "is melting away."

In truth, it is not the rial that is melting, it is the regime itself.

The catastrophic collapse of the rial is the clearest evidence of a regime in terminal decline, clutching at any mechanism, no matter how destructive, to prolong its grip on power.

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Donald Trump is preparing for a military intervention in Venezuela. You don’t send a dozen warships, including a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier, to interdict a few drug traffickers. You don’t deploy 10,000 troops to deter smugglers.

Many, especially in the Global South, will fall hungrily on the parallel with Russia. So much, they will say, for the pretense that Western countries uphold the international order. The US, they will aver, is no different from Russia, acting from self-interest, and then coating its Machtpolitik in cant about freedom and democracy.

The comparison is false, the opposite of the truth.

Trump has no interest in annexing Venezuelan territory. Whatever happens next, whether we end up with shots fired in anger or whether Maduro’s rotten regime agrees to free elections, no one can credibly claim that the US is commandeering Venezuelan resources.

Putin’s objective in Ukraine was to remove a freely elected government and replace it with a Russian client regime. Trump’s objective in Venezuela is to remove a Russian client regime and replace it with a freely elected government. That difference is categorical.

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When a man seeks to lead the largest city in America, his citizenship should be beyond question. Yet the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, an avowed Radical Muslim Communist Democrat and recently naturalized U.S. citizen, has raised a troubling question: Did he obtain his citizenship under false pretenses?

That question became official on June 26, when Congressman Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, formally asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether Mamdani’s 2018 naturalization should be revoked under 8 U.S.C. §1451(a) for “willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism.”

The request, addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, was not a partisan stunt. It was a carefully structured one-page letter that laid out specific evidence, cited public sources, and explained why Mamdani’s own words may point to something more serious than youthful rebellion or artistic expression.

By early autumn, the issue had escalated far beyond a single letter. On October 8, Florida Congressman Randy Fine, a Republican, reignited national debate by denouncing Mamdani as “little more than a Muslim terrorist” and demanding his deportation to Uganda. Fine’s comments reflected genuine anger among voters who believe the system too often protects destroyers rather than creators.

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