Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts
the stars to flight

And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Spain’s economy grew by 2.8% in 2025 to reach €1.68 trillion, driven by strong household consumption and business investment. The figure places Spain ahead of major European economies including France(0.7%) and Italy(0.4%), reinforcing its position as one of the fastest-growing large economies in the region. As I’ve said several times, not everyone in Spain is benefitting from this growth.

There’ve been 2 accidents on local zebra crossings recently, one of them fatal. So, I wasn’t surprised to read that the DGT has warned about ‘zombie pedestrians’. Perhaps they’ll also issue one about zombie drivers who don’t seem to notice pedestrians already on a crossing.

From what Private Eye has told me about a new flat rate on packages from non-EU countries from next July, my guess is that Correos not only mis-treated a magazine as a packet but also jumped the gun. But time will tell.

Europe

How Hungary’s oligarchs have reaped billions in public contracts under cronyist (and Trump-admired) Victor Orban.

Trump Venezuela

For a decade, Gustavo González López oversaw Venezuela’s torture dungeons and spy networks. His secret police became a cudgel for strongman Nicolás Maduro. Opponents disappeared, protesters were rounded up and González was sanctioned by the US, the EU and the UK. The US-backed interim president has just appointed him Minister of Defence.

The Middle East War

See my earlier post.

A Christianity I don’t recognise.

The United States of Trump America

Even White House insiders think trump is an idiot. Podcast. Video.

I worked with Trump. Here’s what I know about his mental state. [This link might have obscured text, so it’s included at the end of this post. Using a Reader View is also an option].

A bit more – from James Boswell and others – on Trump’s forerunner/role model, Lord Lonsdale:-

• His acolytes sat like cringing dogs, waiting for their master to throw them a bone.
• He was highly irritable and violent, and abusive towards others.
• He was indifferent to the suffering of others. The cruellest man on earth.
• His behaviour veered between violent abuse and conciliation, often flying into a fury.

A friend sent me this 1988 clip of Trump on a UK chat show, when ‘he appeared almost human’. You’d be naïve to believe his claim that all the proceeds from his book were going to charity. They didn’t, of course. He was contradicted by his own ghostwriter.

Spanish

• Sosegado: Calm. Restful. Peaceful.
• Brega: Struggle
• Cabildeo: Lobbying

English/Did you know?

Thin, round slices of potato are called “scallops” because of the old verb “to scallop,” which means to cut food into thin slices or pieces, often rounded, which can then be baked or fried. The term “scallop” for the shellfish derives from Old French escalope (“shell” or “thin slice”), linked to the mollusk’s fan-shaped shell.

You Have to Laugh

The importance – for a man – of being 6ft(183cm).At least in the Anglosphere.

Finally . . .

I am 171cm. So . . . . Some famous short men:

• Alexander the Great – 5’2″ (157 cm)
• Winston Churchill – 5’6″ (168 cm)
• Genghis Khan – 5’8″ (173 cm)
• Tom Cruise – 5’7″ (170 cm)
• Daniel Radcliffe – 5’5″ (165cm)
• Dustin Hoffman – 5’5″ (165cm)
• Al Pacino – 5’7″ (170 cm)
• Bruno Mars – 5’6″ (168 cm)
• Elijah Wood – 5’6″ (168 cm)
• Kevin Hart – 5’2″ (157 cm)
• Danny DeVito – 4’10” (147 cm)
• Bruce Lee – 5’7″ (170 cm)
• Floyd Mayweather Jr.,- 5’8″ (173 cm)
• Mark Zuckerberg – 5’7″(170 cm).

The text of: I worked with Trump. Here’s what I know about his mental state

When meeting with Donald Trump in 2018 about a life-or-death homeland security issue in the Oval Office – an impending Category 5 hurricane, the strongest there is – he did something jarring. He started talking about helicopters. Specifically, he wanted to share with us his frustration that helicopters are always breaking down because, in his words, “there are too many parts!” Mid-briefing. We were asking him to issue an urgent warning to Americans to evacuate the affected area, and he went off on a tangent about helicopters. And then another about the election. We finally got him back on track, but the clock was ticking.

I filed it away as a data point. But I now think it was an eye-opening preview.

Let me be direct about something the political press keeps dancing around: the debate about Trump’s mental fitness has always been somewhat misdirected. The question was never simply, Is he sharp? It was always, can the system around him absorb his worst impulses? In his first term, it just barely could. In his second, it cannot. That’s the real story, and it’s far more alarming than any cognitive decline narrative.

There’s not only an undisciplined, irascible, and impulsive man in the Oval Office. He’s now surrounded by people who are hyping those characteristics rather than helping him exercise any semblance of self-control.

I watched Trump operate at close range from a perch inside the Department of Homeland Security. He spent more time with our department than any other. What I observed was a man of genuinely unusual cognitive disarray. He was disorganised in ways that were structurally alarming for a commander-in-chief. For instance, he appeared to think in sudden associations, not sequences, and he absorbed information through flattery and visual repetition rather than briefings. We were literally told to stop sending him documents to read that were longer than a page in length, and, where possible, to provide information in pictures instead of words.

The machinery of government was largely adapted to these peculiarities. Fifty-page background papers were reduced to one-pager descriptions using Trump’s “winners-and-losers” lexicon to try to help him understand complex topics and to coach him through difficult decisions. Officials interjected as the US President grew red-faced, sputtering obscenities after watching a news story that was unflattering or appeared willing to break a law or misuse his power to go after a political opponent.

But even that machinery no longer exists.

The senior officials who tried to help him manage his worst instincts – the chiefs of staff, the defence secretaries, the national security advisers who were willing to walk into the buzzsaw of his anger to speak truth to power – have been replaced or sidelined. What remains is more of a court than a cabinet. Trump’s loyalists have been hired to amplify the man and no longer view their role as trying to assist him in complying with the law, as we once did.

Put another way, the bomb was always there. But now the blast shielding is gone.

I believe Trump’s cognitive decline is self-evident. He rambles more. The tangents have grown longer and stranger: see recent riffs about Hannibal Lecter, the inexplicable detours into shark-related hypotheticals, or the moments where sentences simply stop. Speech pathologists and neurologists have noted the deterioration publicly and while I’m not qualified to diagnose it, what I can tell you is that the contrast with even five years ago is striking. The man I observed in the first term was erratic but the man I observe now is erratic without a safety net.

The irony, of course, is exquisite. Trump spent years suggesting that former president Joe Biden was too cognitively diminished to serve – a characterisation that, whatever its merits, was prosecuted with the zeal of a man who had never contemplated that the charge might one day be reversed.

It’s now being reversed. Yet many of the same commentators who amplified every Biden stumble have adopted the collective posture of people who have suddenly gone blind (or are, perhaps, too scared to criticise a man who threatens to prosecute their newspapers or revoke the broadcast licenses of their cable networks).

I’m not arguing that Trump has dementia, or that any specific diagnosis applies. I’m arguing something narrower and perhaps more frightening. The question of whether a president is fit is partly medical but also partly structural. Can the office of the presidency support the person holding it when that person errs, missteps, or fumbles on serious matters of war and peace? Are there people around willing to correct him to his face? Or, in the case of something like the Iran war, are aides prepared to explain to him the deadly consequences of a failure to prepare?

In Trump’s first term, the answer was a precarious yes. In his second, the answer appears to be no. In fact, the New York Times reported the other week that top aides were actively tip-toeing around the truth in the presence of the President.

“Inside the administration,” the New York Times reported, “some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the President, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”

Think about that for a moment. Aides to the President of the United States are being “careful” not to speak truth to power. They are being “careful” not to challenge the President’s disconnection with reality and cognitive obsession with believing he has achieved total success when, in fact, his actions have caused oil prices to skyrocket, US allies to fear uncontrolled catastrophe, and the West’s enemies to seize the advantage against us. They’re too scared to tell him.

That gap – between the man’s personal limitations and the system’s ability to compensate for them – is the thing that should concentrate the minds of US allies and adversaries alike.

I think back to that day in the Oval Office when the hurricane was barrelling toward US shores.

We needed the President to urge residents to evacuate the Carolinas region. Once we got him focused on the task at hand – and not non sequiturs like helicopter maintenance – Trump had a different and ludicrous idea.

“You know, I was watching TV, and they interviewed a guy in a parking lot,” Trump leaned back and recounted. “He was wearing a red hat, a Maga hat, and he said he was going to ‘ride it out’. Isn’t that something? That’s what Trump supporters do. They’re tough. They ride it out. I think that’s what I’ll tell them to do.”

We were gobsmacked. The President couldn’t possibly tell people in the storm’s path to stay put and “ride it out” when death and destruction were all but guaranteed.

So a clever press aide chimed in. “Mr President, I wouldn’t take that chance. This is going to be a pretty bad storm, and you don’t want to lose supporters in the Carolinas before the 2020 election.”

Trump thought about it for a moment.

“That’s such a good point. We should urge the evacuations.”

We breathed a sigh of relief. Even if it took craven political calculations to get him to do the right thing, it was better than nothing.

Today, I suspect that conversation would have gone differently. Trump now has a team willing to magnify his initial instincts. And in the face of storms on the global horizon, they won’t help the President avoid catastrophe. They’re fine with him telling us: just ride it out.

Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader.

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