December 31, 2025 (Wednesday)

And so, the sun sets on 2025.

At the end of this very difficult year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and for all you have done for me, for each other, and for our nation. For my part, I could not have continued to do what I do without your support and encouragement, and I thank you for it.

If you are comfortable writing it down, I’d love to see in the comments what you did this year to help preserve American democracy and what you hope for 2026. Let’s keep building our momentum.

I am entering the new year tired, I confess, but with high hopes and confidence that the American people can build a better future.

Let’s take this new year out for a spin and see what we can accomplish.

My best to you and yours for 2026.

Neophyte said:

December 31, 2025 (Wednesday)

And so, the sun sets on 2025.

At the end of this very difficult year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and for all you have done for me, for each other, and for our nation. For my part, I could not have continued to do what I do without your support and encouragement, and I thank you for it.

If you are comfortable writing it down, I’d love to see in the comments what you did this year to help preserve American democracy and what you hope for 2026. Let’s keep building our momentum.

I am entering the new year tired, I confess, but with high hopes and confidence that the American people can build a better future.

Let’s take this new year out for a spin and see what we can accomplish.

My best to you and yours for 2026.

And mine to you, HCR. Keep up the good work.

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

December 31, 2025 (Wednesday)

And so, the sun sets on 2025.

At the end of this very difficult year, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and for all you have done for me, for each other, and for our nation. For my part, I could not have continued to do what I do without your support and encouragement, and I thank you for it.

If you are comfortable writing it down, I’d love to see in the comments what you did this year to help preserve American democracy and what you hope for 2026. Let’s keep building our momentum.

I am entering the new year tired, I confess, but with high hopes and confidence that the American people can build a better future.

Let’s take this new year out for a spin and see what we can accomplish.

My best to you and yours for 2026.

And mine to you, HCR. Keep up the good work.

+1

anuary 1, 2026 (Thursday)

On January 1, 1892, seventeen-year-old Annie Moore walked down the gangway from the steamship Nevada with her two brothers Anthony, eleven, and Philip, nine, and into history as the first person processed through the newly opened Ellis Island Immigrant Station. Between 1892 and 1954, when Ellis Island closed, more than 12 million immigrants would come through the facility on their journey to the United States.

The establishment of a federal facility for processing immigrants was a long time coming.

Before the Civil War, states processed immigrants to the U.S. on the docks as they came off boats. The system was haphazard and left immigrants bewildered at the bustle and noise of their new country and at the mercy of swindlers who took their money with promises to find them housing and jobs. Cities and states tried to regularize immigration both to protect the newcomers and to make sure they did not end up homeless and starving, a charge on the city.

The 1840s and the 1850s brought an influx to the East Coast of Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine and Germans fleeing economic hardship and the failed 1848 revolutions and of Chinese and Mexicans migrating to California to pan and dig for gold.

In 1855 the state of New York turned the site of a former U.S. Army fort on the southern tip of Manhattan into the Emigrant Landing Depot, more popularly known as Castle Garden. Between its opening on August 3, 1855, and December 21, 1889, the date of the last recorded data for the site, Castle Garden processed 8,280,917, or 75%, of the 10,956,910 immigrants who entered the United States.

When immigrants arrived at Castle Garden, officials divided them into two lines: English speakers and non-English speakers who would need translators. Officials recorded the names of the newcomers, the ship they arrived on, where they were going, and how much money they had. The new arrivals could buy train tickets from licensed agents, contact relatives, and rest, wash, and exchange money without fear of swindlers. An elaborate system for what was essentially a head tax paid by ship masters for each immigrant funded the operations.

But the coming of the Civil War slowed immigration as foreign men wondered if they would end up on the front lines.

In his third annual message on December 8, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln asked Congress to get involved in the process by establishing “a system for the encouragement of immigration.” Like other Republicans, Lincoln believed immigrants contributed mightily to the nation’s economy. He wrote: “there is…a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals,” while “tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.”

“he nation is beginning a new life,” he wrote, and “his noble effort demands the aid and ought to receive the attention and support of the Government.”

Republicans agreed. In their 1864 platform they resolved that immigration “should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.” Under their leadership, Congress passed the 1864 Contract Labor Law permitting immigrants to borrow money against their future homesteads to finance their voyage to the U.S. and promising that immigrants would not be drafted. Lincoln signed it on July 4, 1864. Immigration picked up again.

But just a decade later, in the midst of the depression that followed the Panic of 1873, California workers angry at what they saw as competition from Asian contract labor prompted federal regulation of Asian immigration to the U.S. In 1875 the Page Act prohibited the migration of contract laborers and alleged sex workers to the U.S. The Page Act did not require the inspection of ships for such people, though, and provided no way to enforce its provisions.

Driving federal immigration more significantly was the 1876 Henderson v. Mayor of New York Supreme Court decision that outlawed all state head taxes on immigrants, thus leaving facilities like Castle Garden and other institutions designed to help poor immigrants without financial support.

Shipping interests and businesses liked the end of the head taxes, but reformers worried that the collapse of immigrant services would make immigrants vulnerable again to swindlers and abusers. They called for federal regulation of immigration. At the same time, agitation against Chinese and Pacific Island immigration in the West continued, and legislators in eastern states worried that the end of the head taxes would stick them with impoverished immigrants in their borders.

Congress didn’t fast-track any such regulation because immigration was falling after the Panic of 1873. But as it began to rise again in 1879, and as Republicans realized they had to court anti-Chinese votes in California after a razor-thin loss there in 1880, lawmakers turned back to the issue.

In 1882, Congress passed the nation’s first sweeping federal regulations of immigration, with not one law, but two. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese workers, although not scholars, diplomats, or businessmen. Three months later, the Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a 50-cent head tax on arriving immigrants and prohibited the entry of convicts, mentally ill individuals, and “any person unable to take care of him or herself.”

Nine years later, in 1891, Congress modified the 1882 Immigration Act to expand government control of immigration and to authorize and fund a federal immigration bureau that would both process legal immigrants and enforce immigration restrictions against those deemed unable to enter the U.S. The new law expanded the reasons that individuals could be rejected from the U.S, including physical illness with contagious diseases. The law made it clear that the federal government would have to replace Castle Garden with its own facility.

Officials turned to Ellis Island in upper New York Harbor offshore from Castle Garden, expanding the former site of oyster beds with landfill until eventually it came to cover about 27.5 acres. On the site, the government built a two-story structure as a main receiving building, then added a hospital, utility plant, laundry, offices, and a detention center.

Immigrants arrived at Ellis Island after a two-week journey from Europe. After entering New York Harbor, they sailed by the nearby Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, dedicated just six years before the facility at Ellis Island opened. A gift to the people of the United States from the people )of France, Lady Liberty stood on a broken chain and shackle that symbolized the abolition of slavery in the U.S., and held up a torch to the newcomers. She held a tablet that represented the law. It was engraved with “July IV MDCCLXXVI”—July 4, 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence.

When the immigrants’ ship anchored in New York Harbor, healthy first-class and second-class passengers, who had received a brief examination aboard ship, did not have to undergo the inspections the third-class passengers did. Those passengers, along with any people who were sick, boarded a barge or a ferry for the inspection station on Ellis Island. Once they arrived, they could expect to wait three to five hours for what would be an inspection of just a few minutes if they were in good health. Doctors would examine them for obvious illness, and officials would try to make sure they would be able to support themselves. Because steamship companies had to pay for the return trip of anyone who couldn’t pass inspection, as well as a fine for bringing those folks ineligible for immigration, they performed their own inspections in Europe, prescreening the people who arrived at Ellis Island.

On June 15, 1897, the wooden buildings of the original Emigrant Landing Depot burned to the ground, taking with them all immigration records held there since 1855. The government rebuilt, this time making the buildings fireproof. The new facility’s Registry Room, known as the Great Hall, served as many as 5,000 people a day. After arrival, the newcomers sat on benches under the huge arched windows and the spectacular Gustavino tiled ceiling, waiting to be called. After medical inspectors determined their physical fitness, legal inspectors asked the immigrants’ name, home town, occupation, destination, and how much money they had.

Once through their inspection, immigrants proceeded to the “Stairs of Separation.” Those bound for New York or New England moved down the left stairs. Immigrants headed anywhere else went down the stairs on the right. The middle stairs were for immigrants headed for the hospital or to dormitories to wait for a special board of inquiry hearing on their case. Those detained made up about 20% of those arriving, but ultimately only about 2% of them were denied entry.

From Ellis Island the newcomers rejoined family and friends or made their way to other states to work in factories or mines, or on farms. In 1965, Ellis Island became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, formalizing its connection to Lady Liberty and the poem inscribed on the base of the statue in 1903. Emma Lazarus turned away from the old Colossus of Rhodes, the giant statue of the Greek sun god Helios that stood at the entrance to the harbor of the island of Rhodes and was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, to offer the world “The New Colossus,” a woman, Lady Liberty, the “Mother of Exiles.”

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

January 2, 2026 (Friday)

Just after midnight on January 1, in a private ceremony in the long-closed former City Hall subway station in Manhattan, New York Attorney General Letitia James swore Zohran Mamdani into office as mayor of New York on a historic Quran. Hours later, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) swore Mamdani in publicly in a ceremony on the steps of City Hall.
“My fellow New Yorkers—today begins a new era,” Mamdani said.

The new mayor emphasized that he represents the everyday people of New York City, “construction workers in steel-toed boots and halal cart vendors whose knees ache from working all day” and “neighbors who carry a plate of food to the elderly couple down the hall, those in a rush who still lift strangers’ strollers up subway stairs.” “I stand alongside over one million New Yorkers who voted for this day nearly two months ago,” Mamdani said, ”and I stand just as resolutely alongside those who did not…. I promise you this: if you are a New Yorker, I am your Mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.”

Mamdani identified this era as “an opportunity to transform and reinvent.” “A moment like this comes rarely,” he said, and “arer still is it the people themselves whose hands are the ones upon the levers of change.”

“To those who insist that the era of big government is over,” Mamdani said, “hear me when I say this—no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.

“For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path—one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception.”

Mamdani recalled past city leaders who called for an end to economic and social inequalities and celebrated the “gorgeous mosaic” that is New York City. Men like Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins, and Fiorello La Guardia believed “that New York could belong to more than just a privileged few,” Mamdani said. “It could belong to those who operate our subways and rake our parks, those who feed us biryani and beef patties, picanha and pastrami on rye” if they used the government “to work hardest for those who work hardest.” He promised to “resurrect that legacy.”

He called for everyday Americans to write a new story for New York City, weaving together the many languages, religions, and countries from which they came to become New Yorkers. He promised that city leaders would not try to divide New Yorkers, but rather would work to bring them together. Rather than using “the good grammar of civility…to mask agendas of cruelty,” he said, they would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

The policies he promised are not simply about lowering costs, he said, but about “the lives we fill with freedom.” For too long, he said, “freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it.” “Here,” he said, “where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.”

Mamdani’s speech was a declaration of a new kind of modern politics that focuses on “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” For decades, the Republican Party has called for dismantling the government, arguing that regulations and taxes were destroying Americans’ freedom from constraints. But for most Americans, government regulation and investments in social welfare like education and infrastructure guarantee freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles, including those imposed by the wealthy and powerful.

The idea of government regulation and a basic social safety net to permit Americans to live their lives to their fullest potential was a key principle of the New Deal launched by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, and Mamdani was right to note that the New Deal was born in New York City.

It was in New York City that turn-of-the-century reformers like Frances Perkins recognized the desperate need of urban workers for laws that would protect them from workplace injuries, provide a safety net for widows and orphans, and guarantee a living wage. Those reformers worked with the Democratic Tammany Hall machine to push such legislation through the legislature, where it picked up support from Republicans. In the first three years after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York passed 36 bipartisan laws regulating factories. Other states, especially those with their own history of progressive reform, quickly followed suit.

FDR came from this political ferment, but reform quickly became bipartisan in New York City, where Republicans had their own history of progressivism under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. In 1933, after a political scandal involving Tammany Hall, New Yorkers elected Republican Fiorello La Guardia to be their mayor after he ran a campaign supporting FDR for president. La Guardia helped to rebuild New York City’s economy during the Great Depression.

By recalling La Guardia and the New Deal, Mamdani was rejecting the modern ideology that demonizes government action rather than celebrating it. He appears to be in good company: an Economist/YouGov poll released on December 30 showed that 80% of Americans believe that “political institutions have been captured by the rich and powerful,” 82% believe that “elites are out of touch with the realities of everyday life,” and 74% believe that “leaders who come from ordinary backgrounds better represent people like me.”

One of Mamdani’s first official acts was designed to restore faith in government by attacking corruption. Mamdami revoked every executive order issued by the previous mayor, Eric Adams, after September 26, 2024. It was on that date that Adams was indicted on five federal charges of public corruption, including bribery, wire fraud, illegal campaign contributions, and conspiracy. After Adams spoke highly of President Donald J. Trump and appeared to agree to cooperate with his immigrant sweeps, the Justice Department in February 2025 moved to drop the charges. The evidence of corruption prompted multiple resignations from the Department of Justice.

In contrast to 34-year-old Mamdani’s inauguration in New York City, the Wall Street Journal on the same day published a story about President Donald Trump’s “signs of aging.” Authors Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw note that at 79, Trump is “the oldest man to assume the presidency” and, “according to people close to him,” “is showing signs of aging in public and private.” He gets little sleep and has been recorded falling asleep at public events, appears to be having trouble hearing, doesn’t exercise regularly, and eats “a diet heavy on salty and fatty foods, such as hamburgers and french fries.” Trump told the journalists that he does not always follow the advice of his doctors because “I have very good genetics.”

After learning that the Wall Street Journal was writing about his health, Trump called the authors to “express…irritation about the public debate over his health.” The authors made it clear that Trump and his doctor say he is in excellent health, and his aides say he keeps a busy schedule.

The Wall Street Journal article was significant not because it acknowledges weaknesses many journalists have already recorded, but because a leading right-leaning media outlet is suggesting that Trump is not up to the task of the presidency.

This, in turn, suggests less about the president’s condition than about the danger for the Republican Party of having Trump at its head going into the 2026 midterm elections. On December 31, Republican polling firm Cygnal reported that in generic polling, 49% of Independents favored Democrats and only 29% opted for Republicans. The Independent’s Washington bureau chief, Eric Michael Garcia, called the poll “a flare gun for Republicans.”

Over Tuesday, December 30, and Wednesday, December 31, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck another five small boats that it claims were being operated by “narco-terrorists.” It killed another 13 people and possibly left some survivors. These latest strikes bring the total to at least 35 and the number of people killed to at least 115.
This morning, at 2:58, Trump’s social media account posted about the ongoing Iranian protests that have been sparked by the skyrocketing cost of living, writing: “If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

At 6:56 this morning, Trump posted on social media that “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice president, was willing to take. P.S., I strongly believe that anyone running for President, or Vice President, should be mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven Cognitive Examination. Our great country cannot be run by ‘STUPID’ or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE! President DJT.”

Later in the morning, he posted one image of a dead bird near a windmill with the caption “Eagles going down!” and another with birds near windmills saying: “Killing birds by the millions!” MeidasTouch noted that the first image was a 2010 picture of a red kite in Spain and the other was a 2006 image from Taiwan.

Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark asked: “What does it mean when your doctors keep insisting you redo the cognitive exam?”

Heather Cox Richardson on How the Trump Administration is Pursuing ‘A Nazi Worldview’

Link.

January 3, 2026 (Saturday)

Today was the legal deadline for the Department of Justice to submit to Congress a written justification for any documents from the Epstein files that the department had redacted or withheld. But it seems unlikely the Justice Department met this deadline because it has missed the December 19 deadline for releasing the files themselves. Both of those deadlines were established by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress on November 19, 2025.
Information from those files continues to trickle out. Those that have been released suggest the Department of Justice considered charging “co-conspirators” and that Trump traveled on Epstein’s private plane with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, along with alleged victims, on several occasions. Mar-a-Lago routinely sent employees to perform massages and other spa services at Epstein’s home, where he exposed himself to those employees. According to Daniel Ruetenik of CBS News, video released on December 23 and 24, 2025, contradicts previous statements about the surveillance system in the prison in which sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in August 2019.

Trump has taken a hit on his domestic policy lately, as well. After the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, Trump announced on December 31 that the administration is removing National Guard troops from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. Then he claimed that the troops had “greatly reduced” crime in those cities and vowed to “come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again—Only a question of time!”

“Donald Trump’s lying again,” Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted on social media. “He lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.” “If President Trump has finally chosen to follow court orders and demobilize our troops,” said Democratic Oregon governor Tina Kotek, “that’s a big win for Oregonians and for the rule of law.”

And then, on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. The fact they chose to release it at a time when most Americans are not paying attention to the news tells you all you need to know about what Smith said. Republicans have insisted that Smith’s indictments of Trump were a sign that former president Joe Biden’s Justice Department was “weaponized” against Trump and MAGA supporters, but in his testimony—under oath—Smith said Trump was guilty.

As Parker Molloy covered in The Present Age, Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.” Smith told the committee that the evidence for the indictment came not from the president’s enemies, but from Republicans who had worked for Trump, campaigned for him, and wanted him to win in 2020.

It is against this backdrop that the Trump administration launched a strike against Venezuela in the early hours of Saturday, January 3. Without consulting Congress, officials ordered the military to seize president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to New York City to face federal charges newly announced by the Southern District of New York.

Trump insists that Maduro is working with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to attack the U.S. with illegal narcotics. This has been the justification for U.S. strikes on small boats, apparently from Venezuela, that the administration claims have been trafficking drugs to the U.S. The administration has implied the deadly drugs it claims the boats are trafficking are illicit fentanyl, although it has told Congress they were transporting cocaine, which it has now indicted Maduro for trafficking.

But aside from drugs, Trump and his cronies have also increasingly emphasized their conviction that Venezuela “stole” oil from the U.S. and must return it. This appears to be a reference to the loss of U.S. rigs, pipelines, and other facilities when Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil companies operating within its borders on January 1, 1976, although Trump might mean the expansion of those seizures under president Hugo Chávez starting in 2007.

This morning, Trump informed the American people of what had happened in Caracas by calling in to Fox & Friends on the Fox News Channel from Mar-a-Lago to describe the strikes and the extraction of Maduro and Flores. He praised the team and boasted that no other country could have done what the U.S. did. “I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. And, uh… if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence—you know they say that, ‘the speed, the violence,’ they use that term—it’s uh, just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.”

In a midday press conference, members of the administration fleshed out the story of what they are calling “Operation Absolute Resolve.” Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to emphasize that the attack and extraction of Maduro and Flores were a law enforcement mission, Trump made it clear the goal was regime change in order to gain control of Venezuela’s oil. The administration acted unilaterally, without consulting Congress, and in apparent violation of international law.

Slurring his words and repeating himself as he read from a script and occasionally wandered off it, Trump called the operation “an assault like people have not seen since World War II” and said it was “one of the most stunning effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”

Trump said the U.S. will “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” evidently not interested in supporting Edmundo González, the former diplomat who beat Maduro in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump turned immediately to Venezuela’s oil industry, saying that it had been “a total bust…pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.” He explained that “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” “This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America,” he said, “will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe.”

If such a mission required U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela, he said, the administration was not afraid of such deployment.

The president launched into the language of his rally speeches—rote by now—before returning to oil. Although international law is clear that countries own the natural resources within their own territories, he claimed that Venezuela had “unilaterally seized, and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars…. They took all of our property. It was our property. We built it…and they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country, considered the largest theft of property in the history of our country.”

And then he hit on the larger foreign policy principle his attack on Venezuela is designed to establish. “America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people and drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere,” he said. He said that the U.S. has now replaced the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—which he called “a big deal” that we “forgot” without explaining that it warned foreign countries from colonizing South America—with the “Donroe Document”: American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

After World War II, the United States and its allies and partners put in place a rules-based international order to prevent future world conflicts. Under that order, the members of the United Nations agreed they would not threaten or attack another country. Russian president Vladimir Putin has sought to replace that rules-based order with the idea that powerful countries will create spheres of influence in their regions. That new world order would justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now the U.S. invasion of Venezuela with the promise that the U.S. is going to “run” the country from now on, as part of its quest to dominate the Western Hemisphere, means the U.S. has abandoned the post–World War II international order and is siding with Russia’s vision.

“By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors,” wrote the New York Times editorial board. That justification seems to be the point.

Trump warned Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro that he has to “watch his ass,” said “Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about,” and warned that “something will have to be done about Mexico.” “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he said. Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland covered with an American flag and the caption “SOON.”
When Maduro arrived in New York City tonight, official White House social media channels, including that of the president, showed him on his perp walk.
By afternoon, though, the triumphal story seemed to be sagging.

The New York Times reported that at least 40 civilians and military personnel were killed in the attack, which hit a three-story apartment building.

Although Trump told reporters that Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn into the presidency and that she seemed willing to work with the U.S. “to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez insisted in a televised address to Venezuelans today that Maduro is the rightful president of Venezuela and must be released, and said the U.S. had “launched an unprecedented military aggression.” “If there is one thing that the Venezuelan people and this country are clear about,” she said, “it is that we will never again be slaves, that we will never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.”

Ben Lefebvre, Zack Colman, and James Bikales of Politico reported that oil companies are leery of Trump’s plan that they will invest billions of dollars in rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industry. Two sources told the journalists that while oil companies would like reimbursement for the equipment and infrastructure they left behind in Venezuela when its government nationalized the oil fields, they are unenthusiastic about Trump’s demand that they invest heavily in rebuilding Venezuela’s destroyed petroleum industry in order to recoup their losses.

They say they have no idea how badly the infrastructure has decayed, and little interest in investing when it is not clear who will be running the country in the future. The administration has failed to reach out to oil executives with a long-term plan, experts told the journalists. One source said “it feels very much a shoot-ready-aim exercise.”

That lack of preparation appears to be in keeping with the overall post-raid planning. Trump told reporters today that administration officials were “designating various people” to “run” Venezuela, “and we’re gonna let you know who those people are.” Tonight Robbie Gramer and Juan Forero of the Wall Street Journal said the administration is “racing to assemble an interim governing structure for Venezuela” but noted that “he lack of details about what comes next led some U.S. officials to question why there was no detailed plan in place well before deposing Maduro.”

Gramer and Forero noted that Venezuela is twice the size of California and has 28 million people in it, millions of whom continue to support Maduro, whose government remains largely intact. Those supporters include armed cocaine-trafficking groups, some of whom fought as guerillas in Colombia, and an army of more than 100,000 soldiers.

Current and former U.S. officials told the reporter that the next phase of Trump’s operation in Venezuela is full of risks and the potential for blunders.

Thanks.

January 4, 2026 (Sunday)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration’s message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week under what legal authority the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, as Trump vowed to do, Rubio served up a lot of words but ultimately fell back on the idea that the U.S. has economic leverage over Venezuela because it can seize sanctioned oil tankers. Seizing ships will give the U.S. power to force the Venezuelan government to do as the U.S. wants, Rubio suggested. This is a very different message than Trump delivered yesterday when he claimed that the people standing behind him on the stage—including Rubio—would be running Venezuela.

When Stephanopoulos asked Rubio if he was, indeed, running Venezuela, Rubio again suggested that the U.S. was only pressuring the Venezuelan government by seizing sanctioned oil tankers, and said he was involved in those policies. When Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press also asked if Rubio was running Venezuela, Rubio seemed frustrated that “People fixating on that. Here’s the bottom line on it is we expect to see changes in Venezuela.” Historian Kevin Kruse commented: “Yeah, people are fixating on a Cabinet Secretary being given a sovereign country to run because the president waged war without congressional approval and kidnapped the old leader. Weird that they’d get hung up on that.”

When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn’t need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn’t need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but President Donald J. Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela’s oil fields and run the country.

Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80.

Rubio highlighted again that the Trump administration wants to control the Western Hemisphere, and he went on to threaten Cuba. Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles articulated the extraordinary smallness of the Trump administration’s vision when he wrote: “We must also marvel at the titanic idiocy of our new ‘Donroe Doctrine’ for it turns America from a global power into a regional one by choice. I still can’t really believe they are going through with this for it is so batsh*t f-ing crazy, and does so much lasting harm to our interests.”

Shortly after Trump told reporters yesterday that Venezuela’s former vice president, now president, Delcy Rodríguez is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez demanded Maduro’s return and said Venezuela would “never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.” Indeed, U.S. extraction of Maduro and threats to “run” Venezuela are more likely to boost the Maduro government than weaken it.

In a phone call today with Michael Scherer of The Atlantic, Trump threatened Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Tonight on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that the U.S., not Rodríguez, is in charge of Venezuela.

Trump also told Scherer that he does indeed intend to continue to assert U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere, telling Scherer that “we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.” Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), meaning it is already part of U.S. national defense.

Although he ran for office on the idea of getting the U.S. out of the business of foreign intervention, Trump embraced the idea of regime change in Venezuela, telling Scherer: “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.” He continued: “Rebuilding is not a bad thing in Venezuela’s case. The country’s gone to hell. It’s a failed country. It’s a totally failed country. It’s a country that’s a disaster in every way.”

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris noted that military intervention in Venezuela is even more unpopular with the American people “than Trump’s tariffs and health care cuts.” In September, only 16% of Americans wanted a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% against it. A December poll showed that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power.” Only 33% approved. Even support for strikes against the small boats in the Caribbean could not get majority support: 53% opposed them while only 42% approved.

“By the time American forces touched Venezuelan soil early Saturday morning,” Morris writes, “Trump had already lost the public.”

But officials in the administration no longer appear to care what the American people want, instead simply gathering power into their own hands for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, trusting that Republican politicians will go along and the American people will not object enough to force the issue. The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress’s resolve, and so far, it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning.

Morris notes that a December CBS poll showed that 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, correctly believed a president must get approval from Congress before taking military action against Venezuela. The president did not get that approval. By law, the president must inform the Gang of Eight before engaging in military strikes, but if an emergency situation prevents that notification, then the president must inform the Gang of Eight within 48 hours. The Gang of Eight is made up of the top leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as the top leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) who as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House minority leader and fellow Gang of Eight member Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had been briefed on the strikes. Himes said: “I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I’ve had zero outreach, and no Democrat that I’m aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we’re now in a world where the legal obligation to keep the Congress informed only applies to your party, which is really something.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—also a member of the Gang of Eight—told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. “They’ve kept everyone in the total dark,” he said.

Nonetheless, Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump’s Venezuelan adventure would not go well: “We’re in the euphoria period of…acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro and Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we’re in that euphoria phase. And what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it’s an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it…. et’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) was more direct: “The U.S. attack on Venezuela is illegal,” he posted. “Congress never authorized this use of military force. I will vote to stop it. This is insane. Health care costs and food prices are surging. Trump’s response is we’re going to run another country. Batsh*t crazy.”

Neophyte said:

January 4, 2026 (Sunday)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration’s message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week under what legal authority the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, as Trump vowed to do, Rubio served up a lot of words but ultimately fell back on the idea that the U.S. has economic leverage over Venezuela because it can seize sanctioned oil tankers. Seizing ships will give the U.S. power to force the Venezuelan government to do as the U.S. wants, Rubio suggested. This is a very different message than Trump delivered yesterday when he claimed that the people standing behind him on the stage—including Rubio—would be running Venezuela.

When Stephanopoulos asked Rubio if he was, indeed, running Venezuela, Rubio again suggested that the U.S. was only pressuring the Venezuelan government by seizing sanctioned oil tankers, and said he was involved in those policies. When Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press also asked if Rubio was running Venezuela, Rubio seemed frustrated that “People fixating on that. Here’s the bottom line on it is we expect to see changes in Venezuela.” Historian Kevin Kruse commented: “Yeah, people are fixating on a Cabinet Secretary being given a sovereign country to run because the president waged war without congressional approval and kidnapped the old leader. Weird that they’d get hung up on that.”

When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn’t need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn’t need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but President Donald J. Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela’s oil fields and run the country.

Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80.

Rubio highlighted again that the Trump administration wants to control the Western Hemisphere, and he went on to threaten Cuba. Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles articulated the extraordinary smallness of the Trump administration’s vision when he wrote: “We must also marvel at the titanic idiocy of our new ‘Donroe Doctrine’ for it turns America from a global power into a regional one by choice. I still can’t really believe they are going through with this for it is so batsh*t f-ing crazy, and does so much lasting harm to our interests.”

Shortly after Trump told reporters yesterday that Venezuela’s former vice president, now president, Delcy Rodríguez is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez demanded Maduro’s return and said Venezuela would “never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.” Indeed, U.S. extraction of Maduro and threats to “run” Venezuela are more likely to boost the Maduro government than weaken it.

In a phone call today with Michael Scherer of The Atlantic, Trump threatened Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Tonight on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that the U.S., not Rodríguez, is in charge of Venezuela.

Trump also told Scherer that he does indeed intend to continue to assert U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere, telling Scherer that “we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.” Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), meaning it is already part of U.S. national defense.

Although he ran for office on the idea of getting the U.S. out of the business of foreign intervention, Trump embraced the idea of regime change in Venezuela, telling Scherer: “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.” He continued: “Rebuilding is not a bad thing in Venezuela’s case. The country’s gone to hell. It’s a failed country. It’s a totally failed country. It’s a country that’s a disaster in every way.”

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris noted that military intervention in Venezuela is even more unpopular with the American people “than Trump’s tariffs and health care cuts.” In September, only 16% of Americans wanted a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% against it. A December poll showed that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power.” Only 33% approved. Even support for strikes against the small boats in the Caribbean could not get majority support: 53% opposed them while only 42% approved.

“By the time American forces touched Venezuelan soil early Saturday morning,” Morris writes, “Trump had already lost the public.”

But officials in the administration no longer appear to care what the American people want, instead simply gathering power into their own hands for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, trusting that Republican politicians will go along and the American people will not object enough to force the issue. The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress’s resolve, and so far, it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning.

Morris notes that a December CBS poll showed that 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, correctly believed a president must get approval from Congress before taking military action against Venezuela. The president did not get that approval. By law, the president must inform the Gang of Eight before engaging in military strikes, but if an emergency situation prevents that notification, then the president must inform the Gang of Eight within 48 hours. The Gang of Eight is made up of the top leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as the top leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) who as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House minority leader and fellow Gang of Eight member Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had been briefed on the strikes. Himes said: “I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I’ve had zero outreach, and no Democrat that I’m aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we’re now in a world where the legal obligation to keep the Congress informed only applies to your party, which is really something.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—also a member of the Gang of Eight—told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. “They’ve kept everyone in the total dark,” he said.

Nonetheless, Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump’s Venezuelan adventure would not go well: “We’re in the euphoria period of…acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro and Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we’re in that euphoria phase. And what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it’s an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it…. et’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) was more direct: “The U.S. attack on Venezuela is illegal,” he posted. “Congress never authorized this use of military force. I will vote to stop it. This is insane. Health care costs and food prices are surging. Trump’s response is we’re going to run another country. Batsh*t crazy.”

The bad people part what a joke.
Many of the bad leaders were installed by the USA to counter the commies or some other Middle Eastern nation.
Allowed to do whatever they wanted until they didn’t toe the line anymore.

Thanks Neophyte.

January 5, 2026 (Monday)

Five years ago, on January 6, 2021, more than 2,000 rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the process of counting the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president of the United States. They tried to hunt down House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and chanted their intention to “Hang Mike Pence,” the vice president. They fantasized that they were following in the footsteps of the American Founders, about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6 she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

In fact, it was not 1776 but 1861, the year insurrectionists tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule. They wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy—our right to determine our own destiny—in order to keep Donald J. Trump in the White House, making sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.

Since the 1980s, Republicans pushed the idea that a popular government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the nation’s social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from greedy minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.

After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the motor voter law, enabling people to register to vote at motor vehicle departments, Republicans increasingly insisted Democrats were cheating the system by relying on the votes of noncitizens, although there was never any evidence for this charge.

As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars and cheating to win elections became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land.

The idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew, along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating. In 2016, Trump insisted that his female Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Other Republican leaders who had initially shunned him began to support him when it became clear that he could mobilize a new crop of disaffected voters who could put Republicans into office.

And they continued to support him, claiming initially that he could be kept in check by establishment Republicans like his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who moved from leading the Republican National Committee to the White House for the first six months of Trump’s first term. In his first months in office, Trump delivered the tax cut Republican leaders wanted, as well as the appointment of one out of every four federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices, who would protect the Republican project in the courts.

But the idea that Trump could be kept in check fell apart in September 2019, when it appeared he was trying to rig the 2020 election. A whistleblower revealed that Trump had called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Until Zelensky did so, Trump said, the administration would not release the money Congress had appropriated to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia, which had invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The attempt to withhold congressionally appropriated funds in order to tilt an election was a glaring violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act codifying the executive branch’s duty to execute the laws Congress passed. In the congressional investigation that followed, witnesses revealed that Trump’s cronies were running a secret scheme in Ukraine to undermine official U.S. policy and benefit Trump’s allies.

Republicans in 1974 had turned against President Richard Nixon for far less, but although Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said not a single Republican senator believed Trump, they stood behind him nonetheless. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues: “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

But once acquitted, Trump cut loose from any oversight. He sought revenge and insisted that “hen somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total.” “The federal government has absolute power,” he said, and he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to.

As early as 2019, Trump had “joked” about staying in power regardless of the 2020 election results, and on October 31, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon told a private audience that Trump was going to declare that he had won the 2020 election no matter what. Trump knew that Democratic mail-in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on Election Day, creating a “red mirage” that would be overtaken later by Democratic votes.

“Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, by calling the election early and saying that the later votes were somehow illegitimate. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again…. He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election.”

Early returns on Election Night 2020, November 3, showed Trump ahead. But, more quickly than anyone expected, Democratic votes turned the key state of Arizona blue, and the Fox News Channel called the race for Biden. Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about 2:30 the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop.”

But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.

Trump insisted a Democrat could not have won honestly. Over the next few months, his campaign demanded recounts, all of which confirmed that Biden won. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits over the 2020 election, most dismissed for lack of evidence.

As legal challenges failed, Trump pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” to win the state of Georgia. Trump’s allies plotted for Trump supporters in seven battleground states to meet secretly and submit false slates of electors for Trump. Two slates would enable Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count the electors from the now-contested states, so that either Trump would be elected outright, or Pence could say there was no clear winner and send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican delegations than Democratic ones, Trump would be president.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s evangelical chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote on November 24, 2020, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni.

Determined to retain control of the government, certain congressional Republicans went along with the charade that the election had been stolen. Trump allies in the House began to echo Trump’s accusations and to say they would question the counts from certain states. Such challenges required a paired vote with a senator, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who saw himself as a top 2024 presidential contender, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who didn’t want to be undercut, led 11 other senators in a revolt to challenge the ballots.

For weeks, Trump had urged his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., for a “Stop the Steal” rally arranged for January 6, the day Congress would count the certified electoral ballots. Speaking at the Ellipse near the White House that morning, Trump and his surrogates told the crowd that they had won the election, and Trump warned: “We are going to have to fight much harder.”

Trump claimed that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country and told the crowd: “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.” “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

And, knowing they were armed, he told them to march to the Capitol.

As Trump’s supporters attacked, lawmakers from their hiding spots begged the president to call off his supporters, but he did nothing for more than three hours. After 5:40, when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump issued a video statement.

“I know you’re hurt,” he said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now…. We love you. You’re very special.” He tweeted: “Remember this day forever!”

When the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for a second time on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection, only 10 Republicans voted in favor, while 197 voted no (4 did not vote). In the Senate trial, 7 Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, while 43 continued to back Trump.

In a speech after his vote to acquit, McConnell said, “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” but said he must answer for his actions in court. “Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

In November 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump for four felonies associated with his attempt to retain power illegally.

Trump fought back, arguing that he had presidential immunity for his actions. Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide the case immediately, but it waited until the last possible moment, on July 1, 2024, to decide Donald J. Trump v. United States, finding that presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. Trump himself had appointed three of the justices in the majority.

A second grand jury returned a new indictment stripped of the actions now immune, but by then it was too late: Trump was reelected president, and the Department of Justice has an understanding that it will not indict or prosecute a sitting president. And so, five years after the events of January 6, 2021, we are learning what it means to have a president who has demonstrated his determination to overthrow our democracy and who does not have to answer to the law.

Although he was elected with less than 50% of the votes cast, Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” As soon as he took office in January 2025, the president and his henchmen flouted the 1974 Impoundment Control Act again, seizing Congress’s right to control the nation’s finances. Trump used emergency powers to ignore the Constitution and deployed troops in Democratic-led cities. When Congress required the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, the administration largely ignored the law. Today, more than two weeks after the deadline, it had released less than 1% of the files. Ignoring the rights afforded to individuals by the Constitution, Trump is seizing people off the streets and prosecuting his perceived enemies.

Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil, and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s. Today, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination. It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just a select few.

In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican president Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln asked Americans to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion,” and to resolve that “these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

“ Trump had called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former vice president Joe Biden”

Oh to be a fly on the wall in Zelenskyy’s office that day!

It’s astonishing how Trump was even eligible to run for POTUS again after Jan 6 (and everything else), let alone elected.

Epstein files? What Epstein files?

January 6, 2026 (Tuesday)

“They say that when you win the presidency you lose the midterm,” President Donald J. Trump said today to House Republicans. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy. They don’t. They have a horrible policy. They do stick together. They’re violent, they’re vicious, you know. They’re vicious people.”

“They had the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator. Nobody is worse than Obama. And the people that surrounded Biden.”

And there you have it: in a rambling speech in which he jumped from topic to topic, danced, and appeared to mimic someone doing something either stupid or obscene, Trump explained the ideology behind his actions. He and MAGA Republicans have absorbed the last 40 years of Republican rhetoric to believe that Democratic policies are “horrible” and that only Republicans “have the right policy.” If that’s the case, why should Republicans even have to “run against these people?” Why even have elections? When voters choose Democrats, there’s something wrong with them, so why let them have a say? Their choice is bad by definition. Anything that they do, or have done, must be erased.

That is the ideology behind MAGA, amped up by the racism and sexism that identifies MAGA’s opponents as women, Black Americans, and people of color. In their telling, the world Americans constructed after World War II—and particularly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting—has destroyed the liberty of wealthy men to act without restraint. Free them, the logic goes, and they will Make America Great Again.

As tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He continued: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

“Because there are no truly free places left in our world,” he wrote, Thiel called for escaping into cyberspace, outer space, or seasteading.

While tech leaders are focusing on escaping established governments, Trump’s solution to an expanded democracy appears to be to silence the voters and lawmakers who support the “liberal consensus”—the once-bipartisan idea that the government should enable individuals to reach their greatest potential by protecting them from corporate power, poverty, lack of access to modern infrastructure, and discrimination—and to erase the policies of that consensus.

Nowhere does Trump’s conviction that he, and he alone, has the right to run the United States show more clearly than in the White House’s rewriting of the history of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters determined to overthrow the free and fair election of Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes in 2020, replacing him with Trump by virtue of their belief that no Democrat could be fairly elected.

But the official White House website reversed that reality today, claiming that the insurrectionists who beat and wounded at least 140 police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence were “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The real villains, the White House wrote in bold type, were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.”

In reality, modern Republican policies have rarely served everyday people, while the policies enacted by Democratic president Joe Biden demonstrably did. Biden rejected the ideology that called for cutting taxes, regulations, and social services in the name of liberty. Instead, he urged Congress to invest in public infrastructure, creating jobs, and he shored up the social safety net.

As Biden prepared to leave office in January 2025, Trump claimed that the U.S. was in freefall, “a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” But Peter Baker reported in the New York Times that the opposite was true: Biden and his administration were leaving behind a country that was in the best shape it had been since at least 2000.

There were no U.S. troops fighting in foreign wars, murders had plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses had dropped sharply, undocumented immigration was below where it was when Trump left office in 2021, stocks had just had their best two years since the last century. The economy was growing, real wages were rising, inflation had fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment was at near-historic lows, and energy production was at historic highs. The economy had added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.

Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”

Once in office, Trump set about dismantling the policies that had achieved those results. And now, after destabilizing the country at home, he is working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since World War II. In addition to an illegal attack on Venezuela to extract Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Trump is threatening Colombian president Gustavo Petro, saying “Cuba is ready to fall,” and warning Mexico to “get their act together.”

Although his sights are primarily on countries in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has also warned that if Iran starts “killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.”

Trump has also threatened Greenland, which is a self-governing island that is part of Denmark, an ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As NATO allies, Greenland and the U.S. have cooperated on defense for decades, so Trump’s declaration that the U.S. needs Greenland for national defense makes no sense.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement Sunday: “The Kingdom of Denmark—and thus Greenland—is part of NATO and is therefore covered by the alliance’s security guarantee. We already have a defense agreement between the Kingdom and the United States today, which gives the United States wide access to Greenland. I would therefore strongly urge the United States to stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people who have said very clearly that they are not for sale,” she said.

On Monday, Fredriksen said: “If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops. That is, including our NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.” Today, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Denmark issued a statement of support for Greenland, Denmark, and NATO.

In Venezuela, the U.S. took Maduro and Flores but rather than supporting the actual winner of the 2024 presidential election, Edmundo González, or opposition leader María Corina Machado, the administration left the Maduro government in place, led by former vice president Delcy Rodríguez.

María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post today that in the hours since Maduro’s removal, the Venezuelan government has cracked down on those showing support for the U.S. operation. It detained at least 14 journalists, sent armed gangs into the capital, restricted protests, and arrested citizens who appeared to be “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America.”

Machado said the government’s actions are “really alarming.”

Trump claims that the U.S. is “running” Venezuela, and he has dropped the pretense that he is concerned about drug traffickers or Maduro’s seizure of the presidency. Instead, he has made it clear that what he really wants is for the Venezuelan government to give him access to the country’s oil. In much the same way as he claims Democrats were responsible for January 6 because they honored the will of the voters and refused to give him the second term he wanted, Trump maintains that Venezuelans “stole” the American oil that sits under their own land.

Trump’s plan to tear up the rules-based international order and replace it with U.S. control over the Western Hemisphere will cost the world dearly, but using the U.S. military to threaten other countries and seize control of their resources does create big winners:

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “I am pleased to announce that the interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States! I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

Thanks.

(sigh)

January 7, 2026 (Wednesday)

This morning, a federal agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good as she was driving away from ICE agents on a residential street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. According to Minneapolis leaders, Good was a legal observer: a volunteer trained to observe police conduct in case of future legal action.
Three videos taken at the scene show a maroon SUV perpendicular on a snowy street. A silver SUV driving up the street stops. Two officers wearing badges that say “police” and body armor get out of the vehicle and walk toward the maroon car.

One of them says, “Get out of the f*cking car,” and the other reaches through the open driver’s side window while trying to open the door. The driver backs up the vehicle, and straightens the wheel as if making a three-point turn. Then she starts slowly to accelerate along the street.

A third officer who has been standing on the side of the road pulls out a gun as the car is turning away. He shoots three times. The maroon car does not hit anyone as it rolls up the street, hitting another vehicle and then a utility pole. The shooter walks briskly away, apparently uninjured.

Seen in slow motion, a video shows the wheels of the maroon vehicle were fully turned away from the shooting officer, who made no effort to jump away, clearly suggesting he did not feel as if he were in danger. His first shot went through the windshield; the next two went through the driver’s side window as the car moved past him. An onlooker shouted “What the f*ck?!”

Video taken by another eyewitness shows ICE agents refusing to allow a self-identified physician to tend to the victim and telling him to back up. Although there is no one tending the clearly visible woman in the car, an agent says: “We have medics on scene. We have our own medics.” When another bystander screams: “Where are they? WHERE ARE THEY?!” an agent tells her, “Relax.” “How can I relax?” she shouts. “You just killed my f*cking neighbor.”

Yesterday the Trump administration deployed federal agents and officers to Minneapolis for what they called the largest federal immigration operation ever carried out, eventually planning to deploy 2,000 agents. The administration has been attacking Minnesota’s Somali community, and Homeland Security Kristi Noem was present at an ICE arrest yesterday, telling a man in handcuffs, who Homeland Security later said was from Ecuador, “You will be held accountable for your crimes.”

Rebecca Santana and Michael Balsamo of the Associated Press reported that Minnesota governor Tim Walz called the deployment “a war that’s being waged against Minnesota.” “You’re seeing that we have a ridiculous surge of apparently 2,000 people not coordinating with us, that are for a show of cameras,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) insists that its actions are protecting American citizens from “the worst of the worst” criminal immigrants, so the shooting of a young white woman, married and the mother of a young child, and how that would look, made it appear eager to smear Good.

It immediately put out a statement that looked much like what it said after officers shot 30-year-old Chicago teaching assistant Marimar Martinez in October when it claimed she had “ambushed” agents, ramming their vehicle before an agent shot her five times. Footage showed that, in fact, the agents had rammed her car, and after the shooting one had sent a text message bragging: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” The Department of Justice dropped the charges it had filed against her, asking a judge to “dismiss the indictment and exonerate” Martinez and her passenger.

Today, DHS posted on social media that “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

Trump jumped in with his own fact-free post lying that the shooter had been run over: “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.

But it is not working.

First of all, Sarah Jeong of The Verge noted that the reason there are so many videos is because “people cared enough to show up where ICE was and record them. It wasn’t just one or two legal observers, and when Good was shot, they didn’t abandon her.”

Second, elected Democrats are pushing back. “I’ve seen the video,” Governor Walz wrote. “Don’t believe this propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.” To reporters, he said: “We’ve been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday I said exactly that. What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV and today that recklessness cost someone their life. I’ve reached out to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and I’m waiting to hear back.”

He told Minnesotans that, like them, he was angry, but “they want a show. We can’t give it to them. We cannot. If you protest and express your First Amendment rights, please do so peacefully as you always do. We can’t give them what they want…. To Americans, I ask you this. Please stand with Minneapolis.”

Walz prepared to call out the Minnesota National Guard if necessary, demonstrating that there would be no need for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in troops. He reminded Minnesotans that the Minnesota National Guard does not wear masks and that it is theirs, not Trump’s.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey told reporters that the DHS statement was “bullsh*t. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.” “To the family, I’m so deeply sorry,” Frey said. “There’s nothing that I can say right now that’s going to make you or your relatives, friends of the victim feel any better.” To ICE and other federal agents deployed in Minnesota, he added: “Get the f*ck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart…and now somebody is dead.”

But something else was also going on today. At the same time the administration was pouring gasoline on the domestic fire ICE had sparked and the international fire it had set with its attacks on Venezuela and threats against Greenland, it was quietly making a number of major financial moves.

The smallest of those moves was that today Trump asked Fulton County, Georgia, for a $6.2 million payout in attorneys’ fees and costs after the criminal charges against him in Georgia were dismissed. Trump had been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by pressuring Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes to give him a victory in the state of Georgia. In November 2025 a new special prosecutor dropped the charges, citing the difficulty of prosecuting a case against a sitting president. Trump boasted on social media of his victory over an “illegal, unconstitutional, and unAmerican hoax,” and continued to push the lie that Democrats stole the election.

Vicky Ge Huang of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial today applied for a national banking license from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, part of the Treasury Department. A banking license would integrate the Trump family’s cryptocurrency more fully into mainstream finance.

If the Treasury Department issues the license—a potential outcome that critics say reveals a major conflict of interest for the president—the president and chair of the new company would be Zach Witkoff, whose father is the son of Trump’s envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff, who the Wall Street Journal recently reported had been handpicked for his role by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The younger Witkoff started World Liberty Financial in 2024 with Trump’s sons Don Jr., Eric, and Barron.

Today, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told an audience at a Goldman Sachs energy industry event in Miami, Florida, that the United States will take control of all oil from Venezuela for the foreseeable future. Lisa Desjardins and Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour reported this afternoon that Trump administration officials have told lawmakers that they plan to put the money raised from their seizure of Venezuelan oil into bank accounts outside the U.S. Treasury. Desjardins clarified that “ources said they understood these as similar or decidedly ‘off-shore’ accounts.”

Yesterday, Trump announced that, as president of the United States, he would control the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.

And then, this afternoon, Trump’s social media account first threatened the defense contractor Raytheon, saying that “ither Raytheon steps up, and starts investing in more upfront Investment like Plants and Equipment, or they will no longer be doing business with Department of War.”

Then, the same account posted: “After long and difficult negotiations with Senators, Congressmen, Secretaries, and other Political Representatives, I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe. If it weren’t for the tremendous numbers being produced by Tariffs from other Countries, many of which, in the past, have ‘ripped off’ the United States at levels never seen before, I would stay at the $1 Trillion Dollar number but, because of Tariffs, and the tremendous income they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past (especially just one year ago during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, the Worst President in the History of our Country!), we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number while, at the same time, producing an unparalleled Military Force, and having the ability to, at the same time, pay down Debt, and likewise, pay a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country!”

Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles wrote: “Trump has gone completely mad.”

Thanks.

“ The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense”

Next he’ll be calling them crisis actors. How does one get paid to be an agitator of this level?

January 8, 2026 (Thursday)

On MS NOW today, columnist Philip Bump broke down when talking about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis. “I have a six year old,” he said. “And…seeing the image of the stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car—really emotional for me and…what I take away from this is, for me that’s the thing that stands out: that this was a family that could have been like mine.”

Bump went on to emphasize that “there are a lot of situations, a lot of incidents that have involved ICE, have involved the government over the course of the past thirteen months in which there is resonance for other families in similar ways,” but what he hit on in his first reaction to Good’s killing was the one the administration must fear most of all. Good was a white, suburban mother, whose ex-husband told reporters she was a Christian stay-at-home mom, and Bump is a white man.
President Donald J. Trump’s people see that demographic as their base. If it turns on Trump, they are politically finished, as finished as elite southern enslavers were when Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded American mothers of the fragility of their own childrens’ lives to condemn the sale of Black children; as finished as the second Ku Klux Klan was when its leader kidnapped, raped, and murdered 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer; as finished as the white segregationists were when white supremacists murdered four little girls in church in 1963.

Evidence that President Donald J. Trump has sexually abused children would likely be enough to crater his political support from this group, making it no accident that the administration is openly flouting the law that required the full release of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of those files, and many of them were so heavily redacted as to be useless. In a court filing on Monday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “substantial work remains to be done” before it can release them all.

But there is no hiding the murder of Renee Good, captured on video by several witnesses as it was. And so the Trump administration is working desperately to smear Good and to convince the public that, contrary to widespread video evidence, the federal agent put in place by the Trump regime shot her in self-defense.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump himself have all insisted that their false narrative is true. Media Matters for America compiled a timeline showing how the Fox News Channel first told viewers that Good had tried to ram officers whose vehicle was stuck in a snowbank, then moderated their language as video appeared, and then, by the evening, parroted the administration’s talking points.

Today, in a press conference on the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance made even more extreme statements, claiming—all evidence to the contrary—that the woman shot in Minneapolis was part of a “left wing network” and that “nobody debates” that she “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.” In fact, among those who “debate” Vance’s version of events are the journalists at the New York Times, who today published a slow-motion analysis that demonstrated conclusively that the vehicle was turning away from the officer when he opened fire.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt increased the attack on Good even more today by saying: “The deadly incident that took place in Minnesota yesterday occurred as a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country, where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.”

The administration appears to be trying to make sure their narrative will get an official stamp of approval by silencing a real investigation. Today, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a statewide criminal investigative bureau in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has shut its officials out of the investigation into Good’s death. The FBI will no longer allow the BCA to “have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” The BCA has, it said, “reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.”

Law professor Steve Vladeck commented: “This is definitely how you behave when you’re trying to bring every resource to bear, rather than trying to cover up the unlawful behavior of your own personnel.”

The FBI is housed within the Department of Justice (DOJ), which is run by Trump loyalists Bondi and Blanche, and as Vladeck suggests, there is appropriate concern that it will not conduct a fair investigation. In an illustration of how Trump has tried to stack the DOJ, today U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that John Sarcone, Trump’s temporary nominee as acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, does not hold that position lawfully. For Sarcone, as for four other U.S. attorneys, Trump has ignored the law to keep his loyalists in control of key Department of Justice offices, where they have targeted people Trump considers enemies. Although judges have said five of Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys are in office illegally, at least three have refused to step down.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty issued a statement saying that her office is “exploring all options” to ensure that a state level investigation of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good continues.

Today Trump appeared to settle into his new role as an American dictator. He announced plans to make the ballroom for which he bulldozed the East Wing of the White House even bigger: despite a longstanding norm that additions to the White House—the People’s House—have a lower profile than the main building, Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported today that Trump is now planning for his ballroom to be as tall as the White House. Trump’s architect also said they are considering adding a one-story addition to the West Wing colonnade that runs alongside what used to be the Rose Garden. White House director of management and administration Josh Fisher also said that administration officials plan to renovate Lafayette Square, north of the White House.

And Trump told New York Times reporters David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs that as commander-in-chief, he has only one limit on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He claimed he gets to determine what is legal under international law, and seemed to stretch that authority to domestic affairs, too, saying that he was already considering getting around a possible decision by the Supreme Court that his tariffs were unconstitutional by simply calling them licensing fees and that he could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops in the U.S. if he “felt the need to do it.”

Meanwhile, Hamed Aleaziz and Madeleine Ngo of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is sending more than 100 Customs and Border Protection agents and officers from Chicago to Minnesota after yesterday’s shooting.
This afternoon, federal immigration agents shot and wounded two people in Portland, Oregon. According to Claire Rush and Gene Johnson of the Associated Press, the shooting took place outside a hospital where the two were in a car. Portland mayor Keith Wilson and the City Council asked ICE to end operations in the city during a full investigation of the incident.

Democrats have spoken out loudly against Trump’s grab for dictatorial powers since he took office, and today some Republicans began to push back as well.

Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the leading sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the DOJ to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. “Put simply,” they wrote, “the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act…. e do not believe the DOJ will produce the records that are required by the Act.”
Last month, House Democrats launched a discharge petition to force a vote to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years. Frustrated that Speaker Johnson would not take up such a measure, four Republicans signed the petition to force it to the floor. Today, seventeen Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 230–196. It now heads to the Senate.

The Senate also pushed back today.

Senators voted to advance a bill that would stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. The vote was 52–47 with five Republicans joining all the Democrats to move the measure forward. Republicans killed a similar measure in November, but Trump’s enormously unpopular incursion into Venezuela and threats against Greenland prompted five Republicans to reassert congressional authority over military action. CNN called it “a notable rebuke of the president.”

The five Republicans voting for the bill were Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Todd Young of Indiana. Immediately, Trump posted on social media that the five “should never be elected to office again.” By reasserting the power of Congress, he wrote, they were “attempting to take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”

The Senate also unanimously approved a resolution to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In March 2022, Congress passed a law approving the plaque and requiring that it be installed, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused and the Department of Justice has complained that because the plaque lists departments and not individual officers, it does not comply with the law.

On this year’s fifth anniversary of the January 6 attack, the Trump administration blamed the police officers themselves for starting the insurrection, making the Senate’s vote appear to be a pointed rebuke of the president. In response to Trump’s calling the rioters “patriotic protesters” retiring senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called the January 6 rioters “thousands of thugs” according to reporter Scott MacFarlane.

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has agreed to let the plaque hang in the Senate until the Architect of the Capitol—the federal agency that maintains, operates, and preserves the U.S. Capitol—determines its permanent location.

Today, as there were yesterday, there were protests against ICE around the country. Tonight, as there were last night, there are vigils for Renee Good.

buffy said:

January 8, 2026 (Thursday)

On MS NOW today, columnist Philip Bump broke down when talking about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis. “I have a six year old,” he said. “And…seeing the image of the stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car—really emotional for me and…what I take away from this is, for me that’s the thing that stands out: that this was a family that could have been like mine.”

…

Today, as there were yesterday, there were protests against ICE around the country. Tonight, as there were last night, there are vigils for Renee Good.

The disagreements by the Trump administration are offensive, the video evidence of a murder is overwhelming.

Thank you.

anuary 9, 2026 (Friday)

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

Wow!

Thanks.

January 10, 2026 (Saturday)

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone.

The video shows Ross getting out of a vehicle and walking toward a red SUV where Good sits in the driver’s seat. Sirens blare as he walks toward her. She smiles at him and says: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” As Ross walks alongside the car, she repeats: “I’m not mad at you.” As he reaches the back of the vehicle, another person, presumably Good’s wife, Becca, says: “Show your face.” As he begins to record the vehicle’s license plate, the same person says: “That’s okay, we don’t change our plates every morning,” referring to stories that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) switch out plates to make their vehicles hard to track. “Just so you know, it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.” Ross’s camera pans up to show the person recording him on her cell phone.

She continues: “That’s fine. U.S. citizen. Former f*cking veteran.” As she walks to the passenger-side door, she looks at him and says: “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”

Another officer approaches the driver’s side of the vehicle and says to Renee Good: “Out of the car. Get out of the f*cking car.”

As the passenger calmly reaches for the passenger-side door handle, the police officer on the driver’s side again says: “Get out of the car!” Other videos indicate that he had then put his hand into the car and was trying to open the door. Good quite clearly turns the wheel hard away from the police officers to head down the street as the passenger yells: “Drive, baby! Drive! Drive!”

Someone says “Whoa!” as the car moves down the street. Ross’s camera shows his face and then sways—remember, he has been filming all this on his phone. There are three shots and the houses on the side of the street swing back into view on Ross’s camera, indicating he did not drop it. As the car rolls up the street, Ross says, “F*cking bitch!” just before there is the sound of a smash.

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

The release of this damning video as an attempted exoneration reminds me overwhelmingly of the release of the video of the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in February 2021 in an attempt of one of the murderers to prove they had acted in self-defense.

In that case, the district attorney for that circuit told police that the video showed self-defense and declined to prosecute. When the story wouldn’t go away, one of the murderers apparently thought that everyone else would agree that the video exonerated the killers. His lawyer gave the video to a local radio station. The station took the video down within two hours, but the public outcry over the horrific video meant the killers were arrested two days later. A jury convicted them, and they are now in prison, two for life without possibility of parole, one for life with the possibility of parole after 30 years, when he will be about 82.

In the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murderers and their protectors were clearly so isolated in their own racist bubble they could not see how regular Americans would react to the video of them hunting down and shooting a jogger.

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking bitch” after he killed her.

The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.

This is the larger meaning of federal agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in U.S. cities. While they are attacking primarily people of color, the message they carry is directed at all Americans: you must do what the Trump administration and its loyalists demand.

Another recording from the past few days shows a federal agent walking toward a woman recording him. She tells him: “Shame on you.” He answers: “Listen. Have you all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?” She responds: “Learned what? What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?” He begins: “Following federal agents….” and he knocks the phone out of her hand. Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”

After doubling down on their false narrative, the administration pulled 200 Customs and Border Patrol agents from a crackdown in Louisiana to send them to Minnesota, where administration officials already had deployed 2,000 federal agents—more than three times the number of police officers in Minneapolis. There they are cracking down, apparently indiscriminately. Yesterday, Gabe Whisnant of Newsweek reported that ICE has detained four members of the Oglala Lakota Nation, a federally recognized tribal nation of the Indigenous peoples who were in North America long before European settlers arrived.

In November, as Sarah Mehta of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted at the time, the administration replaced almost half of ICE leaders across the country with Border Patrol officers. Border Patrol, a subagency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is the agency responsible for acting on President Donald J. Trump’s policy of taking children from their parents during his first term, and it remains at the center of complaints of cruelty, racism, and violation of civil rights. This is the agency led by Greg Bovino, and the one behind the attack on a Chicago apartment building led by agents who rappelled into the building from a Black Hawk helicopter.

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim.

This afternoon, Kyle Cheney, Ben Johansen, and Gregory Svirnovskiy of Politico reported that the day after Good’s murder, Noem quietly restricted the ability of members of Congress to conduct oversight of ICE facilities. The policy came out in court today after ICE officers denied Democratic Minnesota Representatives Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison entry to a detention facility in Minneapolis. Last month, a federal judge rejected a similar policy.

Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services.

The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape.

But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison responded: “I will not allow you to take from Minnesotans in need. I’ll see you in court.”

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Protesters took to the streets today across the United States to lament the death of Renee Good and demand an end to ICE brutality. At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported that ICE’s approval rating has plummeted in the past year, from +16 to -14. The day ICE agent Ross shot Renee Good, 52% of Americans disapproved of ICE while just 39% approved. In February, 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable opinion of ICE, while today 40% do. There is, Morris notes, “a growing and intense, angry opposition to across America.”

January 11, 2026 (Sunday)

The news has seemed to move more and more quickly in the last week.

The story underlying all others is that the United States Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files—the files from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into the activities of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—no later than December 19, and it has not done so.

Epstein and President Donald J. Trump were close friends for many years, and the material the Department of Justice (DOJ) has released suggests that Trump was more closely tied to Epstein’s activities than Trump has acknowledged. Although Trump ran in 2024 on the promise of releasing the Epstein files, suggesting those files would incriminate Democrats, his loyalists in the administration are now openly flouting the law to keep them hidden.

Despite the clear requirement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that they release all the files by December 19, to date they have released less than 1% of the material.

Another part of the backstory of the past week is that the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the Trump administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, a decision that seemed to limit Trump’s power to use military forces within the United States.

Yet another part of the backstory is that on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. In that testimony—under oath—Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
With pressure building over the Epstein files and Jack Smith’s testimony, and with the Supreme Court having taken away Trump’s ability to use troops within the United States, the administration went on the offensive.

Only a week ago, on January 3, the military captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. After months of suggesting that he was determined to end what he called “narco-traffickers,” Trump made it clear as soon as Maduro was in hand that he wanted control of Venezuela’s oil.

Then, on January 6, the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters determined to keep Trump in office despite Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s majority of 7 million votes, Trump’s White House rewrote the history of January 6, 2021, claiming that the rioters were “peaceful patriotic protesters” and blaming the Democrats for the insurrection.

That same day, after the Supreme Court had cut off the administration’s ability to federalize National Guard soldiers and send them to Democratic-led cities, the administration surged 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis in the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever launched.

The next morning, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, and the administration responded by calling Good a domestic terrorist.

On Thursday, January 8, as protests broke out across the country, Republicans in both chambers of Congress began to push back against the administration. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the leading sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the DOJ to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. The House also passed a measure to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years.

The Senate advanced a bill to stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. And, just two days after Trump had reversed the victims and offenders in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that Capitol Police officers had been among the offenders, the Senate unanimously agreed to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating that the plaque be hung, but Republicans until now had prevented its installation.

Friday was a busy day at the White House.

On Friday, Trump threatened Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”

Trump’s threat against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally has had American lawmakers and foreign allies scrambling ever since. In a joint statement, the leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) released a video explaining that “what you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe. You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.”

Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the country in the future.

What oil executives did suggest to Trump on Friday was that they would quite like to be repaid for their losses from the 2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”

Yesterday the government made public an executive order President Donald J. Trump signed on Friday, declaring yet another national emergency—his tenth in this term, by my count—and saying that any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies “will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Specifically, the executive order says, such repayment would “interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela” and, by extension, jeopardize U.S. foreign policy objectives including “ending the dangerous influx of illegal immigrants and the flood of illicit narcotics;…protecting American interests against malign actors such as Iran and Hezbollah; and bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere more generally.” So, it appears, Trump wants to retain control of the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.

Tonight Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said he is under federal criminal investigation related to his congressional testimony about a $2.5 billion renovation of historic Federal Reserve buildings. On Friday the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve grand jury subpoenas.

Powell, whom Trump appointed, released a video noting that he has kept Congress in the loop on the renovation project and saying that complaints about renovations are pretexts. Trump is threatening criminal charges against Powell because the Fed didn’t lower interest rates as fast as Trump wanted, instead working in the interest of the American people. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.” Powell vowed to “continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do, with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people.”

The Federal Reserve is designed to be independent of presidents to avoid exactly what Trump is trying to do. The attempt to replace Powell with a loyalist who will give Trump control over the nation’s financial system profoundly threatens the stability of the country. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, appeared to have had enough. He posted that “f there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.” He said he would “oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.”

Kyle Cheney of Politico observed that it is “ard to overstate what a remarkable statement this is from a Republican senator…accusing the Trump White House of weaponizing DOJ to control the Fed.”

Over a picture of the demolished East Wing of the White House, conservative lawyer George Conway noted: “I also must say that it’s a bit rich that Trump and his DOJ think it’s a good idea to gin up a bullshit investigation about supposed illegalities in….{checks notes}…renovating a federal building.”

On social media tonight, Trump posted a portrait of himself with the title: “Acting President of Venezuela.”

Openly flouting the law?

I am SHOCKED!

Gosh.

January 12, 2026 (Monday)

Today, Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department, Navy Secretary John Phelan, and the Navy Department for violating his First Amendment rights, the Speech and Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the separation of powers, due process, the law that establishes ranks for retired commissioned officers (10 USC 1370), and the Administrative Procedure Act that establishes the ways in which agencies can make regulations.

While this sounds complicated, at its heart it’s about the attempt of the Donald J. Trump administration to trample Congress and create a military loyal to Trump alone.

Defense Secretary Hegseth came to his position from his job as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel. Before that, he served in the Army Reserve and the National Guard but, as Kelly and Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) noted in a Military Times op-ed questioning Hegseth’s fitness for the position, he never rose to a command position and his “track record falls short of military standards.” He is the least-experienced defense secretary in U.S. history.

His attack on Kelly, who is a retired Navy officer and astronaut, began after Kelly and five other Democrats in Congress—Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Representatives Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), and Jason Crow (D-CO)—all of whom are veterans, released a video on November 18, 2025, in which they warned members of the military and the intelligence community that the administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.”

“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution,” the video continued. “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”

The lawmakers concluded: “Know that we have your back, because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.”

The video simply reiterated the law, but White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promptly posted on social media, “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” and by the next day, Trump was reposting comments that called for the lawmakers to be arrested, “thrown out of their offices,” “frog marched out of their homes at 3:00 AM with FOX News cameras filming the whole thing,” and “charged with sedition.” He reposted “Insurrection. TREASON!” and a message from a user who wrote: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”

On November 24, the “Department of War” posted on social media that it was investigating Kelly, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”

Over a photograph of the medals on his uniform, Kelly responded on social media: “When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired—which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.

“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Charlotte Clymer, who writes Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, walked readers through Kelly’s citations. They include the Navy Pilot Astronaut Badge, earned by fewer than 200 service members, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. As Clymer notes, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal is “the highest award bestowed by NASA and one of the rarest awards in the federal government.” Since the medal was created in 1959, it has been awarded fewer than 400 times.

On January 5, Hegseth issued a formal censure of Kelly, saying Kelly’s call for military personnel to refuse unlawful orders “undermines the chain of command,” “counsels disobedience,” “creates confusion about duty,” “brings discredit upon the armed forces,” and “is conduct unbecoming an officer.” Hegseth said he was directing the secretary of the Navy to look into reducing Kelly’s retirement grade.

Kelly responded: “Over twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy, thirty-nine combat missions, and four missions to space, I risked my life for this country and to defend our Constitution—including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would attack me for doing exactly that.

“My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife Gabby recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder. Generations of servicemembers have made these same patriotic sacrifices for this country, earning the respect, appreciation, and rank they deserve.

“Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that.

“If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it. I will fight this with everything I’ve got—not for myself, but to send a message back that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump don’t get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government.”

Kelly’s lawsuit notes that the First Amendment prohibits the government from retaliating against those engaging in protected speech and that the Constitution’s protection of the speech and debate of lawmakers provides additional safeguards. Indeed, the lawsuit says, “never in our nation’s history has the Executive Branch imposed military sanctions on a Member of Congress for engaging in disfavored political speech.”

If the court permits that unprecedented step, the lawsuit argues, it would allow the executive branch to punish members of Congress for engaging in their duty of congressional oversight.

Kelly asked the court “to declare the censure letter, reopening determination, retirement grade determination proceedings, and related actions unlawful and unconstitutional; to vacate those actions; to enjoin their enforcement; and to preserve the status of a coequal Congress and an apolitical military.”

The warning Kelly and the other five Democratic lawmakers offered to military personnel that they must refuse illegal orders took on renewed meaning this evening. Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, John Ismay, Julian E. Barnes, Riley Mellen, and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times reported that when the U.S. military attacked a small boat apparently coming from Venezuela on September 2, 2025, the first such attack of what now number at least 35, it used a secret aircraft that had been disguised to look like a civilian plane.

The journalists report that disguising a military aircraft to look like a civilian plane is a war crime called “perfidy.” “Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy,” former deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force retired Major General Steven J. Lepper told the reporters. “If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity.” The Defense Department manual concerning the law of war explains that combatants must distinguish themselves from the civilian population and may not “kill or wound the enemy by resort to perfidy.”

It explicitly prohibits “feigning civilian status and then attacking.”

Thanks for posting.

January 13, 2026 (Tuesday)

Officials in the Trump administration insist its surges of federal agents into Democratic-led cities are necessary to round up undocumented immigrants, but the agents’ mission increasingly looks as if it is to frighten opponents of the administration into submission. But instead of submission, they appear to be sparking deeper and deeper opposition.

Since agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have broken out across the nation. Federal agents in Minnesota have responded by increasing their violent attacks, many of which have involved U.S. citizens and have been captured on video: agents breaking into a home with weapons drawn, a teenager dragged away from his job, agents guarding a restroom at Target, engaging in door-to-door searches without warrants, using illegal chokeholds, dragging people out of their cars.

Confronted with footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told ProPublica reporters Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk: “Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities.” On Air Force One Sunday evening, Trump cut to the heart of MAGA’s attacks on those resisting ICE when, speaking about Renee Good, he told reporters: “At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”

Luke Broadwater and Katie Rogers of the New York Times noted the response of Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) to Trump’s comment. Raskin recalled that the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, “violently attacked police officers and called them everything from traitors to pigs to racial epithets, and ruthlessly taunted them and maligned them for hours,” and yet Trump pardoned them.

Raskin concluded that “Donald Trump’s very dubious characterization of Renee Good as having been disrespectful is not only factually suspect, but it’s legally irrelevant. The police do not have the right to shoot people in the head because they consider them having acted in a disrespectful way. That legal standard would have led to a slaughter on January 6.”

In The Atlantic yesterday, David Frum explained that the administration’s attacks on Good are not at all a true defense of law and order. “For MAGA America,” he wrote, “ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence.” ICE’s social media accounts celebrate videos of armed agents hurting unarmed nonwhite men and women who are then shown weeping, pacing, or with their head in their hands in a jail cell. Most of the situations the videos show, Frum writes, could be managed “with a couple of plainclothes officers bearing holstered sidearms.” But the point is not to enforce the law; “he point is to prove that the fearsome power of the American state is being wielded by righteous MAGA hands against despised MAGA targets.”

Frum notes that ICE has lowered its standards to fit the deportation targets White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has announced, lower standards that have increased the numbers of untrained and violent agents on the streets, but Frum attributes much of the violence of ICE to the fact that “its main purpose has become theatrical…. ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.”

Frum argues that the violence shows MAGA that a government they control is demanding respect from those overeducated coastal elites they think get too much respect. By punishing Good rather than letting her drive away, Ross made sure she didn’t get away with disrespecting him.

The scenes ICE is performing seem to be the logical outcome of the idea of cowboy individualism Republicans have pushed since the 1980s: white men reclaiming the government they insist has been corrupted by Black Americans, women, and people of color and using the power of that government to defend the “real” America. In that scheme, anyone resisting the government is not showing proper subservience and is anti-American by definition.

But the protests against ICE have created a problem for the MAGA ideology. Key to the idea of the individualist man as a real American is that he will protect white women. And yet white women are among those standing in the front lines against Trump, and now an ICE agent has killed one.

On Sunday, David Marcus of Fox News warned that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.” He claimed that those people organizing to protect their neighborhoods from ICE may be “criminal conspiracies.” He complained of “self-important White women” protesting “with a weird and disturbing glee.” He seemed to threaten them by warning: “if we simply allow these cosplaying would-be revolutionaries to do whatever they want…, Renee Good will not be the last to needlessly die.”

On Monday, Will Cain of the Fox News Channel echoed Marcus, saying: “There’s a weird kind of smugness…in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority.”

That idea that anyone challenging MAGA government is anti-American—even, perhaps, white women—helps to explain the Department of Justice’s decision not to investigate the shooting as an attack on Good’s civil rights, but instead to consider it as an assault on a federal officer. It is investigating not the shooting but the ties of Good and her widow to local activists. This continued attempt to blame Good for her own murder has led to the resignations of at least six career prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Reality is crumbling the MAGA fantasy that their leaders could fix the United States if only they purged it of their opponents and stripped away the laws and governmental systems those opponents have created over decades.

Americans are demonstrating that they do not want to answer to ICE and CBP agents, decked out as if they are a war zone while parading in groups through the suburbs, cosplaying as military heroes. Rather than seeming as if they deserve respect, they look both lawless and foolish. Rather than hiding, Americans are forming squads to alert neighborhoods to their presence, escorting children to and from school, and helping feed neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes.

An Economist/YouGov poll released today shows that only 43% of American adults oppose abolishing ICE, while 46% support abolishing ICE. Popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, today likened ICE to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police.

Yesterday, the state of Illinois sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for “unlawful and dangerous tactics” agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used in what the administration called “Operation Midway Blitz.” Illinois officials noted that federal immigration agents have enforced immigration laws in Illinois for decades without significant effect on public order or public safety. Now things have changed.

Illinois attorney general Kwame Raoul said: “Border Patrol agents and ICE officers have acted as occupiers rather than officers of the law. They randomly, and often violently, question residents. Without warrants or probable cause, they brutally detain citizens and non-citizens alike. They use tear gas and other chemical weapons against bystanders, injuring dozens, including children, the elderly and local police officers.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker said their actions have undermined constitutional rights and threatened public safety.

Minnesota and the state’s two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, also sued the Trump administration yesterday. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison called the federal immigration operation that began on January 6 “a federal invasion.” “These poorly trained, aggressive and armed agents of the federal state have terrorized Minnesota with widespread unlawful conduct.”

“Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention,” Trump posted on social media, revisiting the fact-free refrains of his rallies. “All the patriots of ICE want to do is remove them from your neighborhood and send them back to the prisons and mental institutions from where they came, most in foreign Countries who illegally entered the USA though Sleepy Joe Biden’s HORRIBLE Open Border’s Policy. Every place we go, crime comes down. In Chicago, despite a weak and incompetent Governor and Mayor fighting us all the way, a big improvement was made. Thousands of Criminals were removed! Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing because it gets the spotlight off of the 19 Billion Dollars that was stolen by really bad and deranged people. FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

Today, as Trump visited a Michigan Ford plant, 40-year-old T.J. Sabula, a United Auto Workers Local 600 line worker, shouted “pedophile protector” at him in reference to the administration’s cover-up of the Epstein files. Trump responded by giving him the finger and mouthing “f*ck you, f*ck you.”

Sabula told Natalie Allison and Dan Merica of the Washington Post that he has been suspended from work pending an investigation, but that he has “definitely no regrets whatsoever.”

“ Sabula told Natalie Allison and Dan Merica of the Washington Post that he has been suspended from work pending an investigation, but that he has “definitely no regrets whatsoever.””

Thanks.

Summary: “Die, disrespectful scum!”

Divine Angel said:

“ Sabula told Natalie Allison and Dan Merica of the Washington Post that he has been suspended from work pending an investigation, but that he has “definitely no regrets whatsoever.””

Ha!

January 14, 2026 (Wednesday)

Today is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the independence of the United States from Great Britain.
It almost didn’t happen.

On September 3, 1783, negotiators John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay for the United States, and David Hartley for Great Britain, had signed the document establishing the United States as an independent and sovereign nation.

British officer Lord Cornwallis’s surrender of 8,000 men to General George Washington on October 19, 1781, following the Battle of Yorktown had made it clear that Britain would have to agree to the independence of its former colonies, but the representatives of those colonies didn’t have a lot to bargain with to shape the peace in their favor. What they did have was the ability to play different European powers off against each other, for the American Revolution, after all, was only a piece of a global conflict that included Great Britain, France, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Jamaica, Gibraltar, and India.

Peace negotiations began in Paris in April 1782 and stretched on through the summer and into the fall. The United States were allied with France, which in 1778, just two years after the Declaration of Independence, had come to the rescue of the fledgling nation in its struggle with Great Britain. Spain and the Dutch Republic sided with the Americans too, hoping they could carve their way out from under King George, thus weakening Great Britain and enabling the European nations to take more global territory.

With all these parties involved, negotiations were slow and sticky, especially as Spain wanted to continue to fight until it could capture Gibraltar from the British. (The Great Siege of Gibraltar, which took more than three and a half years, was actually the largest battle of the war in terms of combatants.) At the same time, French foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, was frustrated with the continuing cost of the American war and, in fall 1782, proposed a plan that would offer independence to the United States but offer Spain something it would value as much as Gibraltar: more land in North America. Essentially, the plan would keep the new nation hemmed in where it already was, dividing the land around it between Britain and Spain.

U.S. negotiator John Jay, who as minister to Spain during the war had been instrumental in convincing Spain to loan money to the United States, immediately turned to the British to negotiate without France and Spain. British prime minister Lord Shelburne saw an opportunity to split the new country off from France and set it up as a trading partner until—as would most likely happen—its radical new government fell apart and Britain could reassert control.

The document was a testament to the negotiating skills of the U.S. team. They got independence, of course, as well as a promise “to forget all past Misunderstandings and Differences that have unhappily interrupted the good Correspondence and Friendship which they mutually wish to restore.” All prisoners of war would be repatriated, no reparations would be demanded, and state legislatures were urged to provide restitution for the confiscated lands of British subjects (a provision that the U.S. government had no power to enforce). The treaty left Britain in possession of Canada but threw out Vergennes’s suggestion and established the western boundary of the new nation at the Mississippi River, although it left the northern and southern boundaries of the new nation vague. It then gave both Americans and British the right to transport goods along that watery highway. It also gave the United States exceedingly valuable fishing rights on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

But then it said: “The solemn Ratifications of the present Treaty expedited in good & due Form shall be exchanged between the contracting Parties in the Space of Six Months or sooner if possible to be computed from the Day of the Signature of the present Treaty.”

That is, Congress had six months from the September 3 signing to get the treaty across the Atlantic Ocean, ratify the agreement, and get it back across the ocean to England. The voyages alone could take as much as two months each way.

That put pressure on Congress to act quickly, but the Congress that represented the United States in that era was organized under the Articles of Confederation, a weak and loose agreement of “a firm league of friendship” that the thirteen original states adopted on November 15, 1777. That national government had little power, and those lawmakers interested in real power worked to build new governments in their own states.

Congress was supposed to convene at the Maryland State House in November, but it was a terribly cold winter, and delegates trickled in. As late as January 12, only seven of the thirteen states were represented, and Congress needed nine states to ratify the treaty. Finally, a delegate from Connecticut arrived. Then, on January 13, Richard Beresford of South Carolina, who had been ill in Philadelphia, finally made it to the gathering. Congress had a quorum, and it approved the treaty on January 14.

“By the United States in Congress assembled, A PROCLAMATION,” read the document the Congress had printed to spread the news of the treaty. It reproduced the terms of the agreement, then said, “AND we the United States in Congress assembled, having seen and duly considered the definitive articles aforesaid, did…approve, ratify and confirm the same.”

Seeming to recognize the extraordinary significance of their actions, the congressmen continued: “e have thought proper…to notify…all the good citizens of these United States…that reverencing those stipulations entered into on their behalf, under the authority of that federal bond by which their existence as an independent people is bound up together, and is known and acknowledged by the nations of the world, and with that good faith which is every man’s surest guide…they carry into effect the said…articles, and every clause and sentence thereof, sincerely, strictly, and completely.”

The document was signed by the president of the Congress, his excellency Thomas Mifflin, a name few people now remember. For while the long, difficult, and meticulous negotiations and then the fitful energies of Congress had achieved an agreement that the former colonies were now independent, it would not be until the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788 that they would finally begin the long, difficult journey of becoming a new nation, the United States of America.

January 15, 2026 (Thursday)

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to release all the Epstein files, as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like talking to us.”

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you attention to this matter! President DJT.”

Legal analyst Asha Rangappa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posse Comitatus Act to permit troops to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then, she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws. Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly.

Governor Tim Walz has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to “turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are,” he wrote on social media. Walz also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops. “I know this is scary,” he wrote. “We can—we must—speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That’s what he wants.”

The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.”

The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act “spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country, elected officials who are using their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers who are encouraging left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters today that federal agents will ask Americans to “validate their identity” by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone federal agents allege has committed a crime. As CNN’s Kaanity Iyer reported, today, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show proof of citizenship “without some other basis to make a stop.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the U.S. that the party of a president who wins an election then loses seats in the midterms, and suggested he didn’t want to be in that position. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions in the United States during his presidency. He said polls showing popular opposition to his threat to take Greenland were “fake.” He said he doesn’t care that even Senate Republicans object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation’s financial system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said again, and falsely, that the economy was the strongest “in history.”

“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”

One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields.

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller of Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing strain of Trump’s poor poll numbers, popular anger over ICE, fury over threats against Greenland, Republican pushback over the investigation of Powell, and the December 23, 2025, decision of the Supreme Court suggesting Trump could not use federalized National Guard troops to enforce his power on Democrat-dominated state governments.

That strain is showing in the administration’s raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. The FBI executed a search warrant at Natanson’s home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor they say has illegally retained classified documents. But Natanson is a leading journalist covering the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees who might give her information about the workings of the administration. The agents seized her phone, two laptops—one personal and one issued by the Washington Post—and a Garmin watch.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, makes searches of reporter’s homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Bruce D. Brown called the search of Natanson’s home “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”

Neophyte said:

January 15, 2026 (Thursday)

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to release all the Epstein files, as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like talking to us.”

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you attention to this matter! President DJT.”

Legal analyst Asha Rangappa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posse Comitatus Act to permit troops to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then, she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws. Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly.

Governor Tim Walz has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to “turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are,” he wrote on social media. Walz also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops. “I know this is scary,” he wrote. “We can—we must—speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That’s what he wants.”

The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.”

The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act “spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country, elected officials who are using their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers who are encouraging left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters today that federal agents will ask Americans to “validate their identity” by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone federal agents allege has committed a crime. As CNN’s Kaanity Iyer reported, today, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show proof of citizenship “without some other basis to make a stop.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the U.S. that the party of a president who wins an election then loses seats in the midterms, and suggested he didn’t want to be in that position. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions in the United States during his presidency. He said polls showing popular opposition to his threat to take Greenland were “fake.” He said he doesn’t care that even Senate Republicans object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation’s financial system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said again, and falsely, that the economy was the strongest “in history.”

“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”

One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields.

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller of Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing strain of Trump’s poor poll numbers, popular anger over ICE, fury over threats against Greenland, Republican pushback over the investigation of Powell, and the December 23, 2025, decision of the Supreme Court suggesting Trump could not use federalized National Guard troops to enforce his power on Democrat-dominated state governments.

That strain is showing in the administration’s raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. The FBI executed a search warrant at Natanson’s home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor they say has illegally retained classified documents. But Natanson is a leading journalist covering the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees who might give her information about the workings of the administration. The agents seized her phone, two laptops—one personal and one issued by the Washington Post—and a Garmin watch.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, makes searches of reporter’s homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Bruce D. Brown called the search of Natanson’s home “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”

Ep-what files? What?

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

January 15, 2026 (Thursday)

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to release all the Epstein files, as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like talking to us.”

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you attention to this matter! President DJT.”

Legal analyst Asha Rangappa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posse Comitatus Act to permit troops to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then, she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws. Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly.

Governor Tim Walz has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to “turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are,” he wrote on social media. Walz also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops. “I know this is scary,” he wrote. “We can—we must—speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That’s what he wants.”

The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.”

The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act “spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country, elected officials who are using their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers who are encouraging left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters today that federal agents will ask Americans to “validate their identity” by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone federal agents allege has committed a crime. As CNN’s Kaanity Iyer reported, today, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show proof of citizenship “without some other basis to make a stop.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the U.S. that the party of a president who wins an election then loses seats in the midterms, and suggested he didn’t want to be in that position. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions in the United States during his presidency. He said polls showing popular opposition to his threat to take Greenland were “fake.” He said he doesn’t care that even Senate Republicans object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation’s financial system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said again, and falsely, that the economy was the strongest “in history.”

“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”

One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields.

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller of Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing strain of Trump’s poor poll numbers, popular anger over ICE, fury over threats against Greenland, Republican pushback over the investigation of Powell, and the December 23, 2025, decision of the Supreme Court suggesting Trump could not use federalized National Guard troops to enforce his power on Democrat-dominated state governments.

That strain is showing in the administration’s raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. The FBI executed a search warrant at Natanson’s home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor they say has illegally retained classified documents. But Natanson is a leading journalist covering the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees who might give her information about the workings of the administration. The agents seized her phone, two laptops—one personal and one issued by the Washington Post—and a Garmin watch.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, makes searches of reporter’s homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Bruce D. Brown called the search of Natanson’s home “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”

Ep-what files? What?

Meanwhile… World-leading journal, The Lancet, has found no evidence that using paracetamol during pregnancy increases the risk of developmental harm.

In September, the Trump administration advised pregnant women to limit the use of paracetamol during pregnancy.
What’s next?

Experts say women should feel reassured paracetamol is a safe option when they’re pregnant.

January 16, 2026 (Friday)

Well, President Donald J. Trump finally has his Nobel Peace Prize. Yesterday, in a visit to the White House, Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado presented Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize medal the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded to her in October 2025. Although the medal commemorating the prize can change hands, the committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute have made it clear that “nce a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others.”

Asked today why he would want someone else’s Nobel Prize, he answered: “Well, she offered it to me. I thought it was very nice. She said, ‘You know, you’ve ended eight wars and nobody deserves this prize more than—in history—than you do.’ I thought it was a very nice gesture. And by the way, I think she’s a very fine woman, and we’ll be talking again.”

With all its members dressed in dark blue suits and red ties—Trump’s usual garb—the Florida Panthers hockey team presented Trump yesterday with a jersey bearing his name and the number 47, two championship rings, and a golden hockey stick. At the ceremony, Trump looked over at the gifts laid out beside the podium at which he was speaking, and told the audience: “I heard they have a little surprise. Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s the stick and not just the shirt. That stick looks beautiful. That looks beautiful. Maybe I get both, who the hell knows. I’m president, I’ll just take ‘em.”

And then, of course, Trump says he wants Greenland, a resource-rich autonomous island that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. In a January 8, 2026, piece in the New Yorker, Susan Glasser noted that Trump dumbfounded his advisors in 2018 by suggesting a trade of Puerto Rico for Greenland and, in the fall of 2021, told Glasser and her husband, journalist Peter Baker, that he wanted Greenland as a piece of real estate.

“I’m in real estate,” he told them. “I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ ” He added, “It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.” (Observers note that map projections often either minimize or exaggerate the true size of Greenland: it’s about three times the size of Texas.)

Trump announced his designs on Greenland as soon as he took office the second time, but talk about it quieted down until the administration attacked Venezuela and successfully extracted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Then Trump turned back to his earlier demands.

Those threats against Greenland and therefore Denmark, a founding member of the defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), directly attack the organization that has underpinned the rules-based international order that has helped to stabilize the world since World War II. As NATO allies, Greenland and the United States have always cooperated on defense matters—indeed, the U.S. Pituffik Space Base is operating in Greenland currently.

In an interview with New York Times reporters on January 7, Trump explained that he wants not simply to work with Greenland, as the U.S. has done successfully for decades, but to own it. “Ownership is very important,” he told David E. Sanger.

“Why is ownership important here?” Sanger asked.

“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump answered. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.”
Katie Rogers asked: “Psychologically important to you or to the United States?”

Trump answered: “Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.”

In a different part of the interview, Rogers asked Trump: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” Trump answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”

“Not international law?” asked Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “I don’t need international law,” Trump answered. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people. I’ve ended—remember this, I’ve ended eight wars. Nobody else has ever done that. I’ve ended eight wars and didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty amazing.” After more discussion of his fantasy that he has ended eight wars,” Kanno-Youngs followed up: “But do you feel your administration needs to abide by international law on the global stage?”

“Yeah, I do,” Trump said. “You know, I do, but it depends what your definition of international law is.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country with which the U.S. has been allied for more than two centuries, is “extraordinarily dangerous.” Nichols suggests that Trump might simply declare the U.S. owns Greenland and then dare anyone to disagree (much as he declared he won the 2020 presidential election). That could create a disastrous series of events that would “incinerate the NATO alliance.”

With that collapse, Russian president Vladimir Putin might well begin attacking other NATO members, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (which together, Nichols notes, are about the size of Wisconsin.) If other NATO allies come to their aid, Europe would be at war, and “U.S. forces, like it or not, would find themselves in the middle of this bedlam.” Many of the countries are nuclear powers, and the chances of a “cataclysmic mistake or miscalculation” would grow greater every day. Meanwhile, China might reach for Taiwan, and South Korea and Japan would need to plan for the end of U.S. strategic power, likely with nuclear arms.

Trump is courting peril, Nichols writes. His obsessions “could lead not only to the collapse of standard of living but present a real danger to their lives, no matter where they live.”

Nichols’s concerns are not isolated. They echo those of Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, who warned that the U.S. seizure of Greenland would mean “the end of NATO.” Defense commissioner for the European Union Andrius Kubilius agreed.

And yet, on social media on Wednesday, Trump denied that his actions could hurt NATO. “Militarily, without the vast power of the United States,” his social media account posted, “NATO would not be an effective force or deterrent—Not even close! They know that, and so do I. NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES.”

Later in the day, Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenlandic foreign minister Vivian Motzfeldt met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, but the meeting left “fundamental disagreements” among the parties after Trump reiterated his conviction that the U.S. “really need” Greenland.

Also on Wednesday, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden launched “Operation Arctic Endurance,” increasing their military presence in Greenland in order, as Germany’s defense ministry said, “to support Denmark in ensuring security in the region.”

An attack on Greenland is wildly unpopular in the United States. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this week found that just 17% of Americans approve of the U.S. efforts to acquire Greenland. Only 4% think it’s a good idea to take Greenland using military force. When asked about that poll on Wednesday, Trump called it “fake.” Bipartisan groups in Congress have tried to prevent any attack on Greenland by introducing measures that require congressional approval of such an attack, that prevent military action against NATO members, and that prohibit the use of federal funds for any invasion of a NATO member state or NATO-protected territory.

Democrats are outraged about Trump’s threats to undermine the entire post–World War II rules-based international order, and they note that Americans want lower health care costs and cheaper groceries, not Greenland.

Today eleven U.S. lawmakers, led by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), are in Denmark, where they met with Danish prime minister Frederiksen and Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen. Nine Democrats and two Republicans sought to “lower the temperature” by assuring Denmark that the U.S. would not try to seize Greenland. Coons thanked the delegation’s hosts for “225 years of being a good and trusted ally and partner.”

Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters that “support in Congress to acquire Greenland in any way is not there.” Her suggestion reflects the comment of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) after he met with the Danish envoys in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Wicker later said: “I think it has been made clear from our Danish friends and our friends in Greenland that that future does not include a negotiation” for the acquisition.

Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) went further, telling Wolf Blitzer of CNN that an attack on Greenland will lead to impeachment regardless of who is in control of Congress after the midterm elections.

“You don’t threaten a NATO ally. They’ve been a great ally. We’ve had bases on there since World War II. Denmark has fought with us—by our side—in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I feel it’s incumbent on folks like me to speak up and say these threats and bullying of an ally are wrong. And just on the weird chance he’s serious about invading Greenland, I want to let him know it will probably be the end of his presidency. Most Republicans know this is immoral and wrong, and we’re going to stand up against it…. I think it would lead to impeachment. Invading an ally…is a high crime and a misdemeanor.”

This part made me laugh. Until I realised he said almost the exact same thing about Greenland.

“ the Florida Panthers hockey team presented Trump yesterday with a jersey bearing his name and the number 47, two championship rings, and a golden hockey stick. At the ceremony, Trump looked over at the gifts laid out beside the podium at which he was speaking, and told the audience: “I heard they have a little surprise. Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s the stick and not just the shirt. That stick looks beautiful. That looks beautiful. Maybe I get both, who the hell knows. I’m president, I’ll just take ‘em.””

Thanks Neophyte.

January 17, 2026 (Saturday)

After the extraordinary pushback on President Donald J. Trump’s bizarre demand for Greenland, he has responded with what economist Paul Krugman called “a howl of frustration on the part of a mad dictator who has just realized that he can’t send in the Marines.”

In a long screed this morning, Trump’s social media account said the president is placing tariffs of 10% on all goods from the countries currently protecting Greenland after February 1, and that the tariffs will increase to 25% on June 1. The post says the tariffs will be in effect “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

This post is bonkers on many levels. On the most basic: where is he thinking he’s going to find the money for “the complete and total purchase of Greenland?” And besides, the countries involved—Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—are all U.S. allies. Economist Justin Wolfers notes this trade war will include the entire European Union, for “ trade war with one EU country is a trade war with the entire EU.”

The post also makes explicit that Trump is trying to use tariffs not to nurture the American economy but to force other countries to do his bidding. The question of whether his tariff wars are constitutional because they address what he claims is an economic emergency is currently before the Supreme Court. Two lower courts have found that the president does not have the power to levy the sweeping tariffs he has been announcing. Today’s tariff announcement does not refer at all to economic need but rather is about economic coercion.

Finally, in its insistence that only the U.S. can “protect” Greenland, the screed echoed Russian president Vladimir Putin’s promises to “protect” Ukraine. Ignoring the reality that Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the world’s strongest defense alliance, it said that Greenland and Denmark, of which Greenland is a part, “currently have two dogsleds as protection, one added recently.” It also added that the protection Trump insists only U.S. ownership of Greenland can provide might also include “the possible protection of Canada.”

As huge demonstrations of solidarity broke out today in Copenhagen and Nuuk, the capitals of Denmark and Greenland, respectively, both the European Council, made up of the heads of state or governments in the European Union, and the European Commission, the primary executive branch of the European Union, weighed in on Trump’s threats.

President of the European Council António Costa and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen issued a joint statement, underlining that “erritorial integrity and sovereignty are fundamental principles of international law. They are essential for Europe and for the international community as a whole.” The two leaders reiterated that they are committed both to dialogue with the U.S. and to standing firm behind Denmark and the people of Greenland.

“Tariffs would undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral,” they wrote. “Europe will remain united, coordinated, and committed to upholding its sovereignty.”

The European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas—the EU’s chief diplomat—wrote: “China and Russia must be having a field day. They are the ones who benefit from divisions among Allies. If Greenland’s security is at risk, we can address this inside NATO. Tariffs risk making Europe and the United States poorer and undermine our shared prosperity.”

Representatives from the twenty-seven countries in the European Union are holding an emergency meeting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the EU say they will not ratify a new trade agreement the European Commission and Trump signed last July. Some lawmakers are talking about using a trade “bazooka” against the U.S., a range of measures outlined in the E.U.’s Anti-Coercion Instrument that punish trade rivals trying to coerce the E.U. Those include trade restrictions and restricting investment in the E.U.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported today that Trump appears to be trying to set up his own organization to rival the United Nations. The administration has sent letters to leaders from several countries inviting them to be part of a “Board of Peace” led by the U.S. The board would first tackle the crisis in Gaza and then go on to take on other crises around the world.

Bloomberg reported today that the draft charter for the proposed organization makes Trump the board’s first chair and gives him the power to choose a successor. He would decide what countries can be members. Each member state would get one vote in the organization, but the chair would have to approve all decisions. The draft says that each member state has a term of no more than three years unless the chair renews it, but that limit doesn’t apply to any member states “that contribute more than USD $1,000,000,000 in cash funds to the Board of Peace within the first year of the Charter’s entry into force.” The draft suggests that Trump himself will control that money.

Last night, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez in Minneapolis prohibited agents from the Department of Homeland Security from retaliating against or arresting peaceful protesters or using pepper spray or other less-lethal weapons against them. Menendez also prohibited agents from stopping or detaining people following their vehicles.

The descriptions in the decision of how agents have treated protesters of the treatment of protesters are detailed and damning. The plaintiffs submitted sworn testimony. In contrast, the judge notes, the agents “did not provide sworn declarations from immigration officers (or others) who witnessed or were themselves directly involved,” but instead relied on the declaration of the acting field office director for the ICE St. Paul Field Office, David Easterwood—who was not present at any of the incidents—that the agents said the protesters had obstructed their activities.

Yesterday Fox News broke the story that the Department of Justice is investigating both Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey on criminal charges for allegedly impeding the work of law enforcement officers in the administration’s surge of agents to their state.

Trump’s reliance on bogus investigations to establish a narrative is well established. This tactic of launching investigations to seed the idea that a political opponent has committed crimes has been a staple of the Republican Party since at least the 1990s. As the media reported on those investigations, people assumed that there must be something to them. Trump adopted this tactic wholeheartedly, most famously when he tried to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden—not actually to open the investigation, but simply to announce it—before Trump would release to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated it to help it fight off Russia’s invasion.

The Trump administration is trying hard to project dictatorial strength and power, but the narrative is slipping away from it.

For all of Trump’s bluster about U.S. trade, the world appears to be moving on without the U.S. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada visited Beijing this week, the first visit of a Canadian prime minister to China since 2017. On Friday, Canada broke with the U.S. and struck a major deal with China, cutting its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for China’s lowering its tariffs on Canadian canola seed. Carney posted on social media: “The Canada-China relationship has been distant and uncertain for nearly a decade. We’re changing that, with a new strategic partnership that benefits the people of both our nations.”

Trump’s triumphant narrative is not working at home, either. A new CNN poll released Friday shows that fifty-eight percent of Americans believe that Trump’s first year in office has been a failure. Americans worry most about the economy, but concerns about democracy come in second. The numbers beyond that continue to be bad for Trump. Sixty-six percent of Americans think Trump doesn’t care about people like them. Fifty-three percent think he doesn’t have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president.

Sixty-five percent of Americans say Trump is not someone they are proud to have as president.

In Virginia today, former representative and former intelligence officer Abigail Spanberger took the oath of office as the commonwealth’s seventy-fifth governor, the first woman to hold that position. In her inaugural address, she celebrated the peaceful transfer of power and called for Virginians to work together to make life more affordable and embrace progress, writing a new chapter in the state’s history.

“As we mark 250 years since the dawn of American freedom: What will our children, grandchildren, and their descendants write about this time in our Commonwealth’s history—this chapter—50, 100, and 250 years from now?” she asked.

“Will they say that we let divisions fester or challenges overwhelm us? Or will they say that we stood up for what is right, fixed what is broken, and served the common good here in Virginia?

Today, we’re hearing the call to connect more deeply to our American Experiment—to understand our shared history, not as a single point in time, but as a lesson for how we create our more prosperous future. And so I ask—what will you do to help us author this next chapter?”

Thanks.

January 18, 2026 (Sunday)

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

Neophyte said:

January 18, 2026 (Sunday)

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

Nice.

Thanks for posting.

Neophyte said:

January 18, 2026 (Sunday)

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

the 3% apparently

then a smart fascist regime targets that 3% and boom instant subordination

January 19, 2026 (Monday)

Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”

International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.

This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”

“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is suicide because the Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”

In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.

In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.

Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”
The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.

And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.

Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.

Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.

Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.

While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.

He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.
Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.

Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.

buffy said:

January 19, 2026 (Monday)

Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”

International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.

This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”

“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is suicide because the Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”

In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.

In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.

Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”
The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.

And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.

Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.

Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.

Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.

While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.

He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.
Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.

Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.

Thanks for posting.

January 20, 2026 (Tuesday)

World leaders are gathered at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which is taking place from January 19 to January 23. Trump is scheduled to go to the meeting in person for the first time since 2020, although now, with him still in the U.S., his social media account has been posting wildly.

Just after midnight, the account posted that Trump had “a very good telephone call with Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, concerning Greenland. I agreed to a meeting of the various parties in Davos, Switzerland. As I expressed to everyone, very plainly, Greenland is imperative for National and World Security. There can be no going back—On that, everyone agrees!” Shortly after, the account posted an AI image of world leaders sitting in front of Trump’s desk in the Oval Office with a large picture of North America entirely covered with stars and stripes to indicate American ownership—including Canada, as well as Greenland. The flag also covers Venezuela.

Then the account posted an image of Trump with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio next to him as he stands on what looks to be an arctic landscape, holding a U.S. flag waving above a sign that reads: “GREENLAND—US TERRITORY EST. 2026.”

Later on, it would post private text messages to Trump from Rutte and French president Emmanuel Macron, mocking their attempts at diplomacy, and repost a message reading: “at what point are we going to realize the enemy is within . China and Russia are the bogeymen when the real threat is the U.N., NATO, and .”

And then the account posted: “No single person, or President, has done more for NATO than President Donald J. Trump. If I didn’t come along there would be no NATO right now!!! It would have been in the ash heap of History. Sad, but TRUE!!! President DJT”

But seizing Greenland was not the only thing on the mind of administration officials. The account’s posts suggest they are worried about Trump’s declining popularity. It launched an attack on Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, whom the administration is targeting for alleged mortgage fraud, just before it claimed that Trump was lowering mortgage rates. Later, the account would post a short video of Trump under which the chyron read: “I AM STANDING UP FOR AMERICAN AUTOWORKERS,” although the video was of him promising to stop all federal payments to “sanctuary cities” on February 1.

Then it bopped over to claiming that the people resisting ICE violence in Minnesota are “agitators and insurrectionists. These people are professionals! No person acts the way they act. They are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave, like lunatics, in a certain manner, just like they are doing. They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country.” The first to go, he said, should be Democratic governor Tim Walz and Democratic representative Ilhan Omar, both of whom he called corrupt. Later, the account insisted that Democratic governor of California Gavin Newsom is also corrupt.

Later, the account posted that “he Department of Homeland Security and ICE must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing and taking out of the system. They are saving many innocent lives! There are thousands of vicious animals in Minnesota alone, which is why the crime stats are, Nationwide, the BEST EVER RECORDED! Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW. The people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE, instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”

Then the account turned to reposting long-debunked lies about the 2020 presidential election. It reposted claims that there was voter fraud in Nevada (there wasn’t), that Dominion Voting Machines flipped 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden (they didn’t), that China had rigged the voting for Biden (it didn’t). It appears someone is thinking about the fact that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will be testifying in public on Thursday, January 22.

In Washington today, in a long, rambling speech before reporters, Trump appeared to try to bring his social media post directly to the media. The speech was supposedly to outline the accomplishments of his administration, and he brandished a large sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip, labeled “ACCOMPLISHMENTS,” both of which he later threw on the floor.

But Trump turned from it almost immediately to insist that agents from Immigration and Customs enforcement are not arresting and detaining American citizens, although they very publicly did so on Sunday, breaking into the home of U.S. citizen ChongLy “Scott” Thao without a warrant, holding him at gunpoint, marching him outside in subfreezing weather in just sandals and underwear, driving him around for an hour or two before dropping him back at his home, and then lying that members of his family are on the registered sex offender list.

Trump denied such abuses, claiming that in Minnesota, ICE is apprehending “bad people.” To illustrate his claims, he held up one photo after another of individuals above the label “WORST OF WORST” as he mumbled about how bad they were: “many murderers, many many murderers, people that murdered.” Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who has watched and clipped Trump’s speeches for years, commented: “folks, this is some really weird sh*t. the president is not well.”

From there, Trump was off with the usual litany of complaints about former president Joe Biden, and familiar stories like this one:

“I should’ve gotten the Nobel Prize for each war, but I don’t say that. I saved millions and millions of people. And don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, ok? It’s in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They’ll say, ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige. Got all—that’s why I have such respect for Maria doing what she did. She said, ‘I don’t deserve the Nobel Prize, he does.’ When she got it, they named—they said, ‘Wow that’s amazing, I thought President Trump would get it.’”

Trump also had words about Jack Smith: “Deranged Jack sick Smith. He’s a sick son of a b*tch. They gave me the worst of the worst.”

Trump’s threats against Greenland and his promise to hit Europe with high tariffs if governments there don’t support his seizure of Greenland drove the U.S. stock market sharply downward today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 870.74 points (1.76%), the S&P 500 was down 2.06%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.39%, the worst day for all three of these major indexes since October.

Yesterday Tom Fairless of the Wall Street Journal reported that, contrary to Trump’s repeated assertions, U.S. consumers and importers—not foreign countries—are the ones who have paid for Trump’s tariff war. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, echoed the findings of Yale and Harvard Business School economists, confirming that American consumers and importers have absorbed 96% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs.
Trump’s threats against Europe are an entirely different kettle of fish, for as Konrad Putzier, Chao Deng, and Sam Goldfarb of the Wall Street Journal explain, the European Union is the biggest trading partner of the U.S., its largest investor, and its closest financial ally. European leaders are discussing whether to retaliate against the U.S. using the EU’S Anti-Coercion Instrument, nicknamed “the Bazooka,” which can restrict imports and exports to any country trying to coerce an EU member and can limit U.S. investment there.

In The Atlantic on January 18, Robert Kagan wrote that “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II” and warned they “are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength” and “have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way.”

European and Asian allies have cooperated with the U.S. on both defense and trade, while the power of those alliances has prevented serious challenges to that order. Global trade has generally been free, and oceans have been safe for travel both by humans and container ships. Nuclear weapons have been limited by international agreement. “Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely,” Kagan wrote. “They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

In Davos today, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, told the world, “We are in the midst of a rupture.” The rules-based international order is no longer an automatic route to prosperity and security, he said, as the world’s most powerful nations now use that system’s economic integration to coerce other countries.

In its place, Carney offered a different vision than the “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence that Trump and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin are trying to build.

If “middle powers” pursue a system he called “variable geometry,” he said, they can rebalance the world and help solve global problems while still building strength at home. His vision is a version of the “diplomatic variable geometry” of former U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken, but Carney’s vision decenters the U.S., noting that middle powers must work together to be at the table to avoid being on the menu. Under a system of variable geometry, countries can develop infrastructure and trade at home, strengthening their own nations, while negotiating new international agreements, as Canada has done recently with China, Qatar, India, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc made up of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

But for international affairs, variable geometry means creating international “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests,” “coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.”

“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”

I’m not subscribing to the so-called “madman theory”. I’ve seen his work in Home Alone 2, he’s not that good of an actor.

Divine Angel said:

I’m not subscribing to the so-called “madman theory”. I’ve seen his work in Home Alone 2, he’s not that good of an actor.

Whatever talent he didn’t have then has all gone further down the chute today.

A question about these missives written by HCR. Is there more to it, or is the whole thing posted here? Sometimes, a lot of time, they just seem to stop…

furious said:

A question about these missives written by HCR. Is there more to it, or is the whole thing posted here? Sometimes, a lot of time, they just seem to stop…

I cut and paste the entire entry. The only difference is I put paragraph breaks after every sentence, figuring that it might make it easier to read, depending what device you’re using to do so.

January 21, 2026 (Wednesday)

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this morning, a visibly exhausted president of the United States of America rambled in angry free association in a speech before the world’s leaders. At one point, speaking of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) dignitaries, he told the audience: “Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy, right, last time. Very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’”

He meant Greenland.

The president of the United States went on to give a virulently racist, insulting, rambling speech in which he complained that people call him a dictator but that “sometimes you need a dictator.” More than anything, though, the speech demonstrated his mental unfitness for his position. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote: “No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.”

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark wrote of Trump’s hostility to traditional U.S. allies today: “As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get over this pure, dumb fact: Trump told his fans he had to blow up the liberal order because it was the only way to secure the very benefits the liberal order was already bringing us.” Egger likened this to Aesop’s fable about the greedy farmer who butchered the goose that laid golden eggs.

Later, Trump backed off on the tariffs he had threatened to impose on the countries standing against his seizure of Greenland, claiming he had just had “a very productive meeting” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and had “formed the framework for a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations.” Because of that framework, he said, he would not be imposing the tariffs he had threatened on those nations opposing his designs on NATO.

As Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted, this was not a new deal, but Trump surrendering. The U.S. and NATO have always been free to do whatever they want in Greenland, but Trump had insisted he needed to own it for “psychological” reasons. Now he has reverted back to the original agreement.

Amongst all of Trump’s other lies and threats at his Davos speech, one stood out. Talking about Russia’s war against Ukraine, he said: “It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged—it was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out.” This is Trump’s Big Lie, and it has been thoroughly debunked; the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen from him.

But then Trump went on to say: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news but it should be. It was a rigged election. You can’t have rigged elections.”

This is an astonishing threat. It says he intends to prosecute Department of Justice officials and others for refusing to help him steal the presidency. The timing of this particular threat is not accidental. Tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern Time, former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will testify publicly about the evidence that led a grand jury to indict Trump and led Smith himself to conclude a jury would convict Trump.

Lately, Trump has been rehashing his grievances from that election, repeating debunked claims of rigged voting machines and so on. The issue is clearly on his mind. Jack Smith knows what happened, Trump knows that Smith knows what happened, and it appears Trump is eager to discredit him at the very least.

While Trump is in Davos, the violence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents that has been obvious for a while has ramped up in what appears to be an attempt to spark violence.

Yesterday Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, police chief Mark Bruley told reporters that the police were getting repeated complaints about violations of civil rights by ICE and that ICE agents were stopping off-duty police officers of color. He recounted that ICE agents had stopped an off-duty police officer, demanded her paperwork—she is a U.S. citizen—and then held her at gunpoint. When she tried to film the interaction, they knocked the phone out of her hand. Finally, when she identified herself as a police officer, they got in their vehicles and left.

“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers,” Bruley said, but because “our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted, and that’s what they were. If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”

Yesterday Dell Cameron of Wired reported that internal ICE planning documents show that the agency is planning to spend up to $50 million on jail space and a privately run transfer hub in Minnesota for immigrant detainees from Minnesota and four neighboring states.

Today the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner ruled that the death of 55-year-old Cuban-born Geraldo Lunas Campos detained in Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, was a homicide. Camp East Montana is a tent encampment where migrants have reported poor conditions and physical abuse. Lunas Campos died of asphyxiation after guards put pressure on his neck and chest during an altercation during which Lunas Campos asked for his medication. Two detainees testified that they saw guards choking Lunas Campos, who repeatedly told them he couldn’t breathe. The Trump administration has since tried to deport the two witnesses.

Douglas MacMillan of the Washington Post reported that at least 30 people died in detention last year, the highest number in twenty years. Six people, including Lunas Campos and another detainee at Camp East Montana, died in the first two weeks of 2026.

ICE agents are hanging around schools, threatening children. Reg Chapman of CBS News in Minnesota reported today that ICE has detained a five-year-old preschooler after using him as bait to get someone in his house to open their door. Then ICE transferred him and his father from Minnesota to detention in Texas. His family has an active asylum case and it does not have an order of deportation, meaning they are in the U.S. legally.

Video footage from Minneapolis also shows a federal agent spraying chemical irritants directly into the face of a man agents had pinned and held to the ground. Other video shows Customs and Border Protection leader Greg Bovino throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters.

This afternoon, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

As Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse notes, courts have always interpreted that amendment to mean that a judge must sign a warrant to allow law enforcement to break into a home. Now the Department of Homeland Security says it does not need such a judicial warrant, but can simply use an administrative warrant signed by an official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or ICE if immigrants believed to be inside a home have a final order of removal.

The legal training manual for DHS itself quotes a 1984 Supreme Court decision that “the ‘physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”

Immigration law specialist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted that this memo is a big deal: it is “the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment.”

Two ICE whistleblowers provided the memo to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), explaining that they were shown the memo. They suggested that ICE supervisors seemed to understand the order was unlawful, as the supervisors only told agents about the memo rather than sharing a hard copy with them, and that at least one long-time employee resigned rather than be forced to teach material they thought was illegal.

Blumenthal wrote a scathing letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Lyons noting that the “new policy is based on a secret legal interpretation and is directly contrary to Fourth Amendment law and agency practice.” He demanded to know how many DHS agents had been trained on the memo and where the training had taken place, how many homes had been broken into under the terms of the memo, the legal determination for the memo, and so on.

“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home,” Blumenthal wrote on social media. “It is an unlawful & morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire.”

“I am deeply grateful to brave whistleblowers who have come forward & put the rights of their fellow Americans first,” Blumenthal wrote. “My Republican colleagues who claim to value personal rights against government overreach now have an opportunity & obligation to prove that rhetoric is real.”

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who at the beginning of 2025 was considered a moderate on immigration, wrote: “Yeah I am not voting to give whatever ICE has become more taxpayer money. It’s no longer an immigration enforcement arm of the US government.”

Now ICE has landed in Portland and in Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, where it claims to have 1,400 targets for arrest.

My hypothesis is that he’s had another TIA episode.

Ughhhh.

(Thanks for posting.)

Divine Angel said:

My hypothesis is that he’s had another TIA episode.

The way you can buy a presidency was eventually going to lead to a reality tv star becoming president.
Allies supported the USA regardless of whatever the situation entailed.
Perhaps it was so they would shut up and go away.
The sucking up to them was embarassing.

January 22, 2026 (Thursday)

Vice President J.D. Vance was in Minnesota for the administration today, trying to regain control of the narrative about the violence perpetrated there by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A new poll out today from the New York Times and Siena University shows that nearly two thirds of Americans, 63%, disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, while only 36% approve. Even among white Americans, 57% disapprove, while only 42% approve. Sixty-one percent of Americans, including 19% of Republicans, think that ICE agents have gone too far.

Just hours after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed 37-year-old Renee Good on January 7, and long before there was any official investigation of the shooting, Vance was out in front of the news, blaming Good for her own death and claiming that the officer was clearly justified in shooting her.

But even MAGA voters don’t buy it. Podcaster Joe Rogan has compared ICE to “the gestapo,” and Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that a majority of both young voters and those without a college degree, those who tend to be easy for MAGA to reach, disapprove of ICE enforcement. Media Matters reported that the senior judicial analyst on right-wing channel Newsmax, Andrew Napolitano, called the newly revealed secret ICE memo claiming the right to break down doors to arrest people in their homes “a direct and profound violation of the Fourth Amendment, which expressly says people are entitled to be secure in their homes and that security can only be invaded by a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause of crime.”

Today a jury in Chicago acquitted a man charged with trying to hire a man to kill U.S. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino. The Department of Justice claimed Juan Espinoza Martinez was a member of a street gang who had offered $10,000 to his brother and a friend to kill Bovino. Jon Seidel of the Chicago Sun-Times noted that 31 Chicagoans have been charged with nonimmigration crimes tied to the federal action there. With Thursday’s acquittal, Seidel notes, “15 of them have been cleared. None of the cases have led to a conviction, so far.”

Today Vance continued to defend ICE agents but walked back some of his earlier belligerence. He admitted that “of course there have been mistakes made, because you’re always going to have mistakes made in law enforcement,” although he added that “99% of our police officers, probably more than that, are doing everything right.”

The vice president also denied his words from January 8, when he said of Ross at the White House: “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy’s protected by absolute immunity.” Moving the goalposts considerably today after it turned out that Americans don’t particularly like the idea that masked agents can do whatever they want, he said: “I didn’t say…that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That’s absurd. What I did say is that when federal law enforcement officers violate the law that’s typically something federal officials would look into. We don’t want these guys to have kangaroo courts.”

The New York Times/Siena poll had bad news for Trump more generally, too. It showed that his approval rating has fallen to 40%, while 56% disapprove of the way he is handling his job, and that 49% of registered voters think the country is worse off than it was a year ago, while only 32% think it is better off. In fact, the poll showed him underwater on every single issue: managing the government, Venezuela, immigration, the economy, relationships with other countries, the Israli-Palestinian conflict, the cost of living, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the Epstein files, on which only 22% of registered voters approve while 66% disapprove. The only area where he is not underwater by double digits is on the issue of border between the U.S. and Mexico, where 50% of registered voters approve and only 46% disapprove.

After news of the poll dropped, Trump’s social media account posted that “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense. As an example, all of the Anti Trump Media that covered me during the 2020 Election showed Polls that were knowingly wrong. They knew what they were doing, trying to influence the Election, but I won in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all 7 of the 7 Swing States, the Electoral College was a route , and 2,750 Counties to 525. You can’t do much better than that, and yet if people examined The Failing New York Times, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, Low Ratings CNN, or the now defunct MSDNC, Polls were all fraudulent, and bore nothing even close to the final results. Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling. Even the Polls of FoxNews and The Wall Street Journal have been, over the years, terrible! There are great Pollsters that called the Election right, but the Media does not want to use them in any way, shape, or form. Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”

Trump’s social media account posted that he would add the Times/Siena poll to his existing lawsuit against the New York Times.

Trump also threatened to sue JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon, its chief executive officer, claiming it had broken the law by closing his accounts in April 2021 after notice given just two months before, at the same time that many businesses were refusing to work with Trump after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The bank has refused to do further business with the Trump family, the lawsuit alleges, putting them on a “blacklist.” The lawsuit claims the family was “debanked” because of “political and social motivations,” and Trump wants “at least $5,000,000,000 in damages, an award of attorneys’ fees and costs…and any other relief this Court deems proper.”

JP Morgan Chase says the suit is meritless and that while it does not close accounts for political reasons, it does close accounts “because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company.”

The 2020 presidential election is clearly on Trump’s mind with former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of that election and delivered a grand jury indictment of him on four counts, testifying today before the House Judiciary Committee. Smith was sworn in and testified under oath. Unlike him, representatives are not sworn in for such hearings and are covered by the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution that enables them to say virtually anything they want without legal repercussions.

That matters, as Republicans showed no inclination to engage with the evidence Smith uncovered that Trump conspired to defraud American voters of their right to choose their president and fraudulently seize another term. Instead, they appeared eager to discredit Smith and to fall back on Trump’s narrative that former president Joe Biden and former attorney general Merrick Garland weaponized the Department of Justice against Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Smith called the narratives spread about him and his team “false and misleading,” and said: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity. If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”

That Republicans were not willing to engage with the actual evidence apparently frustrated the president, who openly threatened Smith, posting that “Deranged Jack Smith is being DECIMATED before Congress. It was over when they discussed his past failures and unfair prosecutions. He destroyed many lives under the guise of legitimacy. Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law. If he were a Republican, his license would be taken away from him, and far worse! Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me. The whole thing was a Democrat SCAM—A big price should be paid by them for what they have put our Country through!”

Meanwhile, the Democrats on the committee offered evidence from the events Smith had investigated, playing, for example, the recording of Trump demanding that Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes to steal the state of Georgia, which had voted for Biden, for Trump instead.

As The Guardian noted, when Brad Knott (R-NC) observed that Smith had charged only Trump, suggesting that Smith had singled out Trump for political reasons, Smith answered that he had been in the process of considering charging others when Trump was elected president again and the case was then closed. He said that he and the lawyers on the case believed they did have sufficient proof to charge other people.

This statement is likely to be uncomfortable for MAGA figures who were deeply involved in Trump’s efforts but who were not publicly investigated. In both the House and the Senate, members have been furious at the information that the Department of Justice got the permission of a judge to obtain toll records for Trump’s calls on and around January 6. Many of them were on those calls. Now they are falsely claiming they were “wiretapped” although toll records simply record the phones involved and the duration of the call.

Meanwhile, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller suggested that he, too, is concerned about the law catching up to people on the Trump team. On social media, Miller posted: “Everyone serious understands that the justice system is rigged. Far-left prosecutors, magistrates, judges and juries unhesitatingly shield their violent activists and gleefully imprison their political opponents. Unrigging the system is necessary for the survival of the Republic.”

Billionaire Elon Musk, whose work with Trump led to the government’s dropping a number of investigations of his companies and lawsuits against them, chimed in: “Absolutely.”

Today the United States officially withdrew from the World Health Organization, leaving behind $278 million in unpaid dues. We joined the organization in 1948.

Tomorrow people across Minnesota will stay home from work, school, and shopping areas in an “ICE Out Day” to protest the federal agents in the state. The general strike has the support of businesses, unions, faith organizations, democratic lawmakers, and community activists.

“RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

“ RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

He won’t live to see the midterms of 2026, so sure, go right ahead.

>>This statement is likely to be uncomfortable for MAGA figures who were deeply involved in Trump’s efforts but who were not publicly investigated. In both the House and the Senate, members have been furious at the information that the Department of Justice got the permission of a judge to obtain toll records for Trump’s calls on and around January 6. Many of them were on those calls. Now they are falsely claiming they were “wiretapped” although toll records simply record the phones involved and the duration of the call. <<

Damn these people who know how the law works! How dare they! Obviously it is someone else’s fault if I get caught!!

buffy said:

>>This statement is likely to be uncomfortable for MAGA figures who were deeply involved in Trump’s efforts but who were not publicly investigated. In both the House and the Senate, members have been furious at the information that the Department of Justice got the permission of a judge to obtain toll records for Trump’s calls on and around January 6. Many of them were on those calls. Now they are falsely claiming they were “wiretapped” although toll records simply record the phones involved and the duration of the call. <<

Damn these people who know how the law works! How dare they! Obviously it is someone else’s fault if I get caught!!

they’re lawmakers of course they know

how well run are these great countries

>>>>>>> “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

Does Trump think he is already into his third term as prez?

Michael V said:

>>>>>>> “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

Does Trump think he is already into his third term as prez?

makes sense that they’re expecting a third term to be a given

Michael V said:

>>>>>>> “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

Does Trump think he is already into his third term as prez?

I don’t think he’ll make it through to the end of this 4 year term.

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

>>>>>>> “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

Does Trump think he is already into his third term as prez?

I don’t think he’ll make it through to the end of this 4 year term.

Article 2 section 4.

roughbarked said:

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

>>>>>>> “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” Trump’s social media account crowed tonight. “SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”

Does Trump think he is already into his third term as prez?

I don’t think he’ll make it through to the end of this 4 year term.

Article 2 section 4.

whatever. Either he will be impeached by the Congress for being a dumb fuckfit and going one step too far even for them. Or he will be conveniently found to be mentally unfit for office and save Congress the pain and political agony of impeaching him. Or he will just die of natural causes, he is not a well man.

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

party_pants said:

I don’t think he’ll make it through to the end of this 4 year term.

Article 2 section 4.

whatever. Either he will be impeached by the Congress for being a dumb fuckfit and going one step too far even for them. Or he will be conveniently found to be mentally unfit for office and save Congress the pain and political agony of impeaching him. Or he will just die of natural causes, he is not a well man.

I was in the oil industry too but I wasn’t a well man.

Peak Warming Man said:

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

Article 2 section 4.

whatever. Either he will be impeached by the Congress for being a dumb fuckfit and going one step too far even for them. Or he will be conveniently found to be mentally unfit for office and save Congress the pain and political agony of impeaching him. Or he will just die of natural causes, he is not a well man.

I was in the oil industry too but I wasn’t a well man.

nice palm off there

Peak Warming Man said:

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

Article 2 section 4.

whatever. Either he will be impeached by the Congress for being a dumb fuckfit and going one step too far even for them. Or he will be conveniently found to be mentally unfit for office and save Congress the pain and political agony of impeaching him. Or he will just die of natural causes, he is not a well man.

I was in the oil industry too but I wasn’t a well man.

did you ever meet a guy named Derrick?

Boris said:

SCIENCE said:

Peak Warming Man said:

party_pants said:

whatever. Either he will be impeached by the Congress for being a dumb fuckfit and going one step too far even for them. Or he will be conveniently found to be mentally unfit for office and save Congress the pain and political agony of impeaching him. Or he will just die of natural causes, he is not a well man.

I was in the oil industry too but I wasn’t a well man.

nice palm off there

did you ever meet a guy named Derrick?

tough crowd on this platform

January 23, 2026 (Friday)

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets today in bitter cold temperatures with wind chills of -20°F (–28°C) to protest the occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Status Coup News interviewed a protester walking down the street holding a sign that said: “CLASSIC NAZI BLUNDER: INVADING IN WINTER.”

The protester compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan, noting that both wore masks and raided immigrant communities. He went on: “You know, there’s like all this talk of revolution. We’re the counterrevolutionaries, right?”

He explained: “here is a minority who is trying to create a post-law, orderless, lawless society, where their might makes right. And because, you know, they have guns and are willing to use them, they think they can suspend the Constitution, suspend habeas corpus…, suspend civil liberties, generally speaking.”

He continued: “here was a memo that came out that said that they think they can break into people’s houses without warrants, you know, basically just like, trust us, which is, you know, fundamentally against the Fourth Amendment. And so if you look at the amendments, I mean, they’re trying to tear it down the First, they’ve gassed people, they’ve shot people, you know, hit people with beanbag guns and batons for exercising their First Amendment rights, they don’t want people to, you know, exercise their Second Amendment rights, and certainly their Fourth, but also the Fourteenth, you know, basically, they’re attacking the whole Constitution.”

In his assertion that the Trump administration is engaged in a radical attempt to remake the American government while those trying to stop them are protecting our traditional government, the Minnesota protester was echoing another midwesterner from our history who also had to contend with a minority that had seized control of the federal government and was trying to rewrite the history of the United States of America to justify using the government to enrich themselves.

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois spoke at New York City’s Cooper Union.

Five years before, in his controversial annual message of December 1855, Democratic president Franklin Pierce had ignored the Declaration of Independence and, in service to the elite southern enslavers who ran the Democratic party, retold the founding of the United States as a republic of “free white men.” The rights and privileges of belonging to that republic did not include “the subject races” of Indigenous or Black Americans, the president said.

He called out as fanatics and partisans those northerners, living in free states, who obeyed state free laws and protected enslaved Americans who had escaped from the South. They were radicals who rejected the federal law demanding their return to their enslavers. Even worse, they opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned the 1820 Missouri Compromise prohibiting the spread of human enslavement to the American West.

At Cooper Union, Lincoln rejected Pierce’s rewriting of American history. He also retold the history of America. In his version, though, that history was one in which the Founders opposed enslavement and those who stood against those trying to create a white man’s republic were the nation’s true counterrevolutionaries.

Resting his vision on the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s foundational document, he defended the principle of human equality and told Democrats: “ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”

Lincoln was on solid historical ground when he reminded Americans of his era that those trying to impose a new system of white nationalist oligarchy on the nation were the true radicals, while those defending equality were conservatives.

The colonists who threw off the rule of King George III also stood firmly on the idea that they were protecting longstanding principles of self-government that British officials were trying to replace with tyranny. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders called out “a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

After enumerating the many ways in which the king had usurped the powers of Englishmen that had been established over centuries, beginning with the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta, the Founders launched a new nation. And then, when the Framers wrote a constitution for that new nation, they were careful to place within it a bill of rights to protect Americans from the rise of another tyrant.

Now the Trump administration is made up of radicals who are ignoring that Constitution and that Bill of Rights in their open attempt to create a white nationalist nation.

The man on the streets of Minneapolis today was right to call out the administration’s assault on the First Amendment that protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of people peaceably to assemble.

Thanks to an unsealed State Department memo, we learned today that the administration revoked the visa of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk and detained her for six weeks solely because she co-authored an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The administration concluded that her op-ed “may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

ICE agents arrived in Maine this week, and one took pictures of a legal observer’s car, prompting her to remind him that it is legal to record their actions and to ask why he was taking her information. He answered: “‘Cause we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” He appeared to be referring to Trump’s September 25, 2025, memo NSPM-7 that describes opposition to the administration’s policies—opposition protected by the First Amendment—as “domestic terrorism.”

Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center noted that this dramatic expansion of the legal framework for domestic terrorism appears to be the administration’s argument for suggesting Renee Good was a domestic terrorist after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed her. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem falsely claimed that Good tried to run over Ross, calling it “an act of domestic terrorism,” and Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that protesters are engaging in “domestic terror techniques.”

But, as Levinson-Waldman explains, domestic terrorism has a specific definition in the law: actions that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law, appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the government by intimidation or coercion, and occur primarily in the U.S. “To actually be called a ‘domestic terrorist,’” she writes, “an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying ‘federal crimes of terrorism,’” which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on.

The Minneapolis protester was right about the administration’s assault on the Fourth Amendment as well. On Wednesday, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.

This is a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which says the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” and establishes that the government can violate those rights only after a judge agrees there is probable cause of a crime and signs a warrant.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) warned: “Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home. It is an unlawful & morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire.”

The Minnesota protester was also right to call out the administration’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that no state shall “deprive any person”—not citizen, but person—“of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It is this principle that is at the heart of the challenges to the administration’s rendering of immigrants to foreign countries without due process.

Instead of rooting itself in the real history of the United States of America, Ali Breland of The Atlantic noted on Wednesday, the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation’s roots are not in human equality but in the hierarchical system of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way: one made up of white Protestants who, in their minds, “belong” to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in “blood and soil.”

In the 1770s, and again in the 1850s, everyday Americans recognized the radicalism of those extremists who were trying to erase the nation’s principles and the rule of law, ignoring the longstanding rights of the people to liberty and equality and instead trying to impose a despotism.

Today a protester in Minneapolis, one of those tens of thousands who filled the streets in below-zero weather to demand that ICE end its violent occupation of their city and its abuse of immigrants and people of color, made it clear that Americans in 2026 still believe in the nation’s founding principles of equality and the rule of law, and they utterly reject the right wing’s blood-and-soil radicalism.

Thanks for posting HCR’s letter.

:)

January 24, 2026 (Saturday)

This morning, on a street in Minneapolis, at least seven federal agents tackled and then shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse for the local VA hospital.

Video from the scene shows Pretti directing traffic on a street out of an area with agents around, then trying to help another person get up after she had been pushed to the ground by the agents. The agents then surround Pretti and shoot pepper spray into his face, then pull him to the ground from behind and hit him as he appears to be trying to keep his head off the ground. An agent appears to take a gun out of Pretti’s waistband during the struggle, then turns and leaves with it. A shot then stops Pretti’s movements, appearing to kill him, before nine more shots ring out, apparently as agents continued to fire into his body.

It looked like an execution.

After he was dead, the agents walked away, apparently making no effort to preserve the crime scene, which people on the street later tried to secure by walling it off with trash bins.

As journalist Philip Bump noted, administration officials didn’t even pretend to wait for more information before jumping straight to “the opponent of the state deserved it.”

Mitch Smith of the New York Times reported that federal agents have blocked state investigators from the scene. Drew Evans of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide investigations team that specializes in police shootings, told reporters his agency had obtained a search warrant—a rare step—but the federal government still refused them access.

Tonight, in a lawsuit against Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials, Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison asked a judge for a temporary restraining order to prevent DHS agents from destroying evidence related to the shooting. The suit noted the “astonishing” departure from normal investigations, seemingly trying not to preserve evidence but to destroy it. A judge, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, immediately granted the restraining order, barring the administration from “destroying or altering evidence” concerning the killing.

Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times reported that federal officials also “have refused to disclose the identities of federal agents involved in Saturday’s shooting, as well as the names of federal agents who have shot people in recent days.”

Minnesota police have refused to obey the federal officers, though. Local law enforcement has been talking to witnesses and finding videos of the shooting. Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said at a press conference: “Our demand today is for those federal agencies that are operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity, and integrity that effective law enforcement in this country demands. We urge everyone to remain peaceful.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that it, rather than the FBI, will investigate the shooting. But, as Alex Witt of MS NOW noted, DHS had already issued a statement about the shooting, which falsely asserted that Pretti had “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and that he “violently resisted” as “officers attempted to disarm” him. The statement continued that “an agent fired defensive shots” and added that Pretti “also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

“So,” Witt noted, “they’re gonna be investigating that which they’ve already issued a summary about…. It would seem that it’s a closed book?”

After repeatedly being exposed as liars over previous accusations against those they have shot, the Department of Homeland Security has so little credibility that Witt is not the only journalist calling out the federal agents for lying. Devon Lum of the New York Times wrote: “Videos on social media that were verified by The New York Times contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the fatal shooting of a man by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.

“The Department of Homeland Security said the episode began after a man approached Border Patrol agents with a handgun and they tried to disarm him. But footage from the scene shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him.”

But lying to the American people is the only option for the administration when we can, once again, all see what happened with our own eyes. Pretti did have a permit for a concealed handgun and appeared to have carried the gun with him, although witnesses say he never reached for it. Tonight Noem doubled down on the lie, saying again: “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

When the Democratic Party’s social media account posted: “ICE agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis this morning. Get ICE out of Minnesota NOW,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller replied: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” The Democrats’ social media account responded: “You’re a f*cking liar with blood on your hands.”

Miller continued to bang that drum. When Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said that “ICE must leave Minneapolis” and that “Congress should not fund this version of ICE—this is seeking confirmation, chaos, and dystopia,” Miller responded: “An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response.” When Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar similarly decried the killing, Miller responded: “A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement and this is your response? You and the state’s entire Democrat leadership team have been flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”

Miller is a white nationalist, who has recommended others read a dystopian novel in which people of color “invade” Europe and destroy “Western civilization.” Those who support immigration are, in the book’s telling, enemies who are abetting an “invasion”—a word Miller relies on—that is destroying the culture of white countries. They are working for the “enemy.”

In the wake of Pretti’s shooting, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota governor Tim Walz to suggest he could “bring back law and order to Minnesota” if he handed over the state’s voter rolls to the Department of Justice. As Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted, she explicitly tied the administration’s violence in the state to its determination to get its hands on voters’ personal data before the 2026 election. Minnesota has voted for the Democratic candidate running against Trump in the past three presidential elections, but he insists that he really has won the state each time.

As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers wrote: Republicans could stop this at any time they wanted to.

“All it would take to end the murder of American citizens by an untrained government goon squad is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Dems to defund ICE (or 23 to impeach and remove Trump—3 in House & 20 in Senate). That’s it. 23 Americans can vote for the public and end all of this.”

Morris also pointed out that in December, Trump’s approval rating was negative in 40 states, including 10 he won in 2024. That covers 30 seats currently held by Republicans. Pretti’s shooting will likely erode Trump’s support further. Tonight, even right-wing podcaster Tim Pool reacted to Pretti’s killing by noting that it looked as if the agent had disarmed Pretti before the other agents shot him. “I don’t see Trump winning this one,” Pool commented.

The funding bill for DHS is effectively dead in the Senate, as Democrats have said they will not support any more funding for DHS. Tonight, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters: “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.” But the July law the Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act poured nearly $191 billion into DHS through September 30, 2029, with almost $75 billion going to ICE and $67 billion going to Customs and Border Protection (FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, got just $2.9 billion).

Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA) had more to say: “​​What we just saw this morning on the streets of Minneapolis is another outright murder by federal officials. And let me just be clear, those federal ICE officers are absolute cowards. I am a Marine veteran standing here telling you to your face they are unprofessional, pathetic cowards. Because if a Marine, an 18 year old Marine, did that in Iraq in the middle of a war zone, he would be court martialed because it is murder. And you pathetic little cowards who have to wear face masks because you’re so damn scared, couldn’t even effectively wrestle a guy the ground, so you needed to shoot him? This is why ICE needs to be prosecuted. Yeah, I voted to defund it, but ICE, you need to be prosecuted, and Director Lyons, who’s running ICE right now, I hope you’re hearing this from this Marine to you. You guys are criminal thugs. You need to be held accountable to law if you think you can enforce it, and you need to be prosecuted right now.”

Just hours after the killing of Alex Pretti, agents pinned U.S. citizen Matthew James Allen to the street while he screamed: “I have done nothing at all. My name is Matthew James…Allen. I’m a United States citizen…. You’re gonna kill me! Is that what you want? You want to kill me? You want to kill me on the street? You’re going to have to f*cking kill me! I have done nothing wrong.” Nearby, his sobbing wife screamed: “Stop please! Stop!! Please!! We were just running away from the gas. That’s all we were doing.”

“We all know the poem,” Blue Missouri executive director Jess Piper wrote, “and there is no shade of white that will save you from this murderous regime.”

Tonight, Susan and Michael Pretti, the parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, issued a statement:

“We are heartbroken but also very angry,” they said.

“Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world.

Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.

“I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed.

“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”

Thanks for posting.

Michael V said:

Thanks for posting.

+1

January 25, 2026 (Sunday)

As the nation mourned the killing of VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti yesterday at the hands of federal officials in Minneapolis, President Donald J. Trump spent last night at the White House at a black-tie private screening of a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to the film just weeks after chief executive officer Jeff Bezos dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago following the former president’s reelection and is spending another $35 million to promote the film.

Then, this morning, Trump’s social media account posted a 450-word social media screed complaining about the lawsuit against his addition of a massive ballroom to the White House. Calling the National Trust for Historic Preservation a “Radical Left” organization, the account claimed that the addition “is being done with the design, consent, and approval of the highest levels of the United States Military and Secret Service. The mere bringing of this ridiculous lawsuit has already, unfortunately, exposed this heretofore Top Secret fact. Stoppage of construction, at this late date, when so much has already been ordered and done, would be devastating to the White House, our Country, and all concerned.”

A still photograph from a video of Pretti’s killing circulating today showed an agent aiming a gun at the back of his head as he was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, but this morning, administration officials were nonetheless doubling down on their insistence that the killing had been justified.

On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino claimed the true victims of yesterday’s shooting were federal agents. He confirmed that the agents who killed Pretti yesterday remain on the streets today, though they have been reassigned elsewhere. FBI director Kash Patel claimed on the Fox News Channel that the fact Pretti was carrying a weapon proved that he was planning trouble, although because he was part of a community-led first-responder network, carrying the weapon for which he had a permit made sense.

But Americans are not buying it. They are coalescing around the idea of the American people versus an out-of-control government. As conservative lawyer George Conway put it: “I just checked—it turns out that Art. II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution of the United States does not say ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a bunch of sociopaths who think they can do whatever the f*ck they want and make sh*t up as they go along.’”

Reports out of Minnesota say that in the face of the terror inflicted on it by federal agents, the people there are even more closely linked together in community solidarity. They are patrolling the streets, donating food, delivering groceries, helping with legal services, organizing to look out for each other in a demonstration of community solidarity so foreign to administration figures that Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday suggested that there was something nefarious about how well organized they are as they protect their neighbors.

In Minneapolis today, the Minnesota prison system took the extraordinary step of launching its own website to combat lies from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its first major announcement suggested that Bovino had lied about the Border Patrol operation that was underway when agents killed Alex Pretti. The Minnesota Department of Corrections expressed its condolences to the family and loved ones of Alex Pretti and said that although Bovino claimed that the operation was targeting a man with a significant criminal history, that information was false.

In fact, the individual Bovino identified had never been in custody in Minnesota, and records showed only traffic-related offenses for him. Records did show, though, that he had been in federal immigration custody during Trump’s first administration and had been released.

Chief Brian O’Hara of the Minneapolis Police Department told Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation, “People have had enough. This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone, and now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks…. This is not sustainable. This police department has only 600 police officers. We are stretched incredibly thin. This is taking an enormous toll, trying to manage all of this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much.”

The Minnesota National Guard made it clear which side they were on. Wearing neon vests to distinguish themselves from federal agents, they handed out doughnuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to anti-ICE protesters.

The National Basketball Players Association said it could no longer remain silent. “Now more than ever,” it said, “we must defend the right to freedom of speech and stand in solidarity with the people in Minnesota protesting and risking their lives to demand justice. The fraternity of NBA players, like the United States itself, is a community enriched by its global citizens, and we refuse to let the flames of division threaten the civil liberties that are meant to protect us all. The NBPA and its members extend our deepest condolences to the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, just as our thoughts remain focused on the safety and well-being of all members of our community.”

The newest killing has opened up a rift in Republican ranks. Administration officials not allied with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and her cronies are complaining to reporters, including Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, that they are frustrated with DHS officials’ statements that Pretti was intending a “massacre” of federal agents in the face of videos that disprove such absurd claims. They have told Melugin such comments are “catastrophic.” “e are losing this war,” sources say, “we are losing the base and the narrative.”

Indeed, at the base level of politics, MAGA supporters who support gun ownership are appalled by statements like that of FBI director Kash Patel, who told the Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have the right to break the law and incite violence.” But Pretti had a license to carry a weapon, and he did not brandish it. President Rob Doar of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center noted that Pretti had the right to carry a gun in that situation and that it shouldn’t be necessary “to choose between exercising your First Amendment rights or your Second Amendment rights.” He expressed concern that “our government and agents of our government are not engaging in good faith with what we’re seeing with our own eyes.”

Lawyer John Mitnick, who served as deputy counsel of the Homeland Security Council from its inception during the George W. Bush administration and then served as general counsel of the United States Department of Homeland Security from 2018 to 2019, when he clashed with Stephen Miller, wrote on social media: “I helped to establish DHS in 2002 and 2003 and later had the homeland security portfolio as a White House Counsel and served as General Counsel of the Department. I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty. Impeach and remove Trump—now.”

Aside from a few strong MAGA voices, elected Republicans appeared reluctant to defend the killing. Neither Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) nor House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) commented on it.

Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott did, though, leading the way for other Republicans in districts that are sliding away from MAGA. In a statement, he said: “Enough…It’s not acceptable for American citizens to be killed by federal agents for exercising their God-given and constitutional rights to protest their government. At best, these federal immigration operations are a complete failure of coordination of acceptable public safety and law enforcement practices, training, and leadership. At worst, it’s a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans…. The president should pause these operations, de-escalate the situation, and reset the federal government’s focus on truly criminal illegal immigrants. In the absence of presidential action, Congress and the courts must step up to restore constitutionality.”

G. Elliot Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today that even the Republican-leaning Rasmussen polls have shown that 59% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while only 39% approve. In Strength in Numbers today, he reported that “Trump’s 2024 coalition has come undone.” He explained that “oung voters, non-white voters, and low-turnout voters who swung to Trump from 2020 to 2024 have swung back against him in force. In many cases, these groups are even more anti-Trump now than they were ahead of the 2020 election.”

Morris also noted that Trump’s approval rating is not underwater in ten of the states he won in 2024, as I wrote last night. It’s underwater in fifteen.

Today the editorial boards of both Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and his New York Post urged the administration to pause its ICE operations in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti. The Wall Street Journal’s famously right-wing editorial board warned that “he Trump Administration spin on this simply isn’t believable.” It continued: “Ms. Noem and Mr. Miller aren’t credible spokesmen. Their social-media and cable-TV strategy is to own the libs, rather than to persuade Americans. This is backfiring against Republicans…. Mr. Miller’s mass deportation methods are turning immigration, an issue Mr. Trump owned in 2024, into a political liability for Republicans in 2026. Americans don’t want law enforcement shooting people in the street or arresting five-year-old boys.”

Tonight, the editorial board of the New York Post warned that Trump’s ICE actions in Minneapolis are “backfiring.” “Swing voters…see US citizens dying at federal agents’ hands, and recoil in horror.” It concluded: “Mr. President, the American people didn’t vote for these scenes and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes.”

Trump’s social media account turned defensive tonight. After repeating Trump’s false claim that he had won election in a historic landslide (in reality, he won less than 50% of the vote), it blamed Democrats for the chaos ICE and CBP agents have caused in Democratic-led cities. It demanded that every Democratic mayor and governor cooperate with the administration to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Yesterday, after Alex Pretti’s death, the son of a man Pretti had cared for at the VA hospital published a video of Pretti speaking at his father’s deathbed. “Today we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti said. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it. May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom. So in this moment, we remember and give thanks for their dedication and selfless service to our nation in the cause of our freedom. In this solemn hour, we them our honor, and our gratitude.”

Thanks.

>>>>>>>> Yesterday, after Alex Pretti’s death, the son of a man Pretti had cared for at the VA hospital published a video of Pretti speaking at his father’s deathbed. “Today we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti said. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it. May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom. So in this moment, we remember and give thanks for their dedication and selfless service to our nation in the cause of our freedom. In this solemn hour, we them our honor, and our gratitude.”

January 26, 2026 (Monday)

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump blamed Democratic officials for the killing of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minnesota Saturday morning. Since then, administration officials and their supporters seem to be coalescing around the idea that the reason there have been violent clashes in Minneapolis is not the violence of federal agents there, but that city officials aren’t cooperating with federal officials.

As Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote notes, this language comes straight from the Insurrection Act, and indeed, MAGA leader and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he thinks Trump should invoke that act. Bannon said Pretti “knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”

On right-wing social media, Bannon echoed the language of a dystopian vision of the world that claims immigrants are invading the United States and those protecting them in Minneapolis are dangerous. He told his supporters: “This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well thought through effort to invade the country.” MAGA adherents are embracing the daft idea that the Minnesota people who have come together to protect their neighbors are an organized, paid insurgency.

But the tide seems to be running against them.

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted that the president is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota. Homan is a White House advisor under scrutiny for allegations that he accepted $50,000 in cash stuffed into a CAVA bag after promising to steer government contracts toward those offering him the money. According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, Homan has been clashing with the extremist faction led by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, her advisor Corey Lewandowski, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller because he thinks their made-for-TV violence is doing long-term damage to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice commented: “f Tom ‘Cava Bag’ Homan is your emergency crisis comms guy, you’re f*cked.”

Trump’s account also posted his version of a phone call with Minnesota governor Tim Walz that would let Trump deescalate the situation there. Despite the fact that, as journalist Laura Bassett notes, the administration has been leading its followers to believe Walz is going to jail, Trump’s account posted:

“Governor Tim Walz called me with a request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous SUCCESS in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have ‘touched’ and, even in Minnesota, Crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

This morning, Republican Chris Madel withdrew from the Minnesota governor’s race, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so…. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”
“United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong,” Madel said.

He added: “I am above all else a pragmatist. The reality is that the national Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”

Neil Mehta and Valerie Bauerlein of the Wall Street Journal noted that Preya Samsundar, a Republican strategy consultant, agrees, noting that her own mother, who immigrated legally, has begun to carry her passport with her.

Some Republicans are backing away from the administration over its tactics and violence in Minnesota. Former vice president Mike Pence today called images from there “deeply troubling” and called for a full investigation into Pretti’s killing. By Sunday, Republican senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had all called for investigations.

Today those calls reached deeper into the party, with Republican senators John Curtis of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Todd Young of Indiana also calling for an investigation and “accountability.” This afternoon, Jordain Carney and Adam Wren of Politico reported that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had called a hearing for February 12. He has asked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Rodney Scott, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow, and ICE acting director Todd Lyons to testify.

One House Republican told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico: “Many of us wonder if the administration has any clue as to how much this will hurt us legislatively and electorally this year.”

As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo noted today, even MAGA firebrand Texas governor Greg Abbott said on a Dallas talk show that the White House needs to “recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure that they get back to get what they wanted to do to begin with—and that is to remove people from the country.”

And immigration officers themselves are speaking up. This afternoon, Nicholas Nehamas, Hamed Aleaziz, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Alexandra Berzon of the New York Times reported that immigration officers deployed to urban areas are angry at the aggressiveness the Trump administration is employing and at the administration’s sending them into dangerous situations. They say the arrest quotas, long hours, and public anger at them are taking a significant toll on morale. Most of those the journalists interviewed said they were unhappy that administration officials had jumped to blame Pretti for his own killing. One agent said he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations” but no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”

Throughout the day, there were signs that the administration was preparing to throw Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino under the bus. An unsigned editorial in The Free Press, an outlet closely aligned with the administration, lambasted Noem for pushing lies that the American people can see with their own eyes are untrue. “Perhaps Republican operatives consider the politics of division as a viable strategy for their party to survive the midterm elections,” the editorial said, but it noted that “the administration’s deportation tactics as well as the conduct of federal agents in Minneapolis are driving voters away from the president and his party.”

Then, this afternoon, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported that Bovino and some of his agents are leaving Minneapolis and returning to the sectors from which they came. Before hitting the road, though, on Friday federal agents took into custody Juan Espinoza Martinez, whom a jury acquitted this week after the Department of Justice accused him of participating in a plot to hire someone to kill Bovino. While CBP appears to be leaving, the operation itself will continue.

Tonight Alvarez and her colleague Michael Williams reported that DHS had suspended Bovino’s access to his official social media accounts.
In response to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s suggestion in a letter on Saturday, shortly after Pretti’s killing, that Governor Tim Walz could “restore the rule of law” in Minnesota by handing over the state’s voter rolls, Walz said: “I think everybody understands what the last request was, totally unrelated to anything on the voter files. This is again…Donald Trump telling everybody that the election was rigged…. I would just give a pro tip to the attorney general. There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.”

This afternoon, Trump turned back to tariffs, saying he is increasing tariff rates on South Korean “Autos, Lumber, Pharma, and all other Reciprocal TARIFFS, from 15% to 25%.”

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted that he “just had a very good telephone conversation with Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis. Lots of progress is being made!”

Frey responded with a statement: “I spoke with President Trump this afternoon and appreciated the conversation. I expressed how much Minneapolis has benefited from our immigrant communities and was clear that my main ask is that Operation Metro Surge needs to end. The president agreed that the present situation cannot continue.
“Some federal agents will begin leaving the area tomorrow, and I will continue pushing for the rest involved in this operation to go.

“Minneapolis will continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement on real criminal investigations—but we will not participate in unconstitutional arrests of our neighbors or enforce federal immigration law. Violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they are from.
“I will continue working with all levels of government to keep our communities safe, keep crime down, and put Minneapolis residents first.

“I plan to meet with Border Czar Tom Homan tomorrow to further discuss next steps.”

January 27, 2026 (Tuesday)

The murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday morning at the hands of federal agents has put wind in the sails of those trying to rein in the Trump administration at the same time it has sent the administration scrambling to regain its course. Popular outcry over the killing of a beloved ICU nurse for the VA and popular organization over the general violence of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol have unleashed pent up fury over the actions of the Trump administration. The outpouring has reached as far as spaces like a subreddit devoted to videos of people playing cats like bongos, as Drew Harwell and Scott Nover of the Washington Post noted. The anger has been so overwhelming that it has changed the course of national politics.

Pretti’s killing has thrown into doubt the passage of a funding package that includes the Department of Homeland Security. Seven Democrats in the House voted in favor of the measure, which also includes funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Labor Department, and so on. The bill is one of the twelve appropriations bills that must pass Congress by the end of the month to fund the government. Part of their argument for voting in favor of the bill even with funding for DHS is that the Republicans’ July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” poured so much money into DHS that it can function until September 30, 2029.

So until Saturday, the measure was expected to have enough Democratic votes to pass through the Senate. The killing changed the equation. On Sunday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) issued a statement saying: “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”

Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY) publicly apologized for his vote for the bill. “I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis,” he posted on social media. “I hear the anger from my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE’s unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that.” He called for Trump to pull federal agents out of Minneapolis.

Senate Democrats want the Republicans to take the DHS funding out of the larger bill and pass it to prevent a government shutdown, but such a change would require unanimous consent in the Senate, and Republicans there are refusing to do it. In the House, the far-right Freedom Caucus has written to Trump to ask that he refuse to “allow Democrats to strip funding out to pass other appropriations separately. We cannot support giving Democrats the ability to control the funding of our Department of Homeland Security,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, news about the actions of federal agents is unlikely to garner them more support. People, a widely read popular magazine that has devoted more of its pages to politics lately than in the past, has been publishing stories of those who died in ICE custody last year—at least 32—including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death in ICE custody in Texas has been ruled a homicide. It told readers about five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, detained by ICE after being used as bait to capture relatives, and of Wael Tarabishi, who died of a rare genetic disease thirty days after his father, Wael’s primary caregiver, was detained by ICE at a routine check-in at an ICE facility in Dallas.

News broke today that federal agents deported a five-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras, a country where she had never been before being sent there with her mother. The agents did not permit either to have access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge. An immigration attorney tried to find them, but ICE agents allegedly told the attorney the mother and child weren’t in their database. The two were being held at a hotel rather than a detention center, a choice some advocates suspect was designed to keep them from being included in such a database.

Today Jeff Winter and Pricilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that ICE agents have been collecting the personal information of protesters in Minneapolis. They reported that officials asked federal agents sent to Minneapolis to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” A form titled “intel collection non-arrests” enabled agents to fill in protesters’ personal information.

This information supports the statement of Trump’s “border czar”—a fancy term for an advisor—Tom Homan on the Fox News Channel earlier this month. “e’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Homan said. “We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers, in their neighborhoods, in their schools, know who these people are.”

Before a Border Patrol agent shot Renee Good, he captured her face and license plate on camera, and in Maine, a protester recorded an agent responding to her question of why he was recording her license plate. “We have a nice little database,” he answered, “and now you are considered a domestic terrorist.”

This information also seems to reflect Trump’s 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 that suggests anyone objecting to the administration’s policies is a domestic terrorist.

After the Maine incident, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS. We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement. Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.” She reiterated today that there is no DHS database.

Sources told Winter and Alvarez that federal agents had documented details about Pretti before Saturday. About a week before his death, Pretti stopped his car to observe federal agents chasing a family on foot, shouted, and blew a whistle. Five agents tackled him and one leaned on his back, breaking a rib, before they released him. Medical records confirm Pretti was treated for the injury. It is not clear if the agents on Saturday recognized him.

Federal agents are causing trouble on the international stage, too. Today a federal agent tried to force his way into the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis. As Max Bearak of the New York Times notes, international law forbids federal agents from entering a consulate or embassy without permission from the consul or the ambassador. An employee blocked the agent. Videos show an employee saying: “This is the Ecuadorian consulate. You’re not allowed to enter.” The agent responds: “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.” The Associated Press reports that Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs has filed a protest with the U.S. embassy.

This morning, news broke that ICE agents from the Homeland Security Investigations Unit would join other federal agents working at the Olympic Games in Milan, Italy, in February. According to Brian Mann of NPR, Homeland Security officials have worked at past Olympic Games, but this time many Italians objected. The mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, told reporters: “This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips. It is clear they are not welcome in Milan, without a doubt.”

Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani tried to reassure concerned Italians, saying: “It’s not like these are the people on the streets of Minneapolis. It’s not like the SS are about to arrive.” Former Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte remained skeptical, calling out ICE for “street violence and killings” in the U.S. As for letting ICE agents into Italy, he said: “We cannot allow this.”

The administration appears to be floundering as it tries to respond to the popular outrage.

While DHS has announced it has taken on the investigations of the killings of both Good and Pretti itself, FBI director Kash Patel yesterday told a right-wing podcaster that the FBI will be investigating the Signal chats of those organized in Minneapolis to observe and record federal agents to see if they have endangered federal agents. Aram Roston of The Guardian reported that podcaster Benny Johnson suggested the chats were “coordinated infrastructure,” adding that he would “like for the feds to take a crack at trying to get rid of this infrastructure the way they approach the mob or cartels or other terrorist networks, right?”

Mark Caputo and Brittany Gibson of Axios reported today that sources in the White House told them the administration knows the situation in Minnesota is a mess and is looking for a way to calm the fury without leaving the state. “We can’t lose Minneapolis because if we do, we lose Chicago and Los Angeles,” one advisor explained. “We’re not going to let the people who lost the presidential election over immigration dictate to us on immigration.”

Marianna Sotomayor of the Washington Post reported today that House Democrats plan to open an investigation into Noem as part of “a push to impeach her.” Such an outcome would be a long shot, but they want to make Republicans take a stand either for or against the administration’s policies, something most Republicans want to avoid. Justin Papp of CNBC reported that the Democrats will impeach Noem if Trump doesn’t fire her. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Democratic leaders said in a statement.

As two Republican senators also called for Noem to resign, her supporters in the White House today tried to deflect blame for the outrageous story that federal agents acted in self-defense when they killed Pretti, for he intended to “massacre” them. Officials told Caputo of Axios that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was behind the White House lies. Through an intermediary, Noem passed to Caputo the statement: “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”

For their part, Miller’s team tried to put the blame on federal agents, including Bovino, claiming the agents had said Pretti had a gun. A source told Caputo that Miller “heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops.” Miller called Pretti “an assassin” on social media. Vice President J.D. Vance reposted the statement, and Noem used the same language in front of the press.

Trump made it clear tonight that the crisis in Minneapolis is not going to make him stop his attacks on either immigrants or Minnesota Democrats. At a speech in Iowa, he called those arrested by federal agents in Minnesota “hardened, vicious, horrible criminals.” He called out Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar—a frequent target of his—saying of her Somali birthplace: “She comes from a country that’s a disaster…. It’s not even a country. It barely has a government. They’re good at one thing—pirates. But they don’t do that anymore because they get the same treatment from us as the drug dealers get: Boom! Boom! Boom!”

Omar appeared tonight at a town hall in Minneapolis and said: “We must abolish ICE for good. And Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.” As she spoke, a man rushed her and sprayed her with liquid from a syringe before security grabbed him and rushed him out as Omar herself advanced toward the man. “I’m ok,” Omar later posted. “I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win. Grateful to my incredible constituents who rallied behind me. Minnesota strong.”

Former president Joe Biden also weighed in on events in Minneapolis today. This morning, he posted on social media: “What has unfolded in Minneapolis this past month betrays our most basic values as Americans. We are not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street. We are not a nation that allows our citizens to be brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights. We are not a nation that tramples the 4th Amendment and tolerates our neighbors being terrorized. The people of Minnesota have stood strong—helping community members in unimaginable circumstances, speaking out against injustice when they see it, and holding our government accountable to the people. Minnesotans have reminded us all what it is to be American, and they have suffered enough at the hands of this Administration. Violence and terror have no place in the United States of America, especially when it’s our own government targeting American citizens.

“No single person can destroy what America stands for and believes in, not even a President, if we—all of America—stand up and speak out. We know who we are. It’s time to show the world. More importantly, it’s time to show ourselves.

“Now, justice requires full, fair, and transparent investigations into the deaths of the two Americans who lost their lives in the city they called home. Jill and I are sending strength to the families and communities who love Alex Pretti and Renee Good as we all mourn their senseless deaths.”

January 28, 2026 (Wednesday)

Federal agents continue to rain terror on Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other U.S. cities including Portland and Lewiston, Maine. That violence has made it crystal clear that the goal of attacking immigrants is not simply to create a white nation; it is also to terrorize Americans into accepting the domination of MAGA Republicans.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has delivered the Department of Justice into the service of this project. The Department of Justice is not investigating the killings of Renee Good or Alex Pretti and so evidently intended to cover up information about the shooting of Pretti that a judge ordered its officers not to destroy evidence.

On Monday, four Democrats from the House Committee on the Judiciary wrote to Bondi noting that “ederal agents have now gunned down and killed two American citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—in Minneapolis. Videos taken by bystanders who observed and documented these killings leave little doubt that there is no legal or moral justification for these cold-blooded homicides. Yet, under your leadership, the Department of Justice (DOJ)—an agency created in 1870 at the height of post–Civil War Reconstruction to enforce the civil rights of all Americans—actively obstructed any investigation into these killings, and instead of defending the civil rights of Americans, now appears to be covering up the most egregious civil rights offenses and systematically condoning the lawless killing of Americans by agents of the government.”

The four Democratic representatives—Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, and Lucy McBath of Georgia—noted that Bondi’s refusal to investigate the deaths was unprecedented, and demanded the department provide all documents and information related to the killings by February 2, including those showing who ordered the department to abandon the investigations.

On Monday, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, appointed by President George W. Bush, suggested his patience with ICE had run out. After officials apparently ignored his order to permit a detainee to have a bond hearing or release him, he ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, to appear in court on Friday to explain why he wasn’t in contempt of court. On Tuesday, the government released the detainee.

Today Schiltz canceled the Friday hearing but went on to rake ICE over the coals. He identified “96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” and commented, “The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated.”

“This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” Schiltz warned that he would haul Lyons or other government officials into court if they kept ignoring court rulings. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” he wrote.

Malcolm Ferguson of The New Republic reported today that because the federal government won’t hold ICE and Border Patrol agents accountable for their actions, elected prosecutors around the country have launched a group called Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO. This acronym is more commonly used to represent the saying: “F*ck Around and Find Out.”

Today Bondi traveled to Minnesota, not to restore the rule of law but apparently to try to reclaim the narrative of the crackdown in Minneapolis for the administration. In a social media post, she said that federal agents had arrested “16 Minnesota rioters for allegedly assaulting federal law enforcement—people who have been resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents. We expect more arrests to come. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: NOTHING will stop President Trump and this Department of Justice from enforcing the law.”

She then posted images of 11 of those arrested. They are facing the camera, while the federal agents standing next to them have their backs to the camera. Journalist Matt Novak commented that the photos make the “rioters,” looking at the camera, appear to be heroes, while the ICE agents look like cowards, afraid to be seen. “Bondi thinks she’s going to win the propaganda war with this sh*t,” Novak wrote, “but it’s never been more clear that they’re losing.”

The department charged the 16 with assaulting immigration agents, but the judge overseeing the court where they were charged said she was “deeply disturbed” that Bondi had posted the photographs. In the United States of America, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The government should not post their images suggesting otherwise. “This conduct is not something that the court condones,” Judge Dulce J. Foster said.

G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers reported yesterday that federal agents’ killing of Good and Pretti has created a backlash that amounts to a tipping point. The number of American adults who approve of Trump’s presidency has dropped to a new low: 39.2%. Support for his immigration policies has also collapsed, dropping 18 points from its highest point to put it at –10 now. On deportation, Morris says, he is at -12.

Morris notes that these averages may overestimate Trump’s support, as when Americans hear the world immigration now, they don’t think of migrants under an overpass in south Texas, but of an “ICE officer killing a woman in her car and calling her a ‘f*cking bitch’” or a “regular guy being shot 10 times in the back after being tackled to the ground and disarmed.” Morris shows that Americans have moved dramatically toward abolishing ICE: 46% of Americans now support abolishing the agency,, while only 43% oppose getting rid of it.

Today, music legend Bruce Springsteen posted a song called “Streets of Minneapolis.” “I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” he wrote. “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free.”

As the administration loses control over the national narrative, MAGA domination may well depend on stealing the 2026 and 2028 elections. Hours after federal agents killed Alex Pretti last Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota governor Tim Walz blaming Democrats for the violence and suggesting that to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” the governor must give the Department of Justice access to the state’s voter rolls “to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law.”

Tying aggressive immigration enforcement to access to voter rolls is a different justification for the DOJ’s continuing demands for state voter rolls. According to Eileen O’Connor of the Brennan Center for Justice, since May 2025 the Trump administration has demanded complete voter rolls, including sensitive information, from at least 44 states and the District of Columbia. When most refused, the Department of Justice began in September 2025 to sue for them. So far, it has sued 24 of those jurisdictions.

Abby Vesoulis and Ari Berman of Mother Jones note that Minnesota has the highest turnout rate of any state and is often cited as a model for election security. The journalists also note that right-wing activists have sought voter data for decades as part of their quest to prove that noncitizen voting is a huge problem in the country, an accusation that has been repeatedly debunked.

The federal government has no authority to oversee state elections systems. The 1960 Civil Rights Act Bondi cites as authority says that the attorney general may request records “relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.” But it specifies that the DOJ must provide “the basis and the purpose” for the request. Until now, Bondi has claimed that the DOJ wants to make sure lists are maintained correctly, but tying state violence to the voter rolls is an ominous sign.

“Here’s the bottom line…they’re not entitled to that data,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “This isn’t leadership. This is blackmail. This is the way organized crime works. They move into your neighborhood, they start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want. This is not how America is supposed to work, and I’m embarrassed that the administration is pushing in this direction.”

Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed a search warrant at the elections warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential election. It appears President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists remain determined to convince Americans that the election was stolen through voter fraud despite zero evidence of such a theft, five years in which Trump’s claims have been thoroughly debunked, and the dismissal of dozens of court cases.

On January 2, 2021, Trump tried for an hour to persuade Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump, one more than he needed to steal the state’s electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, the presidential candidate the Georgia people had chosen. When Raffensperger refused, Trump suggested Raffensperger could have committed a crime by refusing to do as Trump demanded.

That story has been in the news again lately, as Trump told the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21 that “everybody now knows” the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

Former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on January 22. A grand jury indicted Trump on four counts related to that attempt, but Trump’s reelection to the presidency halted the case. Smith reiterated his conviction that there was enough evidence that Trump committed crimes to convict him.

And now, according to journalist Jen Psaki of The Briefing with Jen Psaki, Trump’s administration has seized the physical ballots from the 2020 election, all tabulator tapes, and all ballot images from the original ballot count, breaking the line of custody and contaminating the files. Crucially, they also seized all voter rolls from Fulton County. “This is a seismic event,” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Psaki. “This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office…. This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections. He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020.” Ossoff warned that Americans must be prepared as Trump tries to take away Americans’ right to choose their elected officials in 2026.

On January 6, 2026, Trump explained to Republican lawmakers: “You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

On January 6, 2026, Trump explained to Republican lawmakers: “You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

> That will make him the best president in history at getting impeached.

Thanks for posting the HCR letters.

:)

anuary 29, 2026 (Thursday)

Public outrage over the violence of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol has given Senate Democrats a powerful lever. Tonight they forced the Republican majority to split new funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) off from five other spending bills that must pass by Friday to keep the government funded. The Department of Homeland Security will be funded separately for just two weeks while the Democrats and Republicans negotiate the conditions of funding DHS.

The funding measure passed the House before Saturday’s shooting of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Seven Democrats joined the Republican majority in backing it to continue funding for other important agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), reasoning that since the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act had provided enough money to fund ICE and Border Patrol through September 30, 2029, there was no point in taking a stand against renewed extra funding.

But popular anger over ICE shootings and the administration’s lies about them made Democrats in the Senate take a stand against the measure. They demanded accountability and reforms to current ICE operations. Republicans initially said they would not split DHS funding from the rest of the package, then proposed handling the excesses of ICE and Border Patrol through an executive order or through a new, different piece of legislation. Such a plan would avoid the necessity of taking the measure back to the House, which is out of session until Monday.

Senate Democrats refused to pass the measure as it stood. They demanded an end to “roving patrols,” with federal agents required to use warrants and coordinate with local and state law enforcement officials. They wanted a uniform code of conduct for agents and independent investigations to enforce that code. And they wanted agents to use body cameras and to stop wearing masks. Senate Republicans wanted a longer period of time to consider these demands, but they settled on two weeks.

The Senate did not vote on the measure tonight. NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur reported that, according to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the holdup is coming from Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham was one of those Republican lawmakers who worked to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, calling Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, for example, and suggesting that he should throw out some of Biden’s ballots in the state. His phone records on and around January 6, 2021, were among those examined by special counsel Jack Smith’s team. Now, according to Kapur, he wants the Senate to add back into the funding package necessary to prevent a government shutdown a measure that would let senators whose records were seized sue the government for $500,000.

The House is out of session until Monday, and the fate of the measure in that chamber is not clear. House Democrats have said they will not support the measure without significant concessions and will leave the Republicans to pass the measure on their own. But the Republican majority has fallen to two seats and is expected to fall by another seat over the weekend as a special election in Texas is expected to add another Democrat to the House.

Meanwhile, footage circulated today of a woman in Minnesota who left her home to warm the car for her kids and got taken by federal agents. The video shows her calling someone to look after her children, who were left alone in the house.

In the last week, since federal agents shot Pretti, former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all spoken out to condemn his killing and the violence of federal agents as well as the administration’s lies. They have warned that the nation’s core values are under assault and urged Trump officials to change course, while also calling on Americans to defend those core values.

The criticism of all the living Democratic presidents, along with his disastrous performance in Davos, Switzerland, last week and his plummeting numbers—as well as the fact the American people have not forgotten that the administration is continuing to break the law by refusing to release the Epstein files—appears to have sent Trump back to the comfort of older grievances. Today he hit not only his Big Lie but also his complaints about the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, who has been strangely invisible now for months, resurfaced yesterday when the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election from a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia.

The role of the DNI is to coordinate information from various intelligence agencies to make sure the president has good intelligence for making national security decisions, but Josh Dawsey, Dustin Volz, and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Gabbard has been moved off of national security intelligence to chase down Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him, focusing on the idea that a foreign government was involved in such a theft. Two officials told the Wall Street Journal reporters that Gabbard’s report is designed to bolster executive orders about voting before the midterm elections.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort.” In reality, Trump’s claims about the 2020 election have been thoroughly debunked, and dozens of court cases his followers launched have been dismissed. In contrast, a grand jury actually indicted Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election.

Yesterday, Trump’s account amplified a post claiming that Italian officials used military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines in an operation coordinated by China “all to install Biden as a puppet.”

Gabbard is also trying to prove that former president Barack Obama and his staff were behind the accusation that Trump’s campaign worked with Russian operatives in 2016, although this conspiracy theory has no evidence at all and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously agreed that Russian operatives had meddled in the election to help Trump.

Trump’s social media account posted, under emojis of flashing red lights: “BREAKING: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has just released HUNDREDS OF BOMBSHELL RUSSIAGATE DOCUMENTS proving that Barack Obama personally ordered CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence on President Trump and was actively ‘working with the enemy’ to undermine and erode Americans’ confidence in our democracy and President Trump’s LANDSLIDE 2016 VICTORY. This was a coup attempt by Barack Hussein Obama and his cronies… As Jesse Watters said ‘Whatever happens to these guys is not revenge… it’s accountability. And it’s time for people to pay the price.’ ARREST OBAMA NOW!”

Today President Donald J. Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, saying the government agency was responsible for an IRS contractor’s having leaked some of Trump’s tax documents to the press. Presidential candidates and presidents routinely release their tax documents to the public, but Trump has consistently refused to do so. The leaked documents showed that Trump paid no income tax to the U.S. for fifteen out of twenty years while paying almost $200,000 in taxes to China.

The lawsuit says that the leak caused the Trump family “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump.”

This lawsuit is different from the one seeking $230 million from the government for the FBI search of his residence at Mar-a-Lago to find retained classified documents and the investigation of the relationship between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Brad Heath, who covers crime, justice, and investigations for Reuters, explained: “President Trump has filed a lawsuit against the IRS, in which he demands that the IRS, which he as president controls, pay him $10 billion.” Bluesky user Micah made the point more clearly: “the president of the united states should not be allowed to personally loot the treasury to the sum of ten billion dollars and that this is not resulting in immediate, unanimous impeachment is a dramatic indictment of what has become of our political system.”

Thanks Neo. I checked earlier and it hadn’t been put up yet.

January 30, 2026 (Friday)

As the American people continue to express their fury over the violence of federal agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere, officials from the Trump administration today tried to shift the public narrative to shore up their softening base and silence their opponents.

Late last night, more than two dozen federal agents took independent journalist Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, into custody, charging him with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which criminalizes people who move past peaceful protests to threaten someone or obstruct their access to a reproductive health clinic or “place of religious worship.”

That law has usually been used to prosecute antiabortion activists who block reproductive health clinics. As soon as he took office in 2025, Trump praised dozens of right-wing protesters who had been convicted of violating the FACE Act when they committed acts of violence at women’s healthcare clinics.

Lemon is also charged with conspiring to hurt the exercise of rights, a law originally passed after the Civil War to combat Ku Klux Klan members who were trying to force Black Americans back into a form of quasi-slavery.

Lemon filmed protesters who disrupted a church service in Minneapolis on Sunday, January 18. Kiera Butler of Mother Jones reports the ultra-conservative white nationalist church has ties to the Trump administration. One of the church pastors, David Easterwood, is an official from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Jarrett Ley and Samuel Oakford of the Washington Post reviewed the video Lemon filmed at the church protest. They wrote that the video shows that Lemon identified himself as a journalist and followed protesters into the church. Inside for about 45 minutes, he interviewed four parishioners and five protesters. Eight of those nine exchanges appeared calm. The video does not show Lemon participating in the chants with which the protesters disrupted the service. A pastor asked Lemon to leave, and seven minutes later he exited the church.

Federal prosecutors tried to charge Lemon, his producer, and six others shortly after the protest, but a magistrate judge refused a warrant for Lemon and his producer, saying prosecutors had not shown evidence that would justify the arrests. The administration then asked a federal judge to overturn the magistrate judge’s decision. When he, too, refused, calling the request “unprecedented,” the administration rushed the case to the Eighth Circuit. It, too, refused.

At that point, it appears the administration went to a federal grand jury to indict Lemon.

Officials also arrested independent journalist Georgia Fort of Minnesota, along with two participants in the protest: Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy.

The arrests of Lemon and Fort are windows into the deep concern of administration officials about how dramatically Americans have turned against ICE and the Trump administration. At its most basic level, the attack on two independent journalists is undoubtedly designed to intimidate other independent news producers from covering the Trump administration, particularly the violence of ICE and Border Patrol agents.

It is a dramatic assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the government from curtailing the freedom of the press.

It is also a transparent attempt to change the popular narrative. The killing of two white American citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—by federal agents hammered home to white Americans that they are as much at risk from the authoritarian system Trump is building as are Black Americans and people of color who are not citizens. With that realization—especially when administration officials, including Trump, blamed Pretti’s killing on the fact he carried a gun, although he did not use it—solidarity against the administration has been building, with white Americans often leading the way.

All four of the people arrested in the past 24 hours are Black. This morning, the official social media account of the White House posted a picture of Lemon with the caption: “When life gives you lemons…” and an emoji of chains, evoking the chains of enslavement.

In case this appeal to the MAGA base wasn’t clear enough, Attorney General Pam Bondi took to social media to highlight the religious claim behind this profound attack on the freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment. “Make no mistake,” she said. “Under President Trump’s leadership and this administration, you have the right to worship freely and safely. And if I haven’t been clear already, if you violate that sacred right, we are coming after you.”

The administration is appealing to the MAGA racist and Christian nationalist base by demonstrating that it is willing to violate the Constitution to impose MAGA’s ideology on the nation. But it is also apparently trying to signal to white American citizens that they should think they are safe from an authoritarian administration: its top victims remain Black Americans and people of color.

Lemon will be pleading not guilty. After appearing in court Friday, he told reporters: “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now…. I will not be silenced. I look forward to my day in court.”

The growing concerns of administration officials that they have lost control of the narrative over ICE and federal authority might have been behind their willingness to drop what they say is the last of the Epstein files they will be releasing. Congress passed a law requiring the full disclosure of those files by December 19, but until today, the Department of Justice had released less than 1% of them. Today Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department is continuing to withhold nearly 3 million pages of documents because they contain child sexual abuse material and the department has an obligation to protect victims’ rights. He said the department is withholding another 200,000 pages because of legal privileges.

“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche told reporters.

For all the talk of protecting the personal information about Epstein’s victims, the new files released the names and identifying information of a number of survivors, including some who have not previously been associated with the Epstein operation. Twenty Epstein survivors released a statement saying: “This latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files is being sold as transparency, but what it actually does is expose survivors. As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy. This is a betrayal of the very people this process is supposed to serve.”

Journalists are scrutinizing the new material and have already found that billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who said last year that he and his wife had been so repulsed by Epstein that they cut ties with him around 2005, in fact visited with him in 2012, four years after Epstein’s first conviction of procuring a child for prostitution, and continued to correspond with him until at least 2018.

Other administration figures also show up in the files. First Lady Melania Trump wrote a friendly email to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. Before she married Trump and when Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend, Melania Knauss wrote to compliment Maxwell on a picture of her in a New York Magazine profile of Epstein. Knauss added: “I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY. Have a great time!” She signed the email: “Love, Melania.”

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates appears in the files. Elon Musk appears repeatedly in the files with messages suggesting he was a big fan of Epstein’s parties. Trump, too, appears frequently in the files, but a spreadsheet listing accusations against him and other prominent people disappeared shortly after it appeared today.

The lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), wrote to Blanche today formally requesting access to the unredacted Epstein files as soon as possible. Khanna told Jenna Sundel of Newsweek: “The said it identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5 million after review and redactions. This raises questions as to why the rest are being withheld.”

Today Trump announced plans for a massive automobile race into downtown Washington, “the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.,” in August as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer. In an executive order, he called the proposed race a tribute to INDYCAR racing and said the race would “showcase the majesty of our great city as drivers navigate a track around our iconic national monuments in celebration of America’s 250th birthday.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said: “To think, 190 miles an hour down Pennsylvania Avenue—this is going to be wild.”

The attempt to change the narrative around ICE does not appear to have been effective, at least so far. Today the Senate passed the appropriations bills to fund the government in 2026 with funding for the Department of Homeland Security pulled out for longer discussion. Now it heads to the House.

In the Senate, two Republicans joined all the Senate Democrats to vote in favor of an amendment proposed by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to repeal the $75 billion funding increase for ICE that Republicans included in their July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Sanders proposed using those savings to reverse the cuts to Medicaid that were also in that law. The amendment failed by a vote of 49 to 51, but that it got so many votes shows that senators are feeling the pressure over ICE.

“As we speak, ICE agents are shooting American citizens in cold blood, breaking down doors to arrest people, and sending 5-year-olds to detention centers, all in clear violation of our Constitution,” Sanders said. “Instead of funding Trump’s domestic army, we should instead use that money to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing the health care they desperately need by investing in Medicaid.”

Across the nation today, people turned out into the streets in a scheduled nationwide protest. CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz watched the tens of thousands of people protesting in Minneapolis today and said: “I’ve covered many protests…and I have to tell you, I’ve not seen a crowd like this before. I mean, it is eight degrees out here. Eight degrees, it feels like five, it is freezing, but nothing, nothing is stopping these people….”