
Rod Stewart Reveals The 1 Reason His Trump Friendship Is Done: 'I Can't Anymore'
Grammy-winning singer Rod Stewart says he can't be friends with President Donald Trump anymore, citing his administration's ongoing support for the brutal Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians since October 2023 according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Stewart recently sat down for an interview with Radio Times to promote his upcoming set at the Glastonbury Festival, only to tear into Trump, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu — after being asked if he still considers Trump a friend.
'No, I can't any more,' Stewart told the outlet. 'As long as he's selling arms to the Israelis — and he still is. How's that war ever gonna stop? And we should stop selling them as well. What did Starmer say yesterday? They dropped the talks on trade?'
'What fucking difference is that gonna make?' the singer continued. 'Someone's gotta do something. What Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians is exactly what happened to the Jews. It's annihilation, and that's all he wants to do — get rid of them all.'
'I don't know how they sleep at night,' Stewart added.
This isn't the first time Stewart has criticized Trump. The rock icon reportedly said ahead of the 2016 election that he didn't think Trump was 'presidential,' called him a 'prick' in 2020 for pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords and ridiculed him onstage last year.
'I used to go to his Christmas parties,' Stewart told Radio Times. 'He's always been a bit of a man's man. I liked him for that. But he didn't, as far as I'm concerned, treat women very well. But since he became president, he became another guy.'
'Somebody I didn't know,' he reflected.
The singer mocked Trump last year during a Las Vegas concert ahead of the 2024 election for 'turning orange,' as Trump made the racist claim that then-Democratic nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, 'happened to turn Black' before announcing her run.
Stewart is a model railway enthusiast at home, but also politically active in his spare time.
In 2017, he covered all necessary expenses for a group of children with disabilities — whose parents couldn't raise enough money to travel to Washington, D.C. — to protest a GOP health care bill that included proposed cuts to Medicaid.
'I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but I am a father,' he said at the time.
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Atlantic
27 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump Wants to ‘Make Iran Great Again'
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Donald Trump raised the idea of toppling Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei yesterday, it wasn't just the idea that was surprising. It was the particular phrase he used to describe it. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!' he posted yesterday on Truth Social. The phrase became toxic for a reason. Two years ago, an essay in the Claremont Review of Books noted that regime change entered the popular lexicon in 'the early days of the 9/11 wars, when the Bush (43) Administration argued that the security of America and of the entire world depended not merely on defeating hostile countries militarily but on changing their governments into ones more inherently peaceable and favorable to our interests.' Of course, regimes change all the time, but regime change came to mean 'external, forcible transformation from 'authoritarianism' or 'dictatorship.'' This sounds very much like what Trump is discussing. Having switched from discouraging Israeli military strikes against Iran to joining them, he appears to now be toying with broader ambitions. (Trump offers few endorsements stronger than calling something 'politically incorrect.') But the writer of the Claremont Review essay, a prominent right-wing intellectual, warned about such projects. 'We know how that worked out. Regimes were changed all right, but not into democracies,' he wrote. 'And some of them—e.g., the one in Afghanistan—20 years later changed back to the same regime American firepower had overthrown in 2001.' That writer was Michael Anton. Today he is the director of the policy-planning staff at the State Department (a bit of an oxymoron in this administration), and in April, the White House named him to lead the U.S. delegation at technical talks with Iran on a nuclear deal—negotiations that are presumably irrelevant for the time being. Trump's abrupt shift has thrown the MAGA right into acrimony. In truth, the president has never been a pacificist, as I wrote last week. During the 2016 GOP primary, Trump cannily grasped public anger at the Iraq War and turned it against his rivals. Thinkers such as Anton and politicians such as Vice President J. D. Vance then tried to retrofit a more complete ideology of retrenchment and restraint onto it, but Trump is an improviser, not an ideologue. No one should have been too surprised by the president's order to bomb. Still, his rhetorical embrace of regime change was stunning even to those who never bought into his identity as a dove, and certainly to some of his aides. Perhaps Anton was not surprised to see his view so cavalierly discarded; after all, he once likened backing Trump to playing Russian roulette. But Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were unprepared for the change in rhetoric. Rubio solemnly told Fox Business that the U.S. is not at war with the country it just dropped hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance on. Vance, on Meet the Press, insisted, 'Our view has been very clear that we don't want a regime change. We do not want to protract this or build this out any more than it's already been built out.' A few hours later, Trump contradicted him directly, in what would have been embarrassing for someone still capable of the emotion. Vance's views on foreign policy are deeply shaped by the Iraq War, in which he served. Now his boss is at risk of speedwalking that conflict one country to the east. The Iraq War was the product of months of preparation by the George W. Bush administration: military mobilization, avid though unsuccessful attempts to rally international support, an extended period of manufacturing consensus in Congress and in the American public. Yet despite that work, and as even proponents of regime change in Iran acknowledge, the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War was a disaster, perhaps the worst American foreign-policy blunder in history. The U.S. government had good war plans for getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime but had not effectively thought through what would happen after that. Trump has done even less of that thinking, and leads a nation far more politically divided and warier of foreign intervention. Americans have long viewed Iran negatively: A Fox News poll before this weekend's airstrikes found that roughly three-quarters of them view Iran as a 'real security threat.' Still, another poll earlier this month found that most don't want the U.S. to get involved in armed conflict there. A Pew Research Center poll in May even found that slightly more Americans think that the United States is its own 'greatest threat' than that Iran is. Trump's flippant transformation of 'Make America great again' into 'Make Iran great again' exemplifies the hubris of the Iraq War project that he had promised to leave behind. Just as U.S. officials claimed that Iraq could be easily and quickly converted into an American-style democracy, Trump wants to export his catchphrase to Iran, where the implementation would be even hazier than it is here. Iran is a country of some 90 million people, not a dollhouse to be rearranged. Can regime change work? The answer depends on how success is defined. In 1973, for example, the U.S. backed a coup in Chile, toppling the leftist leader Salvador Allende. It worked: Allende was killed and replaced by Augusto Pinochet, who created a stable, market-based, U.S.-friendly Chilean government. But doing that involved horrifying repression and the killing and disappearances of thousands of critics, leaving a black mark on the U.S. record. In another case of regime change, the U.S. government helped topple Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. This, too, was an immediate success. Mossadegh was removed, and the Washington-friendly Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to power. But the legacy of the moment stretched on much longer. The shah was also brutally repressive, and Iranians remembered the 1953 coup bitterly. In 1979, a revolution swept Iran, deposing Pahlavi and installing a virulently anti-American government. That regime still rules in Tehran—for now, at least. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Iran launched strikes on a U.S. base in Qatar, which were intercepted by Qatar's air-defense system, according to the Qatari government. The Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them the chance to contest their removals. President Donald Trump called on 'everyone' to ' keep oil prices down ' after America's recent attack on Iranian nuclear sites sparked fear of higher oil prices. Dispatches Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Extreme Violence Without Genocide By Graeme Wood Signs of violent criminality are ubiquitous in South Africa. Electric fences and guard dogs protect homes containing something worth stealing. Reported rapes, carjackings, and armed robberies all occur far more frequently than in the United States. In Bloemfontein, one of the safer cities, I asked a hotel clerk for directions to a coffee shop, and she said it was 'just across the road,' not more than 500 feet away. When I headed out on foot, she stopped me and said that for my safety, 'I would prefer that you drive.' More From The Atlantic Culture Break Play. In Death Stranding 2, people play as an unlikely hero: a courier who trips over rocks and experiences sunburn. It's the Amazonification of everything, now as a video game, Simon Parkin writes. Disconnect. Franklin Schneider has never owned a smartphone. And, based on the amount of social and libidinal energy that phones seem to have sucked from the world, he's not sure he ever wants to.


Vox
34 minutes ago
- Vox
The Supreme Court's ugly new decision about torture, explained
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The Hill
34 minutes ago
- The Hill
What the Iran conflict means for gas prices
The Big Story Americans could see modest increases in the prices they pay at the pump in the wake of increasing conflict with Iran, analysts say. © iStock Andrew Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told The Hill on Monday that any additional increases in gasoline prices will likely be just a few cents. 'I expect that gasoline prices are going to drift up about three to five cents a gallon over the next couple of weeks,' Lipow said. He added that after an initial 5 percent jump in the price of crude oil, 'the market has sold off since then and now has turned negative.' Oil prices fell Monday, and U.S. benchmark WTI crude was down to about $69 per barrel Monday afternoon — after jumping as high as $75 per barrel late last week in anticipation of U.S. strikes on Iran. The U.S. hit Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night, bringing the country directly into Iran's conflict with Israel. Gasoline prices were higher Monday, averaging $3.22 per gallon, up from $3.14 a week ago. Austin Lin, principal analyst for refining and oil products at Wood Mackenzie, told The Hill he believed that fuel prices were higher than they would otherwise be as a result of the conflict, but that he did not believe they would rise much further. 'There's a good argument that says Q3 versus everyone's expectations from a month ago is going to see higher pricing,' Lin said. 'I would temper that and say, I don't think there's probably a lot of uplift from where we currently are.' Read more on the subject at Welcome to The Hill's Energy & Environment newsletter, I'm Rachel Frazin — keeping you up to speed on the policies impacting everything from oil and gas to new supply chains. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe here. Essential Reads How policy will affect the energy and environment sectors now and in the future: New York planning first large US nuclear plant in years: Hochul New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) ordered the state's public power utility this week to start working on a zero-emissions advanced nuclear energy site that would be the nation's first major nuclear plant project in nearly two decades. Trump in wake of Iran attack: 'Everyone, keep oil prices down' In the wake of the U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, President Trump on Monday urged 'everyone' to keep oil prices down. Parliamentarian rules against Senate effort to force Postal Service to sell off EVs The Senate parliamentarian says Republicans cannot include a measure that would force the sale of electric vehicles (EVs) used by the U.S. Postal Service in their 'big, beautiful bill.' Green energy credits phaseout divides Senate Republicans How to phase out Biden-era green energy tax credits is emerging as a key flashpoint among Senate Republicans as they seek to advance their version of the 'big, beautiful bill.' What We're Reading News we've flagged from other outlets touching on energy issues, the environment and other topics: There Might Not Be a Map for That: Budget Cuts Threaten Geological Surveys (The New York Times) A potent heat dome is building over the US, sending temperatures into the triple digits (CNN) On Tap Upcoming news themes and events we're watching: What Others are Reading Two key stories on The Hill right now: Supreme Court lifts third country deportation limits; liberals pen scathing dissent The Supreme Court on Monday lifted judge-imposed limits on the Trump administration's deportations to countries where migrants have no ties over a scathing dissent from the court's liberal justices. Read more Former ambassador to Russia: Putin, Xi will celebrate Trump's 'preemptive war' in Iran Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul offered warnings on Saturday of how U.S. strikes on Iran could influence U.S. adversaries around the world. Read more You're all caught up. See you tomorrow! Thank you for signing up! Subscribe to more newsletters here