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New York Post
28-07-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Trump hails Thailand-Cambodia cease-fire: ‘We have saved thousands of lives'
President Trump took a victory lap Monday after Cambodia and Thailand reached a cease-fire deal to stop deadly fighting that erupted between the two Southeast Asian neighbors last week. On Saturday, the president had called up the leaders of the two countries and halted trade negotiations with them in a bid to stop the conflict. Cambodia and Thailand agreed an 'unconditional' ceasefire that would be effective at 12 a.m. local time Tuesday. 'I am pleased to announce that, after the involvement of President Donald J. Trump, both Countries have reached a CEASEFIRE and PEACE. Congratulations to all!' Trump, 79, proclaimed on Truth Social. 'By ending this War, we have saved thousands of lives. I have instructed my Trade Team to restart negotiations on Trade. I have now ended many Wars in just six months — I am proud to be the President of PEACE!' Trump said he spoke on the phone with Thailand's acting Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet before touting the deal publicly. 4 President Trump touted his efforts to end the skirmish between Cambodia and Thailand. Daniel Torok / The White House 4 Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim helped broker the ceasefire deal between Cambodia and Thailand. POOL/AFP via Getty Images The deal was first announced by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who hosted in-person talks between the two countries, several hours before Trump made his post. Since fighting erupted Thursday, at least 38 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians have been forced to evacuate disputed border region. Thailand has alleged that Cambodia launched rockets into civilian areas within its borders, prompting it to scramble F-16 fighter jets. 4 Cambodia and Thailand exchanged fire after a border dispute turned violent last week. via REUTERS Meanwhile, Cambodia has claimed that soldiers from Thailand shot at its troops first during an encounter at Prasat Ta Muen Thom, an 11th century Hindu temple claimed by both countries. The last time major fighting broke out between the two sides was in 2011, but the countries have frequently clashed since Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953. 'I'm using trade to make peace,' Trump boasted Sunday during an exclusive interview on Miranda Devine's 'Pod Force One' podcast. 4 The Post's Miranda Devine sat down with President Trump during his swing through the United Kingdom. Daniel Torok / The White House 'We were doing a deal, we're getting ready to sign it, and I'm saying we're not signing it unless you make a deal with your next-door neighbor, which is a very good neighbor,' Trump said, referring to trade negotiations with Cambodia. 'They've been neighbors for a long time, but they've had some fights.' If no agreement is reached by Aug. 1, most imports to the US from both countries will be slapped with a 36% tariff.
New Statesman
23-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
How Donald Trump plunged America into a blind war
Photo by Daniel Torok/The White House via Getty Images One minute after midnight on 21 June, a small group of US B-2 Spirit bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri heading west across the Pacific. They were picked up shortly afterwards by flight tracking accounts on social media, prompting breaking news alerts that multiple American bombers capable of carrying the type of heavy ordinance that would be needed to destroy Iran's nuclear sites were airborne as journalists frantically traced their trajectory. In fact, this was a decoy. The real strike group was flying east across the Atlantic, with seven B-2 bombers joined by US fighter jets as they reached the Middle East, which escorted them into Iranian airspace. In the early hours of 22 June local time, they dropped a total of 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), 30,000-pound guided bombs known as 'bunker busters', on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo and Natanz. A US Navy submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles at a third site in Isfahan as part of what the Pentagon called 'Operation Midnight Hammer'. By now, most people will have seen Donald Trump's address to the nation in the hours that followed, flanked by his distinctly uncomfortable-looking vice-president JD Vance along with secretary-of-state-turned-national-security-adviser Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump, predictably, pronounced the whole operation a 'spectacular military success', declaring that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been 'completely and totally obliterated', which he could not possibly have known at the time and has yet to be confirmed. 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' Trump intoned. 'If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.' Appearing to veer from his script towards the end, he added, 'I want to just say, we love you, God.' In the best-case scenario for those who support these strikes, Trump has acted decisively, ordering the use of military force where successive previous presidents had equivocated, and setting back the Iranian nuclear programme for years, perhaps even for good. He has finally neutered a regime that has long been defined by its rallying cry, 'Death to America', and delivered Israel from the existential threat that would have been posed by a nuclear-armed Iran, which one former Iranian president is said to have described as a 'one-bomb country'. According to this rendering, Trump has taken advantage of a moment of profound weakness for Tehran, whose most notorious proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been eviscerated by the Israeli military campaign over the last 18 months, and whose most senior military commanders and nuclear scientists have been assassinated. He has forced a reckoning for the Iranian regime – that will be quietly welcomed by many in the region and beyond – abandon your nuclear ambitions, or cease to exist. In the process, he has also proved the TACO theory (Trump Always Chickens Out) wrong. Perhaps some even see him delivering on his election campaign mantra that he would deliver 'peace through strength'. This is all, theoretically, possible. We should be clear, less than 24 hours at the time of writing from the US strikes, that nobody – not Trump, not the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and not Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei – knows for certain where this will lead, or how this war will end. (Trump has already called it a 'war' on social media.) But the history of recent US military campaigns in the region does not bode well. The exception often noted is the first Gulf War in 1991, where the coalition military effort known as Operation Desert Storm lasted than two months and succeeded in forcing Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from Kuwait, although the Iraqi dictator was permitted to remain in power. The problem with the optimistic case this time is, to quote the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the 'known unknowns', and the 'unknown unknowns'. In the short term, the known unknowns include what capabilities Iran retains to retaliate, both in terms of its proxies abroad (including the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq), the remaining stockpiles of missiles and drones in Iran, which Israel has repeatedly targeted in recent days, and its ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where almost a third of the world's seaborne oil transits. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Ayatollah Khamenei, who is 86 and said to be in faltering health, is reportedly sheltering in a bunker, according to the New York Times, avoiding electronic devices for fear of revealing his location and communicating only through a trusted aide, where he has listed several clerics who could replace him if he is killed, along with substitutes for the military chain of command. We do not yet know how Khamenei will respond to these attacks and whether he will assess – as many commentators have insisted – that he must now retaliate in some meaningful form if he hopes to restore Iran's deterrence and remain in power. We do not know whether Tehran can be induced to resume negotiations on a nuclear deal with Washington, as many European leaders have now urged. We do know, however, that Iran had previously negotiated a nuclear deal – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – with the United States, the UK, France, China, Russia, and the EU in 2015, which Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018. It is not clear that any Iranian government would entrust its future to a new deal that could be similarly torn up by the next US administration. (Trump has also launched trade wars against Canada, Mexico and China since returning to power despite signing much-hyped trade deals with them during his previous term.) Meanwhile, the example of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, which has pursued nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them despite the significant costs, and is not currently being bombed by the US, might well suggest to the Iranian regime that the surer course for survival would have been to race for a bomb while it still could, and, if it has the opportunity, to try again. We also know that despite the repeated messaging via US backchannels in the hours after the strike that this was a 'one-and-done' operation – a limited campaign to target the nuclear facilities and nothing more, certainly not the prelude to regime change – Trump and Netanyahu have delivered starkly contradictory signals. Netanyahu openly urged the Iranian people to 'stand up' against the regime after launching the Israeli military campaign on 13 June. Trump has demanded 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER' from Iran on social media and threatened to kill Khamenei. '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???' Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on the evening of 22 June. 'MIGA!!!' Given these statements, it is not hard to see why the Iranian government might conclude that the US and Israel have, in fact, launched a war that aims to overthrow them, and, therefore, that this is not merely a negotiating ploy that could yet end in a new nuclear deal, but an existential fight that justifies any means. Then there are the unknown unknowns. We do not know, for instance, whether there could be other Iranian nuclear facilities that had not yet been identified, and what steps the regime might have taken to ensure the survival of key personnel, equipment and material. We do not know how secure the regime's grip on power is and whether Khamenei could yet be sidelined, or simply replaced, by hardliners from within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or former high-ranking officials. 'Tehran is now full of such plots,' one anonymous source, who claimed to be part of a plan to replace the ageing supreme leader, told The Atlantic after the strikes. 'Everybody knows Khamenei's days are numbered.' If the regime does fall, it is far from clear what type of government would take its place, and what that would mean for the region, and well beyond. Recent examples – such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria – suggest liberal democracy is an unlikely outcome. 'The US is now entangled in a new conflict, with prospects of a ground operation looming on the horizon,' taunted Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current deputy chair of the country's security council, who is now probably best known for his bellicose social media threats. He then claimed that a 'number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.' (It is worth bearing in mind that his main role these days seems to be garnering attention and provocative headlines.) With the Russian military tied down in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is unlikely to offer much in the way of meaningful help in the short term, but he will certainly capitalise on what appears to be a flagrant breach of international law and what he will present as yet more evidence of American hypocrisy. (Putin, too, claims to have attacked Ukraine in part to stop the country developing nuclear weapons and threatening Russia's national security.) Moscow also stands to benefit from a rise in the price of oil if Iran threatens the Strait of Hormuz or targets other oil-producing facilities in the region. Beijing has strongly condemned the US attack, which the foreign ministry said, 'seriously violate the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law'. China is Iran's largest trading partner, which supplied around 15 percent of the oil the country imported last year, and will not welcome the prospect of a massive spike in oil prices if the conflict escalates at a time when the Chinese economy is already slowing. But the prospect of the US getting drawn into another interminable war in the Middle East and deferring, yet again, the mythical 'pivot to Asia', with its focus on deterring a Chinese assault on Taiwan, offers other potential benefits to Beijing. The reverberations of Trump's gamble will be felt far beyond the borders of Iran. Flanked by Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as he delivered his speech in the hours after the attack, the impression was less a show of unity than a president who is keenly aware of the domestic political risk this involves – and the vehement opposition already emanating from parts of his Maga base – and determined to show that his top lieutenants were all on board. Perhaps that was why Vance in particular, who has built his political brand on his opposition to US military intervention overseas, looked so perturbed. Trump has plunged the US into a war with Iran, with no apparent strategy, and objectives that appear to be evolving, in real time, on social media. Maybe the best-case scenario will yet transpire, and the Middle East will emerge from this conflict more stable and prosperous, but recent history cautions against too much optimism. [See also: The British left will not follow Trump into war] Related
Fast Company
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Trump ditches the American flag for his stern new portrait
The White House just unveiled a second version of President Trump's official portrait, and it's even more foreboding than the first. The new portrait, which was taken by the chief White House photographer Daniel Torok and revealed on Monday, shows Trump in a dark blue suit and red tie, sitting in a nearly dark room. It appears to be an evolution of Trump's first official portrait, also taken by Torok, which debuted just before his inauguration. Trump's first portrait strayed markedly from the precedent set by past administrations in terms of how the chief executive is presented. But this 2.0 version includes a striking omission that even the first did not: there's no American flag. It's just the most recent development in Trump's monthslong campaign to adopt a darker, sterner personal brand that aligns with his desired image of control. Leaving convention at the door Cara Finnegan is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois and author of the book, Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital. According to Finnegan, presidents are 'always deeply invested in their political image.' In an interview with Fast Company back in January, Rhea L. Combs, director of curatorial affairs at Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, explained that presidential portraits have historically aimed to balance relatability with strong leadership and American pride. To signal relatability, every president in the last 60 years has been photographed with a wide smile, positioned at a straight-on angle to keep the subject eye-level with the viewer. The lighting is typically soft and even, giving the composition an approachable feel. And, to reinforce the concept of commitment to the country, each president since Gerald Ford has included the American flag in the background of their official portrait. During his first term in 2016, Trump hewed closely to this historical approach. In contrast, for his inaugural portrait this year, he bucked nearly every tradition—including lighting, framing, angle, and facial expression—resulting in an official image that aimed to convey dominance rather than relatability. Still, he kept a sliver of the American flag in the background. For portrait 2.0, though, that final vestige of convention has also been abandoned. 'The mug shot arguably is his presidential portrait' At the time of the first portrait's release, Torok took to his personal X account to confirm that his portrait of Trump was inspired by the President's mug shot, taken after he was found guilty of 34 felony counts in May 2024. Trump used the mug shot as a marketing tool throughout his campaign, repositioning it as a kind of badge of honor by selling pieces of the suit he wore in the photo and featuring it on rally posters. This 2.0 version blurs the line between mug shot and presidential portrait even more. Once again, Trump is pictured making his signature scolding, eyebrow-raised expression from his mug shot that Torok already emulated once before. Compared to the first portrait—which was significantly darker and more harshly lit than the average presidential portrait—version 2.0 has brought the dimmers down even further, obscuring almost half of Trump's face in shadow. And instead of an illuminated background featuring the American flag, this image features what is essentially an ominous black hole surrounding the President. On X, Torok responded to a commenter with a brief explanation of how he chose to capture the image: 'Fairly dark room. One massive overhead soft box. And a streak of sunlight from the sunset over his right shoulder. Cinematic lighting.' That last detail of emulating cinema seems to hint at the broader rationale behind Trump's sterner second term image, from an oil painting in the White House of his bloodied face to the commercialization of his mug shot: It's all about using production to craft a specific narrative. With portrait 2.0, the Trump administration seems to be saying Trump is the star, and the United States is merely the set. 'What's striking to me is that the release of each second-term official portrait has prompted comparisons to the 2023 mug shot,' says Finnegan. 'It's clearly become the image to which every subsequent photographic portrait of Trump is inevitably compared. Yes, Trump himself immediately embraced the mug shot and commercialized it, and now it even hangs outside the oval office, so he's authorized it himself in that way. But if every photographic portrait of Trump is compared to the mug shot, then the mug shot arguably IS his presidential portrait.'
New York Times
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
It's President Trump Again, This Time in Full Frame
President Trump has a new official photographic portrait — his fourth since 2017, two produced during administrative transitions and two in the first months of his nonconsecutive terms. We have come a long way from the Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, in which the Virginian general stands at his desk with stiff republican reserve. The new official image, shot by the government photographer Daniel Torok, presents the incumbent in tight close-up and obscure quarters. Its lighting is immoderate, its tone forbidding, but compared to the last one its subject's mood has actually brightened. For that previous portrait, released at the time of the presidential transition in January 2025, Mr. Torok used egregious spotlighting from below that gave Mr. Trump the mien of a horror movie villain. The ex-president become president-elect glowered and squinted, in marked imitation of his mug shot taken at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. The new portrait, by contrast, displays a classically Trumpian tonal incongruity; for all the darkness, note the humor. The lighting is more head-on. Mr. Trump's shoulders are relaxed, his affect has softened. His neutral expression is moderated by a slight warmth in the eyes — a classic pose that a younger generation, following the supermodel Tyra Banks, knows to call 'smizing.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
03-06-2025
- General
- The Independent
New official presidential portrait of Donald Trump unveiled at White House
Donald Trump 's new official portrait was unveiled by the White House on Monday, 2 June. The close-up image replaces a photograph that was released for the 47th US president's inauguration earlier this year. An eight-second video released by the Trump administration showed the Republican, wearing a blue suit with an American flag pin, sporting a serious expression against a black background. It slightly differs from the earlier portrait, which showed a more brightly-lit Mr Trump in front of a US flag. The image was captured by chief White House photographer Daniel Torok, who also took Mr Trump's earlier portrait.
