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Trump Takes His American Decline Tour to Davos - 2026-01-22T00:06:04Z

Have you seen Laurence Olivier in the 1960 film The Entertainer? Olivier plays a seedy music-hall performer named Archie Rice. The film is a specimen of England’s gritty “kitchen sink” realism from the 1950s, but it’s also an allegory in which Archie represents a declining postwar Britain. Archie loses his son—killed at the Franco-British rout at Suez—as well as his elderly father, formerly a more successful music-hall star, who, moments before a planned joint performance to bolster Archie’s sagging career, dies in the wings. “Better to be a has-been,” Archie’s wife Phoebe observes sadly, “than a never-was.”

Trump’s Davos speech (video; transcript) reminded me of The Entertainer’s haunting final scene. In a mostly empty theater Archie sings a few bars of his theme song, “Why Should I Care?”:

If they see that you’re blue

They’ll look down on you

So why oh why should I …

Archie stops, thanks the audience for coming, then says with a downward swipe of the hand: “Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night. I’ll come and see you.”

Trump’s supporters (most recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson) often advise that we take Trump “seriously, not literally”—a condescending formulation coined in 2016 by the conservative writer Selena Zito. Listen to the music, not the words. I tried to do this on Wednesday morning while watching Trump’s Davos speech. Like most of his recent public appearances, it was an endless stream-of-consciousness recitation of preposterous lies, childish boasts, and angry insults, most of which we’ve heard before. The words said: I make America mighty, you Europeans make yourselves weak, plus you are so goddamned ungrateful, shame on you. The music said: I’m losing my wits, I’m losing my power, and I sort of know it, but:

If they see that you’re blue

They’ll walk out on you

So why oh why should I

Bother to care.

Until now, Trump’s political story has been the pride that goeth before the fall, except the fall keeps getting delayed. To render a different comparison from the entertainment world: Trump is like a popular streaming TV series that delivered a riveting first couple of seasons, but then alienated the critics and more discriminating viewers by delaying the climax again and again with wildly implausible plot twists. The logical endpoint to the story was January 6, 2021, but the producers got greedy and gave Trump a not-remotely-believable second term in which he threatens to invade Greenland and throw the Federal Reserve chairman in prison. Trump’s show runner is out of ideas; the Greenland story arc, for instance, is an obvious steal from Borgen’s bleak final season.

On stage at Davos, however, Trump looked like he might be entering his final season, and that what’s left of Trump’s brain is starting to realize it. Consider:

  • In the speech, Trump said “I won’t use force” to acquire Greenland. This was a sign of weakness. To be clear: It isn’t weak to say America won’t invade Greenland. It’s weak (and foolish) to suggest repeatedly that America will invade Greenland, and then back down. (Most foolish of all, of course, and disastrous for NATO, would be for Trump to follow through on his threat and invade Greenland, which he may still do because his word has never exactly been his bond.)
  • After the speech, Trump backed away from his threat to slap 10 percent tariffs on eight Western European countries, set to rise to 25 percent in June, for opposing the United States’s acquisition of Greenland. This is another sign of weakness, following the logic described above. (And as explained above, he may change his mind on this as well.)
  • In the speech, Trump said the word “tariff” 16 times. But the Supreme Court is expected to render Trump’s insta-tariffs, which effectively give Trump power of the purse, null and void (though now probably not until late February at the earliest).
  • During the speech, Trump’s solicitor general argued before the Supreme Court that Trump should be permitted to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook (and, by implication, Fed chair Jerome Powell). It didn’t go well. Reading between the lines, the conservative justices are annoyed with Trump for complicating their efforts to overturn Humphrey’s Executor (1935), which protects independent agencies from presidential interference. They’d rather not have to explain why they’d maintain independence for the Fed but not for other independent agencies. (The answer is that they disdain the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission as nanny-statism but respect the Fed because it protects their 401ks). Now they may have to.
  • Before the speech, Trump’s administration suffered another humiliating defeat when two federal judges effectively removed Lindsey Halligan from her job as United States Attorney. Halligan was installed to manufacture indictments against two perceived Trump enemies, James Comey and Letitia James. The indictments were both thrown out by judges, and two subsequent attempts to indict James failed to persuade grand jurors.
  • In the speech, Trump didn’t mention the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, which Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, urged Trump for months to pursue. With every passing day it becomes clearer that the Justice Department has zero basis to investigate Powell. In his speech, Trump didn’t mention the investigation; instead, he mocked the Fed chair as “Too-Late Powell.” He also acknowledged with Archie-Rice-like bitterness that whoever he names to succeed Powell will “change once they get the job”:

You know, they’re saying everything I want to hear. And then they get the job. They’re locked in for six years. They get the job. And all of a sudden, let’s raise rates a little bit. I call them. “Sir, we’d rather not talk about this.” It’s amazing how people change once they have the job. It’s too bad. Sort of disloyalty, but they got to do what they think is right.

  • In the speech, Trump said, about Venezuela, “Every major oil company is coming in with us. It’s amazing. It’s a beautiful thing to see.” This being Davos, every person in that room knew Trump was lying. Except for Chevron, which is already in Venezuela, major oil companies aren’t especially interested in the place. Exxon Mobil Chair Darren Woods angered Trump at a White House meeting by calling the country “uninvestable.” Woods said further: “Significant changes have to be made to those commercial frameworks, the legal system, there has to be durable investment protections, and there has to be a change to the hydrocarbon laws in the country.” But this is exactly the sort of nation-building for which Trump has no appetite. He won’t even unseat the Chavista government!
  • Before the speech, Trump was upstaged by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (video; transcript). This, and not Trump’s rambling oration, is the speech people will remember from Davos. It was a powerful statement of America’s loss of influence under Trump. “For decades,” said Carney, “countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.” “We knew,” Carney continued, that “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.” But “this fiction was useful” because American hegemony “helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” Now, Carney said:

This bargain no longer works…. Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

This wasn’t just rhetoric. Carney explained that Canada has initiated a “strategic partnership with the EU,” including on defense procurement, and has entered into new partnerships with China, Qatar, India, ASEAN, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mercosur. “Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu… We know the old order isn’t coming back [italics mine].” Trump ended it forever.

Trump replied in his own speech that Carney “wasn’t so grateful,” a remarkable statement given that a year ago Trump was threatening to annex Canada much as he’s now threatening to annex Greenland. “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” Here Trump was not unlike Archie Rice answering the public’s indifference by angrily threatening to stalk his audience to their place of work. But Trump didn’t dispute Carney’s assertion that he, Trump, has trashed America’s old, rules-based international order, and that it isn’t coming back. Like most sufferers of malignant narcissism, Trump is constitutionally incapable of recognizing that relationships, both interpersonal and international, are a two-way street. Gratitude can’t be extorted.

The United States is being ushered off the international stage. History will remember that as Trump’s most significant contribution. Trump won’t acknowledge that his influence is fading because if they see that you’re through they’ll walk out on you. And it seems to me that, like Archie Rice, he’s starting not to care that his curtain is ringing down.

The Subtext of Trump’s Batshit Speech in Davos - 2026-01-21T23:36:37Z

It feels odd to describe a speech as “good news” when it involves the president of the United States rambling incessantly and threatening America’s European allies. But, taken one way, Donald Trump’s stark raving mad speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday was good news.

A day earlier, the stock markets had tumbled, for two related reasons. One was that Trump continued to escalate his threats to seize Greenland by military force, a move that would almost certainly mean the end of the NATO alliance. The second was that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—whose country has long been one of America’s closest allies, if not its closest—gave a rousing speech at Davos about the need for a new global order without the U.S. as its leader.

“I will talk today about the breaking of the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraint,” he said. “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” He later added, “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

This was a potential inflection point. The United States was at risk of losing its hegemonic position in the West, for what may be the dumbest imaginable reason: Trump wants Greenland because it looks very big on a map, and perhaps because the U.S. once temporarily protected it.

Trump’s speech was demented. There were several moments when he talked up American military supremacy in a way that was clearly meant to intimidate those who stood between him and the frozen Danish territory in the North Atlantic. But the speech also was the beginning of a walkback that would continue throughout the day. Trump may have saber-rattled, reminding Europe of America’s big battleships and superior armed forces, but he also pledged not to use the American military to attack Greenland.

“We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that,” he said. “OK, now everyone’s saying, ‘Oh good.’ That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”

He was right: That was the biggest statement, at least as far as the major news organizations were concerned, as they blasted out breaking-news alerts declaring that Trump promised not to take Greenland by military force—though generally failed to acknowledge the very long history of Trump breaking his supposed promises.

Anyway, later in the day, Trump took an even bigger step back, releasing a statement that more or less said he was forgetting about acquiring the island for the time being and dropping his threat to slap 10 percent tariffs on Europe in retaliation for opposing his demands for Greenland.

“Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region,” he posted on Truth Social. “This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations. Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the Tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st. Additional discussions are being held concerning The Golden Dome as it pertains to Greenland.”

The stock markets stabilized. Those headlines about Trump promising not to invade Greenland, which understandably irked people given the missing context, seemed to have gotten it right. Yes, the speech was crazy. But it was a crazy speech that marked the start of our crazy president walking back one of his many crazy missteps—for now.

As far as wind-downs go, few have been more Trumpian. He mocked NATO repeatedly and told the visiting dignitaries that they would be “speaking German” if it wasn’t for the United States. (For all the video evidence of Trump’s cognitive decline, the best evidence comes in moments like these—he just isn’t as clever as he was five, or especially 10, years ago.) He still huffed and puffed, talking up the U.S. military in a way that was obviously meant to be intimidating: I’m ruling out invading Greenland now, but if I didn’t, you’d be in real trouble.

“We want a piece of ice for world protection and they won’t give it,” Trump whined later in his speech on Wednesday. “We’ve never asked for anything else … so they have a choice: You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no—and we will remember.”

For Trump, losing always requires these bombastic efforts, which are seemingly deployed only to protect his own frail psychology. But make no mistake, Trump backed down because he had to. Though investors have been unfazed by Trump’s belligerence for months, they recognized that an invasion of Greenland—a rather serious and, after the Venezuela invasion, believable threat—would destroy the current international order, causing economic devastation. Trump’s speech was largely aimed at these investors, who are the people who really shackled him. Which is why he was so hostile toward everyone else.

To put it in Axios-ese: Trump touched the hot stove and got burned. But that analogy only goes so far. Children learn from their burns; Trump never does. His face-saving Truth Social statement was by no means definitive. Whether this “future deal” comes to pass is anyone’s guess. But if it does, it will certainly not involve the U.S. owning Greenland, which means this issue will likely flare up again. (For the record, it already did once before, when Trump began his second term by declaring that acquiring Greenland was one of his primary goals.)

This is obviously not a tenable way to conduct American foreign policy, but it’s how America conducts foreign policy under Trump. There’s no changing it. Our allies, meanwhile, are living in the world Carney outlined a day earlier. “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it,” he said. “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” Their emerging strategy seems to be to band together and concoct ways to mollify the temperamental nincompoop who’s running America.

ICE Launches Crackdown in Maine Called “Operation Catch of the Day” - 2026-01-21T20:52:27Z

The Department of Homeland Security is crudely referring to its newest immigration crackdown in Maine as “Operation Catch of the Day,” as it prepares to hunt and catch immigrants like lobsters.

“These masked men with no regard for the rule of law are causing long-term damage to our state and to our country,” Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline said on Wednesday. “Lewiston stands for the dignity of all people who call Maine home.”

Maine’s two biggest cities, Portland and Lewiston, have large Somali populations, and were already on edge as the Trump administration continued its racist targeting of the group. The operation’s very name speaks to the inhumanity with which these agents treat people.

DHS announced the operation began with a series of arrests on Tuesday. It’s not clear how long ICE agents will be stationed in Maine, or if Border Patrol agents currently in Minneapolis will head to Maine next.

“ICE has been operating in Maine for a while. But now they’re threatening to step up their brutality, and bring what we saw in Minneapolis to our state,” Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner said on X last week, before offering strategies for community members to combat aggressive immigration agents. “We will not let masked agents come to Maine and terrorize our communities. We will not be intimidated. This is our home.”

CBP Chief and His Goons Shamed Out of Minnesota Gas Station - 2026-01-21T20:39:58Z

Border Patrol is not welcome in Minneapolis’s streets, its schools, or its gas stations.

A crowd of anti-ICE protesters stormed federal agents at a Speedway gas station on Nicollet Avenue Wednesday, throwing out Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino alongside his masked subordinates.

Videos captured by independent local journalist Amanda Moore showed dozens of Minneapolitans photographing and chanting at the agents, yelling at them to “get out.”

“Get in your fucking car and go,” one woman can be heard screaming in Moore’s footage. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“This isn’t Christian, this isn’t American. This is fascism,” another man shouts.

In another clip captured by Moore, Bovino appeared to be icily booted from the Speedway’s convenience store, with a man following steps behind him.

“ICE does not belong on this property at all, we do not support ICE,” the man said. “Get off our property. Bye, bye, bye.”

Bovino then walked into a huddle of people—several of which appeared to be Border Patrol agents—behind a gas pump and a large, tan SUV. The crowd seemingly trapped a sedan at the private establishment, forcing the driver to step out of his vehicle to demand they “get the fuck out of my way.”

After the driver repeated himself several times, an agent took it upon himself to shuffle his confederates away from the gas station’s thruway.

“Get out of my city,” the driver said as he drove off.

Mass protests have kicked off in Minnesota since ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen, on January 7. Since then, federal officers have ripped people from their homes and families, pulled over school buses, attacked teachers and students at a Minneapolis high school, and even clashed with local law enforcement.

In an attempt to defend their own city from the state-sponsored violence, some residents have opted to openly carry their firearms through the city, brandishing their Second Amendment right to bear arms. Locals have formed neighborhood watches to follow ICE vehicles, banging pots and pans and screaming to alert others when agents enter their residential neighborhoods. The movement has extended beyond picketed marches and morphed into something far more direct—apparently capable of hunting down Bovino and his underlings before forcing them out of the area.

Local politicians—including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—have advised ICE and Border Patrol to exit their cities and state, arguing that the federal agents have done more harm than good. In 2025, before Good’s death, the agency killed 32 people—it’s deadliest year in more than two decades.

But rather than heed the warning, the Trump administration has opted to up the ante, issuing grand jury subpoenas to Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, while placing 1,500 active-duty troops on standby for a potential invasion of Minnesota. The Minnesota National Guard has already advised its members to wear hi-vis reflective vests—rather than military camouflage—in order to keep them safe from the fury of local residents who could mistake them for federal agents.

Trump Appears to Change His Mind on Greenland After EU Threat - 2026-01-21T20:10:21Z

Donald Trump is now claiming that the “framework of a future deal” has been reached on Greenland and “the entire Arctic region.”

The president posted on Truth Social Wednesday afternoon that he had a very productive meeting with the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As a result, he wrote, a possible “solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations. Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the Tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st.”

Truth Social screenshot @realDonaldTrump Based upon a very productive meeting that I have had with the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, we have formed the framework of 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. Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the Tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st. Additional discussions are being held concerning The Golden Dome as it pertains to Greenland. Further information will be made available as discussions progress. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and various others, as needed, will be responsible for the negotiations — They will report directly to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Jan 21, 2026, 2:27 PM

Last week, Trump had threatened to impose tariffs against European countries that opposed his plan to annex Greenland. He may have been persuaded otherwise after European pension funds began divesting from U.S. Treasuries and the European Parliament suspended a possible trade deal with the U.S. Wednesday over his threats.

Despite Trump’s post Wednesday, his dream of annexing Greenland still seems unlikely, given that Rutte and NATO do not control the territory, Denmark does. Both the elected leadership of Denmark and Greenland have said any discussions about Greenland’s future is up to them, not the United States, and that the island is not for sale.

Trump also wrote that “Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and various others, as needed, will be responsible for the negotiations—They will report directly to me.” It’s a rather large question mark as to what will actually be the subject of the negotiations.

Vance is not well thought of by European leaders, and has insulted them on several occasions. A meeting between Vance, Rubio, and the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark in the White House last week was over very quickly, giving the impression that it didn’t go well, especially considering NATO countries deployed troops to Greenland the next day. That does not bode well for these new negotiations.

Leavitt’s Response to Trump Greenland/Iceland Slip Will Blow Your Mind - 2026-01-21T20:09:28Z

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wants to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t mix up Greenland and Iceland—but he did. Multiple times.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos Wednesday, Trump repeatedly and erroneously mixed up Greenland with Iceland, a completely separate landmass and independent nation. The gaffe sparked concern that Trump, who has been showing increasing signs of cognitive decline, had no idea what country he was even demanding to own.

Once again demonstrating her fierce commitment to truth-telling, Leavitt tried to defend the president by lying about something that everyone heard.

“President Trump appeared to mix up Greenland and Iceland around three times,” NewsNation’s Libbey Dean wrote on X after the speech.

“No he didn’t, Libby,” Leavitt responded. “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is. You’re the only one mixing anything up here.”

She included an image of Greenland, which appeared to be a large mass of ice. Regardless of what was written in Trump’s prepared remarks, the president claimed the territory was “Iceland” multiple times—another place entirely.

Watch what Trump said for yourself:

Ted Cruz Hasn’t Learned His Lesson on Fleeing Texas’s Cold Weather - 2026-01-21T19:48:23Z

Senator Ted Cruz appears to be leaving Texas yet again ahead of another major winter storm.

The third-term lawmaker was photographed boarding a flight to Laguna Beach, California, Tuesday, sparking concerns online that the lawmaker’s controversial history of ditching his constituents (and dog) amid bad weather was morphing into an inevitable bad habit.

Cruz’s office told Houston Public Media Wednesday, when the photo took off on social media, that he left on a work trip planned several weeks ago, and that he would be back in Texas before the storm arrived.

“Senator Cruz is currently on pre-planned work travel that was scheduled weeks in advance,” a spokesperson for Cruz said. “He will be back in Texas before the storm is projected to hit.”

Texas is gearing up for another potentially disastrous ice storm this week that is expected to batter the north and central regions of the state. Governor Greg Abbott preemptively declared a state of emergency to handle the imminent freeze, prompting state agencies to actively monitor Texas’s electrical grid and oil supplies.

When asked to confirm if Cruz had left for Laguna Beach, his spokesperson said: “You have the tweet with the pic.”

The scene is remarkably reminiscent of one of Cruz’s worst moments in 2021, when he bailed on his community—and his dog—to fly to Cancun during a historic winter storm that crashed Texas’s power grid, leaving millions without heat or electricity for several days.

But that wasn’t the only time Cruz was missing in action during a Lone Star State emergency. Last July, when floods killed at least 135 people in central Texas, Cruz was busy vacationing in Greece. He caught a flight back two days later, in what his office said was the “first flight home.”

Trump Prepares to Deploy Troops to Minnesota to Snuff Out ICE Protests - 2026-01-21T19:30:54Z

The Trump administration is ordering active-duty military police soldiers to be ready to deploy to Minneapolis.

MS NOW, citing three unnamed sources, reports that an Army military police brigade unit stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was issued “prepare to deploy” orders Tuesday. At least a few hundred soldiers are now getting ready to potentially go to the city, which has been rocked by violence from federal agents following the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer.

“We have nothing to announce at this time, and any tip about this is pre-decisional,” a Department of Defense official told MS NOW.

This latest order comes after news of another deployment from Friday. Two battalions of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, stationed in Alaska and specially trained to operate in winter weather, were also issued orders to be ready to deploy. There are at least 500 soldiers in a battalion.

Last summer, the Trump administration deployed 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, where they mostly guarded federal buildings, including an immigration detention center. That deployment was found to be illegal in federal court. If soldiers are deployed to Minneapolis, they would have to refrain from enforcing the law against civilians, otherwise they would be violating the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, as Trump was found to have done in Los Angeles.

President Trump has been simultaneously threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and claiming that he doesn’t need to do so in order to use federal troops to put down what he sees as a “rebellion.” Either way, not only is he threatening the Constitution and the stability of the U.S., but he would also be following the example of a dictator, which, oddly enough, he just said he wants to be.

Trump Says “Sometimes You Need a Dictator” After Alarming Davos Speech - 2026-01-21T19:10:28Z

President Trump, who has a lengthy résumé of authoritarian tendencies, thinks that sometimes “you need a dictator.”

“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said on Wednesday, speaking of the long-winded, indignant, and incredibly boring address he gave earlier that day at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case.… It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”

This kind of talk—which Trump has all but normalized—sheds further light on his aggressive, antagonistic approach to diplomacy, especially after he spent the morning threatening Europe, Canada, Greenland, and, bizarrely, Iceland.

“As I [have] always said, he is at his most honest when he is at his most malevolent and depraved,” George Conway commented on X.

Abigail Spanberger’s First Move as Virginia Gov. Was a Masterstroke - 2026-01-21T18:26:28Z

Even before taking office last Saturday, new Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, demanded and received the resignations of several of her Republican predecessor Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to the board that oversees the University of Virginia. In a similar vein, the state’s new attorney general, Democrat Jay Jones, forced out legal counsels at George Mason University and the Virginia Military Institute who were appointed by his Republican predecessor.

Job changes at state colleges aren’t usually national news. But what Spanberger and Virginia Democrats are doing matters well beyond the Old Dominion. Republicans like President Trump and Youngkin keep appointing right-wing partisans to traditionally apolitical roles like university board member and FBI director. These appointments are designed to turn key nonpartisan institutions into apparatuses for the Republican Party.

Democrats can’t leave these people in place. The next Democratic president must follow Spanberger’s and Jones’s examples and fire unqualified hacks that Trump has put into critical nonpartisan positions, particularly if the president eventually replaces Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with someone who will do the GOP’s bidding even if it doesn’t make economic sense. (Powell’s term ends in May.)

Republican leaders no longer believe in nonpartisan institutions or nonpartisan appointees chosen for their expertise. So many GOP appointees don’t believe in the true missions of the institutions that they are being put in charge of and aren’t qualified to lead them—and therefore must be removed from these jobs as quickly as possible.

What’s happened over the last year at the University of Virginia is one of the clearest examples of the GOP’s destructive plans for nonpartisan institutions, and something Spanberger had to address. Conservatives have long viewed elite colleges like UVA as too liberal. They became enraged over the last few years as UVA, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson, incorporated more information about Jefferson’s slaveholding into student-led university tours. Youngkin, elected in 2021, had been aggressively adding superconservative figures with little education policy experience to the boards at UVA and other public universities in the state.

With Trump in office, those board members joined with Trump appointees at the Department of Justice and the Youngkin administration to shift the university right. Trump appointees threatened to cut federal funding from UVA unless it ended diversity and inclusion programs and made other changes: the same playbook they used against schools across the country. The conservative board members at UVA quickly implemented these changes, which were in line with what they and the governor wanted anyway. So UVA president James Ryan was ousted, supposedly for being too pro-diversity; transgender women were banned from university sports; basically any mention of ethnicity or race at the university was eliminated. The Youngkin appointees then rushed to appoint a new president, even after Spanberger had won the election and it was clear she didn’t share Youngkin’s vision for the university.

And even without any Trump involvement, the UVA board shut down the tours that were insufficiently pro-Jefferson. How to discuss Jefferson, diversity and equity programs, and much of what a university does and stands for is connected to broader political issues. There is no way to completely remove ideological considerations from the operations of a huge college. But what’s happened over the last year is an ideological and partisan takeover of the school. Faculty and university administrators skilled in navigating complicated issues on campus had their authority usurped by Youngkin, his political cronies, and Trump appointees in Washington. That’s not how a university or any other institution should be run.

But that’s Republican governance in 2026—particularly in Washington. Kash Patel is woefully lacking in experience to run the FBI and uses the bureau’s resources to investigate Trump’s enemies, exonerate the president’s friends, and drive the director’s girlfriend’s friends home from parties. At the Kennedy Center, Trump replaced Deborah Rutter, who had run orchestras in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago, with Richard Grenell, a Trump hatchet man with little experience in the arts. After failed U.S. Senate and gubernatorial runs, Kari Lake is running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, sidelining people with real experience in journalism abroad.

I’m emphasizing roles that are formally presidential appointments but usually not tied to the election cycle or considered political and partisan assignments like Cabinet secretaries. Christopher Wray was scheduled to run the FBI till 2027, but resigned from his 10-year term early because Trump planned to replace him with Patel. Rutter had served under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden.

Trump has also fired the heads of the National Security Agency and Joint Chiefs of Staff after unusually short tenures to install his own choices. Trump has tried to force Powell to quit early, leading to the totally unprecedented move of the sitting Fed chair publicly describing how the administration was threatening him with criminal charges. All indications are that Trump will try to use the appointment of a new Fed chair as a way to pick a person with total fealty to the president, not what’s best for the U.S. economy.

Anyone picked by Trump for one of these jobs must be considered suspect. Some, like Patel, are clearly unqualified. A Trump appointee to run the Fed, no matter how credentialed, will almost certainly have promised not to run that agency in an objective way as a condition of being chosen by Trump.

So the next Democratic president will need to clean house. I would prefer that the FBI director, Fed chair, and head of the NSA and other such jobs not be tied to presidential election cycles. But the cat is out of the bag now. Trump has appointed very partisan, unqualified, super-right-wing people all over the government. Getting rid of them is the only path to restoring nonpartisan institutions with nonpartisan, deeply credentialed people in top positions.

Spanberger and Virginia Democrats are providing a model. Her new appointees for Virginia college boards aren’t hyperpartisan crazies. They even include some Republicans (although not the MAGA kind). And it’s great to see that Spanberger seems to understand that being anti-MAGA is critical right now, even for a moderate Democrat like herself who generally prefers bipartisanship over fighting. In addition to the education changes, among Spanberger’s first moves was rescinding a Youngkin executive order requiring Virginia law enforcement agencies to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She has also supported a push by Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature for a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to gerrymander its U.S. House districts, to balance out what Republicans are doing in Texas and other states.

Spanberger’s only been governor for a week, so we shouldn’t make too much of her early moves. But what she and Jones did on education policy needs to be the standard for Democrats across the country. MAGA Republicans will destroy any institution that doesn’t advance MAGA values. You can either leave them in place and let them destroy institutions or remove them, save the institutions, and deal with bad-faith criticism that you are being partisan and political. There is no safe third option. Spanberger made the tough, right choice—and other Democrats should follow her example.

Trump Blurts Out Real Reason for Insurrection Act Threat—and It’s Dark - 2026-01-21T17:53:45Z

Do President Trump’s advisers actively want him to act like a dictator? At the very least, there’s plainly a deep split inside Trumpworld on this question. As deranged as it seems, one faction clearly believes Trump absolutely should project unconstrained tyrannical power, to frighten ordinary voters and institutions into compliance, while another faction thinks acting like a Mad King risks a huge electoral rebuke and, by extension, that normal political patterns still apply.

You can see this tension in Trump’s ugly new comments about invoking the Insurrection Act, which would empower him to use the military for domestic law enforcement. Lately he’s suggested that he might not invoke it after all. And in an interview flagged by Aaron Rupar, Trump said this again.

But this time, Trump added an asterisk:

Asked if he sees the act as “necessary,” Trump said: “I don’t think it is yet. It might be at some point.” Trump added that other presidents have invoked it, and said: “It does make life a lot easier. You don’t go through the court system. It’s just a much easier thing to do.”

Emphasis added. Trump seems to think invoking the Insurrection Act means he’s no longer constrained by the courts. That’s nonsense. Yes, the act would allow him to deploy the military to carry out things that “law enforcement” (a grotesque misnomer for ICE) is doing in places like Minneapolis amid his immigration crackdown. And given that Trump has already sanctioned extraordinary abuses of power—detentions of U.S. citizens, warrantless arrests, excessive violence against protesters, including the occasional killing—empowering the military to do all this is an unsettling prospect.

But it emphatically does not mean Trump can evade the courts. Anything Trump orders the military to do will also be subject to legal limits. As Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck emails me: “The same laws and the specter of judicial review that [constrain] what civilian law enforcement agencies can do will also constrain anything the military can do.”

Indeed, it’s likely that the second Trump invoked the act, he’d be hit by lawsuits from, say, the state of Minnesota, presuming he deploys the military there, and from civil society groups representing victims of the crackdown. This would be intensely litigated, with lower courts scrutinizing the invocation’s rationale, fact sets related to the deployment, military conduct on the ground, and so on.

It’s possible that Trump is referring to an 1827 Supreme Court decision suggesting that presidential invocations of the act are not subject to judicial review. But much court precedent and law since then casts doubt on whether that ruling is good law, says Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center, and even if the administration claims it applies, the courts would hear litigation over that.

“There will be lawsuits—this will be heard in court,” Nunn told me. And no matter what, everything the military actually does on the ground would itself “be subject to judicial review,” Nunn added, because “they still have to follow the law.”

What’s striking here is that Trump believes the act provides him license to circumvent the judiciary. As Vladeck noted: “Trump seems to be under the misimpression that invoking the Insurrection Act is tantamount to imposing military rule.” So this is really a window into Trump’s fantasies about presiding over martial law, or over a military dictatorship.

Trump’s advisers are clearly divided over all this. Recall that Suzie Wiles recently declared it “categorically false” that Trump will use the military to suppress voting in the midterms. She wants to create the impression that Trump isn’t capable of massive abuses of power with the military, probably because it’s political poison in the elections, which she apparently thinks will happen on schedule. You see the influence of this in Trump’s recent softening of his Insurrection Act threats.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, is acting very much like he wants Trump to invoke the act. Last year, Miller refused to say whether he’s discussed this with Trump. He constantly uses public language that’s plainly designed to push Trump in that direction. He regularly describes protesters as insurrectionists and relentlessly lies that court rulings limiting Trump’s crackdowns are illegitimate, even calling the judges themselves insurrectionists. Miller is likely whispering in Trump’s ear that invoking the act means no more pesky judicial interference.

What’s really at stake here runs deeper still. After the killing of Renee Good, administration officials conspicuously did not reassure the public that institutional steps are being taken to avoid future horrors. They didn’t promise an impartial examination to build confidence by involving stakeholders on all sides. Instead, they offered an account that anyone could see with their own eyes was nonsense. As writer Radley Balko notes:

The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything.

I’d take that further. Miller, JD Vance, and the other ethnonationalists around Trump operate from a worldview dictating that modern levels of immigration profoundly threaten national social cohesion. They think this view is widely shared by a “silent majority.”

But the surprise of the moment has been the extraordinary solidarity that ordinary Americans have shown with immigrants and against Trump-Miller-Vance’s parade of ethnonationalist horrors. Miller is using state-sponsored violence and terror to try to break up that alliance. A big reason Trumpworld is unapologetic about Good—Vance responded by exaggerating the immunity of ICE officers, and Miller kept describing protesters as insurrectionists, meaning it’s open season on them—is to warn Americans showing solidarity with immigrants that they do so at their personal peril.

The fascists around Trump want us to think Trump will circumvent the courts. They want to create the impression that he’s fully capable of presiding over a military dictatorship. They think that will cow Americans and institutions into compliance. But if recent events tell us one thing, it’s this: That absolutely, emphatically is not going to happen.

EU Freezes U.S. Trade Deal After Trump’s Appalling Davos Speech - 2026-01-21T17:28:31Z

Donald Trump’s Greenland fixation has frustrated Europeans enough that the European Parliament has suspended work on a trade deal with the United States.

The legislative body was looking at removing import duties against American goods, as part of an agreement made between the U.S. and the European Union over the summer at Trump’s golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. In order for the deal to be implemented, the Parliament and EU governments have to approve it, and the Parliament’s trade committee was going to vote on proposals on January 26 and 27.

But now, everything has been put on hold. The news came as Trump used his Wednesday speech at the World Economic Forum to triple down on his threat to seize Greenland (even though he mistook the territory for Iceland several times). Last week, Trump threatened to levy tariffs on eight European allies that oppose the U.S. annexing Greenland.

The deal was already facing some opposition over the fact that it favors the U.S., as the EU would be dropping most of its tariffs while the U.S. would keep a base rate of 15 percent. However, it was on track to be approved with conditions, including an 18-month sunset clause and the ability to respond to any surges in American imports.

Trump has refused to hear any reason on Greenland, telling reporters Wednesday, “You’ll find out,” when asked how far he is willing to go to take over the territory. Not only is a trade deal stalled, but European pension funds in Denmark and Sweden are exiting U.S. Treasuries. With Europe beginning to respond with economic measures against the U.S, will Trump budge at all on Greenland, or double down on his tariffs?

Guess Who’s Delighted by Trump’s Growing Obsession With Greenland? - 2026-01-21T17:12:20Z

At least one person has been absolutely thrilled by Donald Trump’s recent push to acquire Greenland: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. leader’s relentless quest to annex the Danish-controlled territory has put America at odds with some of its strongest allies. Over the long weekend, Trump announced a new wave of retaliatory tariffs against European countries that oppose his Greenland takeover, cautioning other NATO members against participation in a joint military exercise on the island.

That sparked a celebration in Moscow, which has worked for decades to dismantle the European-friendly intergovernmental military alliance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledged Tuesday that NATO was in “deep crisis,” a reality that he said he couldn’t have previously imagined, reported The Wall Street Journal. Lavrov also rejected Trump’s warnings that Russia would attempt to occupy Greenland if the U.S. did not do so, telling the paper that the Kremlin had no such plans.

Trump has claimed that America “needs” Greenland “for defense.” But what exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, especially in light of the fact that myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

NATO, which currently encompasses 32 member nations, has practically defined world order and global trade since the end of World War II. Originally formed to defend against the threats of the Soviet Union, the alliance has since morphed into a powerful collective bloc that has both weakened Russia and diminished European defenses (in exchange for American nuclear protection) as the largest peacetime military alliance in world history.

Much to the chagrin of defense strategists, Trump has proved a vocal critic of the Western military and trade alliance, repeatedly insisting that the Unites States has gotten a bad deal, in which it gives more than it receives.

“It’s a five alarm emergency that’s dividing North America from Europe,” John Foreman, a former U.K. defense attaché in Moscow and Kyiv, told the Journal. “Russia must be sitting back thinking Christmas just keeps coming.”

Power players in Moscow have definitely taken notice of Trump’s efforts, opting to encourage the U.S. leader rather than dissuade him. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rubbed Trump’s ego earlier this week, claiming that Greenland’s annexation would “undoubtedly go down in the history books.”

“And not only in the history of the United States, but in world history,” Peskov said.

The vast majority of the American public opposes Trump’s proposed northern expansion. A YouGov survey published Tuesday found that 72 percent of polled voters do not support a military takeover of Greenland. Even Republicans were far less likely to support the measure, with 52 percent opposed compared to 22 percent in favor—a detail not lost on The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, which chose to lead its site Wednesday with the Journal’s report.

Second Pension Fund Dumps U.S. Treasury Holdings as Trump Spirals - 2026-01-21T17:12:14Z

As Donald Trump delivered rambling remarks touting his new world order at the World Economic Forum in Davos, yet another European country announced that it had sold off billions of dollars of U.S. Treasuries.

Alecta, a Swedish pension fund, revealed to Reuters Wednesday that it had been slowly selling off its U.S Treasuries for about a year. “Since the beginning of 2025, we have reduced our holdings in U.S. government bonds in several rounds, and together the reductions account for the majority of our holdings,” said Alecta’s chief investment officer Pablo Bernengo.

Bernengo said that the decision to sell off American assets was “related to the reduced predictability of the policy pursued in combination with large budget deficits and growing government debt.”

Alecta reportedly sold between $7.7 billion and $8.8 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds over the course of last year, according to Dagens Industri, a Swedish business daily.

News of this major divestment comes just one day after AkademikerPension, a Danish pension fund, announced that it would sell $100 million in U.S. Treasuries because of “poor [U.S.] government finances.”

While Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier Wednesday dismissed Denmark’s holding of U.S. bonds as “irrelevant,” Europe collectively holds roughly $8 trillion of U.S. bonds and equities, providing it with a potential lever to fight back against Trump’s unchecked threats and tariffs—should it choose to pull it.

Former U.S. allies in Europe have started to push back against Trump’s repeated and unwelcome efforts to acquire Greenland (sometimes Iceland) from Denmark. A key group of European Union members blocked a trade deal with the United States Wednesday, after Trump threatened to take over Greenland and levy a 35 percent tariff on any European country that did not support his imperialist ambitions.

Republicans Cut Into Greenland Cake in Shocking Kennedy Center Party - 2026-01-21T16:54:54Z

As President Trump headed to the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday evening, MAGA congressional Republicans—and a pro-Russian Romanian right-wing nationalist—were at the Kennedy Center taking a bite out of a Greenland-shaped, American-flag-covered cake.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna could be seen in one video of the event alongside fellow Representatives Andy Ogles and Abe Hamadeh. Also in attendance was George Simion, the leader of Romania’s far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians party. Simion, who lost the 2025 Romanian presidential election, has been accused of acting as a Russian agent, and was even banned from Ukraine for pushing a “unionist ideology that denies the legitimacy of the state border of Ukraine,” according to Politico. Now he’s joined MAGA in its imperialistic venture on Greenland, something the anti-NATO Kremlin likely has little issue with, especially if it can get in on it too.

“We cut it!” Luna said after making the first slice.

“We will be there for all the free people in the world,” Simion says as he makes his cut, before mumbling under his breath about having to “get rid of Macron.”

This is yet another mockery of Greenland’s sovereignty as the Trump administration claims again and again that it will move to take Greenland, regardless of any international protest.

“This is how some in the US view Greenland and its people—as a cake to be cut up and shared with smiles and laughter,” the European Commission’s Antoine Bondaz wrote. “Sorry, but this is deeply disrespectful and frankly pathetic.”

“Putin must be celebrating this. These are the enablers who are literally handing the United States to Putin,” chimed activist Fred Guttenberg. “Next, they will suggest that we call ourselves the Soviet Republic of America.”

Trump Issues Chilling Warning on His Plans for Iran - 2026-01-21T16:33:45Z

It seems that President Donald Trump’s brilliant plan to help Iranians is to hold his wavering, mysteriously bruised finger over the big red button.

During an exclusive interview Tuesday with News Nation, host Katie Pavlich asked Trump for his response to “taunts” and threats from Iranian leadership. The president, who appeared genuinely confused throughout the interview, had recently advocated for new leadership in Tehran, following widespread antigovernment protests.

“Well, they shouldn’t be doing it, but I’ve left notification if anything ever happens, we’re gonna blow the hell—the whole country’s gonna get blown up,” Trump slurred.

Amid escalating state violence against protests, Trump urged protesters to keep demonstrating and take over their institutions, promising that help was “on the way!”

When no actual help materialized, Trump claimed that he’d talked himself out of ordering a military strike on Iran, after its government allegedly canceled thousands of scheduled executions.

Still, more than 3,900 people were killed, and 24,000 were arrested in the violent crackdown on protesters in Iran, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi published an op-ed Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal warning that Iran would not hesitate to respond to any attack from the U.S. “with everything we have.”

He also blamed Trump for fanning the flames of the protests, which Araghchi claimed had been taken over by foreign and domestic terrorists.

“The U.S. has tried every conceivable hostile act against Iran, from sanctions and cyber assaults to outright military attack—and, most recently, it clearly fanned a major terrorist operation—all of which failed,” Araghchi wrote. “It is time to think differently. Try respect, which will allow us to advance farther than one may believe.”

Trump Uses Davos Speech to Brag That He Can “Crush” the Housing Market - 2026-01-21T16:33:15Z

Donald Trump said, during his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, that he could crush the housing market if he wanted to.

“I am very protective of people that already own a house, of which we have millions and millions and millions. And because we have had such a good run, the house values have gone up tremendously, and these people have become wealthy. They weren’t wealthy,” Trump said. “They’ve become wealthy because of their house, and every time you make it more and more and more affordable for somebody to buy a house cheaply, you’re actually hurting the value of those houses obviously, because one thing works in tandem with the other.”

Trump went on to say that he could easily crush the housing market by making it easier to buy homes.

“Now if I want to really crush the housing market, I could do that so fast and people could buy houses. But you would destroy a lot of people that already have houses. In some cases, they’ve mortgaged their house and the mortgage would be very low, and all of a sudden the mortgage without any changes becomes very high and they end up losing the house,” Trump continued, adding that “we should be paying the lowest interest rate of any country in the world because without the United States we don’t have a country.”

Trump’s alarming assessment of housing affordability shows that he still thinks like a landlord and property developer concerned about the value of his own assets. At a time when people are concerned about affordability in their lives, particularly when it comes to owning or renting a place to live, the president seems more concerned with people who already own property than those who are struggling.

In Trump’s own hometown, newly elected NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected in a landslide on an agenda of freezing rent and making the city a more affordable place to live for everyone. It’s quite evident that Trump thinks doing that would “crush the housing market” and hurt the people who really matter to him: those wealthy enough to own a home already.

Trump Threatens Canada After Carney Draws Standing Ovation at Davos - 2026-01-21T15:42:01Z

President Trump used his time at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday in Davos to admonish Canada as its leaders look to other world powers for more coherent and consistent partnership.

“We’re going to build the greatest golden dome ever built … that’s going to just, by its very nature, going to be defending Canada,” Trump said, referring to his far-fetched plan to build a defense system covering the entire North American continent, a larger version of Israel’s short-range Iron Dome.

“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also, but they’re not,” Trump continued. “I watched your prime minister yesterday, he wasn’t so grateful. They should be grateful to us.… Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

The Trump administration has shown increased aggression toward NATO and North American allies alike, eroding years of soft power and diplomatic relations.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” Carney said at his Tuesday speech in Davos. “And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. Open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney continued. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

Transcript: Trump Is Destroying Higher Ed. Here’s How To Rebuild It - 2026-01-21T15:34:21Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.


Perry Bacon: Marshall Steinbaum is an economist at the University of Utah. He’s a fellow at the Jain Family Institute. If you have a Twitter account, overall he’s just a very smart guy who has a lot of interesting insights—mostly about economics, some about higher education—but just somebody I’ve enjoyed following and reading. So, Marshall, thanks for joining.

Marshall Steinbaum: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. That’s a very flattering introduction.

Bacon: What I want to get into today is that you co-wrote a memo—a proposal—70 pages long. I’m trying to think of the right way to describe it. Anyway, it was co-written by you and a fellow named Andrew Elrod, and it’s a look at what higher education policy should be. The title is Rebuilding American Higher Education: From an Engine of Inequality to a Pillar of the Public Interest.

The reason I was so interested in this is that we’re having a higher education discourse in which the Republican Party and the Trump administration are very opposed to college and higher education as we know it—it’s too liberal, it’s too woke, whatever words they use. But if you listen carefully, a lot of their criticisms are shared by what I would call centrist Democrats, for now. In more polite language, they say colleges are wrong, colleges are too elite, colleges are too radical, and so on. And you, of course, saw the repression on campuses that happened when Joe Biden was president.

So I think there is a critique of higher education on the right, and there’s a critique on the center left that are different versions of the same thing. And what you bring is a different critique of higher education, with different solutions. So I want to start there. In your view, what are the main problems of American higher education?

Steinbaum: So I think it all comes down to the phrase institutional stratification and segregation. And that is on all sorts of dimensions, like income and wealth as well as race and ethnicity and nativity, for that matter.

Basically, what we have now in this country is a higher education system that consists of heterogeneous institutions that each enroll homogeneous student bodies. And what was different in the past is we had at least a more egalitarian system where you had more homogeneous institutions relative to now, enrolling a more heterogeneous student body.

So in economics terms, I call that a pooling equilibrium that has collapsed to a separating equilibrium by means of cream skimming. That is to say, due to the privatization and plutocratic takeover of higher education, institutions are increasingly trying to pick and choose their students for getting the maximum ability to pay so they can charge the highest tuition.

For public institutions, that typically means trying to recruit—or I should say for public flagship institutions, that means trying to recruit across state lines, enroll out-of-state students because they’re worried about a budget model that relies too much on state appropriations.

There have been some cuts, although I think the degree to which there’s been austerity in higher education is actually somewhat overstated in the discourse. There’s certainly been austerity in some sectors and some reaches of higher education, but it’s really what is being funded as opposed to the amount of funding.

And the institutions that we have are trying to accommodate themselves to this world where there’s less public funding available or it’s key to different programming that the institutions put together. And instead they’re trying to reach out and get the students that come with the dollars that they think will keep the doors open.

And that means basically whereas there used to be a place in the public systems for a variety of different students, each of them able to access a high quality of education, now it’s more like where you start in life dictates the type of institution they are going to have access to. And that’s behind a lot of the public dissatisfaction and loss of trust in the higher education system that isn’t articulated by the elites either of the right or of the center left as you described to begin with.

Bacon: OK, let me say this in super-simple terms. Community colleges and non-flagship institutions often enroll a lot of lower-income students and a lot of students of color.

Then you have flagship schools—say, the University of Michigan at the high end, but even places like the University of Alabama—these more elite, publicly funded state schools that are trying to enroll higher-income students. They tend to have whiter student populations who can pay their way, and they even recruit out of state.

Then you have the Harvards and Dartmouths, which of course enroll very few students, but are very homogeneous. They talk about diversity a lot, but in reality they have a very homogeneous population, particularly in terms of income, wealth, and whether their parents went to college.

So you have that. And there was a period in America when a lot of colleges enrolled all three of those groups at once.

Steinbaum: Yeah, that is a very good summary. I would say the one point that neither of us has made so far is the calibration, the reengineering of the sort of mid-tier state school away from providing an academic education that’s broadly applicable to a student population that is mostly in state, both in the past and in the present. They’re not offering that anymore, and they have accommodated themselves to the world of plutocracy and privatized funding by converting solely to a sort of workplace training model.

And that’s especially important to highlight in the present discourse where a lot of political elites are saying the problem with higher education is that it’s not keyed to the real world enough, that you have woke professors teaching unimportant subjects to students that don’t need that kind of an education in order to do the jobs that are actually available on the market.

The fact is that is the way in which the higher education system has already been reengineered. This is why I say the elite reaction to the current loss of trust seems to be more of the same. “More of the same” means disinvestment from academic programs serving a nontraditional population by means of the broadly accessible state four-year institution, and instead replacing that curriculum entirely with workplace training. And it doesn’t even serve students’ interests narrowly in the workplace.

That’s the point that I would make about this as a labor economist, which is, you think this is supposedly more relevant because it’s teaching you the skills for the jobs that are actually available. But what it’s actually doing is letting employers dictate the curriculum and transferring the cost of training for the jobs that those employers are offering from the employers themselves to the students in the form of tuition and student debt.

They figured out how to transfer the job training to the students and they dominate the curriculum. And that kind of ties students to being pre-dedicated to a given career and specifically a given employer.

What I study from my work on labor economics is the dependence of workers on employers and the coercive ability that confers on employers. Basically, I view this erosion of the academic potential of the mid-tier state university as one mechanism by which employers exercise control over their workers. Teaching workers the curriculum that they need for the jobs of tomorrow—or whatever the buzzword is—is really tying workers to their future employers and eroding their ability to earn money in the labor market because basically they don’t have any broadly applicable skills or fewer of them.

Bacon: So, to be a little bit more reductive again on my end, at least in the political discourse I follow a lot on the right, what you end up with is this: They’re complaining about—again—are they complaining about you in different ways? And when I say you, I mean your work. You’re for forgiving student debt. You’re for a different economic system.

When I listen to Josh Shapiro and other politicians complaining about higher education, what I think I’m hearing is that Republicans don’t like college professors and elite universities because those professors say things that are to the left of them. They advocate for an economy that is less capitalist, and so on.

But I think something similar is happening on the center left. The professors who are “too woke” are actually a very small number of people who have public platforms, who also have a lot of intelligent thoughts. And following your Twitter feed, I do get the sense that Joe Biden’s White House staff probably did not love you, and would probably love to say, All college professors are like that guy.

So we have a class of people—at a lot of colleges—who are highly intelligent and who do not share the views of the elites of either party. That’s what’s actually going on here.

Steinbaum: It’s interesting to think what either the right or the center left think of me in particular as a professor with a public platform who articulates—I like to think—potent criticisms of shared higher education policy consensus. I’ll reserve judgment on what they think of me.... I do think broadly both sets of constituents, what they don’t like about the higher education system is that it permits relatively high-prestige, relatively well-remunerated employment to their critics. So definitely on the right, they think I should be dismissed basically on the basis of my ideology.

On the center left, I would say, as far as I have interacted with this world, it’s really not as much of an ideological critique, but more of a generational one. It’s basically: We senior policy people or professors, or however you want to conceive it, have been trying to defend the higher education system from its critics for 30 years, way before you got here, you young upstart. And the way that we’ve done that is by resting the value of the higher education system on the promise to increase individual earnings.

So labor economists doing new—self-flattering, but I’ll say groundbreaking—work in labor economics, you’re coming into the higher education system and saying, No, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve misinterpreted what the purpose of higher education is in the labor market.

And they’re like, That’s not helpful. We had a good defense of higher education going on the basis of its promise to increase individual earnings. And now you’re coming in and saying it doesn’t increase individual earnings. You’re the problem because you’re undermining the foundation on which the higher education system that we have defended has reconstituted itself.

Bacon: You made this point about elites versus the public. Why do you think the public is down on higher education? Because this is interesting—your theory is interesting. Why does the public have very different concerns that we’re not addressing? Cost is obviously one concern, and that’s always been there, but what else is there?

Steinbaum: Yeah, so the elite consensus critique of higher education is in the nature of what we’ve already been discussing: that it is a bunch of overpaid, overconfident professors that aren’t doing anything that’s really worthwhile for the public.

And crucially, what is true about the elite critique is that it doesn’t center what I think is wrong with the higher education system, which is plutocracy.

So the public’s critique of the higher education system—what I like to imagine myself more aligned with—is: This system used to be available to us. It used to be part of the local fabric of the economy, both from where I’m going to send my kid that offers an affordable higher education. That’s where I want my kid to go—the university that I’ve been paying tax dollars towards my whole life, and they’re going to be living in this state too. That’s part of what this local, geographically demarcated society is about, is supporting this higher education edifice.

That’s been closed off by the withdrawal of state funding. What I articulate in the papers, what I view as this downward spiral is where state governments that have been taken over by plutocrat-serving legislators say, We’re going to cut higher education.

The state flagship institutions that have some ability to recruit out of state and do the University of Alabama model: OK, fine, just basically deregulate us completely, make us, to all intents and purposes, not a state institution. We’ll absorb the funding cut, or at least the funding reorganization, and we will go out and recruit higher-paying students from out of state. Just don’t make us enroll too many students from in state, because what is wrong with the funding cuts is that we needed that money in order to educate the students you wanted to educate. So if you’re going to cut the funding, don’t make us admit those students that are harder to educate—or whatever line the institutions would come up with.

The state legislatures agree to that because their main priority these days is cutting taxes for rich people. And the institutions basically are no longer available to most of the state’s population other than maybe to children of the legislators themselves.

Then next time the funding cycle rolls around, the state legislature is like, Why would we fund this? It’s basically a private institution at this point. They can support themselves by going out of state or going into partnerships with local employers or whatever. It’s no longer our business.

And that downward spiral bespeaks the alliance and the ideological consensus among the ruling class of whatever nominal ideology you’re talking about, and separates them—the higher education system and the plutocrats who run it—from the public that they’re no longer serving.

I don’t imagine that the broad majority of the United States population shares my left-wing views. But I do think they want a higher education system that they think is affordable, that offers a high-quality education to their children, and is part of the local economic fabric. And I view that as basically requiring a total, pretty radical reform to the higher education system that has come to exist over the last couple of decades.

Bacon: And now let’s come to those reforms. They were very interesting to me. OK, so the first one is direct federal institutional funding.

So you want to have colleges and universities funded by the federal government—feels really weird right now, but even without Donald Trump, it feels challenging—instead of being funded by the states. Unpack why that would be important.

Steinbaum: So not instead of by the states—that is to say, we’re talking about replacing ... there’s basically a three-legged stool in the current system. There’s tuition—student tuition backstopped by federal loans—there’s state appropriations, and there’s federal research grants.

The federal research grants not only fund research, but there’s overhead on top of that. So a big source of specifically the state flagships’ funding is basically 50 percent overhead on top of any federal research grants. So [those are] the three big pots of money that exist in public higher education.

What we propose is replacing the tuition pot with direct federal funding of the institutions. And in fact, we also propose replacing that overhead, so the federal funding would not be tied to research grants through the research agencies. It would come directly as part of the federal government’s education policy through the Department of Education appropriations. That’s basically the idea.

Bacon: It’ll be on top of state funding.

Steinbaum: We are definitely saying ... the economics of the proposal rely on basically maintaining levels of state funding, which we’ll get to, because I don’t think that we should take that as a given by any stretch of the imagination.

But it’s not replacing the state appropriations. The economics works if the state appropriations basically stay at the current level. So that’s what we contemplate.

Why go to institutional funding? Basically that tuition leg of the stool that I just described is already federal funding, is our argument. That is to say, the federal government is originating 100 billion dollars of new student loans every year, of which 70 percent of that principal value will never be repaid. So it’s already funding institutions through the indirect mechanism of backstopping their high tuition, and then the students don’t actually repay the loans.

And the institutions and the whole system likes it that way because it’s basically no-strings-attached federal funding, because the mythology is the free market regulates institutions. And the free market operates through students freely choosing which institutions they’re going to go to, and they’re going to go to the one with the highest value. And if they’re choosing wrong, we can help them choose right.

There were a lot of policy moves starting under the Obama administration of: People are making the wrong choice. So let’s inform them about which institutions really are the high-quality institutions, so that the free market mechanism will operate more efficiently.

I don’t think the free market mechanism has any hope of operating efficiently. I don’t think ... this is similar in some ways to health care, where yes, it’s extremely expensive and if you make students pay the full tuition—that is to say, without backstopping with federal student loans—they’ll definitely spend less on higher education and they’ll cut back. But individuals are not very good at choosing high quality. No shade on individuals, it’s just the type of market where the free market is never going to be an effective regulator.

So you need someone who actually has an education policy and knows how the system works. In our ideal world, the federal Department of Education would play that role of a sector-specific regulator. And they would say, We are the paymasters. We’re not going to do this backdoor thing through unrepayable student debt. We’re going to fund directly and we’re going to have some pretty onerous strings attached.

And that is exactly what the current crop of institutions is most afraid of: those strings. That is to say, one big string would be you can’t charge tuition, or something.

I’m not a doctrinaire free-college guy. What I am is a doctrinaire uniform-tuition guy. So I don’t like different students paying different tuition, because to me, that invites the institutions to basically pick and choose their student body for the highest tuition payers. So my version of the regulation would be low uniform tuition across applicants, backstopped by the federal institutional appropriations and other regulations, such as no plutocrats on the board of trustees, no what I call “credentialing master’s programs.”

So another thing that institutions do is create these professional degree programs that are very expensive. And they basically tell students, OK, you need this in order to get a job. They’re preying on students’ career anxieties. That would be eliminated.

So given that all of the degree programs that the institutions would be offering are operating under our imagined federal institutional appropriations, that gives the federal government direct power to say, You can’t offer that program if it doesn’t serve our aims. And the criteria that we’re proposing is basically it has to be in the public interest, not in the interest of moneymaking on the part of the institution.

Bacon: You said, “I’m not a reflexive free-college guy.” That struck me, because I didn’t necessarily expect you to say that. But the point being, you would not be for every college charging a hundred grand per student. Your point is that there’s something uniform—say, $5,000 of tuition a year—and if you have to go into debt for that, we’ll talk about how to do that, but a uniform policy.

Steinbaum: The uniform is what’s important and what is contrary to the status quo. One of the myths that we attack in the paper is the idea that charging different students different tuition is progressive because it redistributes from the rich students to the poor students. That’s not how it actually works, is our argument in the paper.

How it actually works is the students who have a lot of outside options, which tend to be the more well-off students, they’re the ones the institutions are lusting after to try to recruit. And the people who end up getting the short end of the stick are the people who don’t have a lot of outside options. Those are typically going to be in-state students, and they’re the ones where tuition has gone up and especially student loan repayment has been going down.

So my view is you have to have uniform tuition in order to create neutrality on the part of institutions in terms of which students they want to enroll—or increase neutrality. They’re not only going to be going after the wealthiest students.

The other thing that’s worth saying here is: You would think that the free-college proposal—for example, the ones that Warren and Bernie put out in the 2020 Democratic primary—you’d think that state higher education institutions would be some of their loudest supporters, because it’s offering a huge amount of federal money basically to reduce tuition. Why wouldn’t you want that if you’re a higher education institution?

The fact is, they all uniformly opposed it, and they’re the reason why it died in the Biden administration. Even in the Biden administration, it trickled down to free community college, and they killed even that.

And the reason why they killed it is because the whole idea of free tuition and an entitlement to higher education takes away the institution’s gatekeeping power. And the institution’s gatekeeping power is what they sell to their plutocratic supporters on the board of trustees or among the donor community.

The institutions want to be able to pick and choose who’s allowed through our doors and who gets our degree. That is how they confer prestige upon themselves and upon their students. And that is why any given billionaire would want to be on the board of trustees, is because they can tell their friends at cocktail parties, I’m on the board of this super prestigious institution, or I’m on the board of this institution, and you will have heard of it because your perception of it is that its prestige is rising. The way that an institution’s prestige rises is by enrolling a more elite student body, and all of that—

Bacon: Your proposals for public colleges—you’re trying to prevent the public college from becoming less public. You’re not going to touch, necessarily, the Swarthmores and the Yales—

Steinbaum: No, we are going to touch them. It’s a little subtext in the proposal, but basically what it says in the proposal is that everyone loses access to the federal student loan mechanism unless ... they submit to the regulatory apparatus.

And the regulation, for example, includes not having plutocrats on the board of trustees. So if Yale wants access to the federal student loan program, they have to totally reconstitute themselves—not have their board made up of the wealthiest Yale grads or whatever. And they have to charge uniform tuition. So would Yale want to do that? I don’t know how dependent they are on the federal student loan program.

Bacon: Sorry—let me ask. So we’re going to have uniform tuition, but there’s still going to be student loans? Federally—

Steinbaum: The uniform tuition—that’s an undergraduate thing. Let me be clear. The proposal says everyone gets one free undergraduate degree or technical qualification. So the proposal says free. I said on this chat that I’m not ... free isn’t the thing to insist on.

To me, uniform tuition is the thing to insist on. And uniformity is what’s really threatening to the stratification in the higher-education system. So Yale can still charge tuition to undergraduates as long as it’s uniform. Graduate studies still has tuition associated with it.

Although we would cap that, too, because if there’s still a federal student loan program ... handing out loans, we don’t want them to be handing out indefinite loans. In some ways, that is exactly the weak point of the federal student loan program that backs up tuition now. Even where you have some states restraining undergraduate tuition growth and doing some version of free college, they’re definitely pushing on the graduate tuition in order to make up the shortfall.

And that’s pushing a lot of loans onto the federal balance sheet that aren’t ever going to be repaid.

Bacon: Sorry, the cost is uniform—for every student?

Steinbaum: When we’ve been talking about uniform tuition, that is among undergraduates attending a given institution.

Bacon: Do colleges currently charge some students more than others?

Steinbaum: Oh, yeah.

Bacon: Right—they offer different financial aid.

Steinbaum: Yes, exactly. Financial aid is a form of price discrimination, tuition discrimination among the student body. And the argument among the center-left or centrist higher education policy establishment is that is progressive: We want more of that, because what that means is higher tuition paid by the students with more ability to pay. And that enables us to offer more generous financial aid to poor students.

And that is just not how the higher education system works. The schedule of tuition as a function of parental income is getting steeper, especially at state flagships. But what’s happening on the other end is not: OK, we’re using that excess tuition to fund generous financial aid packages for lower-income students. It is: We are not admitting as many lower-income students.

So the state flagships in some sense are going more in the direction of what the Ivy League or well-endowed private institutions have been doing for a while, which is: We have a very progressive tuition schedule because we offer generous financial aid. We just don’t actually admit any poor people. That is where the state flagships—

Bacon: The uniform cost would have to be fairly low.

Steinbaum: Yeah. In my world, the 5,000 you said ... I mean, $5,000 is higher than what poor students pay in the status quo for state mid-tier institutions—I don’t know, it’s probably about average, actually. But state flagships are at higher tuition, including for poor students. So we would basically say everyone pays a uniform tuition across the board.

What that does is hopefully generate this pooling equilibrium where the name over the door doesn’t matter as much. Most institutions are offering comprehensive programs to a wide variety of students, and you go to your local university. You’re not necessarily trying to go to the most prestigious university, or the one that will offer you the most tailored financial aid package.

Bacon: So let’s move to your second idea. “System integration and desegregation: build geographically delimited systems, but institutions that are serving heterogeneous student bodies.” So the ideal, in your mind, is a college has lots of different kinds of students, of incomes and wealth backgrounds, and so on—and that we’re moving away from that.

That’s an important core point of this. Where you went to college is not a symbol for all these other things if the colleges are actually fairly diverse, and I mean that in a thousand ways.

Steinbaum: Yes. “A thousand ways” is an important point to make. I guess to throw out even more economics jargon here, I already talked about pooling equilibrium and separating equilibrium on this call. Another form of jargon would be we propose horizontal differentiation, and the current reality is vertical differentiation.

So in the economics world, vertical differentiation means some products are better than others. The better product has higher prices. The richer people buy the better product at the higher price. The poor people buy the worse product at the lower price. That’s the higher education system that currently exists. We don’t like it.

Bacon: It’s like cars and everything else. We don’t want—

Steinbaum: The horizontal differentiation might be: OK, your state public higher education system might have a liberal arts college, and it might have a large research campus, and it might have a teaching-focused four-year institution in it. But those things are all accessible to all types of students.

So a student who wants a liberal arts education can go to the liberal arts one, but that doesn’t mean that they’re of lower status than the people who go to the research one. That’s the idea: There’s value in differentiation in the higher education system, but that differentiation should not be about sorting students by background or by their income. It should be sorting students by their interests and their own tastes in what they would want out of a higher education system.

Bacon: In other words, there could be a new school—or whatever the thing in Florida was. There could be a research school, there could be an engineering school that’s more focused on math and science. But those things would not just—it would not be only the best students, or really the richest students, at one institution, is what you’re getting at.

Steinbaum: Exactly.

Bacon: OK. “Our proposal would be funded by ending underwater lending.” We can get into that a little bit—talk about the funding. How does that work?

Steinbaum: Yeah, so as I said earlier, my assessment is the federal government is originating 100 billion dollars of student loans every year, of which 70 percent is not going to be repaid. So the biggest source of funding in our proposal is $70 billion of new student loans that instead would be allocated toward direct institutional funding, as we’ve already talked about.

When you look at the numbers in the free-college proposals from the late 2010s, that’s the ballpark we’re talking about. That is to say, it’s not a huge outlay. And the point I would make is this: Underwater student lending is due to tuition inflation on the part—or partly due to tuition inflation—on the part of institutions.

The key question that always kills progressive policy proposals, supposedly, is, How are you going to pay for it? And my argument is we’re already paying for it through this underwater student lending. So there’s no new money there.

The other big source of funding that we propose that takes us up to just over 100 billion is the overhead on federal research grants. As I said, the federal research agencies—NIH, National Science Foundation, climate research through NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense—all of those provide this 50 percent on top of any grant toward the infrastructure of the university.

We would separate that money from the research grant. So they’re still funding research—research is still important and the federal government should be funding it, we have proposals on how to reform that too—but basically sever that overhead and put that in the pot that goes in direct institutional appropriations.

And the reason there is because tying the overhead money to researchers creates a stratified political economy within higher education. The institutions are trying desperately to recruit the top-flight scientists that bring in those million-dollar research grants from the feds, because that money comes along with the overhead, and that’s what keeps the lights on.

If the institution’s getting that money other than through the recruitment of top scientists, then the idea is there’s more egalitarian wage distribution, you could say, within higher education itself.

So there’s a whole section of the paper that’s about dismantling the academic 1 percent and rebuilding the academic middle class. The academic middle class in my mind is basically the tenured professoriate, which is a dwindling share of all of the academic labor. We have adjunctification and other forms of proletarianization and deprofessionalization of most academic labor. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the 1 percent of people that are pulling down high six-figure salaries because they bring in this research—the overhead funding that the universities need.

So that kind of plutocratic political economy within higher education would be solved basically by severing the institutional aid from the research overhead. So those are the two big sources of money.

And then, as I said earlier, the economics don’t work if the states withdraw funding or try to avoid ... the big concern in the 2010s was “maintenance of effort” on the part of the states. If the feds up their funding of higher education, how do we know the states aren’t just going to reduce it? And that’s obviously been an issue in federal policy before. So we have some proposals in the paper to basically prevent that from happening as well. So we could get into that if you want, but that’s basically the financial architecture.

Bacon: When you talked about universities and grants, it reminded me of how much of the crisis right now feels like the Trump administration is cutting off federal grants to these researchers, and therefore these universities are losing a lot of money.

But I want to talk about, partly, you emphasize that you want to have a bigger role for the federal government in higher education. And I think a lot of people—particularly people who are New Republic listeners and readers—are thinking, Dear God, he wants Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and that whole team doing more in higher education?

So reconcile that for me a little bit. How would someone who is not a Trump supporter right now support a larger role for the federal government in higher education?

Steinbaum: The baseline argument is what enables the current Trumpian assault on the higher education system is the loss of trust among the broad public and many key stakeholders going back over decades. And so the strengthening of the federal role in higher education is meant to restore the public’s trust. And what we argue is basically you need to do that if you want to reform higher education in a pro-social direction.

So the alternative is exactly what you enumerated, which is I think a lot of what the sort of center-left or centrist higher education policy establishment is coming forward with: We need to take the politics out of medical research. And the way that we do that is by separating the higher education system even more from the federal government.

The fact is that is nothing more than a slogan. For all the reasons I’ve given, the system is totally dependent on the federal government. That’s why the Trump administration has been able to throw its weight around so much.

So I don’t think any of those people that are saying, We need to separate medical research from politics and take the wokeness out or whatever as a means of saving higher education—they’re not proposing a huge increase in state appropriations to higher education or levying new taxes in order to support it other than through the federal system.

They’re just saying, rhetorically, the problem here is that the wokesters polluted the image of higher education and that alienated the plutocrats. And we need to bring the plutocrats back on board by crushing the wokesters even more.

So that’s the kind of criticism of higher education you would get from Silicon Valley or something like that. We replaced excellence. That’s their new kind of buzzword: We replaced excellence with wokeness or however they want to characterize it, and that is the problem.

So we need to side with Silicon Valley there and say, Yes, we are restoring excellence. We’re doing the most cutting-edge medical research in the world. You shouldn’t be touching that with your ideological agenda. Instead, leave that be; don’t interfere.

If your constituents are Silicon Valley billionaires, it makes sense that you would argue that point, but I don’t think it is a very ... it’s not going to carry a lot of weight when it comes to the politics of higher education because that is tailored to a very narrow constituency.

The much broader constituency is thinking: I just want my kid to go to the local university and have a good education there and not be paying back the student loans for the rest of their life, and have it ruin their life. That’s all I want. And that constituency is served by a more egalitarian system, not a more stratified one.

Bacon: Let me move to the fourth point. I think this is an important one—labor reform. Because part of what’s going on here is the way you want to protect academics who have thoughts that maybe the political establishment doesn’t want is not getting politics out of education, because you probably can’t do that.

Your solution is to make sure that professors and faculty have real protections. So if they say something on Twitter or Bluesky, or whatever, that the center left—or more broadly, Republicans—don’t like, they have labor [protections]. The way to have academic freedom is not getting all federal rule out of education. We’re never going to do that. It’s by having real protections for the people who work in higher education.

Steinbaum: That’s right. I think there’s been no greater protection than solidarity on the part of academic labor so far. And there’s a lot more upside; they haven’t—not by any stretch of the imagination—hit the ceiling of solidarity among higher education labor. No one’s going to save us other than ourselves is my ethos when it comes to the assaults on academic freedom.

And also, for all of its flaws, the professoriate is basically—I should say academic workers more broadly—are the stakeholders that have the greatest motive to make the higher education system egalitarian and broadly accessible. If you’re looking at administrators, they’re trying to do the opposite: to stratify their institutions in order to appeal to plutocrats because they think that their saviors are going to be billionaire donors who endow new centers or whatever. And that’s how they’ll save themselves. And state legislators ... they only want the institution that they think glorifies themselves and their supporters. I see state legislators as being broadly at this point subservient to the plutocrats on the board and not to the broader state population. They’re not interested in providing a public good to the people of their state.

There’s just very few public officials who have stood up for an egalitarian ... higher education system. So when it comes to which of the existing higher education constituencies are the ones that serve the public interest most, it is definitely the academic workers operating in solidarity. I would say my own perspective is ... especially the ones that don’t enjoy the institutional protections that were available in an earlier era.

There is definitely a generational divide among academic workers where you have the older generation is like: Let’s keep what we have. Let’s fight like hell to defend ourselves against this assault from all of our enemies.

And in my view, without recognizing the broad public loss of trust, it’s just ... I also think that comes from an earlier generation, frankly, of progressive politics, which imagines itself as minoritarian, and that the broad public is opposed to us because they’re more conservative than we are: We are the righteous elite. And our job is to protect the public from their own bad political instincts, which is to side with the right. That has definitely not served academia very well. And I also just don’t think it’s true that academia doesn’t have the support of the broad public. I think it would if it offered a quality product. And the problem with the status quo is that it doesn’t, and we’re deluding ourselves if we think we should just cling to what we have and try to defend it against all of its hostile actors.

Bacon: We’ve glanced at this a few times. You talk a lot about democratic governance of universities a lot. And the story of how involved these boards are—that came out a lot during the repression of Palestinian protests, how active these boards are at private schools.

But—I think it’s obvious that private schools have these rich people who give a lot of money and are put on boards because they give a lot of money. Explain how public schools have some of the same dynamics, where the board is unrepresentative and dominated by plutocrats as well.

Steinbaum: Yeah, it’s frankly not any different because, for all the reasons we’ve already talked about, the public institutions ... have really privatized. So what constituency are they trying to serve? If not a plutocratic, definitely a more socioeconomically-advantaged population.

And then when you’re talking about lower-tier institutions, they’re trying to appeal to local employers. So that’s who’s on the board. It’s like: OK, your role is to educate our future workforce and you better do that according to my dictates and not equip them to go get a job somewhere else other than in my workforce.

So how does it happen? For the same reason it happens in the private sector. You have investors—so to speak, donors in this case—who want representation and control over the institution they’re supporting.

As these university systems have become more dependent—or less dependent on state appropriations, or the state appropriations are now conditional on getting funding from other sources—the administrations have gone around with hat in hand trying to collect donations.

We live in a plutocratic society anyway, so it’s like, Who has the money? But when they collect donations, they’re not collecting a couple hundred bucks from a random alumnus who has broad, warm, fuzzy feelings towards the place they went to college 20 years ago. They’re going to the people with the money, which is to say billionaires.

And when billionaires give money, they give a lot more per call. But they also demand more control. The person who’s giving a couple hundred bucks because they have warm, fuzzy feelings towards their alma mater, they’re not asking to be on the board. Maybe they want a look at their kid or something like that. But even that seems old-fashioned to think that’s their motivation at this point.

The plutocrats, they want to be represented on the board. They want to control the institution. And as I said earlier, at a cocktail party where they’re talking to other plutocrats, when they say, Oh, I’m on the board of X University, they want their interlocutor to hear that and think, Oh, that is a university that I perceive has risen in status and in prestige, so it reflects well on you that you are on the board of it.

So that is the dynamic that kind of brings the plutocratic interest to bear on what was once a public institution. And the plutocratic interest is very much on gatekeeping access to the ruling class, in my opinion. The reason why higher education politics is so fraught—in the way that I see it—is, no matter what, it controls intergenerational access to the ruling class. Social reproduction happens through higher education, no matter what the higher education system looks like.

So either you have social reproduction that is relatively egalitarian because people from nontraditional elite backgrounds can get access to the elite through the higher education system. Or you have social reproduction that is completely plutocratic because a ruling class rigidly reproduces itself generation after generation.

And a more plutocratic higher education system is going to have the latter context, where a plutocrat sits on the board, runs the institution in a way that they think they and their friends would want their children to be educated. And mostly, that involves excluding people that should not be the peers of their children. And that is basically what the system that currently exists is designed to do.

Bacon: So ruling class is a little tough to define. Let’s play this out—let’s personalize it a little bit. I don’t recall where you went to college ... you can share that or not. I went to Yale, and I think that’s relevant to this conversation only because—and I, until recently, was a columnist at The Washington Post, and I’m at The New Republic—I think a lot of the people who populate elite institutions in America are, let’s call it, part of the ruling class for now.

If you go to Congress, for example, and look at senators and House members—those people disproportionately went to 10 or 15 colleges that are very elite, and so on. So just thinking this through a little bit, part of it is that my dad did not have a college degree, et cetera. My parents were not wealthy at all. My mom got her B.A. three months before I did.

But, point being: that’s unusual for Yale. The point is that these universities—our college education system—have allowed a few more people in than they did in 1950. There are more Black students at Yale than in 1950. But in general, it’s still reproducing these inequalities, is what you’re getting at.... Even if it has some social access, even as it’s doing some redistribution, it is in general re-entrenching the economic divides we had before.

Steinbaum: Yeah, I broadly think that if you look back at the higher education system that existed at the end of World War II and compare it to the system that exists now, I don’t know which one is more stratified. We definitely had less stratification between the end of World War II and the end of the 1960s through a variety of means.

There’s the GI Bill from the feds and more generous research funding from the feds. We also had state appropriations that were really designed to vastly expand systems to a newly well-educated state population.... It’s like what’s called the high school movement.

The universalization of high school education is a broad phenomenon from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The demand for more higher education at the state level is a phenomenon of the interwar period. To some degree it predates this, but in terms of a mass higher education phenomenon, it’s an interwar phenomenon.

And then what happened after the war is the sense that: OK, we’ve expanded the system, but it’s too disorganized. There’s too many different types of institutions and they’re doing different things. We need to standardize it to some degree, but do that in an egalitarian fashion.

So throughout the 20th century, there’s basically been a fight within higher education policy that is: The system’s too disorganized, we need to make it more well-constructed and efficient, but exactly how do we do that? By making it more stratified? Or do we do that by making it less stratified?

In the postwar era, “less stratified” won out for a brief period of time. My view is basically it ended with the backlash against campus protests in the 1960s that was viewed by the ruling class as being the sort of end result of the New Deal and civil rights movement creating a threat to the social order that was ultimately out of control and had to be put down.

And so you had this elite consensus between what you might think of as the elite center-left and the elite center-right in the late 1960s and early 1970s to convert away from institutional funding towards student debt as a means of disciplining the student body and getting the faculty under control, because all those people definitely did not like what they perceived as an overly radical faculty that had too much job security.

So between those things, that elite consensus is what created the higher education system that we have now. And as you described it, you can tell what kind of institution someone is going to go to by their socioeconomic background and vice versa.

For a given institution, if I tell you a student is at some institution, you can make a very good guess about what their socioeconomic background is on the basis of that information. So that institutional stratification—this is where we started this conversation—that is what I perceive as the signature quality of the higher education system that currently exists.

Bacon: And your point is that when something is stratified like this, it’s inevitably going to be unpopular.

Steinbaum: Yeah, “these beautiful universities.” Everyone says, “Oh, we have the best higher-education system ... in the world.” That defense against Trump—“How could you destroy this beautiful creation that is a credit to our country?”—I gag or vomit whenever I hear that.

Bacon: You mean that people are saying, Don’t destroy Harvard or Yale, or—

Steinbaum: Even the University of Michigan, or the University of Utah, where I teach, for that matter. It’s like: This is so great because it’s world-class and supposedly does all this groundbreaking research that’s a credit to this country, that powers our economy and attracts students from overseas.

Yeah, all of those things are true, and that is an aspect of the higher education system that’s worth defending, but what I imagine most Americans hearing when they hear the phrase, This is the best higher education system in the world, is: My kid’s not going there, or doesn’t have access to the best ones. They have access to a defunded state institution that’s no longer offering an academic education.

Or alternatively: They got charged through the nose. They’re still paying off their student debt, and that’s the best system in the world? That ruined my life. That didn’t give me the economic status and middle-class security that I expected from it. In fact, that screwed me over.

So I really think trying to defend the system by saying how great it is is a wrong path. Definitely not what a sound majoritarian political movement would use to defend the system that exists.

Bacon: The reason I mentioned where I went to school and so on was that I think part of what I was trying to get at—and failed to—was not to brag about myself, but to say that the problem is that the people who benefited from the system are in the jobs describing the system.... It’s hard to get a bunch of Yale graduates to say the system is stratified—and entrenching our power—because why would they say that?

So part of it is, the broad public, and the people who attend these defunded colleges, don’t get a chance to speak very often in forums that matter.

Steinbaum: Yeah. I totally agree with that. It’s a huge weakness of the sort of higher education policy establishment that has tried to defend the system from Trump, is how elitist it is, for the reason that you’re saying.

Their experience of higher education is: This is what put me ... in the high-status job that I have. It’s because I got a master’s of public policy or whatever ... at the Kennedy School at Harvard or something like that. Or I went to Yale Law School. That is what gives me identity. You’re coming after the institution that I place all of my identity in.

And well, that is not the higher education system that actually exists. And as you say, the people who have to deal with that higher education system don’t get heard in the halls of power.

And then the other aspect of that—this is who’s defending it—is the people who benefited from it, they’re going to say: OK, well, protect my thing, protect the thing that I like.

So they’re going to keep chopping off aspects of the system that exist and throwing them to the wolves to protect the thing that they care about. And what they’ve chopped off is the thing that the public actually had an interest in preserving. And so now those people have betrayed what should be their public constituency.

Bacon: So, to finish up here, what is next for this kind of—you have a big, broad idea of really changing the higher-education system in really fundamental ways—ways that, as you acknowledge, a lot of people who consider themselves Democrats, and maybe liberals, don’t agree with.

So where do you go from here? This idea that we need a different system, where the federal government is involved, but in a different way than it has been before ... I’m not even sure Elizabeth Warren would support these ideas right now. How do you build the system to move this thing?

Steinbaum: So really the motivation for embarking on this project to begin with—which is absolutely not over by any stretch of the imagination ... I’ve been studying these subjects for a decade now, and that’s only the beginning. I plan to spend the rest of my life on this kind of thing.

It is because the fight over student debt cancellation—well, student debt in general, and then as it morphed into cancellation specifically as a policy proposal toward the end of the 2010s—I felt was too focused on student debtors as the victims of—or, victims is not quite the right word, because that is how I see them—more the sort of sympathetic, downtrodden that we elite have to help and lift up from above.

And moreover, the criticism then was: OK, if you cancel the student debt, that’s your policy proposal and we’re just going to have to do it again in 10 years after more student debt is accumulated. I think that is a legitimate criticism.

So both of those two concerns that I had coming out of the sort of last round of higher education policy war speaks to the need for an alternative vision from the left that gives people a chance to rally around.

I don’t like that the centrist elites are so focused on: The system is good. Why are you attacking this good system? Or at least the part of the system that educated me is good. Why are you attacking that part? Let’s sacrifice something else to preserve it.

The public wants to be educated. They want access to a high-quality, reasonably-priced higher education, and we have to give it to them. And that is what the policy proposal is trying to do.

So if you’re asking concretely, what do I plan to do with it, I’m hoping that political candidates would be asked: OK, do you support this proposal or elements of this proposal?

I think a big cleavage, as this conversation has already alluded to, in the pretty near future is: Do you want to get the federal higher education further separated from the federal government, or do you want the federal government to take ownership of the system that they’re funding and improve its quality?

So I think that, regardless of the exact details of what’s in the proposal, I think that cleavage is going to be very central to the way this is talked about in the midterm election or the next Democratic presidential primary round. So that is a big motivation for putting it out there.

I also think it is—aside from candidates going around and being asked, What’s your higher education policy agenda? and hopefully they’ll say, Oh, that paper, I like that paper. That’s my agenda—is just the public demanding that of state legislators.

Not so much on the political campaign, but ... at present, when higher education administrators and regulators go before the state legislature and are grilled about wokeness running amok on campus, they basically have nothing to say that in my view is healthy towards the long-term interest of the higher education system.

Bacon: They would either concede the point, or say, we have intellectual diversity, and start counting Republicans.

Steinbaum: Exactly. None of that is a robust defense of the actual system. So in my view, this is a robust defense of the system and it is a vision that in theory—I mean, I don’t imagine plutocrat-dominated boards of trustees are going to get behind this vision anytime soon—but you could imagine some higher education administrators looking at this and saying: This is what I’m going to say we’re doing at my campus and why it should be funded by the state legislatures, because we are actually providing a high quality education to the people of this state.

Alternatively, it’s the kind of thing that in the hands of a state legislator—I’m imagining a pro-social, not necessarily the most left-wing state legislator, but someone who wants to be seen as creating a public good, fostering a public good for the people of their state—they would have this proposal in front of them and question the regulators and the higher education administrators that are in front of them at hearings and say: Why are you trying to recruit out of state in order to make up tuition?

That has been the kind of thing that state legislators are pressuring flagship public institutions to do in the past—to some degree. There are some legislators that have put arbitrary caps on that, but also not funded the institution, so they’re tying the hands of the administrators because that is a populistic-seeming thing to do.

The whole point is this proposal hangs together as a comprehensive agenda. So it is the kind of thing that could motivate a progressive-minded state legislator to take up and champion, as: I’m going to build a higher education system that actually serves the interests of the people who live in the state.

And that involves not recruiting out of state. It involves not trying to get the best researcher that brings in the most federal grant money and kind of subordinating the whole institution to that. It involves providing an affordable, high quality education to everyone in the state who wants it, regardless of their background.

Perry Bacon: Let me ask one final question. This is happening all the time now, where Democratic politician X—who went to a fancy school, or made sure their kids went to UPenn, or whatever—that’s a good example, because Joe Biden ... all his kids went to them—they go out of their way to say, Everyone shouldn’t go to college. College is not for everyone. Can we address this head-on here? I agree that college is not for everyone, but they’re not really saying that. They’re really saying: We want to make sure college is for everyone who wants to go, not just for people whose parents think they should be there.

Steinbaum: Yeah. And I would further point out, I mean it’s especially galling for me to hear that now from exactly the type of politician who 20 years ago was saying: Everyone should go to college. Because that is how you get into the middle class. And the college earnings premium is so high that if anyone goes to college, basically any amount of student debt, any amount of tuition is worth paying for it because the college earnings premium is so enormous.

Now that exact same politician—or type of politician—is saying: No, not everyone should go to college, because it sounds populistic to say, Oh no, I support trade school or whatever.

Bacon: And you and I support trade school.

Steinbaum: Yeah. But I also think the trade-schoolification of the higher education system amounts to transferring the cost of job training onto students’ shoulders.... As we have already talked about, it’s not in fact a pro–working class message, at least in the reality of that.

What I would diagnose in this case is that politicians don’t know what to say about higher education. They want to say something that doesn’t sound so elitist and so woke. So they’re saying: Ah, trade school. That’s what I’m going to say.

And I’m giving them something else to say that is, in my view, actually pro-social and would actually bespeak a progressive reform to the higher education system that is populistic, that isn’t actually serving the interest of employers as opposed to workers. So ... that kind of person, yes, pisses me off too. They are in fact saying: You shouldn’t go to college. Only my kid should go to college. God forbid we actually have a higher education system that the broad public can access.

If they don’t want to be caught saying that and being correctly interpreted by their audience to say, The higher education system isn’t for you, they can instead espouse the views and reforms that this paper puts out. I’m offering that to them in good faith and they can take it up. It’s now available to them. They can’t say, at least, there’s at least no other ideas on the table.

That’s the best I can do, is I can make it the case that there are better ideas on the table and it’s on you if you don’t espouse them.

Bacon: A great conversation. I learned a lot. Marshall, tell people where they can find your ideas generally—where you are on social media and other platforms—and then, second, where they can find this specific proposal.

Steinbaum: Yeah. So we really dove right into the substance of it without—I should have said this upfront. This paper is a joint publication of the Jain Family Institute, where I’m a senior fellow in higher-education finance, as well as Higher Education Labor United, which is a coalition of union locals representing workers in various aspects of the higher-education system. So it’s pretty ecumenical in terms of faculty, academic staff, graduate students—different Locals representing different aspects of the higher-education workforce.

But in any event, they’ve come together as a coalition to put proposals on the table exactly like this one—proposals that are more responsive to the reality of the system that exists. You can go to [Higher Education Labor United]’s website—they have the paper posted there. It’s also posted on my website, marshallsteinbaum.org.

Bacon: I included a link to the proposal in the chat, if anybody wants to check it out. There’s a link there to Marshall’s proposal. But go ahead—sorry.

Steinbaum: Yeah. As you said in your introduction, I’m a senior fellow in higher-education finance at the Jain Family Institute. We publish a lot of reports, particularly on student debt, and some of the ideas in this proposal draw on work we’ve done over the years. You can find that work through our Higher Education Finance program at the Jain Family Institute.

My website is marshallsteinbaum.org if you’re interested in my other academic work—we haven’t touched on a whole swath of it, but if you really like reading academic papers, they’re all there. And I’m on Twitter at @Econ_Marshall.

Bacon: And I guess I bring you up only to say that there are economists out there who are not Larry Summers or Jason Furman ... despite the media only calling those two people.

Steinbaum: Thank you very much, Perry. I’ll end there. I am an economist who is not Larry Summers or Jason Furman—that’s enough. That’s all you need to know.

Bacon: Good to see you, Marshall. Take care.

Steinbaum: Thank you very much.

Trump Is Destroying Higher Ed. Here’s How Democrats Can Rebuild It - 2026-01-21T15:31:51Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

The Trump administration has laid siege to colleges, cutting their funding and launching ridiculous investigations. But the administration took advantage of preexisting frustrations with higher education, says Marshall Steinbaum, an economics professor at the University of Utah and fellow at the Jain Family Institute. Policy decisions by Republican and Democratic politicians and universities themselves have created an unequal higher education system, where schools with lots of resources and money draw students from upper-income families, while those from poorer backgrounds attend schools that are inferior in terms of funding and quality. Steinbaum says that we need a total overhaul of higher education, including a requirement that publicly funded schools charge similar tuitions and therefore draw economically diverse student bodies. Steinbaum says we currently have heterogeneous universities that have homogeneous student bodies; we should instead have similar colleges that enroll diverse student populations. He’s co-written a comprehensive plan for higher education that he hopes officials in both parties adopt.

World Leaders Openly Heckle Trump Official During Davos Speech - 2026-01-21T15:22:37Z

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick faced a tough crowd at the World Economic Forum in Davos—and was heckled by a surprising, but familiar, former U.S. vice president.

During an official dinner Tuesday night, Lutnick reportedly launched into a tirade criticizing Europe, inviting jeers from the forum’s major members, heads of state, and other dignitaries.

“We are here at Davos to make one thing crystal clear: With President Trump, capitalism has a new sheriff in town,” Lutnick said, according to the Financial Times.

Multiple people reportedly started heckling Lutnick’s speech—including former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who started booing the secretary, two executives told the Times. Amid the chaos, Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, walked out of the dinner.

The hosting WEF chairman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, ended up calling off the event before desserts had been passed out, one source told Reuters.

The U.S. Commerce Department claimed that Gore was the only one who booed.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum Wednesday, Trump continued the American posturing as he tried to take credit for Europe’s existence in a winding, incoherent address.

Trump Goes on Confused Rant When Asked About His 2026 Goals - 2026-01-21T15:12:05Z

What are Donald Trump’s goals for 2026? They’re all over the place.

The president was asked about his goals in regard to getting his agenda through Congress ahead of the midterms, and he gave a meandering answer about his own executive orders.  

“We passed so many executive orders. I have great executive orders that are really common sense and good. I mean, like water coming out of a sink. The water wouldn’t come out. They had all sorts of ridiculous restrictions. I took all of that off,” Trump said to Katie Pavlich on NewsNation Tuesday night. “Coming out of the shower head, you’d stand under the shower, there’s no water coming out, so I passed—so many things like that. 

“Straws. They don’t have to be paper anymore. They don’t have to melt in your mouth.… I’d like to have that all confirmed by Congress,” Trump continued, before adding that he got more important things accomplished through executive order, and would like to have all of his executive orders confirmed by Congress, estimating that 35 to 40 percent of his executive orders have already become law. 

“So you want your executive orders codified in law, so to speak,” Pavlich said. 

“Ideally, we get ’em codified and we get ’em codified soon, yes,” Trump replied.

Trump is well known for rambling and meandering around reporter’s questions, even in friendly interviews. But the vagueness indicates he’s either fully checked out or he’s hiding his agenda, as Trump and his inner circle are unlikely to settle for simply turning his many damaging executive orders through Congress. 

Getting Trump’s agenda through Congress will be a tall order. The president could barely get his own budget through Congress last year, and ended up causing a lengthy government shutdown. Trump’s executive orders also would have to survive court challenges, and some of them may not even get through the right-wing Supreme Court. 

Trump Mixes Up Iceland and Greenland in Incoherent Davos Speech - 2026-01-21T14:41:56Z

America’s presence at the World Economic Forum Wednesday was overshadowed by its leader’s latest obsession: obtaining Greenland—or, maybe, Iceland, depending on Donald Trump’s ability to remember his military aim.

Thousands of influential figures, including prominent CEOs and world leaders, gathered in Davos ahead of the global conference. Trump was asked to deliver opening remarks Wednesday, but his speech went wildly off the rails as he began to hyperfixate on his rationale for staking an American flag in Greenland, a Danish-controlled territory.

But over the course of an hour-long (and counting, at time of publication) speech, Trump repeatedly and erroneously mixed up Greenland with Iceland, a completely separate landmass and independent nation, raising alarm over just how educated Trump is on the focal point of his U.S. expansion.

Before a host of European leaders—including some of America’s longest allies—Trump insisted that “there’s nothing wrong” with the potential acquisition, likening his desired annexation of the region to Europe’s colonial history.

“Just as the European nations have,” Trump said. “All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”

Trump reiterated that the U.S. could take Greenland by the use of “excessive force” that would be “practically unstoppable.”

The president has been locked into the idea of obtaining Greenland since at least 2019, when he told reporters that the arrangement could be handled as a “large real estate deal.”

In recent weeks, the president’s threats have escalated in fervor and frequency. Earlier this month, Trump told The Atlantic that the U.S. “needs” Greenland “for defense.” But what exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, particularly because myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

Forcing the issue, however, could irreversibly damage America’s relations with some of its most significant allies. Over the long weekend, Trump announced a new wave of retaliatory tariffs against European countries that oppose his Greenland takeover, cautioning NATO allies against participation in a joint military exercise on the island.

Late into Monday evening, Trump continued to provoke America’s allies by releasing private messages sent to him by French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. He also taunted world leaders by sharing images on Truth Social that included a photo of himself in the Oval Office beside a posterboard of the Western hemisphere—with Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela colored in with the American flag.

“This would not be a threat to NATO,” Trump claimed before the global conference Wednesday, patting himself on the back for his lackluster support for the U.S.-backed military alliance. “This would greatly enhance the security of the whole alliance. The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO. When you think about it, nobody can dispute it.

“You have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no, and we will remember.”

Trump Embarrasses All of America in Slurred, Disjointed Davos Speech - 2026-01-21T14:36:34Z

President Trump delivered yet another rambling, long-winded speech Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, using the massive world stage to rail against windmills, complain for the umpteenth time about how the 2020 election was rigged, reaffirm his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark, and take credit for every good thing in the world.

The room was dead silent virtually the entire time.

“Certain places in Europe are not even recognizable frankly, anymore. They’re not recognizable. And we can argue about it, but there’s no argument,” Trump said early in his speech to the room full of Europeans. “Friends come back from different places—I don’t wanna insult anybody—and say ‘I don’t recognize it.’ And that’s not in a positive way.… It’s not heading in the right direction.”

The rhetoric aligned seamlessly with the deeply racist, anti-immigrant sentiments that the European right is pushing with his support.

Trump also took the time to hit on one of his favorite punching bags: windmills.

“There are windmills all over Europe. There are windmills all over the place. And they are losers,” Trump said, seemingly talking about the windmills personally. “One thing I’ve noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses, and the worse that country is doing. China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China.”

This is not true, China has multiple wind turbine farms.

“Did you ever think of that? They put up a couple big wind farms, but they don’t use them, they just put them up to show people what they could look like,” he continued. “They don’t spin, they don’t do anything.”

Trump then of course got to Greenland, accidentally mixing it up with Iceland for nearly the entire time he spoke about it.

“Until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me,” Trump said, meaning to say Greenland. “They called me daddy … very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy.’”

“So we want a piece of ice for world protection. And they won’t give it,” Trump continued. “We’ve never asked for anything else, and we could have kept that piece of land. And we didn’t. They have a choice. You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember.”

It’s been a rough 36-ish hours for our fearless leader. On Tuesday, he made a guest appearance at White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s briefing only to read names and show pictures to the press corp for over an hour. And now, after his plane was initially diverted on its way to Davos last night, he’s doing more useless ranting.

Trump, 79, Asks Reporter to Give Him Information on Taliban Hostage - 2026-01-21T14:22:18Z

President Donald Trump appeared to have never heard of an American held captive by the Taliban for almost a year. 

During an exclusive interview Tuesday with News Nation, host Katie Pavlich touted Trump’s previous efforts to liberate hostages and asked the president about Dennis Coyle, a U.S. citizen who was reportedly kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan last January.  

“What is your administration doing to get him home?” Pavlich asked. 

“Well, if you give me the name,” Trump said, even though Pavlich had just told him.

“Dennis Coyle,” she repeated. 

“Well, if you give me some information, I’ll take care of that,” Trump continued. 

“I know that your administration is working on it—” Pavlich said.

“I know they are,” Trump said quickly. “But I could do some things on the internet that are pretty impactful.”

Pavlich asked if Trump had a message for the Taliban, who had held Coyle “for no crime.”

“Well I’m not happy about them holding anybody. And especially if he’s not guilty of anything. And it sounds—from what I’ve heard, and again I’m not that familiar with it like you are, but I will certainly take a very strong position on it,” Trump said.

But Trump’s remarks made it seem that he’d had never even heard of Coyle at all, and the president’s brilliant plan to free him seemed simply to involve posting a “very strong position” he’d made up on the spot.

Ex-Ally Warns Trump’s Decline Is “Significant” After Disastrous Speech - 2026-01-21T14:01:53Z

A former White House attorney is ringing alarm bells over Donald Trump’s declining mental health.

Ty Cobb, an employee of the first Trump administration and a now outspoken critic of the president, told The Beat on MS NOW Tuesday that the recent shift in Trump’s psychological condition was “palpable.”

That day alone, Trump spent a 90-minute press briefing mumbling to himself over a stack of papers, alleging that “pirating ships” is the only thing that Somalis succeed at, claiming that “God is very proud” of his first year back in office, and alleging that a witness to Renee Nicole Good’s death in Minneapolis earlier this month was a “paid agitator.” Outside the press conference, he continued to damage relations with Europe over his obsession with acquiring Greenland.

“Those are not the comments of a rational human being and certainly not presidential at all,” Cobb told MS NOW’s Ari Melber. “Likewise, yesterday you had the clear, deranged, demented, and insane note that he sent to the leaders of Norway, saying that because Norway, which has no control over the Nobel Peace Prize, hadn’t given it to him, that he was free to disregard peace and very interested in Greenland. I don’t think there’s anybody outside of the United States who believes that Trump is sane.”

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told The Wall Street Journal Monday that he had attempted to negotiate with Trump against a new wave of tariffs on European countries after the U.S. leader suddenly turned sour on NATO countries participating in a joint military exercise in Greenland. Trump, according to Støre, responded that the world would not be safe until America had “Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

“Since you’ve worked for him in the White House, when you make that reference to ‘sane,’ do you mean problems with how he approaches things that have long been there, or are you referring to some decline?” Melber asked.

“No, I think there’s been a significant decline,” Cobb said. “He’s always been driven by narcissism. But I think the dementia and the cognitive decline are palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians.”

Transcript: Trump’s Crazed NATO Tirades Rattle Experts: “Mad, Erratic” - 2026-01-21T11:08:57Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 21 episode of The
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.


Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Over the weekend, the news broke that President Trump sent a deranged text to Norway’s prime minister about his desire to seize Greenland. In it, Trump linked his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize to the possibility of taking Greenland by military force. It turns out that wasn’t a one-off. Trump said something very similar in remarks to reporters on Tuesday.

And all this has prompted at least one medical specialist to sound the alarm. That notion in turn was amplified by a Danish politician who called Trump “mad and erratic.” Which got us thinking about how all this madness must be getting perceived by the rest of the world. So we’re talking about this to Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist who specializes in international relations and has a great new piece for Foreign Affairs magazine arguing that Trump is leading us into a future of primitive anarchy. Elizabeth, nice to have you on.

Elizabeth Saunders: Thanks. Good to be here.

Sargent: So Trump has been talking about taking over Greenland, and everybody has already seen the text that he sent to Norway’s prime minister. I’ll read the key part:

“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.”

Elizabeth, the idea that Trump stopped eight wars is pure fiction, but from an international affairs perspective, what does it mean that Donald Trump is talking this way to the leader of another sovereign country?

Saunders: Well, and an ally—two allies, at that, who are essential to the defense of Europe and Ukraine. It’s astonishing. And leaving the “eight wars” fiction aside—“eight wars plus” fiction aside—it’s not that unusual for leaders to say things behind closed doors or even in diplomatic cables that are strongly worded and so forth, even leader-to-leader.

But I think this level of pettiness, and the accusation that Norway is somehow responsible for him not getting the Nobel Prize and that that should matter in the matter of Greenland’s sovereignty, is kind of beyond anything I think any of us have seen or even can speak about in history.

Sargent: Just about the pettiness of it—I think Donald Trump actually sees this as a really world-historical injustice that he’s been denied this prize, don’t you? I think he really sees it that way.

Saunders: I try not to predict with too much confidence what’s going on in Donald Trump’s mind. I do think he just has no love for the Europeans, and his National Security Strategy talks about making Europe’s civilization great again in so many words. And I think that every time Europe talks about the rules-based order, it must drive him crazy. So maybe he thinks it’s a world-historical injustice; that’s entirely plausible. Maybe he’s just petty.

But I think fundamentally, he just does not respect Europe, and he’s been very consistent for decades about how he doesn’t like multilateral alliances and he doesn’t believe in multilateral trade agreements. These are the bedrock principles of Europe. And now he wants Greenland.

And he’s essentially saying: I am going to violate ... the most fundamental norm of the post-1945 order, the one Putin violated in 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine. I’m going to take Greenland away from an ally. And that is something that I think is shocking to most analysts who ... I mean, speaking only for myself, hardly anything shocks me.

Sargent: Yes. And I want to get into your great piece about this at the end of this discussion.

But first, let’s listen to Trump bring this up one more time with reporters. Here’s him talking about it. The “María” he refers to here is María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan leader who gave her Nobel to Trump. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): You know, I should have 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, okay? 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 María doing what she did. She said, I don’t deserve the Nobel Prize. He does.


Sargent: So again, what he’s primarily preoccupied with here is whether Norway denied him the Nobel. And also, I think Trump appears a bit confused about how prizes work, but it’s a little hard for me to avoid noticing that he’s sticking with this line. He’s got to think on some level, somewhere, that this makes strategic sense.

Saunders: Well, I think the Europeans are taking it very seriously. And so whatever he’s thinking, they’re no longer treating it as a remote possibility. I mean, the speeches this morning in Davos by Macron and Mark Carney of Canada were truly astounding.

Carney’s in particular essentially declared the rules-based international order dead, which many of us have already done. But for the Canadian prime minister to say it out loud on television at an international forum on television is really crossing a Rubicon, I think.

As for what Trump is thinking, I think what Trump wants is Greenland. What he’s thinking is he wants Greenland. And it hasn’t been given to him in the easy-peasy way that he thought it would be, maybe. I don’t think there’s any plan.

I have been wondering, what would even a peaceful U.S. annexation—leaving aside all the reasons why that’s not going to happen, but for argument’s sake—what does it look like for the United States to “acquire” Greenland?

Are we going to run Greenland’s courts? Are we going to administer Greenland as a territory? Are we going to appropriate money for its infrastructure? The people of Greenland do not want to be part of the United States, so it would be under hostile terms.

There is no reason strategically why this should happen. We have an ally. Their interests and our interests should align and have aligned for 80 years. And they do all those things.

Now, Greenland may choose to become independent of them, but that’s a matter for Denmark and Greenland to work out. It’s inconceivable that it would be more strategically valuable for the U.S. to “own” Greenland than it would be to keep the status quo.

Sargent: Well, maybe you could clarify for listeners what the current arrangement is, because we actually have access to Greenland in many ways, and pretty much everything Trump wants, presumably, he could have right now. Can you talk about that?

Saunders: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think there’s a very useful contrast here with the new Venezuelan regime. So we have this well-known concept called the principal-agent problem, where if you are a principal and you want an agent to do something for you, that’s great. But if you don’t want to have to monitor them closely, they’re probably going to slack off or do it a different way.

And so that’s what the risk is in Venezuela. The Venezuelan government—the Delcy Rodríguez government—is only going to promise to give Trump what he wants while there’s U.S. military pressure offshore. The minute that goes away, they go back to running the illicit economy and so forth.

And the reason is because the principal and the agent have divergent interests. They want to make money, and we want the illicit economy to go away, or to have the oil, or whatever it is that Trump and his Venezuela-toppling acolytes want out of Venezuela.

The opposite is true in Greenland. It is the rare case where acting through an agent is actually far more efficient because their interests are complete—or were until last week—completely aligned. There is no reason why you can’t act through Denmark and get what you want—and if you want to be crass about it, at lower cost.

Sargent: Yeah. And the administration, just to your point that you raised earlier, they have not laid out an actual plan for taking it over, whether it’s by buying it or by taking it by force ... what happens down the line? They don’t seem to feel any obligation whatsoever to explain why he’s doing this. And just to sort of tease out your point a little more, it would actually be worse for us to acquire it than to not acquire it. Isn’t that your point?

Saunders: Yes. I mean, it is. What I’m suggesting is the reason you hire an agent to do stuff. To run your factory or to … this is part of life. It’s a term that comes from economics. You do it because maybe they have expertise that you don’t have, or maybe it’s just more time-efficient or cost-efficient to delegate a task to an agent.

The difficulty is if the agent has different preferences than you: maybe they want to slack off, maybe they want to take kickbacks, maybe they want to run a drug side business, whatever it is. I mean, that’s essentially the Venezuela problem. You’ve got to monitor them very closely or else just do it yourself. Who among us has not had the [thought], Ugh, I’ll just do it myself.

In Denmark, you have an agent who is already doing it exactly the way every U.S. administration until now—and probably everyone into the future were it not for Trump—would choose to do it. They’ve said, We used to have more troops there, if you want more troops there, great.

Most world leaders, most American presidents can only dream of that kind of access. And so ... it will be far more costly. The biggest reason why—and the lesson that we learned in Iraq, and we’ve learned it over and over and over again in interventions going back a century—is that we would be essentially occupying territory where the people don’t want us. That’s also happening in Minneapolis, by the way.

Sargent: Well, yes, totally different reason for the occupation, of course. To your point about how this is just batshit insane, let’s check out what a Danish politician, Lars-Christian Brask, said about Trump. Listen to this.

Lars-Christian Brask (voiceover): You know, if I could come with some advice, it would be for the Senate and the House to start to take control of the political power in America, because with this mad and erratic behavior, you know, you have to ask the question, is the president capable of running the United States?


Sargent: It’s interesting how from an international perspective, people don’t quite understand why other American politicians and institutions are letting Trump run wild this way without any serious constraints. It must look extremely baffling to the rest of the world. Is that something you’re seeing in other international coverage?

Saunders: Yes. I’ve been asked this question by international journalists as well. And I think you have to hear—you have to understand the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2.

So in Trump 1, there were still people around him who would step in and check his most extreme impulses. They may have enabled many extreme policies, but they stepped in. I mean, he mused about buying Greenland in 2019. There were still some constraints around him.

Presidential advisors are a very important check on the president’s ability to use military force and an important political constraint. They can go public. They are political actors in their own right. And it’s the subject of my most recent book, The Insiders’ Game.

In Trump 2.0, he has constructed a White House apparatus where nobody will say no to him. He handpicked people that will be sycophantic, will say yes. And so there are effectively no checks on his foreign policy.

I mean, I wrote in Foreign Affairs in June that we have “the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship.” So I think Trump is Trump and has always been Trump. He’s always disliked NATO and alliances and multilateral trade. He may have wanted Greenland for ... long before 2019.

What you have now is Trump in a completely permissive environment. And so, you know, the constraints have been defanged. Congress is completely supine. And the Supreme Court has given him immunity for his official acts. So there’s really no shadow of any constraint on him now.

Sargent: One Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, has been basically making that point. He’s been forcefully criticizing Trump. He told Punchbowl News in a new interview that he’s considering using his power to try to slow down this madness from Trump on Greenland, including trying to block nominees in committee and slow the Senate down in other ways.

Tillis called Trump’s threats toward Greenland and Denmark the “betrayal of a friend.” He recently said, “I’m sick of stupid” about all this.

Elizabeth, isn’t it incredible that we don’t hear more Republicans talking like this? I mean, the Republican Party has a whole lot of people who have a genuine interest in foreign relations. Maybe we don’t agree with them on a lot of things, but they’re not completely crazy or complete lightweights either. And yet they just let all this stuff slide without a word.

Saunders: Well, the sorts of things that Tillis is talking about are exactly the way Congress used to act—and I say used to really before 9/11. They would block things in committee. They would demand answers or haul ... White House officials up to the Hill.

And it got worse after 9/11, I think, because of the delegation to presidential power. And so Trump isn’t entirely responsible for the trend, but I think he has been the one who has seized it.

Sargent: I want to talk about Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was the cardiologist to the late Vice President Dick Cheney—former vice president. Trump’s talk about Greenland prompted him to call for action. Reiner said this on Twitter:

“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.”

I thought that was pretty eye-opening and obviously very true. What did you think?

Saunders: Well, I mean, I’m not a doctor, so I defer to those who are. I definitely—I think it’s hard to disentangle the permissive environment of Trump 2.0 from the obvious signs of aging. Trump is Trump. Obviously, Biden had issues of his declining health.

And not to excuse what his advisers did by any stretch, but their approach was to keep him away from the public eye. Trump’s advisers’ approach is just to let him loose. And so there is a sort of loose-cannon feeling to it now. I think you’re seeing this on so many fronts.

The other vehicle for really constraining him that would maybe stop him in his tracks is if the Republicans went after him for his attacks on Jerome Powell. Because that is an existential threat to the Fed’s independence. And that affects the whole economy.

It’s almost so esoteric that it’s ... and it’s not military force, [so] it’s sort of easier politically, I would imagine, for Republicans to be brave about.

But if the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was not invoked on January 6, I don’t see how it could be invoked over Greenland. Even though annexing Greenland is such a historic breach of trust with our allies, makes no strategic sense at all and is just clearly a fiasco waiting to happen.

Sargent: Well, just to close this out on that point, there may be one way to understand what he’s doing. And it goes to what you wrote in your piece for Foreign Affairs, which talked about how Trump is really breaking this basic principle that should be undergirding things: that you just don’t redraw borders by force. I think maybe what he’s trying to do with all this is break that principle. Does that make sense to you?

Saunders: Yes. I mean, there are those who would point out that the United States violates borders all the time. It did in Iraq. It has done so in Latin America repeatedly over a century. So I mean, the rules-based order has always been—I like to say the liberal international order was never fully liberal, never fully international, and never fully orderly.

And the U.S. was always the one that could break it and so forth. And we annexed all kinds of territory, and we don’t treat the people equally. American Samoa, for example, Puerto Rico. So in that sense, it’s not so much of a direct break.

The fact that he’s not even rhetorically defending the principle of territorial order is different. You can accuse previous presidents of hypocrisy because they were trying to uphold the principle while violating it. He’s not even trying to uphold it. He’s essentially siding with the Putins of the world who feel it can be violated and shouldn’t ever really exist.

Plus you also have the ... you’re attacking your own NATO ally, which, that is a new dimension. And I think that is what really makes it the potential death blow to whatever remains of the rules-based order.

Sargent: So what’s going to happen, Elizabeth?

Saunders: My goodness. I still think when push comes to shove, I have a hard time imagining what even a military landing on Greenland or takeover or annexation—I have a hard time connecting the dots from where we are now to the U.S. owns Greenland.

That said, absolutely nothing would surprise me. And I do think that for the Europeans and for Canada, this is a real—if the Munich Security Conference was a shock wake-up call, this is the turning point.

Sargent: Well, Elizabeth Saunders, that was certainly harrowing enough, but, talk about realism, you gave us a good dose of it. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Saunders: Thank you for having me.

The Minneapolis Faith Community Is Showing How to Fight ICE - 2026-01-21T11:00:00Z

The Reverend Susie Hayward felt as if she had experienced the full spectrum of human emotion over the span of a week. As the minister of justice organizing at Creekside United Church of Christ in southern Minneapolis, Hayward has been deeply involved in organizing and participating in the community response to the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“Myself and my community are feeling our nervous systems are all dysregulated, and we are feeling fear and we’re feeling grief and we’re feeling anger. So there is all of that, as we are being terrorized in our communities,” said Hayward. But, she continued, the current moment is also characterized by “a great deal of connection and courage and, just frankly, love that is also surging through this city among folks.”

Although ICE has been present in large numbers in Minneapolis since late December, the deadly shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer earlier this month has resulted in a surge of organizing and protests in the local community—and faith leaders are playing a key coordinating role. Minneapolis has a diverse population representing a number of different faiths, so the interfaith organizers represent a broad spectrum of religious affiliation.

Members of Hayward’s church are involved in such activities as patrolling outside schools and houses of worship to disrupt ICE activity, and assisting migrants who may be afraid to leave their homes by delivering groceries and offering rides. This has become a major priority for many in the local Minneapolis community—one Minneapolis church has delivered more than 12,000 boxes of food to families unable to leave their homes, according to MPR News.

For Kelly Sherman-Conroy, an associate pastor at All Nations Indian Church in Minneapolis, ensuring that local organizers are well trained is a deeply personal endeavor. Growing up in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Sherman-Conroy saw members of wealthy, white congregations in the Twin Cities visit her community to undertake mission projects—without actually learning about the people they were ostensibly serving.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Sherman-Conroy helped form an interfaith network of faith leaders known as Movement Chaplains, providing training on how to effectively engage in nonviolent protesting. The emphasis of these trainings is on “deescalation and cultural awareness and sensitivity,” she said, and teaching “what it means to be a guest in the space.”

“There’s been a big call for people of faith to show up more, especially clergy,” Sherman-Conroy explained. “I’m a big proponent of saying, like, ‘Don’t send somebody out and make that invitation if you don’t give them the tools to keep themselves safe and others safe.’” Twin Cities neighborhoods with large Somali populations have been disproportionately targeted by federal agents after a right-wing influencer peddled unsubstantiated claims of fraud occurring at daycare centers operated by Somali Minnesotans.

Hayward is also active in multifaith networks that have mobilized in the wake of Good’s death. She has tried to offer pastoral care to detained migrants, although she was blocked from doing so, and participated in an event calling on Target—which is based in Minnesota—to stop allowing ICE agents to operate on its premises.

Faith leaders have also organized virtual “nightly healing spaces,” offering pastoral and therapeutic care for Minneapolis residents “after they’ve been out all day long, facing harassment and intimidation by ICE, witnessing traumatic events,” Hayward said.

Hayward has found herself in need of some of these services. She was one of the clergy members who responded to the scene on the day of Good’s death, and was pepper-sprayed by ICE when she arrived at the location. She has been shoved and insulted by ICE officers.

“I’ve had ICE agents … flip me off and push me around and say harmful things to me, as they are to everybody here,” Hayward said. “If they’re doing this to a white clergywoman in a collar, what are they doing to my brown and Black immigrant neighbors when the videos aren’t rolling?”

Nationally, the events of the past month in Minneapolis have inspired multifaith leaders to respond on a larger scale. To Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, the president and CEO of the Interfaith Alliance, the countrywide mobilization is in keeping with the history of the nation. He pointed to the abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights Movement as times when religious leaders were active in pushing for progress.

“One of the great American traditions is religious leadership showing up and helping America to see a way forward,” Raushenbush said. Interfaith Alliance has hosted in-person and virtual trainings that educate people on the intersection between faith and current politics, as well as practical “essential knowledge” to help communities respond to federal law enforcement.

“How do you show up safely? How do you deescalate situations when they arrive? … If you’re going to show up on the streets, what is your spiritual reservoir that you will draw from in order to be in that moment and remain nonviolent?” Raushenbush said of the trainings. “People need training in order to make sure that they’re able to be as effective and centered and organized as possible.”

Sherman-Conroy said that Movement Chaplains only go where they are invited, wearing orange shirts to identify their presence. “When we go into these spaces, we don’t center ourselves, right? We center our community. So for us, the idea is that community is a spiritual practice,” she said.

There has been some tension in Minneapolis faith communities in recent days. On Sunday, protesters disrupted a worship service at a St. Paul church, where one of the pastors serves as the head of the local ICE field office. The Justice Department is now investigating the event. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local civil rights activist and ordained reverend, argued in an interview with The Washington Post that the protest aligned with Christian principles, saying that “if you compare anyone’s actions and behaviors against that scripture, that will tell you who is on the right side of history and who is on the wrong side of history.”

Diverse communities across Minneapolis have been affected by the actions of federal law enforcement. Sherman-Conroy noted that Native Americans have been targeted by ICE officers, who arrest them on suspicion of being undocumented immigrants. The Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, which holds an ICE facility, was named after the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, who advocated for the rights of Dakota Indians in the nineteenth century. The Episcopal Church of Minnesota is among the organizations that want Whipple’s name removed from the building.

“Bishop Whipple himself would never have endorsed his name going on a building where so much fear and terror is manifested,” Daniel Romero, a volunteer leader of the Interfaith Coalition on Immigration and ministerial candidate with the United Church of Christ, told the Associated Press.

Other Christian leaders in the region have highlighted the connection between faith principles and political action. Episcopal Bishop Craig Loya said in a homily earlier this month that Christians should be inspired to “make like our ancient ancestors, and turn the world upside down by mobilizing for love.”

From Hayward’s perspective as a Christian, the level of community action is “manifesting as an embodied expression of the greatest command of all, which is to love God and love [your] neighbor.” She said she has been heartened by the community response, and the intertwining of faith and demonstration.

“I feel like I’m witnessing the great awakening of democracy here, from the ground up,” Hayward said.

The Supreme Court Just Got Caught in Its Gun Rights Contradictions - 2026-01-21T11:00:00Z

The Supreme Court is running into a problem: There appears to be a gap between what the court writes in its opinions and what the justices in the majority actually mean.

Over the last year, the conservative justices have chastised lower court judges for not following their unsigned orders in unrelated cases. Those orders often don’t have a majority opinion upon which other judges can rely, and they typically aren’t seen as a final view on the merits.

In a case in August, however, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh gratuitously accused a lower court judge of “defy[ing]” the Supreme Court’s rulings—a cardinal sin in the federal judiciary—because the judge blocked the Trump administration from freezing certain grants by the National Institutes of Health.

“Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote. He pointed to an unrelated stay the court had issued in a Department of Education case, which involved different federal grants, different laws, and a completely different agency. I noted afterward that the justices were essentially asking the lower courts to read their minds and guess the right outcome instead of applying existing law and precedent.

This problem was originally confined to the court’s shadow docket cases, where things have proven to be a little more freewheeling. At oral arguments in Wolford v. Lopez on Tuesday, however, the telepathy gap now appears to be affecting the court’s merits cases—the ones that receive full briefing, oral argument, and a written opinion—as well.

Wolford is a follow-up case to New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen, the court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in 2022. In Bruen, the conservative majority struck down New York’s restrictive law for obtaining a concealed-carry permit and announced a new judicial test for evaluating whether a gun restriction violated the Second Amendment. (More on that test later.)

After the ruling in Bruen, multiple states revised their existing concealed-carry laws to comply with what they thought was the new legal framework. Among them was Hawaii, which did not allow concealed carry at all prior to Bruen. In addition to other changes, the Hawaii legislature passed a law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property that is accessible to the public without the owner’s permission.

This “default-property” rule flips the burden from the property owner to the gun owner when deciding whether it is lawful to carry a legally owned firearm in public. A group of Hawaii gun owners challenged the law, arguing that it violated their Second Amendment rights by requiring them to obtain permission from every privately owned business they visit—gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, and so on.

Hawaii, on the other hand, said that the law was constitutionally sound because states had long regulated the carriage of firearms on private property. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll stop noting the “generally accessible by the public” part from here on out.) The state cited anti-poaching laws in the founding era and some later statutes, including an 1865 law in Louisiana that forbade people from carrying guns on “premises or plantations,” which critics have claimed was part of the discriminatory “Black Codes” of the Reconstruction era.

Prior to Bruen, lower courts had weighed whether a gun restriction violated the Second Amendment with various balancing tests. On one end were state and federal interests in public safety. On the other was an individual right to bear arms for “ordinary, law-abiding citizens,” as one of the court’s prior decisions phrased it.

That approach had led lower courts to uphold many existing gun restrictions, as prior Supreme Court decisions had suggested they should. With Bruen, however, the court’s conservative majority explicitly forbade lower courts from engaging in such balancing tests. Instead, the court outlined a novel history-and-tradition test for judges to use when hearing constitutional challenges to gun restrictions.

“When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.”

This originalist approach, as I’ve noted before, led to chaos in the lower courts as judges struggled to figure out which historical laws were analogous to existing ones. The Supreme Court partially backtracked in the 2024 case United States v. Rahimi to conclude that only a common principle was needed, not a near-identical analogue. Hawaii argued that it had met that burden, a point on which the court’s liberal justices seemed to agree.

“There was a history of, in at least New York in 1763, just before the founding, that prohibited trespassing and hunting on other people’s lands because trampling on the land was destroying it,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Alan Beck, the lawyer arguing for the gun owners. “So you don’t need under Rahimi an exact duplicate historically. You just need an analogous principle.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also noted that the Hawaii law brought reasonable clarity to a status quo that Bruen had disrupted. “Once Bruen said you can carry the gun outside of your home, and there was an alternative, well-established principle that private property owners can exclude people,” she explained to Neal Katyal, the lawyer representing the state of Hawaii in the case, “I think the states were trying to make sure that property owners had the opportunity to do that.”

That did not stop the plaintiffs from claiming that Hawaii had some sort of animus against them. “There’s a clear body of evidence here that this was done to undermine Bruen and to undermine the Second Amendment right,” Beck claimed, “and, thus, this law very clearly implicates the Second Amendment.”

The reality of Hawaii’s law is that it would significantly impact the practical ability to carry a firearm in the state if one needs affirmative permission whenever entering private property. Under Bruen, however, the level of a law’s impact isn’t supposed to matter. The conservatives dispensed with balancing tests in that decision because too many gun restrictions were being upheld under those tests, leading Thomas, Alito, and others to make a familiar complaint: “Mr. Katyal, you’re just relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status,” Justice Samuel Alito bluntly told Katyal. “I don’t see how you can get away from that.”

The conservative justices noted that similar measures, if applied in the First Amendment context, might be unconstitutional. Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted, for example, that the First Amendment allows candidates to go door to door to solicit votes. “But you say that it’s different when it comes to the Second Amendment … when the candidate wants to walk up and he’s carrying a gun,” she noted. “What exactly is the basis for the distinction?”

It is odd to imagine a candidate canvassing for votes with a gun at his side, but that may be beside the point. Katyal argued that it didn’t matter because the court had charted a radically different course with gun rights. “With the First Amendment, you’ve got burden tests and all sorts of stuff that this court disclaimed in Bruen at page 22,” he told Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “And so it’s just going to apply somewhat differently.”

Barrett and Roberts, who appeared to be in favor of striking down the Hawaii law, pressed Katyal further on other First Amendment examples, such as soliciting. Barrett even proposed an eyebrow-raising hypothetical, in which a private property owner—again, like a store or restaurant—could reject someone on the basis of race under Katyal’s reasoning.

“I mean, absent a public accommodations law or in a private residence, you could turn someone away on the basis of race,” she noted. Katyal disagreed with her premise under the Bruen framework. “There is no antidiscrimination component in the Second Amendment the way there is with the equal protection clause,” he countered.

That prompted Alito’s aforementioned interjection that Katyal was reducing the Second Amendment to a “second-class right.” He respectfully disagreed, noting that the Bruen test was a much blunter instrument than the tests the court had developed in other areas of constitutional law. “It’s not a second-class right,” Katyal replied. “It just doesn’t have the same components of viewpoint discrimination or antidiscrimination for the Fourteenth Amendment, and it’s just not in the Second Amendment.”

What the case ultimately comes down to, in other words, is what the court really meant in Bruen. The justices could have adopted a more multifaceted test, but they eschewed it in favor of a simpler, bright-line originalist test. If the conservative justices truly meant that Second Amendment restrictions are presumptively invalid unless they had a historical analogue, which Hawaii has readily provided here, then the case should not be as difficult as the justices made it sound on Tuesday.

If, on the other hand, the goal of Bruen was to demolish all concealed-carry restrictions in blue states, to force them to accept the presence of guns in nearly every aspect of everyday life, to treat gun owners as akin to a constitutionally protected class, and to elevate the right to carry over basic private property rights, then the court’s decision in Wolford will be as easy as the conservative justices made it sound on Tuesday. Lower courts will once again be left in the unenviable position of trying to guess what the Supreme Court really meant instead of relying on their written rulings for guidance. A decision is expected by the end of June at the latest.

There Is No Bigger Kitchen-Table Issue Than ICE Violence - 2026-01-21T11:00:00Z

If there’s one thing you can depend on from the current Democratic Party leadership in Congress, it’s their total commitment to bringing everything back to the kitchen table. Every fresh controversy or abuse of constitutional rights is almost inevitably driven back in that direction, whether it’s reframing the outrage du jour—regardless of what it is—as a question of affordability or just changing the subject entirely.  

Whether Donald Trump is starting foreign wars, ordering military-style occupation of our cities, or praising the murder of Twin Cities mother Renee Good, the question “What about the kitchen-table problems?” is guaranteed to be the first response by leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—even as members of their party call for defunding and abolishing Trump’s secret police in all but name.

Given their fixation on America’s dining rooms, it may help Jeffries and Schumer understand the problem of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to put it all in their favored kitchen-table terms. While there is no question crimes like the murder of Renee Good and ICE’s mass deportation campaigns in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Louisiana, and North Carolina are a flagrant assault on human rights and American democracy, the agency’s activities are also putting the squeeze on everyone’s pocketbooks. Not only are ICE’s operations hiking up everyone’s grocery bills, they are also, contrary to administration claims, making the housing crisis worse by terrorizing the construction industry and making life unlivable in immigrant neighborhoods. 

When it comes to grocery bills, ICE’s raids have frozen large swathes of American agriculture with chilling consequences for consumers nationwide. The American Immigration Council estimated that, as of 2019, nearly half of all farmworkers were immigrants and that 27.3 percent are undocumented. These figures rise even higher when the question shifts to crop production; there, immigrants make up 57 percent of the workforce, with undocumented workers making up 36.4 percent of that total. The United States, in other words, depends on immigrants to stay fed, ensure abundant supplies of food, and keep the costs of grocery bills down.  

With these realities in mind, it is unsurprising that ICE’s mass-deportation campaign has significantly disrupted food production. A Bay Area Council–UC Merced study from June 2025 argued that expelling all undocumented immigrants from California would shrink the size of the state’s agricultural sector by 14 percent, putting a serious crimp in America’s most agriculturally productive state. But this damage is not limited to the Golden State. Agricultural advocates were sounding the alarm as early as April 2025 after the American Business Immigration Coalition determined that mass deportation, nationwide, would shrink agricultural output by between $30 billion and $60 billion and push many farms to the breaking point. 

Raids in agriculturally rich California, which began last spring, may already be showing up on grocery bills. An August 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics report covering food prices for June and July, mere weeks after ICE and the Border Patrol’s incursion into Los Angeles and nearby regions, found the wholesale price of vegetables had surged by 38.9 percent, the biggest single increase since March 2022. The larger chilling effect of ICE operations prompted Trump’s own Department of Labor to issue a stark warning in October that continued deportations could lead to further increases in food prices. “The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens,” as the report says, “combined with the lack of an available legal workforce is threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”

Our society’s reliance on immigrant labor to keep the cost of food down doesn’t stop at the production end. In the words of the late, great Anthony Bourdain, Mexican and Central American immigrants are “the backbone of the [restaurant] industry,” who made up “most of the people in my experience cooking, preparing your food.” To put that in numbers: approximately 22 percent, with the number rising as high as 30 percent in states like California, Texas, and New York. 

The consequences of these actions are already being felt by restaurants in Los Angeles, Texas, and Minneapolis at the time of writing. All have reported that deportation campaigns have forced them to curtail operations as workers, now afraid of being arrested by ICE, are unable to come in to work, fearful for their safety. For restaurant workers and owners, ICE’s newly aggressive posture means all are constantly on guard for raids, regardless of their legal status. In an industry where an estimated 30 percent of all restaurants failed each year before Trump’s reelection, unnecessary closures and lost work could be the difference between solvency and bankruptcy for many of these businesses.

The grocery bill and restaurant check are only the first of many kitchen-table expenses pushed to new heights by Trump’s campaign of mass deportations. Americans may also discover that ICE’s actions are pushing the price of housing even further out of reach for many, rather than reducing it, as Trump and his officials have consistently promised. The root of this problem lies, again, in the American construction industry’s dependence on immigrant labor to remain operational. The National Association of Home Builders estimated, as of 2023, approximately one in four American construction workers are immigrants; they made up an estimated 32.5 percent of all skilled construction tradesmen, such as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters.

These numbers are why a recent study by the University of Utah’s Troup Howard, Amherst College’s Mengqi Wang, and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dayin Zhang, found that increased deportations were most likely to slow the already-sluggish rate of residential home construction to a crawl.

A July Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey found, as the ICE campaign began escalating nationwide, an estimated 92 percent of contractors were struggling to fill job openings in construction, and a third of all construction firms reported delays in project timelines. In the words of Coastal Construction CFO Patrick Murphy, “When there are sudden crackdowns or raids, it slows timelines, drives up costs, and makes it harder to plan ahead.”

Making matters worse is the indiscriminate nature of ICE raids. Even if workers do not face direct confrontation at their job sites, ICE’s assaults on immigrant communities have made their neighborhoods inherently unsafe. Many immigrant residents of cities, thanks to high-profile raids at communal locations such as civic celebrations and Home Depot parking lots, have opted to stay home from work rather than risk being snatched up by masked federal agents. The indiscriminate nature of patently racist practices like Kavanaugh stops have forced immigrants in American cities to hunker down, relying on neighbors to help with critical errands like grocery shopping. Even though Donald Trump has promised to exempt farms and hotels from worksite raids, that matters little when ICE is just as willing to arrest people for existing outdoors as they are to raid a job site.

For all of these mounting pocketbook problems, there is an even more direct kitchen-table reality that ICE has visited on countless homes: empty chairs. Every person detained by ICE means one more family is now missing a parent, sibling, or loved one. This is a loss that cannot be measured in numbers or percentages. No matter how you slice it, ICE’s actions are the preeminent kitchen-table problem for everyone, whether you are balancing your books or sheltering your family from their latest campaign of brutality.

Our Vaccine System Is Delicate. Trump Just Threw a Bowling Ball at It. - 2026-01-21T11:00:00Z

Parents and pediatricians in the United States are in uncharted territory. As front pages catalog a dizzying array of domestic and international chaos, the U.S. measles outbreak quietly continues to spread at alarming speed; in 2025, we finished the deadliest flu season for children on record outside of a pandemic, only to stumble into a new record-breaking season this year; Covid and RSV continue to surge; diseases that were largely vanquished before many of us were born now threaten a comeback.

Earlier this month, the United States announced, under the purview of longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that some vaccines would only be available to high-risk infants, while others would be available under “shared clinical decision-making”—previously a little-known term that meant a vaccine’s benefits were unclear and could only be given on doctors’ orders. The changes reduce the vaccination schedule of the U.S., once a global leader, by a full third. Never before has the United States made such drastic changes to its vaccination schedule or any of its public health guidance so rapidly, and all without input from outside experts or the public.

The new recommendations will likely make it harder for children to get vaccinated—either because providers follow the new guidelines and don’t offer the vaccine to some patients or because insurance companies and federal programs stop covering the vaccine if it is offered. Confusion may also play a major role. It’s not always clear who is “high risk” and what “shared clinical decision-making” even means, in legal and practical terms. After all, vaccination, and all health decisions, are always shared decisions—with careful explanations of the benefits and the side effects. (No one is bursting into the exam room with a needle and arm restraints, despite anti-vaxxers’ paranoid fantasies.) Parents and providers are still wading through bewildering announcements to understand what, exactly, has changed, and then we’re bombarded with a firehose of misinformation on social media (and, increasingly, in traditional media).

But these changes to the recommended vaccine schedule will also cause another problem: They won’t only take away certain vaccines from kids who no longer qualify. All vaccines may now face supply and demand issues.

“We’ve never had a change for this many vaccines all at once,” Eric Hall, assistant professor of epidemiology at Oregon Health and Science University, told me. Everyone is trying to understand what happens next, and “honestly, we don’t really know.” But, he said, this is the likely scenario: The abrupt change in recommendations will introduce confusion and misunderstanding among parents and providers. More parents will see vaccines as optional, and some will opt out. As fewer children get some or any vaccines, providers start stocking fewer doses and manufacturers may make fewer vaccines.

That means, even if you are eligible under the new restrictions, and you know to ask for the vaccines, and your provider is willing to give the shots, you may still struggle to get them. And the overall slide in confidence could affect vaccines that are still recommended. Your hospital might plan for fewer hepatitis B or RSV shots at birth and run out of stock before your baby is born; your pediatrician might think your baby got those shots at the hospital and decide not to stock so many in their practice. Vaccines are expensive to buy and store; the cost of wasted doses could mean pediatricians—already one of the most underpaid medical professions—can’t afford to keep enough vaccines in stock.

“I do think that can have implications on availability and the supply chain and some of these other pieces that make sure vaccination is available for everybody in the community who wants it,” Hall said.

“These recommendations will create additional confusion, concerns, and challenges,” said Jason Schwartz, associate professor of health policy and management at the Yale School of Public Health—and by creating new doubts about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, the new limitations “will suppress demand for those vaccines.”

The first bottleneck in the vaccine supply could come with how doses are ordered and reimbursed. For most states, there are two ways that providers usually order vaccines. One is through the federally funded Vaccines for Children program, where providers order the shots at no cost and are closely audited on how many they give out. VFC covers more than half of children in the United States: kids who are on Medicaid, uninsured and under-insured, or Alaska Native and American Indian children. For the time being, the Trump administration has said it will continue to provide vaccines through VFC, even though some of the shots are now restricted. “My concern,” Hall said, “is we don’t know how long that’s necessarily going to last, or if that will be something that changes down the road as well.”

The other way providers order vaccines is privately through the manufacturer or a distributor, where they must front all costs of the order. This is how the kids who are fully insured via private insurance tend to get their shots. And in theory, even if insurance companies stop covering some of the shots for some kids due to the new guidance, families with funds could get around the problem by paying out of pocket.

But because providers pay up front for vaccines from the private market and monitor VFC doses closely, they only place orders for how many vaccines they expect to give. Even before the recent changes to vaccine guidance, providers already faced challenges in anticipating demand and fronting the expenses associated with vaccines—not just the costs of the shots but also the refrigerators and freezers to hold them and the staff to administer them and file for reimbursement. (While pharmacies are sometimes able to vaccinate children, there are state-level age restrictions on pharmacy vaccine administration and the vast majority of children get vaccinated by their pediatrician or family doctor.)

Providers are “essentially fronting large sums of money to make sure they have the vaccines available,” Schwartz said. “That comes with significant financial exposure.” Some doctors, especially smaller practices, might order less so they don’t go broke if the vaccines aren’t used. And while anti-vaxxers have accused pediatricians of getting rich because of vaccine reimbursements, those payments are “very modest in the grand scheme of medical billing,” because the payments cover the costs of staffing, record-keeping, supplies, and cold storage, Schwartz pointed out.

The new restrictions will make it harder for providers to know how many combination vaccines and how many single-antigen shots they should order. Hepatitis B shots, for instance, are now restricted as both high risk and shared clinical decision-making—which is confusing enough. But the vaccine is often given in combination with HiB (haemophilus influenzae type b), diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTAP), and polio. If parents want only the fully recommended shots, providers would need to stock three separate vaccines—which incurs additional shipping and storage expenses. In addition, some vaccines only come in bulk, and vials meant for multiple doses need to be discarded after a certain amount of time. Vaccines also have a shelf life, so those different expiration dates need to be monitored and juggled.

If a vaccine is delayed—if the hospital doesn’t have it in stock, if a pediatrician’s order is delayed, if parents have worries that aren’t assuaged yet—children are much less likely to get it at all, according to new research. “Anything that introduces friction like that is going to lead to those opportunities being missed,” which is why maintaining a steady supply of vaccines and “avoiding that missed opportunity at all costs is important,” Schwartz said. “Anything that destabilizes the very well-developed, planned, structured cadence of our vaccination program will put providers on their heels, not just in terms of how they help communicate vaccines, but making sure that they continue to maintain the robust vaccine supplies that could be predictable in the past.”

The vast majority of parents support vaccines and do not want their kids to get sick. But the new recommendations, and the misinformation they encounter from top U.S. health officials down through the information ecosystem of the internet, will lead to confusion. Similarly, nearly all providers understand the value of vaccines and want their patients to be protected, but they have limited time at medical visits to cut through all of the noise around vaccines—in addition to all of the other conversations that happen around growth and well-being and developmental milestones. “The more time that goes toward trying to address hypothetical concerns around vaccines that are unfounded, there’ll be less time to address all the other important issues that ought to be included in the well-child visits,” Schwartz said. As The Washington Post recently reported, providers may also need to deal with parents trying to get their kids vaccinated ahead of schedule because of the new worries about availability.

Some groups are trying to fill the gap left by federal guidance. The new Vaccine Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota conducts exhaustive reviews of the scientific evidence with which existing and highly respected medical organizations, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, may make recommendations. Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health, for instance, are developing a dashboard to survey outbreaks anywhere in the U.S. Some states are forming regional alliances, like the West Coast Health Alliance and the Northeast Public Health Collaborative, to preserve access to and recommendations for vaccines and more. Former top officials who were pushed out of U.S. health agencies are now landing at state and local health departments.

But increasingly, where you live may determine which vaccines you can get—and your overall risk based on others’ vaccination rates. Vaccine policies are set by states, and until now, states have relied on clear, evidence-based recommendations from the federal government, Hall said. “Now, what we’re seeing is essentially a lot of fragmentation happening.” The fragmentation and polarization are likely to worsen as red states feel financial and political pressure from the Trump administration to step in line. School vaccine mandates, which are set by state and local governments, are facing their greatest threat in generations, Schwartz said. “Your child’s risk of vaccine-preventable disease, on the one hand, will look different based on where you live and, in large part, on the political party in power,” he said. But those geographical differences can only go so far, Schwartz added: “As the old saying goes, infectious diseases don’t respect borders.”

Trump Tirades on Greenland Get So Scary that It Rattles Medical Expert - 2026-01-21T10:00:00Z

Over the weekend, President Trump sent a deranged text to Norway’s prime minister linking his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize to the possibility of taking Greenland by military force. That wasn’t a one-off: Trump said something similar in rambling remarks on Tuesday. Trump’s lunacy is prompting a medical expert to sound the alarm: He notes that Trump’s conduct should “trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.” That was amplified by a Danish politician, who called Trump “mad and erratic.” So how is all this madness perceived by the rest of the world right now? We talked to international relations expert Elizabeth Saunders, who has a great new piece for Foreign Affairs magazine about the future of “primitive anarchy” that Trump is leading us into. She explains the deeper reasons Trump is so unconstrained, how his spiraling conduct is seen by other foreign leaders, and why there’s reason to fear that Trump’s designs on Greenland are deadly serious. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

ICE Has Cut Its Detainees Off From Medical Care - 2026-01-20T21:23:22Z

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has stopped paying for immigrant detainees to receive health care—and isn’t planning on paying for months, independent journalist Judd Legum reported Tuesday.  

ICE Health Service Corps, the entity that provides immigrants in detention with health care, quietly posted last week that Acentra, the agency’s new third-party administrator for medical claims, would not begin processing claims until at least April 30. “Please continue to hold all claim submissions while IHSC works to bring the new system online in the interim,” the post read. 

ICE had previously paid the Veterans Association Financial Services Center to process claims for reimbursement—but abruptly ended that contract on October 3, 2025. According to government documents reviewed by Legum, ICE was left with “no mechanism to provide prescribed medication” and no way to “pay for medically necessary off-site care.” Immigrants in detention could no longer receive dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, or chemotherapy.

To be clear, ICE is not simply not paying for detainees’ medical treatment: Multiple reports suggest they are not providing it at all, even though federal law requires them to do so. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff released a report in October documenting at least “85 credible reports of medical neglect” at U.S. detention centers. 

Internal administration data obtained by Legum suggested that ICE has potentially accrued hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid medical claims. In 2024, the VA processed $246.42 million in medical claims, but despite a significant increase in the detainee population, the VA processed only $157.2 million in claims in 2025.   

“Assuming the medical needs of a typical ICE detainee remain constant, the data suggests nearly a $300 million gap between needed care from third-party providers and what ICE paid,” Legum wrote. “This gap is a combination of unpaid bills since October 3 and ICE detainees who are simply being denied necessary medical treatment.”

As ICE has upended health care access for immigrants in detention, national detentions have hit record levels, and the numbers of people dying in ICE custody have risen with them. 

Seven immigrants died in ICE custody in December, making it the deadliest month since Donald Trump returned to the White House. And 2025 was the deadliest year for immigrants in detention since 2004. 

So far, January is on track to be even worse: At least six people have already died in ICE custody this year, including one man who reportedly was choked to death by an ICE agent. 

“You’ll Find Out”: Trump Warns Greenland on How Far He’ll Go - 2026-01-20T21:19:32Z

At a Tuesday afternoon press conference, President Trump was asked just how far he’d be willing to go to acquire Greenland. His response: “You’ll find out.”

His apparent threat only further reinforces what has been feared for weeks—that Trump will completely fracture U.S. diplomacy with the European Union, or worse, try to take over Greenland regardless of the risk or respect for sovereignty.

“If a consequence of your determination to take control of Greenland is the ultimate breakup of the NATO alliance, is that a price you’re willing to pay?” a reporter followed up later in the press conference.

“I think something’s gonna happen that’s gonna be very good for everybody. Nobody’s done more for NATO than I have.... Getting them to go up to 5 percent of GDP was something that nobody thought was possible,” Trump replied. “I think that we will work something out where NATO’s gonna be very happy and we’re gonna be very happy. But we need it for security purposes.”

That notion of happiness was quickly questioned, as well.

“Mr. President, you said you’re confident something’s gonna get worked out in Greenland, but Greenlanders have made it clear they don’t wanna be part of the U.S. What gives the U.S. the right to take away that self determination—”

“When I speak to them, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”


While Democrats and even some Republicans are perplexed and alarmed by Trump’s imperialistic goals, others have thrown their full weight behind them. As Trump himself promised, it seems like only a matter of time before this situation escalates further.

DOGE Goons May Have Used Social Security Data for Election Plot - 2026-01-20T21:07:46Z

Two employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may have been misusing Social Security data.

The Social Security Administration referred two DOGE employees to the Justice Department for being in contact with an advocacy group that hopes to “overturn election results in certain states,” Politico reports, citing court documents. One of them allegedly signed an agreement that could have involved using Social Security data to match with state voter rolls.

The SSA referred the two employees for violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using their jobs for political purposes, according to DOJ official Elizabeth Shapiro. The court filings, disclosed Friday, were part of a list of “corrections” on testimony from SSA officials in the legal fight over DOGE gaining access to Social Security data.

The disclosures also show that DOGE team members shared information on unauthorized third-party servers and could have accessed data prohibited by court orders at the time. Shapiro said that two employees referred to the DOJ were the only known members involved with the political group, which wasn’t identified in court papers.

“At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement,’” Shapiro wrote, noting that it’s unclear whether the two DOGE employees actually shared data with the group.

However, Shapiro said emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”

The news seems to confirm some of the fears surrounding DOGE’s access to sensitive government information: that the data could be used for illegal and nefarious purposes. DOGE’s access went far beyond the SSA to different government agencies including the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department. Who knows if Musk and DOGE are also using that information illegally?

Trump, 79, Kicks Off Press Conference by Reading Aloud to Himself - 2026-01-20T20:25:52Z

It’s been exactly one year since Donald Trump returned to the nation’s highest office. To mark the occasion, the president secured quality time in front of some of America’s top journalists Tuesday to, apparently, do little other than to talk to himself.

Trump joined the White House press briefing, sidling up alongside press secretary Karoline Leavitt with a large stack of papers that turned out to be more prop than speech. But it was the content of Trump’s remarks—or rather, lack thereof—that caused some onlookers to question whether the president was in a healthy state of mind.

“Hm, I’m just looking at these charges, it’s just pretty incredible,” Trump said, rifling through the stack of papers, intermittently pausing to hold a page up to the camera. “Many murderers. Many, many murderers. People that murdered.”

The president did not stop to name names, or to clarify which people he was targeting in his scrambled monologue, but the entries followed a general template that read at the top: “Minnesota: worst of worst.”

Trump continued to read names and lists of charges, sometimes without even looking at the camera. Instead, it appeared he was simply reading brand-new information aloud to himself.

Mass protests have kicked off in Minnesota since ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen, on January 7. Since then, federal officers have ripped people from their homes and families, pulled over school buses, attacked teachers and students at a Minneapolis high school, and even clashed with local law enforcement.

In response, some protesters have opted to openly carry their firearms through the city, brandishing their Second Amendment right to bear arms. Locals have formed neighborhood watches to follow ICE vehicles, banging pots and pans and screaming to alert others when agents enter their residential neighborhoods.

Local politicians—including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—have advised the federal agency to exit their cities and state, arguing that ICE and Border Patrol agents have done more harm than good. In 2025, before Good’s death, the agency killed 32 people—its deadliest year in more than two decades.

But rather than heed the warning, the Trump administration has opted to up the ante, issuing grand jury subpoenas to Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, while placing 1,500 active-duty troops on standby for a potential invasion of Minnesota.

“I’m going through this because I think we have plenty of time. I’m going to a place—beautiful place—in Switzerland, where I’m sure I’m very happily waited for,” Trump rambled. “In Switzerland they don’t know about this. They have other problems, but they don’t have this problem.”

“Look,” Trump said, holding up another page. “Killed someone.”

Minnesota Police Chief Warns ICE Is Targeting His Cops Now - 2026-01-20T19:44:04Z

ICE’s racial profiling and unconstitutional acts in and around Minneapolis are even ensnaring local police.

Mark Bruley, the chief of police in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, said at a press conference Tuesday with other area police chiefs that local police departments have been “receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. citizens,” adding that federal agents were demanding to see paperwork proving U.S. citizenship.

“As this went on over the past two weeks, we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off-duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them,” Bruley said, narrating an instance from one of his own officers who was boxed in by ICE officers while driving, who even knocked her phone from her hand as she tried to film her interaction with them.

“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers.… We know our officers know what the Constitution is, they know when right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted,” Bruley continued. “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. It has to stop.”

Bruley’s words show that ICE is not only engaging in racial profiling; they are desperate. It’s now known that the Trump administration feels that it can target just about anyone in its immigration enforcement efforts, contrary to laws and the Constitution. Federal agents began terrorizing the Minneapolis area more than a month ago to target the local Somali community at Donald Trump’s insistence, and those efforts have grown to target people of color more broadly, especially Latinos and Asians.

The revelation that all people of color are in ICE’s crosshairs in Minnesota highlights that the Trump administration shows no signs of stopping and is only escalating its efforts, despite becoming increasingly unpopular. What will it take for all of this to stop, and for Congress to finally intervene?

Trump’s DOJ Subpoenas Top Minnesota Democrats as ICE Terror Spreads - 2026-01-20T19:23:04Z

The Justice Department subpoenaed multiple Minnesota Democrats Tuesday, in what seems to be a clear retaliation against their resistance to President Trump’s aggressive door-to-door deportation campaign. The subpoenas reportedly didn’t cite a specific criminal statute, but the investigation is centered on claims that these leaders conspired to stop the rollout of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents in Minnesota.  

Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty were all served subpoenas. 

Walz responded publicly to the subpoena. 

“The State of Minnesota will not be drawn into political theater. This Justice Department investigation, sparked by calls for accountability in the face of violence, chaos, and the killing of Renee Good, does not seek justice. It is a partisan distraction,” Walz wrote. “Families are scared. Kids are afraid to go to school. Small businesses are hurting. A mother is dead, and the people responsible have yet to be held accountable. That’s where the energy of the federal government should be directed: toward restoring trust, accountability, and real law and order, not political retaliation. Minnesota will not be intimidated into silence, and neither will I.”

This story has been updated. 

Trump Sec. Has Brilliant Plan to Lower Food Costs: Just Spend Less - 2026-01-20T19:11:45Z

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins just made her viral “Let them eat chicken” moment so much worse.

Rollins landed in hot water last week after she claimed that following the Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines wouldn’t force Americans to spend more on groceries. The secretary claimed that “over 1,000 simulations” found that it would cost consumers only “around $3” for a meal consisting of a “piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing.”

Setting aside Rollins’s eerie reference to “simulations” rather than grocery store aisles, pretty much the entire internet—including several Democratic lawmakers—started trolling the secretary for doling out such paltry rations for Trump’s so-called “Golden Age.”

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Rollins doubled down on her meager menu with an important caveat. “We had run almost 1,000 simulations, and between $3 and $4 is a fair number—if you can have access to that food,” Rollins said.

She also rolled out a new and equally outrageous claim based on “new numbers.”

“A full day, meaning three full square meals and a snack, is about $15.64,” she claimed.

While $15.64 is perhaps a slightly more realistic number for the cost of a day of meals, it’s still incredibly low—and it isn’t even consistent with Rollins’s original claim. Let’s do some quick Trump Math: If every Rollins Meal only costs an average of $3.50, then three of them should only cost $10.50. So how much is left for a snack? Just over $5, which is more than the cost of any of the Rollins Meals! Does that make sense? No! But it doesn’t have to because it’s Trump Math!

The Trump administration has continued to claim that consumers can easily afford groceries, even as Americans struggle against a weakening job market and soaring prices spurred by Donald Trump’s outrageous tariff policies.

Meanwhile, the president’s family has raked in a whopping $1.4 billion since reentering the White House one year ago, which is about 16,821 times the median U.S. household income.

Transcript: Why Trump Is Losing Ground Even in This Deep-Red State - 2026-01-20T18:33:31Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.


Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Aftyn Behn, who is a Tennessee state representative. You might know her nationally because she ran for the House seat in the Nashville area, which ... Donald Trump won in the 2024 election by about 22 points, but Aftyn only lost by nine.

So, a big margin there, it was a big over-performance, and a sign both that Trump is unpopular, but also a sign, I think, that Democrats are finding candidates people are connecting with. So welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Aftyn Behn: Excited to be here.

Bacon: So, I guess I’ll start with that—OK, so you had this 22, and then you had nine. So talk about why you think the margin was smaller. That probably has something to do with you, and something to do with the national discourse. So talk about what you think happened there.

Behn: Just some background for your audience: Nashville had a consolidated Democratic district until after our redistricting cycle in 2020, and they cut up Nashville into three Republican districts. And in fact, Representative Mark Green, who represented the district prior to resigning, told the supermajority in Tennessee, “Do not do this. It will backfire.” Well, this election, the backfire happened.

And so it includes some of the highest turnout precincts in Nashville, which are historically Black communities, goes all the way up to the Kentucky border and then down to the Alabama border. And this race was competitive for a confluence of factors.

One, the inability for a Republican trifecta in Washington to deliver for working families in the state. And the fact that the Republican supermajority has not ended our grocery tax, has not made life more affordable, really created this race as a referendum on affordability.

Two, I’m an organizer, and so I’ve been organizing in Kentucky and Tennessee for the past decade. And I have been part of a movement to rebuild the Democratic infrastructure in a lot of these rural areas as well. And so we leveraged that Democratic infrastructure to bolster our numbers.

Three is that I used to work for national Indivisible, and so I understood the inherent nationalization of special elections like this, and I knew that if I was the candidate, the spotlight would be on Tennessee for something good. And that we could leverage the national spotlight for fundraising to localized margins.

Bacon: So let’s talk about why Donald Trump is not as popular ... you mentioned affordability a little bit, but just to drill down, why Tennessee is red ... I live in Louisville, so I know that all these “red states” include plenty of Democrats, plenty of independents, and plenty of thoughtful people who don’t necessarily love to see ICE kill people.

So talk about what specifically you heard from people about why they did not like what’s [been] happening over the last year.

Behn: One anecdote in particular really stands out because it was incredibly jarring. I was standing outside the highest-turnout precinct in Clarksville, Montgomery County—which, for your listeners, Montgomery County is at the foothills of Fort Campbell, a military base. And there was a Republican-looking couple that was walking into the polling precinct on Election Day during the general; she was nine months pregnant. She had a massive cross necklace.

And I was trying to convince them to flip their vote for me and not vote for the Republican. And as I was inquiring what their issue—their choice issue was ... he turned to me and said flatly, “We don’t want our tax dollars going to Israel.” And then I said, “Well, I don’t either, and my [opponent] has taken money from AIPAC.” And so he said, “All right, you’ve got our vote.”

So this election was really striking because ... Israel, the conflict over there, how people felt about it, played a role. Obviously, affordability. And the Epstein files. My first commercial—obviously the arc of that changed dramatically once Trump [was] kind of jockeying for the Epstein files to be released, although not in their entirety. But it did play a central role.

And I think what it really surfaced for Tennessee voters was that there are two systems of justice in this country: one for the wealthy and well-connected, and one for the rest of us. And so the Epstein files was really the container to talk about that.

Bacon: So your race happened during this government shutdown over health care too, so I assume—how did that play out?

Behn: It was heartbreaking. And I think it’s very easy in a consolidated majority district—which is not ... this one was Republican, I was running as a Democrat. But just another anecdote that I think highlights the importance of nuance in politics: The state rep that lives in Montgomery County held a health care town hall, of which I was the special guest because I was running in the special election. And this African American woman—former veteran or veteran—working in the Social Security offices in Clarksville, when talking about the health care trade-off for the government shutdown, burst into tears. And she said, “Why is my pain being traded for the pain of others? I don’t understand.” And it really encapsulated how people feel about government right now.

People don’t want to think about their government. They don’t want to wake up and start thinking about if they’re going to get a paycheck because the government isn’t functioning because you have a bunch of Washington bureaucrats that can’t get it together. And unfortunately, the real-world impact—it decimated people’s livelihoods in this district. And so the way that I talked about it was, [they were like], “Would you have voted in favor of the government shutdown?”

And honestly, the district is really diverse, and I would’ve had a bunch of town halls asking people what they thought. But I think that anecdote highlights the nuance of the situation in Tennessee.

Bacon: So after your race, there were a lot of people praising you, and there was also a little bit of commentary along the lines of, you weren’t enough of a Joe Manchin–type. You mentioned the fact that you were involved in Indivisible. I knew your work before this. You’ve been very involved in what I’m going to call “progressive activism.”

So talk about that a little bit. Would you have done ... I think I know the answer to this, but why did it help, and not hurt, that you actually had a record of doing progressive things, even in Tennessee, in the district?

Behn: I appreciate your framing, Perry, with that question. I think some of my critics would argue that I was an inherently flawed candidate, but I think it’s a trade-off.

It’s tough to say what candidate would do well when our districts are so incredibly gerrymandered. If the district was a consolidated Democratic district in Nashville then perhaps an African American candidate would’ve done better. If it was entirely rural, then the Joe Manchin type would’ve done incredibly well. But that’s just not the case.

And so this race was about turnout, it was about mobilization. I had the highest total voter turnout of any Democratic state rep in a safe House district in Tennessee. I can mobilize my own voters, of which I did in Nashville.

And just for your audience, The New York Times reported that the RNC had a 78-page dossier on me, which never feels good. And it didn’t the day that it dropped into the right-wing media ecosystem. The breath was taken out of me.

But they immediately centered on the fact that—they pulled out a podcast clip of me lamenting about the bachelorettes in Nashville. They thought that would deter turnout in Davidson County. Well, joke’s on them, because Nashville turned out in even greater numbers to vote for me.

Bacon: Yes, because your progressivism probably helped in the Nashville area, particularly.

Behn: Yes, exactly. And we lost less in rural communities. There were a lot of Trump-Behn voters. And a lot of that had to do with the continuity of organizing from the legislature, which includes corporate accountability and affordability. And I think voters just want someone who they can trust. Unfortunately, I think the Republican Party still has a grasp on Tennessee. But I do think we used this race to build the permission structure [so] that people might start to question what is happening around them.

Bacon: So Kamala Harris was in the area and you did an event with her. Is that right?

Behn: Well, our schedules just couldn’t align. I was living in 30-minute increments, unfortunately. But she did come down here to support the race and to turn out Black voters in Asheville.

Bacon: Let me ask it this way. The question I was getting at is that I read some commentary [saying] you should have distanced yourself—talk about, when we nationally think about this race ... I think there’s a discourse about whether Democrats should move to the right, or talk about affordability more, or talk about transgender rights less, or differently. And you did not do a lot of what I’m going to call punching left, for now. You did not do a lot of, “The activists are stupid,” or ... “We listen to college professors too much.” And that might be true, but you did not do a lot of the sort of triangulation-style stuff. Why not?

Behn: I didn’t equivocate because I’m just someone who ... I can’t do that. That’s not my politic. And I never wanted to be a politician who sacrificed her values or her communities on the chopping block as political capital. That was never me.

And so the narrative that I was able to adopt quite early on because of what is happening in Tennessee was that immigrants and trans kids are not the reason grocery prices are high, you can’t afford your mortgage, life is unaffordable. It’s not the reason. And the real boogeymen are the billionaires and the multinational corporations that aren’t paying taxes. And that was, once again, it was continuity from my state legislative tenure.

But in terms of the national party, I was so deeply grateful because not only did Vice President Kamala Harris show up, we actually had an event with former Vice President Al Gore and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And for me it was so beautiful because it showed the spectrum of the Democratic Party and that everyone really came together for this race because they understood the existential threat that we are under.

I just felt so lucky and in awe that there was so much attention to Tennessee for something good and that the surrogates and the spectrum of the Democratic Party came together for this moment.

Bacon: Thinking about your race, what do you hope candidates from the party run on, broadly? I think you’re seeing a lot of discussion about affordability.... I personally would like to hear candidates talk about affordability, but also talk about, We shouldn’t have the National Guard in cities, ICE shouldn’t be taking over cities.

I think it’s worth talking about economic issues that are purely pocketbook issues, but also these—rule-of-law, democracy, these things do matter. I hope we talk about those things, too. But what do you see? Affordability is obviously more important to everyone, but I think these other issues matter, too.

How do you hope to see candidates run in places like where you’re running?

Aftyn Behn: I think the spectrum of constitutionality and strengthening democracy is in alignment with affordability. And it highlights the nature of a gerrymandered district, because I’m a social worker, and so Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—for your listeners—is a very important framework for me as a social worker to understand. If people are struggling, if they’re in survival mode, they’re not able to self-actualize and think about politics or the strengthening of our democracy.

And in Tennessee, there are so many people that are struggling. And so affordability was really the key tenet. And then I would say in some of the more privileged areas of the district, obviously democracy reform, ending Citizens United was a big issue. And ensuring that our constitutional rights are not foregone.

I tried to articulate this during the congressional race, but the Tennessee supermajority isn’t doing anything transformative right now. They’re actually filing legislation in the Tennessee state legislature so that it makes its way through the conservative Sixth Circuit and ends up at the Supreme Court to undo your federally protected constitutional rights.

And so my pitch to national donors in this race was: You have to start investing in places like Tennessee and Kentucky, because what is happening here will come to your doorstep next. And I think it resonated. In Tennessee, we’ve been living under Project 2025 for 15 years. There are no checks and balances.

I like to say that we are in an “electoral autocracy” because we are, and it makes me … they created these districts to be uncompetitive, but I think the issues moving forward for candidates have to be … preserving the Constitution, democracy reform, getting corporate money out of politics, and, of course, affordability.

Bacon: So talk about that. Skip to that. Your day job—what is it like to be a legislator in ... because I have some friends [who are] legislators in Kentucky, who are Democrats and they also—I’m glad somebody’s doing it, I would not want to—I think you live in Nashville and the capital’s there, so that’s probably easier. But what is this like, and more importantly, why is it important that you’re there, even though you’re going to lose every vote?

Behn: To give some perspective to your audience, the Tennessee Democrats in the House could leave the state for the entire duration of session and it could proceed without us. That is how little power we have.

We’ve officially entered the dark era. There are state agencies that have stopped communicating with Democrats. We can’t get responses for our 60,000 voters. The information that is coming out sometimes isn’t accurate. It’s truly like we have entered a dark era.

And so I really look at my role right now as organizing to create a paradigm in which Democrats and leaders like myself can thrive in the next decade. And eventually, perhaps there will be an electoral shift in outcome when the pendulum sways.

And so I think this period of Tennessee politics will be defined by leaders who stand up to corruption and grifting and the austerity that all of our states are going to have to implement because there is no money.... I’m not running for the congressional seat again, and instead I’m going to focus my efforts on organizing to build that paradigm in which I can run for higher office and hope [to] bring along a coalition that will eventually flip a statewide seat.

Bacon: Yeah, I was on the Tennessee Lookout webpage today, and I guess—talk about this immigration bill, like this immigration bill described that they’re moving through. Describe that a little bit, and describe what you can do about it, if anything.

Behn: To give you some perspective—so 10 years ago, we were able to stop a lot of the anti-immigrant legislation in the Tennessee legislature via the traditional processes. That is not the case anymore. Like I said, our strategy has really shifted to [litigation] because of the supermajority and the culture wars that are emanating from the body.

But the immigration—so, last special session in January, last year, they passed a bill to create an immigration czar. They passed a bill that would give felonies to any elected officials voting for sanctuary city policies. They voted to reprimand and ... publicly withhold funding for any municipality that passed—it’s just, there’s no local autonomy that is enabled right now because of these immigration policies. And then yesterday, a few weeks ago, Republican leadership said they had worked with Stephen Miller to draft this kind of “slate of hate,” this immigration portfolio that they debuted yesterday. And obviously it’s all really bad.

I’m trying to not be desensitized in this moment because it is so hard to remember from last January, the onslaught of authoritarian … I feel like every day I wake up and the horrors persist. The legislation yesterday also included that courts now have to opt into the 287(g) program.

So imagine you are an immigrant and ... you are the victim of a heinous crime. They’re forcing courts to opt into this program in which ICE agents will be there to pick you up when you go to court. It is violent. It is disgusting—

Bacon: You’re saying Stephen Miller literally is writing their immigration bill with them?

Behn: Yes.

Bacon: Oh, gosh. It wanted to be a model for the country, is what you’re getting at here?

Behn: Yeah.

Bacon: A model of harshness.

Behn: Yes. And some of these—a lot of the legislation—is already federally enacted. But who knows how it’s going to materialize in the Tennessee legislature. And once again, all of this is a distraction. Because they have not lowered grocery prices. They have not made housing more affordable. And they’re trying to create a spectacle over here so you are not paying attention to the fact that they have not delivered for Tennessee families.

Bacon: Let me finish on why is it important—I assume most of our audience, most people watching, don’t live in a red state, don’t live in a gerrymandered state—why is it important that people across the country know what’s going on in a place like Tennessee where the policies are not going to go the way we want them to and it’s going to be a long time? What can—why is it important? And then two, what can they do if you’re not in Tennessee?

Behn: An excellent case study of this is the ban on gender-affirming care nationally. It started in Tennessee. They passed a bill to ban gender-affirming care. Our attorney general then took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and they actually sent out—the attorney general’s office sent out an email to the entire legislature inviting us to the tailgate to watch the oral arguments in which they would take health care away from the most vulnerable kids in our country. Our leaders went to D.C.—they also tailgated.

And so what is happening here could happen to you next. And so ... however you think about the South, as W.E.B. Du Bois once said, As goes the South, so goes the nation. It’s true. And we are fighting—whatever you think you are dealing with in your blue state, it is suffocating to live under the policies that are being enacted here. And so please continue to invest in organizations and organizers like myself that really are thinking forward and thinking about the next 10 years of what’s going to happen and taking advantage.

Because once again—things are already bad. They’re going to get worse. You need organizers and thought leaders like myself that understand how to take advantage of the crises, the compounded crises we’re going to face in order to create opportunity to improve and make Tennessee a better place to live.

Bacon: Aftyn, great to see you. Thanks for the great answer to finish there. I appreciate you. And great campaign—congratulations on that. I think we’ll be tuning in to other things you do in the future. See you soon.

Behn: OK. Thank you.

Why Trump Is Losing Ground Even in This Deep-Red State - 2026-01-20T18:30:22Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

President Trump’s approval is dropping across the country, even in states that backed him strongly in 2016 and 2020. That’s partly why Democrats did so well in elections in 2025. Aftyn Behn was one of those Democrats. In a December special election in a U.S. House district in the Nashville area that Trump won by 22 percentage points in 2024, Behn lost by just nine.  And Behn didn’t succeed by bashing her own party, as many red-state Democrats do. Instead, the progressive and former Indivisible staffer leaned into affordability issues and Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. In the latest edition of Right Now, she describes why her campaign was so successful. Behn, who is a state representative, also explains why it’s critical for Democrats across the country to pay attention to what happens in GOP-dominated states like Tennessee. 

Canada Warns That Trump’s America Is Causing “Rupture” in World Order - 2026-01-20T17:47:19Z

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is warning that the global order is in the middle of a “rupture.”

Carney made the remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, and without mentioning Donald Trump by name, declared that America’s policies were exposing the flaws in the financial system and causing it to fail.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” Carney said. “And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. Open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney continued. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

Carney’s speech is significant not only because of Canada’s status as America’s largest trading partner but also because of his background in finance prior to entering politics. Carney served as governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, leading the British central bank through Brexit and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” Carney added, making a pointed jab at the U.S. under Trump. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

Carney is directly pointing out that Trump is attempting to weaponize the integrated economic system against those countries tied the most to it—in effect countries with strong economic relationships with the U.S. like Canada. This speech signifies that Canada, led by Carney, is eyeing a way out to protect itself from retribution from Trump.

Canada already faced down Trump’s ludicrous call to have Canada become America’s fifty-first state, and is now working together with its NATO allies to oppose Trump’s attempt to annex Greenland. It seems that Carney is hoping to end Canada’s dependence on trade with the U.S. so that it won’t be held hostage to Trump’s whims.

Trump’s White House Ticked Off By Giant Esptein Birthday Letter - 2026-01-20T16:59:39Z

A giant replica of President Trump’s unsettling birthday letter to his former friend and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein has been erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Sharpies lie in front of the statue, inviting passersby to sign the card.

This is at least the third piece of protest art placed by a group called The Secret Handshake, whose members choose to remain anonymous. They also placed a poop statue in critique of the January 6 insurrectionists, and more recently one of Trump and Epstein holding hands.

“Kudos to these Trump Deranged Liberals for constantly inventing new ways to light Democrat donor money on fire by spreading fake news,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Washington Post, in a Monday email.

X screenshot grizzy @Furbeti A giant twelve foot tribute to Jeffrey Epstein-Donald Trump’s infamous birthday card has been erected in the National Mall, Washington. photos of the giant birthday letter

“Looking forward to your jail sentence, DJT!” one message on the card read, according to the Post.

The original birthday message appeared in a book of compiled letters for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, and is an imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein. As Trump wrote, the two knowingly express awareness that there’s “more to life than having everything,” while not stating what that secret something is. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” says Donald in the dialogue, to which Jeffrey replies, “Yes, we do, come to think of it.” Donald answers: “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” The dialogue is written in the sketch of a nude woman’s figure.

Trump ended the message by calling Epstein a “pal,” wishing him happy birthday, and writing, “May every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has denied that he sent the note.

Trump Suddenly Says He Doesn’t Care About the Nobel Peace Prize - 2026-01-20T16:46:15Z

Donald Trump would like the world to know that he is absolutely not obsessed in any way with the Nobel Peace Prize that he didn’t win.

Speaking with reporters amid a Nobel Prize–fueled social media frenzy Monday evening, the president claimed that he no longer cared about the award.

“I don’t care about the Nobel Prize,” Trump said, on the tarmac beside Air Force One.

“First of all, a very fine woman felt that I deserved it and really wanted me to have the Nobel Prize, and I appreciate that,” he continued, referring to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who gave Trump her award last week.

Despite Machado’s unnecessary kowtowing, Trump snubbed the peacemaker, opting to recognize Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro’s second-in-command—as the interim leader of America’s latest oil-rich acquisition.

But Trump obviously wasn’t over his loss, noting to the reporters around him that he was still suspicious of what he believes is Norway’s outsize influence on the prize’s outcome.

“If anybody thinks that Norway doesn’t control the Nobel Prize, they are just kidding,” Trump said. “They have a board, but it’s controlled by Norway, and I don’t care what Norway says.

“But I really don’t care about that,” he added before boasting that he had saved “tens of millions of lives.”

Norway, which hosts the Nobel Prize committee, is simply home to the prestigious award ceremony—its government has no involvement in deciding who wins.

It’s no secret that Trump has long pined for the international honor: The U.S. president phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the contention could be that Trump’s perceived political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.

“They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country,” Trump said, during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb in October. “My election was much more important.”

Trump’s long history of coveting the prize on its own undercuts his claim to suddenly no longer care, but his words carry even less weight following a Sunday revelation from Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Støre told The Wall Street Journal he had texted Trump to argue against a series of tariffs the U.S. president plans to impose on NATO allies who sent troops to Greenland for a joint military exercise. Trump responded that the world wouldn’t be safe until the U.S. had “Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” Trump wrote back, according to Støre, “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.”

Meanwhile, Trump has gone out of his way to aggress U.S. relations with the European Union over the last several days, publishing private text exchanges with French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, flaming Britain for returning an island within its overseas territories to its original nation, all while trudging forward with a preposterous and potentially violent scheme to annex Greenland from Danish control.

Top ICE Official Describes Who’s a Fair Target in Stunning Interview - 2026-01-20T16:19:11Z

ICE agents believe they have the authority to interrogate anyone en route to a “target.”

That’s what a senior agency official, Marcos Charles, told Cecilia Vega on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday. Vega had asked Charles about how ICE has been carrying out its stated goal of targeted enforcement, noting that the agency appeared to be stopping and detaining people simply because they looked Somali or Latino. 

“Our officers are—are conducting targeted enforcement looking for the worst of the worst. If they encounter anybody in the area of which they’re operating, they are OK to talk to those people. They’ve been authorized to talk to anybody that’s around there and establish  citizenship,” Charles said. Vega pointed out that this didn’t seem targeted. 

“If they were in that area looking for a target, and they were en route or coming from that target and encountered that individual, they are authorized to talk to somebody and speak to somebody—” Charles said, before Vega interrupted, confused.

“How do you define the area? Officers are walking down the street, driving down the street. The entire city of Minneapolis is everybody, potentially,” Vega asked, wondering if the entire city was under suspicion. 

“Nobody’s under suspicion, but we’re looking for those targets. And, again, if we walk—encounter somebody, as we’re walking up to a building, as we’re en route to that building, that’s still part of the operation as they proceed to that target,” Charles said. 

Charles, who is the acting associate director of enforcement and removal Operations for ICE,  basically confirmed that ICE operates under the assumption that nearly everyone is fair game for arrest if the agents on the scene think someone is an undocumented immigrant. This explains how ICE agents in Minnesota have been trying to get the state’s residents to racially profile their neighbors, asking them to point out their Asian neighbors. 

In July, President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said that ICE agents have the right to detain anyone for any reason, brazenly admitting that the agency uses racial profiling. On Sunday, ICE agents dragged a half-naked man out of his Saint Paul home into the freezing cold, only to release him hours later once they realized he was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. 

Here’s How Much Money Trump Made in His First Year Back in Office - 2026-01-20T16:13:13Z

President Donald Trump has pocketed at least $1.4 billion since reentering the White House one year ago, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Without a doubt, Trump’s biggest moneymaker has been his family’s various cryptocurrency grifts, which have reportedly earned at least $867 million. Trump’s cryptocurrencies allow his family to essentially receive bribes outside of the public eye that can directly influence U.S. policies.

For example, just two weeks after a foreign investment firm backed by the United Arab Emirates promised $2 billion for Trump’s World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform that is majority owned by a Trump business entity, the president greenlit the country’s access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips.

Trump has also raked in at least $90.5 million from major technology and media companies, as part of a rash of settlements from lawsuits waged from the Oval Office—in order to make good with a president now overseeing their industries.

Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit over the edit of an interview with Kamala Harris, and weeks later, the Federal Communications Commission greenlit Paramount’s merger to Skydance. Other companies also offered settlements as tithes to the new king. Meta agreed to pay $25 million, ABC News agreed to pay $16 million, X agreed to pay $10 million, and YouTube agreed to pay $25.4 million.

Even companies Trump didn’t sue ran at him with fists full of cash: Amazon paid the Trumps a whopping $28 million for Melania, the documentary about the first lady—far more than it’s ever paid for similar projects.

The Trump Organization has also raked in at least $23 million in licensing fees from its development projects around the world, which go hand-in-hand with the president’s diplomatic relations. As Trump has cozied up with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his family’s company has projects going up in Jeddah, Riyadh, Diriyah, and the Maldives. In Vietnam, the Trump administration agreed to lower tariffs after Vietnamese officials illegally fast-tracked construction on a $1.5 billion Trump golf complex outside of Hanoi.

While Americans have been struggling against a weakening job market, soaring prices, and steadily increasing inflation, Trump has easily netted 16,822 times the median U.S. household income. Is it any surprise that a recent poll found that only 36 percent of Americans said Trump has the right priorities, down from 45 percent at the beginning of his term? Looking at these numbers, and the sweeping corruption they suggest, it should probably be zero.

Police Search for Suspect After Shocking Shooting of Democratic Judge - 2026-01-20T15:39:49Z

Authorities are searching for a suspect in the shooting of Judge Stephen Meyer and his wife, Kimberly, who were targeted in their Indiana home on Sunday. Judge Meyer was wounded in the arm, and his wife in her hip. Both are in stable condition.

Lafayette police responded to reports of a shot fired at 2:17 p.m. on Sunday, and a caller notified the police that a man in disguise knocked on the Meyers’ door claiming to have found their dog, before shooting.

“I want to ensure the community that every available resource is being used to apprehend the individual(s) responsible for this senseless unacceptable act of violence,” Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski said in a press release. “I have tremendous confidence in the Lafayette Police Department and I want to thank all of the local, state and federal agencies who are assisting in this investigation.”

While no motive has been established, the shooting of Meyer—a Democratic Tippecanoe County Superior Court judge—would be one of many threats and acts of violence against officials that have marked the first year of President Trump’s second term. And it’s put other local judges on edge.

“I worry about the safety of all our judges,” Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote in a letter on Sunday evening. “As you work to peacefully resolve more than 1 million cases a year, you must not only feel safe, you must also be safe. Any violence against a judge or a judge’s family is completely unacceptable. As public servants, you are dedicated to the rule of law.… I know you join me in praying for Steve and Kim and their speedy recovery.”

Trump Invites War Criminals to His Extreme “Board of Peace” - 2026-01-20T15:13:13Z

Donald Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” is already a farce, with many of the invited members having been accused of war crimes. 

Among the world leaders invited are Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who each have arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the former for Israel’s brutal massacre in Gaza and the latter for crimes committed during the ongoing Ukraine war. 

Also invited is Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, who is accused of various human rights violations, including abuses against the country’s Uighur and Tibetan populations. Trump personally confirmed Putin’s invitation to reporters Monday night, and scoffed at news that France’s Emmanuel Macron will not join the board. 

“Well, nobody wants him because he’s going to be out of office very soon, so you know, that’s alright,” Trump said. “I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and champagnes, and he’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join.”

The whole board seems to be a joke designed to weaken the United Nations and fatten Trump’s wallet, with every member required to pay a $1 billion fee. (It’s unclear where this money will be held.) Some countries with far-right leaders, such as Argentina and Hungary, have already accepted Trump’s invitation, but other U.S. allies have been hesitant, wondering what the point is and how the body would actually resolve international conflicts.  

Trump Issues Awful MLK Day Statement After Uproar Over His Silence - 2026-01-20T14:40:01Z

President Trump issued a flimsy, ill-defined proclamation on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at 8:15 p.m., after hours of silence—and criticism from the NAACP.

“Dr. King pioneered a movement that would go on to triumphantly reaffirm our national conviction that every man, woman, and child is endowed by their Creator with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the statement read. “As President, I am steadfastly committed to ensuring that our country will always be guided by the same principles that Dr. King defended throughout his life and to upholding the timeless truth that our rights are not granted by government but endowed by Almighty God.” 

Trump went on to note that he had “proudly ordered the declassification of documents related to [King’s] assassination,” even as the family actively disapproved of how he went about releasing them at the time.  

Notably, the statement made no mention of racial justice or African Americans.

NAACP National President Derrick Johnson was unconvinced by the president’s proclamation, stating that “Donald Trump has zero interest in uniting this country or recognizing its history and diversity.”

“Instead, he wants to pit us against each other so that we don’t pay attention to the fact that his net worth has more than doubled while families lose their health care and access to essential services,” Johnson continued. 

Trump’s purposefully unspecific proclamation is yet another example of American politicians whitewashing, sanitizing, or outright denigrating the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a man who was surveilled, slandered, and eventually killed for organizing against violent racial discrimination and economic inequality of African Americans.

“We renew our resolve to honor our heritage, reclaim our freedom, and recommit to the truth that America is, was, and forever will be a great Nation,” Trump wrote near the end of his proclamation, using verbiage that had nothing to do with MLK Day. “On this day, I encourage all Americans to recommit themselves to Dr. King’s dream by engaging in acts of service to others, to their community, and to our Nation.”

Trump Posts Private Messages From World Leaders Pissed Over Greenland - 2026-01-20T14:26:48Z

The president appears ready and willing to turn on some of America’s greatest allies in his quest to conquer Greenland.

In a frenetic string of posts to Truth Social late Sunday night, Donald Trump skewered Britain and France, and released private messages sent to him by French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Trump claimed that Britain was acting with “GREAT STUPIDITY” in its Chagos Islands deal, which would return the islands—a vestige of the empire’s colonies—to Mauritius. Despite previously supporting the exchange, Trump suddenly claimed that handing over the island of Diego Garcia, which hosts a U.S. military base, would appear weak to global forces such as China and Russia, and add to a “very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”

In another needless dig at America’s strategic partners, Trump also put Macron and Rutte on blast, publishing screenshots of private messages the European leaders sent to him in an attempt to redirect his energies away from annexing Greenland.

“I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” Macron wrote, according to Trump’s posts. “Let us try to build great things.”

That was, apparently, insulting enough to Trump to warrant a public callout that effectively calls into question the security of any exchange with the current U.S. leader.

Continuing his breathless digital rant, Trump shared a picture of himself in the Oval Office beside a poster board of the Western hemisphere—in which the U.S., Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela were colored in with the American flag. In another post, Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself planting a U.S. flag in rocky terrain next to a sign reading “Greenland: U.S. Territory, Est. 2026.”

Meanwhile, while speaking with reporters earlier the same night, Trump opened his arms to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom he invited to join his “Board of Peace,” an idea he floated in September as part of a 20-point peace plan to control Gaza.

“Yeah, he’s been invited,” Trump said.

ICE Drags Half-Naked Citizen Out of His Home Into Freezing Cold - 2026-01-20T14:21:15Z

The Department of Homeland Security appears to have just made up the craziest excuse for terrorizing a U.S. citizen with no criminal record.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were caught on camera Sunday dragging a elderly grandfather out into the snowy streets of St. Paul, Minnesota, wearing nothing but his basketball shorts, a blanket draped over his shoulders—and a pair of handcuffs.

Screenshot of a tweet

DHS released a statement Monday claiming that ICE had been conducting a “targeted operation” to detain two convicted sex offenders. “The US citizen lives with these two convicted sex offenders at the site of the operation. The individual refused to be fingerprinted or facially ID’d. He matched the description of the targets,” the statement said.

But the family of ChongLy “Scott” Thao told a very different story, according to journalist Marisa Kabas.

“[Thao] does not live with, nor has he ever lived with, the individuals DHS claims were targets of this operation. The only people residing at the home are Mr. Thao, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his young grandson,” the family said in a statement. “They do not know the individuals DHS references.

“ICE agents did not present a warrant, did not ask for identification, and nevertheless forcibly entered the home with weapons drawn,” the statement said. “Mr. Thao went willingly with ICE, despite knowing he had done nothing wrong.”

One family member, Louansee Moua, wrote in a post on Facebook Sunday that agents pointed a gun at Thao’s daughter-in-law’s head during the chaotic arrest. Thao was driven around, questioned, and fingerprinted before being returned home.

The family’s statement said that dragging Thao half-naked into 12-degree weather was “unnecessary, degrading, and deeply traumatizing.”

This incident comes just days after one St. Paul resident warned neighbors that ICE agents had begun asking people to identify where Hmong and other Asian families live, as Donald Trump’s door-to-door immigration enforcement campaign continues to terrorize the Twin Cities.

Transcript: Angry Trump’s Threats Go Haywire as Damning ICE Video Hits - 2026-01-20T12:26:33Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 20 episode of The
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Editor’s note: After we recorded this episode, Trump kept raging about protests in Minneapolis. He seethed about jailing Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. He shared a video about supposed “anti-ICE anarchists.” And he exploded about Minnesota politicians allegedly wanting criminals in their state, showing his fury over the protests is on full boil.


Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

A few days ago, Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the military against protests in Minnesota over the ICE shooting of Renee Good. Then he suddenly dialed it back a tiny bit, but still reiterated the threat. This, even though damning new info shows even more clearly that her killing was entirely unjustified. On another front, Trump just threatened to levy tariffs on countries that don’t go along with his desire to seize Greenland. In this case, he didn’t walk it back, but the coverage it got treated it as just Trump being Trump. What struck us about all this is how the insanity of Trump’s threats almost carves a path for more to come, numbing us with the sheer constancy of it. Mark Follman, a writer for Mother Jones, has a good new piece that gets at some of this, talking about how Trump normalizes violence and depravity over time. Mark, good to have you on, man.

Mark Follman: Good to be here. Great to see you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act. Here’s what he said:

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of ICE, 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.”

Mark, how seriously do you take that threat and what’s your reaction to it?

Follman: I think it’s very serious and it’s worth looking at as part of a much longer pattern of how he does this kind of threatening behavior, whether it’s on social media or how he talks with the press.

And the notion that there’s ambiguity in it—I mean, that’s something that he plays with too. And that’s also, I think, intentional. But clearly we’re in an environment right now where there’s escalating tension and violence, particularly in Minneapolis. And this is very much directed at that. And I think it’s quite serious.

Sargent: Yeah, I think there’s no question about it. And I want to get into that broader pattern a little bit later. But first, let’s listen to this. Trump weighed in again on it in an exchange with the reporters.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, the Insurrection Act, which has been used by 48 percent of the presidents as of this moment, the Insurrection Act also, if you look at it, I believe it was Bush, the elder Bush. He used it, I think, 28 times. It’s been used a lot and if I needed it I’d use it. I don’t think there’s any reason right now to use it but if I needed it I’d use it. It’s very powerful.


Sargent: So this is being covered as a big walk-back on his part, but Mark, what’s striking about it is that he’s still threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act with those quotes. Which would be an extraordinary abuse of power given what he intends to do with the military—i.e., send it in to quell protests.

He still made the threat again and all of a sudden this has been recast in the media as “not all that crazy.” What do you make of that?

Follman: Yeah, well, it’s also worth noting that he does his very common technique of using numbers and stats and sowing confusion around it too. I think he said that the elder President Bush used it 28 times.

What is he talking about there? No one’s ever heard anything about that as far as I know. I think more importantly, he’s toying with the idea and trying to keep people guessing, and particularly the media kind of guessing about what his intentions are. But look at the pattern again of what he says and does, and I think it’s quite clear.

Sargent: And it’s crazy. Let’s just be clear that invoking the Insurrection Act in this context would be an enormous abuse of power.

Follman: I think that’s right. I mean, you have to have an insurrection to use it, in theory. And if you look at what’s going on in Minneapolis, there are tense protests and there’s violence, but most of that violence, from what I’ve seen in all the reporting—and we have reporters there too working for Mother Jones, everything that I’m seeing from on the ground there—most of that violence is at the hands of ICE and Border Patrol. It’s not the protesters.

People are upset, and rightly so, but there’s not a lot of violence going on there coming at them. And that of course is part of the narrative that the Trump White House is trying very hard to establish, that ICE is under siege, that Border Patrol is under siege from some violent conspiracy, which is part of what I wrote about today in my piece.

Sargent: ICE are the ones inflicting violence on the local population. It’s largely a one-way thing. It is a tense situation. All these types of events, this type of turmoil tends to attract all sorts of different people who have different agendas and so forth.

But at a very fundamental level, what we’re testing here is whether Trump can essentially inflict heavily armed government militias on local populations, exert violence on those local populations, and then when things get pretty damn tense, use that as the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military. That’s what’s being tested.

Follman: Right, what are we to expect will happen when an essentially militarized police force is going and hunting people down, going “door-to-door,” in the words of the administration, and trying to deport people, and inevitably, innocent people are being caught up in that.

There’s a lot of violent arrest and detainment going on. We’ve all seen the videos. And so, of course, there’s going to be chaos and some violence that results from that, but it feels very much like they’re looking for a predicate.

They want this to happen, that this permission structure that’s now been given to this federal agency to go do this in this way is very much looking for that result and that kind of escalation.

Sargent: Absolutely. It’s as clear as day. So let’s move to a fresh New York Times analysis of the video footage of the Renee Good shooting. It’s very powerful. It went frame by frame. The Times said this: “The visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over.”

Mark, if anything, that undersells this analysis that they did. The footage shows the exact moment the agent shot her the first time, and he was just plainly not in front of the car at that point. It’s hard to see how he could have been in fear for his life then. What did you think of the analysis?

Follman: Yeah, I think it was very illuminating in ways … affirming, I guess, what we could already see from the original—or the initial—eyewitness video that came out and had gone viral the day of this horrific killing of Renee Good. Clearly it was a dangerous situation, but it was one that I think the agent, the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, put himself into.

We know that law enforcement is trained not to do exactly what he did, to go in front of a car the way that he did. You can also see clearly from the video that she was trying to move away; the vehicle was moving slowly. So this was not a situation where his life was in imminent danger. He was not “run over viciously,” in the words of Trump and other administration officials.

I mean, that’s plain as day from the video. Even if the circumstances are tense and murky and complicated in a certain way, I think that what The Times did to really document frame by frame from multiple perspectives is that much more telling, in that you can see space between Ross and the vehicle. You can see when the shots are fired exactly as the vehicle’s turning away.

Clearly he deliberately was firing at her, not in a move of self-defense. I mean, he was moving away from the vehicle to the side and she was pulling away and then he shot her twice more through an open window. I think it’s very damning.

Sargent: Oh, it is absolutely damning. And I’m glad you brought up that point about the car being turned away, because I thought what this really captured with crystal clarity is you see her looking to the side and turning the car to the right.

There’s no way that anyone in good faith could look at that and think she was trying to weaponize the vehicle in any sense.

Follman: Right, it seemed clear that she was trying to evacuate from the situation, to drive down the street away from the ICE officers. So for the administration to characterize this as her maliciously, violently trying to run over or ram … or to say that she did run over an agent … I mean, this was Trump’s initial response, was that he literally … that she literally ran over the officer. And that’s just obviously a lie when you look at the videos.

Sargent: Right. And the soft version that they offer, one that you hear from people like JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt and Kristi Noem, is she weaponized the vehicle, or there’s a slightly harder version: “She rammed him.”

None of that’s true. The video is absolutely clear. She doesn’t think she’s doing anything like that. She thinks she’s turning slowly out of the situation. That’s it.

Follman: Right. And I think part of this, Greg, too, is that they—part of their strategy or these tactics they use is to have people debate this murkiness. And the bigger picture is something else. And I think that this is a key part of what I wrote in my piece for Mother Jones about how Trump uses these violent events.

They want to set the narrative instantly and chaotically in order to support a story that they want to tell that may be totally untethered from the reality, but that’s really not the point. The point is the narrative itself. And so that’s why they’re so aggressive and so quickly using these kinds of falsehoods to create a picture of something that didn’t happen.

Sargent: Absolutely. Let’s just switch to another Trump threat. Here, he’s talking about tariffs, and he suddenly says this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): And I may do that for Greenland too. I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that. I’ll give you a little.


Sargent: So note that Trump is just treating this as something ordinarily within the scope of his powers. I might do a tariff. That’s—it isn’t within the scope of his powers to impose tariffs unilaterally in order to coerce other countries to help him annex another country’s territory. Yet everyone just yawns at this stuff now, Mark.

Follman: Yeah, if you step back and look at this, he’s been doing this kind of tactic for a long time, whether it’s with foreign affairs or domestic politics or anything in between. Some people will look at this and say, Well, this is a negotiating tactic. And there may be some truth to that.

I think he’s positioning himself. But the notion that he could do these things that he’s saying is almost beside the point. He wants to, I think, ultimately project total power, total control. And to a large extent over the first year of his second term, he’s been able to do that and get away with it. There’s really no serious check on his power thus far. And so I think we’ll see him continue to behave this way.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about your piece. It’s very good. People should check it out. You wrote about this interesting dynamic where the threats themselves and the violence almost builds up a kind of permission structure for Trump to get worse and worse. Can you talk about that dynamic?

Follman: Yeah, so what I wanted to take a look at was the kind of rhetoric that Trump and his top cabinet officials all use after these big traumatic events. We’re talking about political assassinations, mass shootings, of course the ICE killing of Renee Good on January 7.

And there’s a very clear pattern if you go back and look at what he and the others say and what they do in the immediate aftermath, really with an intention, I think, to control the narrative, as we were talking about. And one of the things I look at is how this is really a very distinctive method.

People often point to Trump’s behavior and his rhetoric and it’s often very appalling and outrageous. He’ll say terrible things that aren’t true, that are demeaning, that are debasing. And people get very caught up in that. Especially in an emotional moment of national trauma. And that’s intentional. That’s part of what I’m talking about in this piece.

When you see some of the ugliest things he says in these instances, whether it’s the killing of Good or the mass shooting at a church last fall or the killing of Charlie Kirk. They’re trying to establish that it’s all about a far-left radical conspiracy. Whether there’s any truth to that at all doesn’t matter.

And I think that they’re also trying to reiterate that there’s a divided country that he’s in charge of. I mean, it’s a very divisive message and this is unique. I mean, most presidents don’t do this. If you look back at our recent history, politics is always contentious, but to have a president respond to killings, to mass attacks, to assassinations in this way is pretty unique.

And it’s intentional. It’s not unhinged in the sense that he’s acting from no place of control or no place of forethought. I think that’s what’s important here. You can look at it from a standpoint of moral judgment and say, Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s totally unhinged, the stuff he’s saying. But he’s doing it very intentionally, by design, to create this effect.

Sargent: I want to bear down on what it is that he’s doing in another sense. You talked about how unusual this is in a president. I think there’s a dimension of this that even some reporters and media figures kind of overlook, which is the deliberate nature of the desire to pit Americans against each other in a violent way.

I think there’s, at this point, no way to deny that the Trump MAGA project is really fundamentally about unleashing ethnic hatreds, maximalizing those ethnic hatreds and supercharging antagonisms among Americans. American versus American—violent antagonisms as well. They don’t even try to hide that anymore. Is that an overstatement or not?

Follman: Well, I know you’ve been writing about this recently as well. I think that the intentional divisiveness is very clear. Whether or not—I mean, Trump will sort of generally or categorically denounce violence, and his aides will do that too. I think that there have been moments over the years where his response to violence has suggested that he welcomes it in terms of the political dividends it pays for his agenda.

That’s maybe a little bit different than saying he wants violence to happen or he’s trying to actively make it happen. But certainly his response to it is not to try to tamp it down. And that in and of itself, I think, is very telling. We can’t read Trump’s mind, but we can watch his behavior, we can watch his language, and look at the pattern of it, which is what I did with this piece.

The way he reacted to a mass shooting at a church in Michigan—the way that he reacted to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is kind of a paramount example. The way that they quickly turned him into a persecuted martyr and used it as a predicate to say, We are now going to go after what they called a vast left-wing radical conspiracy in the country, as if some organized conspiracy was responsible for Charlie Kirk’s killing, when in fact we know from law enforcement authorities and evidence that’s come out in the case so far that this was a lone individual acting on his own.

That’s what they’ve said. There’s been no evidence to the contrary that has emerged in the four-plus months since that horrific tragedy. And yet they’ve established this narrative that there is this vast “radical left conspiracy” in the country that they now have to eradicate.

That’s literally what Stephen Miller said talking to JD Vance from the White House five days after Kirk was murdered. We are going to unleash the “full fury and power of the federal government” now to respond to this.

Sargent: By the way, where is that? I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re actually cracking down on anybody. I wouldn’t want to say this is an empty threat because I think Miller is scouring every corner of the law right now to find ways to put leftists in jail. But there’s kind of a bullshit element to it too. Like, Miller’s kind of full of shit, isn’t he?

Follman: Well, I think you can look at it a little more broadly too. It’s creating, again, a political narrative that provides cover to do a lot of these kinds of extreme actions and policies.... I talked with Matt Dallek, a political historian, for my piece, and I think he put it well when he said, in part, this is justifying after the fact these extremist policies that they’re carrying out.

So that would include the way they’ve unleashed ICE and Border Patrol in blue cities and states. That if people accept the idea, vaguely, in the background, that there’s this vast radical leftist conspiracy that’s going to go around killing people just because they are MAGA or support Trump, if people buy into that in any way, it sort of softens the field for them to do some of these other things they’re doing too with the way that they’re trying to handle immigration and deportation of people in the country.

Sargent: Just to close this out, I think the way I would put that is that they think the supercharging of all these violent tensions and malignancies among Americans, among ethnic group against ethnic group, American against American, creates the conditions for their type of politics to take hold.

I don’t know whether Trump really thinks it through that way, but I’m reasonably certain that Stephen Miller very much does. At bottom, though, I think Miller clearly wants Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. There’s some video out there that never gets talked about where—and I think this is the only time Miller has been asked this. He was asked a number of months ago: Have you discussed invoking the Insurrection Act with Donald Trump? And he just kind of hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t answer the question.

I’m not in his head, as you say, but I’m pretty sure that he is quietly whispering in Donald Trump’s ear that the time has come to invoke it. And so you can hear in Miller’s rhetoric, he uses all sorts of language that really is deeply kind of shaped around the idea of getting Trump to that place. And he’s trying to get Trump to invoke it, and Trump hasn’t done it yet, but it is something that Miller wants and he thinks this sort of turmoil creates the conditions for that.

Follman: I think that’s right. I think that that it is a very serious possibility and something that that Miller and others around Trump perhaps want to see happen, really ultimately as a furtherance of maximizing his power and his control, this idea of maximizing the unitary executive theory. That Trump’s in charge, Congress is no longer in charge, the courts are no longer in charge, no one else has a say, he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants.

And so using the Insurrection Act would be another expression of that, predicated on this rising tension and violence and chaos that we’re seeing, largely perpetrated by the operations that they’re carrying out with ICE. So in that sense, yes, I think if we look at what they’re doing, if we look at the pattern of rhetoric, we can say this is a very serious prospect now that they’re considering.

Whether or not they’ll take that step, I don’t know. I mean, it is an extreme thing to do and it will cause a lot of knock-on effects and unknown effects and they can’t ultimately control what they may unleash if they do that. So hopefully they won’t, but we’ll have to see.

Sargent: I agree 100 percent, Mark Follman. I really think [there’s] a very reasonable possibility that they’ll go for it. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Mark’s work over at Mother Jones, including his new piece. Mark Follman, great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Follman: Yeah, thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.

After Renee Good’s Murder, Wine-Mom Gangs Are Now the New Antifa - 2026-01-20T11:01:00Z

“We’re middle-aged,” podcaster Jennifer Welch says of herself and her co-host, Angie Sullivan. “We’re Fox News–coded.” The Fox vibe can leave people uneasy, she says. “‘Oh, shit, where were these women on January 6?’”

But the J6 impression doesn’t last. On their hugely popular podcast I’ve Had It, Welch and Sullivan waste no time in uncorking woke sass. Last August, Welch went viral, saying, “I’ve had it with white people that triple-Trumped, that have the nerve and the audacity to walk into a Mexican restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, an Indian restaurant, go to perhaps their gay hairdresser—I don’t think you should be able to enjoy anything but Cracker Barrel.” Welch’s mean-girl nickname for Trump—“Canks,” for his swollen calf-ankles—won her more praise for gall, as has her ruthless criticism of moderate Democrats. 

Being leftists in Fox’s clothing turns out to be an excellent political niche. Last year, left-wing Gen Z podcaster Matt Bernstein admiringly interviewed Welch on a show called “The Liberal Wine Moms are Radicalizing.” Rad streamer Hasan Piker praised the Welch-Sullivan show as “the most radical progressive podcast in North America.” With their down-home accents and brassy style, Welch and Sullivan seem to have resurrected Ann Richards, the iconoclastic pro-choice governor of Texas in the 1990s. They have millions of followers on TikTok and YouTube, and their show is often at the very top of Apple Podcast ratings.

But they and other Fox blondes with left-wing views are also exploiting a truth now universally acknowledged. With white women in America, it’s always a coin toss.

White women will simply never live down the fact that a majority of them triple-Trumped. And of course the biggest MAGA hams are white women: ICE Barbies, trad wives, MAHA mothers, racist Karens, and anti-feminist belles in porny, Mar-a-Lago makeup. The presumption of MAGA sympathies among white women has even made space for Iyoncé, a popular Black social media creator. Iyoncé advises potentially MAGA-presenting white women on how to signal that they’re “safe,” meaning antifascist. For a safe look, she recommends wearing a crossbody bag, looking tired from doomscrolling, and refusing to cover gray hair.

These are excellent tips for many white women. But Welch and Sullivan—and fellow lefty podcasters Amy Poehler, Nicolle Wallace, and Glennon Doyle—don’t look tired or have gray hair. That’s why their clique of white women is uniquely threatening. Matthew Bernstein is right: They’re the dreaded wine moms, the sardonic Yellow Tail consumers who can blend in with Christian nationalists in segregated MAGA spaces. Mere rumors of their presence can destabilize white families, communities, institutions. If antifascist protesters now wear MAGA caps and dress like far-right frogs to confuse Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the wine moms who costume themselves as trad wives may have pioneered this form of undercover sabotage.

It’s no wonder MAGA Megyn Kelly is set off by fellow white women like Poehler; her book-club manner conceals liberal commitments, making her a traitor to the master-race ladies’ auxiliary club. And surely Tucker Carlson had wine moms in his sights in 2022, when he said, “The archetype of the person that I don’t like is a 38-year-old female white lawyer,” adding: “I hate you.”

So wine moms have the right enemies. But they can also give Vichy vibes. Wine moms can present to Black women as the 2021 Women’s March did: a bunch of rich white knitters, brunchers, and pick-me girls. But like Zohran Mamdani keeping a poker face beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office, wine moms are practiced in staying sphinxlike as MeToo bosses and trad sisters preach right-wing madness. Only later do they turn tactical and become “the skunk at the garden party,” as Welch now describes herself.

Still, after 10 years of patience, protests, and panic, wine moms are drunk on pain. Last week, one of their number, Renee Good, was shot three times at point-blank range by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who then said the loud part louder: “Fucking bitch.”

So wine moms have turned their pain to rage.

At the same time, in the paranoid and spiraling Trump administration, wine moms have managed to gain a reputation as outright terrorists.

In a vile January 11 column for Fox News, Canks supporter David Marcus warned: “What we are seeing across the country [is] organized gangs of wine moms [who] use Antifa tactics.” He then lied that Good, who had been murdered just days earlier, was “a trained member” of just such a phantom wine-mom gang.

Marcus of course had no evidence. To him, the problem was Good’s race and gender. He cited a zombie poll without a link: “Only 24 percent of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18–44, that number leaps to an astounding 61 percent.”

So now Fox News is framing a majority of white women as terrorists. Perhaps one day an ICE officer will be asked in a hearing where exactly the wine-mom gangsters were headquartered, what their training consisted of, where their WMDs were, and just how dangerous they were that they merited being preemptively murdered for attending a protest.

This panic about moms is somewhat anomalous in repressive regimes. Two years ago, a Cambridge University study of protesters found that while women-dominated protests are put down less often than those dominated by men, the level of violence also depends on what kind of woman is involved. “Feminists are deemed more deserving of repression” than “women who highlight their roles as mothers and wives.”

Feminists, it turns out, also have children these days. They’re the bad kind of moms.

In eighteenth-century London, gin was known as “mother’s ruin,” and enterprising working-class gin moms were feared as menaces to society. Similarly, the 1960s white ladies drawn to mother’s little helpers agitated the patriarchy. They did too much skipping of chores, consciousness-raising, and leaving of husbands.

Wine moms today might or might not drink wine. But like their bygone sisters in gin and pills, they might prove ungovernable.

A Letter From a Minneapolis Mom - 2026-01-20T11:00:00Z

My teenager and I were a block from the intersection where Renee Good was shot in the face, an hour before it happened.

This is a Minneapolis story, about children who barely remember the choking smoke of the George Floyd uprising fires, and the mom who closed all the windows and said we were going to have as much screen time as we wanted as a treat! So sit tight, because I’m going to pull the hose out front and fill some trash cans with water—why? It’s just a thing mommies do sometimes. (When there are embers in the sky and someone made rings of wheelie trash cans and filled them with gasoline and threw in a match so they’d fuse to the asphalt and block fire trucks.) Yes, of course we can make popcorn!

And it’s the story of sitting at a stoplight, and listening to the radio, and hearing that Melissa Hortman’s memorial rally, quickly repurposed from the scheduled No King’s rally, has been canceled because maybe the gunman, who is still at large, is going to spray the crowd with A.K. fire. And being at that stoplight, and turning to another teen, who barely remembers the fires and popcorn, and saying: “No, we’re going.”

This is the story of trying to be a good and moral mom in the city of Minneapolis over the last decade, just like Renee Good and Melissa Hortman were, and how you do it full of uncertainty, in between loads of laundry and grocery runs and kids rolling their eyes at you and generally thinking you’re reckless or a coward, between the Mother’s Day cards that tell you you’re the greatest mom ever. As my hero Jon Kabat Zinn terms life, it’s “full catastrophe living”—though now being lived with the streets seething with unhinged, murderous goons.

Oh, and I should mention: The helicopters are back. Constant since they shot Renee Good in the face. They shake the walls. Some throw down Batman-style spotlight beams and look like they’re resting on a cone. Some you never quite find, especially when it’s cloudy. The other night, I was walking the rescue pup and looked toward my house: Three helicopters, and Venus.

I have two teenagers. They were just 14 and toward the end of 11 when George Floyd was murdered. Now my son is off in college and my daughter is 17, and perfect in the way all 17-year-olds are—a little bit baby, a little bit all grown up, an ultimate frisbee captain, a gardener, a person who asks you: “Did you ever hear of someone named David Bowie?” And then you don’t know what to do with your face.

All teenagers are like this. They just showed up to the party, and they can see what they can see, but they don’t know what they don’t know—like all of us, except we’ve been at the party longer, so we can say things like: “First they shot Abraham Lincoln, then MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm, Harvey Milk—or wait, was Malcolm before RFK?” But by the time we’ve nattered on, they’re teenagers, they’re bored talking to mom at the party and have gone to see who else is there.

From school, while Renee Good’s body was cooling after being shot by the murderer Jonathan Ross, my perfect teenager texted me: One of her friends’ dad was in the crowd on Portland when Renee Good was shot in the face by the murderer Jonathan Ross; that dad was pepper-sprayed; the kids were going to the vigil that night.

Um … they’re shooting cute girls in the face right now, so maybe not?


During the George Floyd uprising—we’re all supposed to say “uprising,” though honestly some of it was an uprising and some of it was crime during the cover of the uprising—I felt like nothing good happened after dark; it was when the brawlers and mischief-makers came out, when fires started, when phones stopped working.

I walked to meet her at the bus stop. Do you think going would be safe?

They’re Nazis. How is this different from the beginning of everything in Germany with Nazis?

OK, granted. But I don’t think a lot of people would say: “I’d like my 17-year-old to go to a place where Nazis can get her?”

She told me that we were obligated to use our whiteness as a shield for our Black and brown neighbors. I told her that we seem to be living in an upswing of brute misogyny—shooting Melissa Hortman, shooting Renee Good; being a cute girl might be an invitation to getting shot in the face right now? “Know when to hold them,” I said. “Know when to fold them. Know when to walk away, and know when to run. That’s wisdom.”

You always say that.

At that very minute, across town, at the high school that the other half of her frisbee team comes from, murderous ICE thugs were attacking children.

We didn’t know that then.

We knew it quickly enough, though, as the videos starting flying from kid-phone to kid-phone, through Instagram stories and Snapchat messages. These people do not care if you are a kid, noted a friend of hers. They will kill you.

I told her we’d go to the Saturday march, the big important one, and we sat side by side on the couch Wednesday night and the Instagram videos and stills of the Wednesday night vigil flooded in, and I became the coward who prevented her from going to the most important vigil of all time. 

Which might be true! I don’t know. Sometimes you make a call and it’s the wrong one. Welcome to parenting.


Every day since my cowardice ruined her chance at the best vigil ever, my girl has been out in it. 

Thursday night she marched in the cold rain (that seemed pretty safe; I honestly think no one makes trouble in January rain in Minnesota because even if you wanted to, five minutes in you can’t feel your fingers or toes). On Friday, she raided the piano bench for slide whistles and tin flutes to go bother ICE agents at the Hilton downtown (that one seemed pretty fun, like a big New Orleans street party, and she even made the background of one of the official Star Tribune videos, and cleared out before the city sent in Minneapolis police to arrest everyone who wouldn’t clear out). On Saturday, we went to the big Powderhorn Park rally together; and it was jam-packed, bitterly cold, and I was deeply touched by some of the spontaneous art people made to commemorate Renee Good’s bravery and life.

I was particularly touched by one sign, whose creator obviously spent hours drawing Good’s face—really thinking about her, the sparkle in her eye, the mischievous tilt of her chin.

I was also deeply touched to see several of Tobi’s high school friends up in a tree over the frozen crowd. This is what being a teenager means in Minneapolis right now; they’re all at rallies. Her little voice piping: “ICE out, fuck ICE; ICE out, fuck ICE!” sounded so funny to me. All those conversations a decade ago: You can say that word, but you have to be mindful of how the people around you are going to hear it. As our Mayor Jacob Frey learned anew.

Today my dear daughter went to another ICE training—that’s four anti-ICE events in four days.

Today an ICE caravan trailed by watchers honking their horns blazed by my house. The ICE goons blew right past the stop sign by the elementary school—that’s the third time that has happened since last Wednesday.

My teenager brings back nuggets of information from each new event, like: The people leading the training think this is going to go on for another month or two. 

Am I worried? Kind of very!

What am I going to do about it? Keep grinding through?


Oh, I also have a working theory of why Minnesota has been the Center of the World for a while now.

My unified theory goes like this. Minneapolis was founded by abolitionists, and the call of justice runs deep here. (I can walk you over to one of America’s first integrated cemeteries. Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone are buried there.) But it was an internally inconsistent sense of justice because among abolitionists’ most meaningful acts was to outlaw the Dakota from the territory. Black good, brown bad?

Anyway. I grew up in New York City—fourth-generation descendant of mainly Jews who fled the Russian pogroms—and identified as a Beastie Boy American most of all, so I got to this party pretty late. But when I got here, Minnesota was, in fact, a powder keg of injustice. We had so many cover stories about thumper cops when I worked at City Pages, the city’s eruption over George Floyd’s murder was one of those moments when no one should have been surprised, but everyone was.

Did I mention that the burned-out husk of the Third Precinct is a couple of good frisbee tosses away from my kid’s high school, which has the All Nations program for Indigenous kids from all tribes, serving our neighbors at America’s largest urban reservation, Little Earth? And that the American Indian Movement was born in our neighborhood, where George Floyd was killed and the Third Precinct stands charred, wrapped in barbed wire? 

I saw that the New York Post and CNN are posting stories about how Renee Good, before she was murdered by the ICE thug Jonathan Ross, had a son, Emerson—named for the American philosopher of moral conviction—who attended a school with a curriculum mentioning George Floyd, as if it was some kind of inculpatory evidence against her. Giant swaths of our neighborhood are still flattened; not mentioning George Floyd here would be like not mentioning Central Park in New York City—absurd, it’s our geography.

Back to the unified theory: George Floyd’s murder made Minnesotans seek—and vote for—justice. That brought a left-leaning legislature to power, which gave us Melissa Hortman and all the runway to pass our “Minnesota miracle” of enshrined abortion rights, family leave, and free school lunch. That miracle brought Tim Walz into the national spotlight, and put him on the presidential ticket. It also brought less miraculous moments: the masked man impersonating a policeman who killed Hortman, which brought the rage and violence of Donald Trump, and the gun to the face of the mom in the car with the dog in the back.

Do you think about the fact that both Hortman and Good died like moms, with the family dog just right there, close enough to touch? I do. I particularly do when my own dogs howl at the ICE goons and the honking watchers tear down the road. What is being a nice, pretty white mom who believes in a just future for all children? Is it the most dangerous thing the right wing can imagine? I think the recent body count might point to: Yes. 

But I can’t think about it too much. I have to take the dogs for a walk, then do a grocery run for a family trapped in their apartment like Anne Frank in her attic, and then my perfect child is taking a friend to an ICE training. Am I worried for her?

Of course. I’m worried for us all.

But moms worry, and then we act. One of my greatest frustrations with American conceptions of parenting is that it’s all about potty training or scraping yogurt off the floor. And while it is that, it’s also one of the most morally complex and fascinating ongoing interactions with the world anyone can ever undertake, and I guess I’d like to ask you to see the current war on Minneapolis differently. It started with two Minnesota moms, Becca and Renee Good, no doubt still reeling from the assassination of Minnesota mom Melissa Hortman. Most everyone you see in the streets right now is or came from a Minnesota mom, just like them. If Trump and Vance and Elon (and all the rest?) are the ultimate bad daddies, maybe the best way to look at the battle for Minneapolis is to call it the equal and opposite insurgence of actual Good—and a whole lot of trying-to-be-good mommies.

Trump Is About to Find Out What Every Bully in History Has Found Out - 2026-01-20T11:00:00Z

In 2025, Donald Trump scared people. And institutions. Go back in your mind to the way he came out of the gate, gunning the accelerator on every front. Pardoning the insurrectionists. Dismantling the executive branch. Firing inspectors general and heads and members of independent commissions. Arresting people for writing op-eds. Threatening universities and law firms. Shipping people off to El Salvador.

That was Round One in the Trump boxing match against reality, and for a time, Trump was winning. The shock felt from his attacks on political opponents and institutions left them flat-footed. Some prominent law firms caved to Trump’s threats and agreed to do pro bono work for his pet causes. Universities cut deals to stay out of his gunsights. Media companies capitulated. Amazon decided to make a movie about Melania (it debuts at the end of the month at—you guessed it—the “Trump-Kennedy Center”). Trump’s power reached from the normal political realm down into the culture itself. A number of firms and universities and others fought him, but the general cultural vibe was very much in the direction of trying to stay in line—the better to avoid the tyrant’s attention—or actively trying to win it with embarrassing acts of sycophancy.

Now we’re at the start of Round Two of the boxing match, and I smell something changing. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have been impressively uncompromising—and uncompromised, which is more important—in their public statements since ICE hit town and executed a blameless U.S. citizen. Trump and the cowardly Pam Bondi (does she understand how the history books will treat her?) launched investigations into the two men. Walz and Frey responded by saying, in essence, Bring it on. Said Walz: “Two days ago, it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week, it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic. The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.” (Hey, good idea, governor: How about the state of Minnesota or the city of Minneapolis arrest Jonathan Ross?)

Over the weekend, three high-ranking American Catholic cardinals denounced Trump (not by name) and his imperial bullying in what was, for cardinals, a strongly worded statement. “Our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination,” they wrote. That followed statements by Pope Leo criticizing Trump for his treatment of immigrants.

Last Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that his country had made a deal with China that would dramatically drop tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and allow nearly 50,000 of them to be sold in Canada. This is a move to keep a close eye on.

Ever watched a video about a Chinese E.V.? I have. These vehicles are good. Maybe not just good. They look amazing. And they’re cheap, comparatively. That’s why Joe Biden imposed a 100 percent tariff on them in 2024—to keep the competition safely on the other side of the planet. Then–Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau followed Biden’s lead and imposed the same level of tariff. Both were protecting their car industries, and this is one form of protectionism that I’d imagine most Americans support: No one wants to see Detroit die.

But Carney, with elbows clearly up, has different ideas. OK, Trump, make all the fifty-first state jokes you want. You think I’ll just let this happen? Well, try this on for size: I’m going to bring Chinese E.V.s onto North American soil.

Detroit must be in a dead panic over this. And Trump is learning that little Canada with its mere 40 million people actually has some leverage over the mighty United States that the bully didn’t think it had.

And if Canada has leverage, what about the EU? The EU is the world’s third-biggest economy, after the United States and China. Does Trump really think he can impose tariffs on the EU over this Greenland madness and the EU won’t retaliate? Trump is set to speak in Davos on Wednesday. EU leaders are scheduled to meet in Brussels on Thursday. They’re not going to take whatever idiocy he launches lying down.

So, all over the place, and in a range of realms, people have started to confront the bully. There remains, however, one group of people, or two closely related groups, that have yet to join the club: corporate America and Wall Street—the biggest cowards in the country.

Why haven’t they? We know why. They’re mostly Republican, and they voted for Trump. They want their tax cuts. They’re terrified of crossing him. They know they helped elect a president bent on weaponizing the civil service to seek revenge on his enemies—and that he’ll order the Justice Department’s antitrust division or the Securities and Exchange Commission or others to go after them in a heartbeat the moment they end up on Trump’s blacklist.

But this too may be starting to change. Detroit, as noted, has to be worried that Trump is setting off a chain of events that may put them out of business. European countries are beefing up their defense spending, which should get a gravy train rolling for American defense giants—but the EU already started freezing out U.S. contractors last fall, and if Trump tries to seize Greenland, U.S. contractors will lose billions in opportunities. And even some Wall Street figures have been critical of Trump recently over the scandalous investigation of Fed Chair Jay Powell and Trump’s proposed credit card interest rate cap.

I’m not expecting much out of these people. They don’t care about anything, really, except their bottom line. But the king’s madness is starting to affect that. If Trump drives this country into a position where most of the world—save Russia, Hungary, Chile, El Salvador, and a handful of other right-wing dys-fantasy lands—wants to do business with China and the EU, corporate America and Wall Street will miraculously find their backbones. And once that happens, Trump won’t have many friends left.

Trump’s shock troops still scare some people on the streets of our country, and tragically so. Over the weekend, I saw a heartbreaking sign posted on the door of a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis: “WE ARE OPEN,” the sign said. “Please wait for us to unlock the door. Thank you for understanding.” It’s reasonable that those poor people should be scared. What a ghastly sight to see in the United States of America.

But those of us not facing that kind of direct threat? For that cohort, 2026 will not be a repeat of 2025. And the bully will learn what bullies throughout history have learned. Eventually, people decide they have had enough. And “eventually” is coming.

Size, Fear, Anger, Repression, and More: Key Factors to Watch in Iran - 2026-01-20T11:00:00Z

Iran may be closer to a revolutionary moment than at any point since 1979—but it is not yet in a revolutionary transition. The mistake many observers make is to treat visible unrest as evidence of imminent collapse. History suggests otherwise. Cycles of protest and repression are not signs of failure in authoritarian systems; they are, in fact, how such systems function. What matters now is whether protest can spread, deepen, and organize in ways that change the balance of power. Here are five factors to keep in mind as we watch these events unfold.

First, size matters—but only up to a point. What matters more is who is not protesting.

Much discussion of Iran’s unrest focuses on the visible scale of demonstrations. Research on civil resistance often cites the “3.5 percent rule”: Movements that mobilize roughly that share of the population at peak moments tend to succeed. In the Iranian case, that would imply many millions in sustained participation—not the perhaps tens of thousands reported this past week, though exact figures are difficult to verify, given internet blackouts. The rule is a useful heuristic, not a guarantee. Numbers alone do not produce regime change, but they are a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for a popularly based revolution. (Regime change can, of course, also come through elite-led coups.) Organization, leadership, elite fracture, and a clear political agenda matter just as much—and so does whether protest spreads into strategically vital sectors of the economy.

I was present in Iran during the 2009 Green Movement, when demonstrations in Tehran reached hundreds of thousands and, at moments, more than a million participants. That scale posed a real challenge because it mobilized a broad, urban, secular, and religious middle class demanding reform. Today’s protests are geographically dispersed and persistent but appear to involve far fewer people at any given moment. More importantly, they have not yet translated into sustained strikes in strategic sectors such as oil, petrochemicals, transportation, or large factories. The decisive fact is not the courage of those protesting but the millions of fence-sitters who sympathize yet fear joining them.

Second, fear works because it is rational—and because the state still functions.

Fear in Iran is not only about repression in the narrow sense. It is also structural. Leaving aside the current inflationary surge, currency collapse, and spikes in food prices, Iran’s administrative system still has the capacity to function relatively competently. The state continues to deliver subsidized education, health care, transportation, fuel, electricity, and water, alongside extensive welfare and patronage networks.

For much of the urban middle and working classes, protest is not a simple moral choice. It is a calculation that weighs political frustration against the risk of losing access to a system that, however corrupt, still provides. There is also the often-overlooked figure of the “dissatisfied Islamist”: citizens who accept the Islamic Republic’s framework but are deeply unhappy with its performance. Many of the merchants who have closed their shops in protest—traditionally conservative and sometimes regime-aligned—fit this category. Their actions signal economic grievance and political pressure, not necessarily a desire for regime overthrow. In both cases, fear is not cowardice; it is rational risk assessment.

Third, anger without leadership and organization does not produce transitions. Iran lacks the bridge.

The most underappreciated feature of the current moment is the disconnect between the street and the only domestic actors capable of steering a transition. There are no chants calling for imprisoned or marginalized opposition figures to step forward; no effort to revive banned parties; and no visible attempt to link protest energy to institutional pathways, political organization, or negotiation. This absence matters enormously.

Paradoxically, Iran does possess much of the infrastructure an alternative regime would need: an experienced bureaucracy, dormant political parties, and leaders who know how the state works. Figures like Mostafa Tajzadeh—who has openly called for a transition away from the Islamic Republic and is now entering his eleventh year in prison—could plausibly serve as bridges between street pressure and elite negotiation precisely because they have pasts within the system. That past, however, is treated by many protesters as a disqualifying stain rather than a strategic asset.

In this vacuum, abstract or nostalgic alternatives rush in. Calls for Reza Pahlavi reflect not a viable political project but the absence of credible domestic leadership—symbolism filling the space where organization should be.

Fourth, repression works because the regime’s core is not only ideological—it is generational.

The Islamic Republic remains astonishingly ideologically unified at the core. Roughly 10 to 15 percent of the population—across senior political leadership, the Revolutionary Guards, the security services, and key bureaucratic posts—remains deeply committed to the regime’s legitimacy and values. These are not merely opportunists; many are true believers willing to absorb isolation, economic pain, and even death to preserve the system, as Iranian casualties in Syria demonstrated.

This cohesion is also generational. Much of the coercive apparatus is staffed by people whose entire adult lives have been bound to the Islamic Republic. There is no pre-1979 state to restore, no alternative institutional memory to return to. That makes elite defection harder than in late Soviet or Eastern European cases.

Finally, the international environment matters—but it cannot substitute for internal fracture.

Democratic transitions rarely succeed in isolation. Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968 show how heroic movements can be crushed when coercive power remains intact and no assistance is forthcoming. By contrast, the Philippines in 1986 remains the classic case of people power: Mass mobilization coincided with military splits, church backing, U.S. pressure, and an organized political alternative.

Iran today lacks that alignment. Donald Trump’s Iran policy is not aimed at democratization. It is more interest- than values-based, focused on zero nuclear enrichment and the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program; missile dismantlement to reduce threats to regional partners; and ending support for regional proxies and explicit threats (“Death to America” and “Death to Israel”). This amounts to pressure without nation building—or even wholesale regime change. But Iran differs from cases like Venezuela in a crucial respect: Its ruling core is not primarily a cartel; it is an ideologically and generationally committed elite, making external coercion less predictably effective unless it coincides with domestic fracture.

At the same time, foreign leaders must be exceedingly careful, because ill-calibrated rhetoric can be worse than silence. Without overstating the influence of Trump’s words—which matter far less than domestic conditions—such rhetoric can still raise expectations, encourage risk-taking, and leave Iranians to absorb the consequences alone.

Trump’s recent statements illustrate the danger. He effectively declared his own red line when he warned that the regime would face severe consequences if it killed protesters. Like Obama’s red line in Syria, that threat was never enforced. His exhortations urging Iranians to “take over government buildings” and assurances that “help is on the way” were irresponsible, particularly because the moment when outside pressure might have mattered—when people were still in the streets and being killed—had already passed. The subsequent public “thank you” to the regime for supposedly “pausing” executions appeared deeply misjudged, even if intended to buy time for the United States, its regional partners, and Israel to prepare for possible Iranian missile retaliation in the event of an American strike.

Many around the world and inside Iran dream of ending a regime that has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. and the West for half a century and a boot on the face of a majority of Iranians. Against that backdrop, speculation that the movement of naval assets into the Persian Gulf signals a large-scale military strike—or a dramatic, Maduro-style move against Ayatollah Khamenei—seems unlikely. A more plausible scenario would be a limited military operation modeled on the December 2025 U.S. strikes against ISIS in Syria: at a minimum, narrowly targeted to signal resolve and increase negotiating leverage over what’s left of Iran’s nuclear program and, at most, designed to neutralize Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile capabilities—its remaining serious threats to regional partners—rather than to pursue regime-level effects. Whether such actions could fatally weaken the regime by decapitating its leadership and degrading its remaining deterrent capabilities remains uncertain, though it is certainly possible.

The upshot for Democrats and liberals in the United States is not to embrace regime change by force, but to moderate knee-jerk rejection of any form of U.S. intervention. The task is to identify a narrow but consequential overlap between measures that open space for more Iranians to take to the streets, organize, and build a peaceful opposition—and measures that advance core U.S. interests without falling into the trap of occupation, nation building, or total war. If Iran is entering a long endgame, the danger is not intervention per se, but failing to distinguish between actions that widen political possibility and those that foreclose it.

A California Climate Policy Is Polluting Wisconsin - 2026-01-20T11:00:00Z

In much of rural Wisconsin, manure is everywhere. It’s in the ground, the drinking water, and the air communities breathe. The state is home to more than 300 concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs, which produce billions of pounds of manure every year.

Kim Dupre, a clean-water advocate who lived in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, for 20 years, has watched the state go from an idyllic agricultural haven to a barren region dominated by factory farms and their waste. Schools and local businesses have closed, and the state’s growing public health crisis has been linked to a lack of access to clean drinking water in rural areas. “It doesn’t feel like country living. You feel like you’re in an industrial park,” Dupre said.

Big Ag took hold of the Midwest decades ago. And some of these trends—shrinking populations, farm consolidation, and local business closures—are common in rural areas across the country. But some residents and activists say a recent, allegedly pro-environmental policy is making things worse: A climate program implemented some two thousand miles away is encouraging farms in Wisconsin to turn manure into fuel using anaerobic digesters. The pollution problem is growing.

The California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, or LCFS, is a climate program implemented in 2011 to incentivize the production of alternative fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state. It’s a key part of California’s climate strategy, and has issued more than $22 billion worth of credits for low-carbon fuels since 2013. One of the “low-carbon” fuels heavily incentivized by the LCFS is factory-farm biogas, a fuel source produced from methane released by manure and animal waste. Farmers are paid to install anaerobic digesters—giant machines that break down waste, capture methane, and turn it into natural gas used for electricity, heating, and fuel—and are awarded credits, which Californian transportation companies and fuel producers can buy to offset their carbon emissions. In 2024, the California Air Resources Board, the governing body of the LCFS, updated the program to accelerate the deployment of zero-emission infrastructure like digesters, which critics argue solidified factory-farm biogas as one of the program’s most incentivized fuels. Nearly 200 manure digesters across 16 states are now funded by the LCFS, according to an analysis from Food and Water Watch. Outside California, Wisconsin, Texas, and New York have the most LCFS-funded digester projects.

Biogas and biodigester technology are supported by a broad coalition of agricultural groups, fossil fuel giants, utility companies, and politicians across bipartisan lines. Supporters call it a game-changing technology that will cut methane emissions from the agriculture sector, while providing farmers a new source of income. Alongside the LCFS, a number of federal grants and state programs have been dedicated to building more digesters. With funding from former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, funneled over $150 million in subsidies to manure biogas projects in 2023 alone.

Critics view digesters—and the public funds being funneled into their construction—as a form of greenwashing, i.e., making something seem more environmentally friendly than it actually is. Digesters lead to larger herd sizes, they say, meaning not just more planet-warming methane overall but also more air and water pollution in rural communities already burdened by the impacts of industrial agriculture. “It’s not that we’re anti-technology, but we don’t want to be a sacrifice zone either,” Dupre said.

To produce biogas and feed a digester, a massive quantity of manure needs to be produced on-farm, said Tyler Lobdell, a staff attorney at Food and Water Watch. “You only have biogas production when you have a factory farm in operation that has all sorts of problems that go far beyond methane emissions,” he added. The average number of cows confined on a factory-farm dairy generating LCFS credits is 7,900 cows. For context, the national average dairy herd is 377 cows.

“LCFS is rewarding factory farms for polluting locally, for contaminating communities’ drinking water, for causing more air pollution in local communities, and ultimately for just being bigger climate polluters,” Lobdell said. When the LCFS began incentivizing methane capture in 2018, that began a “gold rush for manure” that has led to the emergence of a whole new industry,” he said.

Mary Dougherty, a senior regional representative at the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, says digesters and the fiscal support they’re receiving from programs like the LCFS have drastically changed the purpose of American dairies. “We’ve reached a point where the manure is more valuable than the milk. The cows are not there to feed people, they’re there to feed the digester and generate carbon credits. That is not the American farmer—the story, the fable, the myth, and the beloved archetype of our country—it’s not that,” Dougherty said.

The mother-of-five has been fighting factory farming in Wisconsin since 2015, when she first heard of plans for an industrial hog farm to be built near her town of Bayfield. She ran a restaurant at the time, and knew little about factory farming.

“It felt like we were being invaded without any sort of consent on our part,” she said. It’s a common occurrence in rural communities: Companies come in preaching a new operation or technology, promising jobs and a revived economy. But the more Dougherty learned about industrial agriculture, the more she believed a CAFO would harm her community’s health and well-being. She threw herself into organizing, with her community and allies, and the proposal was dropped. Dougherty has since spent her career helping other communities organize against CAFO expansions and digester implementation—which she, like other critics, fears will drive farm expansion and a worsening public health crisis. “Quality of life suffers when CAFOs expand,” Dougherty said.

Research suggests that dairies with digesters have increased their herd sizes by 3.7 percent annually, which is 24 times the growth of dairies without digesters. But in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, which has five industrial dairies that receive LCFS credits, herd sizes grew on average 58 percent since they were installed. More cows means more manure, and more manure means increased risk of water contamination.

Across Wisconsin, where 25 percent of people get their drinking water from private wells, an estimated 80,000 wells contain unsafe levels of nitrate, the compound found in animal manure and commercial fertilizer. More than 90 percent of nitrate contamination comes from excess manure and fertilizer application from industrial agriculture, according to a recent report from the Alliance of Great Lakes. Surplus nitrate consumption has been linked to a number of health risks, including thyroid cancer, premature birth, and blue baby syndrome.

It’s not just Wisconsin being impacted by California’s carbon market, either. In Iowa, a dairy that leaked over 365,000 gallons of manure in three weeks in 2022 now receives LCFS credits. Residents in San Joaquin Valley, California, a predominantly Latino area dealing with water and air pollution from industrial agriculture, and a number of environmental organizations are suing the California Air Resources Board for its failure to address the environmental justice impacts of the LCFS.

Digesters have been promoted as a form of climate policy. But in addition to the environmental justice concerns, it’s not clear that digesters reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as they claim to, particularly if they’re driving an increase in cows overall: They do not address enteric fermentation (cow burps), which accounted for 27 percent of U.S. methane emissions in 2022 alone, said Sarah D’Onofrio, a researcher who works with digester-impacted communities across the country. “That’s where most of the methane emissions from dairy are coming from; they just ignore that,” she said. D’Onofrio fears the LCFS and programs like it will only worsen consolidation among American farms. Several states, including Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, and Michigan, have now implemented or are considering programs similar to the LCFS. “It’s encouraging already bad patterns of letting the big guys get even bigger, and the small guys are getting left out. They can’t even benefit from these programs.” The California Air Resources Board did not respond to a request for comment.

To truly mitigate the environmental impacts of agriculture, Dupre, who herself owned a farm for two decades, said taxpayer dollars should be going to small-scale farmers who prioritize pasture-based grazing and perennial cover—more sustainable farming practices that improve animal welfare while enhancing soil health. “You get what you incentivize in this country,” she said. “If you get paid for your pollution, you don’t have any incentive to reduce or quit polluting, right?”

Trump’s Rage at Protesters Boils Over as ICE Scandal Takes Worse Turn - 2026-01-20T10:00:00Z

Last week, President Trump unleashed an angry tirade over anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, threatening to invoke the “INSURRECTION ACT” against “professional agitators and insurrectionists,” i.e., ordinary people. On Friday, Trump seemed to suggest he might not, but he also left the threat very much dangling out there. Indeed, after we recorded this episode, Trump kept raging, seething about jailing Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, sharing tweets about “anti-ICE anarchists,” and exploding about Minnesota politicians supposedly wanting criminals in their state, showing his fury is on full boil. This comes as a devastating New York Times frame-by-frame analysis of Renee Good’s shooting shows very clearly that the shooting was not remotely justified. Making all this still worse, troops are now reportedly mobilizing for possible deployment to Minnesota. We talked to Mother Jones writer Mark Follman, author of a new piece on Trump’s exploitation of crises. We discuss how the Trump-ICE justifications are collapsing, how dangerous invoking the Insurrection Act would be, and what Trump hopes to accomplish by stoking social antagonisms at moments of national trauma. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

How AI Is Reshaping Science’s Most Trusted Tool - 2026-01-19T11:00:00Z

When scientists and regulators need clear answers to health risks—such as whether Tylenol causes autism (it doesn’t)—they typically turn to systematic reviews, widely regarded as medicine’s gold standard of evidence. Many aspects of our lives are governed by findings from these reviews: from the drugs prescribed by physicians, to vaccine mandates, to environmental policy. The problem is that conducting reviews is notoriously slow and labor-intensive. New artificial intelligence (AI) tools are poised to substantially accelerate this process, transforming how quickly scientific evidence filters into society. Handled responsibly, this could improve care and save lives—but only if it preserves the standards that make these reviews trustworthy.

Systematic reviews are a method of answering a scientific question by collecting and evaluating all the relevant studies. They’re called “systematic” because (in contrast to the single-author, state-of-the-field summaries they were designed to replace) there are strict standards for how to conduct them and how to report what the team finds. In principle, this makes the process transparent and reproducible: Every step—from how studies are searched for and selected, to how their quality is assessed and their results synthesized—is clearly documented. This makes it harder to cherry-pick studies to support a preferred conclusion, and easier to identify bias.

In practice, this is an arduous task. Once the research team has settled on a precise question, a typical review requires two or three researchers to screen tens of thousands of papers by reading their titles and abstracts. Finding the relevant studies requires special expertise: Reviewers must know where and how to search in order to not miss important findings. Papers that look promising are then set aside for reviewers to read in full and decide whether to include that paper or not. Data from the selected papers are methodically extracted according to a plan determined beforehand, and the evidence is then synthesized.

In medicine, this process typically takes between 10 and 14 months. But they sometimes take much longer: one reviewer told me she was helping with one that had been four years in the making. These delays come with costs: In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, even accelerated reviews were frequently outdated by the time they were published, meaning that clinicians and policymakers were often making decisions based on evidence syntheses that lagged behind the rapidly changing science.

The problem is getting worse as the number of published studies increases; there are more studies to screen, assess, and analyze. Modern science has thus produced a kind of paradox: The more research exists on a topic, the harder it becomes to say what the research as a whole implies.

“How we do systematic reviews needs to change,” Ella Flemyng, the head of editorial policy and research integrity at Cochrane, one of the world’s leading evidence-synthesis organizations, told me. “It’s not sustainable going forward.” That’s where AI comes in.


The most time-consuming part of a review—screening many thousands of abstracts—is a prime candidate for automation. It is also the sort of task that AI models are, at least in principle, good for.

A fairly narrow kind of AI is already baked into software reviewers use. Some tools, for instance, help reviewers by showing them the most likely relevant titles and abstracts first, and pushing the rest further down the stack. But the system doesn’t decide which studies are potentially relevant; it only sets the order of what the reviewer sees. The decision—and the reasoning behind it—still rests with the reviewer.

A new wave of tools, based on generative AI, aims to go beyond sorting papers and to automate various stages of the reviewing process. Some products, such as Elicit and SciSpace, feel like the chatbots we are so accustomed to: Users can type a question, and the system returns a summary of the research (with sources). Effectively, these tools are trying to handle all aspects of the review—the search, inclusion, and synthesis. Others, like Nested Knowledge, are more constrained, and look more like the specialized software reviewers already trust, just with AI features layered in. In both cases, the promise is that work that currently takes months could soon be done in minutes or hours.

Now, a process typically filled with red tape feels like a scientific wild west. Generative AI–based tools are being heavily marketed, while strict guidelines for how to integrate them into the review pipeline have lagged behind. “Everything is moving very, very fast,” said Kristen Scotti, a STEM librarian at Carnegie Mellon University. “A lot of the recommendations are not out yet, so people are just kind of flopping around.”

An increasing number of reviews are being conducted with these new tools. So far, these haven’t been published in the most prestigious journals, where they are likely to make the most impact, partly because there were no widely accepted standards for what responsible AI use looks like.

This has begun to change. In November 2025, the world’s four major evidence synthesis organizations—Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI, and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence—published a position statement called the Responsible Use of AI In Evidence Synthesis (RAISE) to help guide the use of AI in reviews. The tone is cautious, reminding reviewers that they remain responsible for the output and that any tool has to be rigorously tested before it becomes part of a review. Flemyng, who is an author of the statement, told me that “a lot of these [AI] uses in reviews are still exploratory. Or if you’re using them, you need to validate their use in the specific review before you actually use them. We don’t have the evidence base for a blanket roll-out for any of these tools.”

The RAISE recommendations fall short of the kinds of procedural detail that reviewers are used to. “That guidance is very general: It tells people what to do, without telling them how to do it.” Farhad Shokraneh, a researcher specializing in systematic reviews at the universities of Oxford and Bristol, told me.

Still, this statement offers a green light for integrating AI in reviewing workflows. With the backing of the leading synthesis organizations, we are likely to soon see many more—and better—reviews being published that use these tools.

The benefits will not just be (much) faster reviews. Evidence could also be updated more quickly as new studies come in, turning today’s slow, static reviews into something closer to living, continually refreshed summaries. Already, some funders, like the London-based health research charity Wellcome Trust, are dreaming of “real-time aggregation of scientific data.”

Researchers may also be able to include studies in more languages. This is a hurdle for contemporary reviews, said Margaret Foster, the director of evidence synthesis services at the Medical Sciences Library at Texas A&M University. “I’ll have students who want to look at acupuncture for nausea caused by chemotherapy,” she said. “And we know there’s a lot of research coming out of China. It would be great if we could access that research.”

In an optimistic scenario, anyone could run reliable systematic reviews on their computer by simply asking the model a question and letting it filter through the literature and summarize it succinctly. But the veteran reviewers I interviewed unanimously agreed: We’re far from that point. Many are skeptical we’ll ever get there.


For starters, many of the AI-based tools are not reproducible, lacking one the fundamental characteristics of science. Multiple studies have found that prompting these models with the same query—say, “What is the effect of acupuncture on chemotherapy-induced nausea?”—at different times may result in the model selecting different studies and producing different results. Even small changes in the phrasing of the prompt can likewise yield dramatically different outputs.

These systems are black boxes: the procedure that generated an output can be difficult (and sometimes practically impossible) to trace. Together, a lack of reproducibility and transparency is a problem for evidence-based policy. It could mean recommending a cancer treatment based on a review that no one can independently verify or fully understand.

Another fundamental problem is that “AI gives you false sense that everything has been searched,” Foster told me. “But these AI tools don’t have access to all the databases.” They are often trained on only freely available scientific papers, which represents only a slice of the scientific literature. Having access to the best databases is essential for having an accurate picture of the evidence. But is also prohibitively expensive.

These concerns are even more pressing when public information itself is in flux. The Trump administration has been removing datasets and studies from the national libraries. If AI-based tools are trained on or search uneven scientific records, then we lose the original motivation for systematic reviews: namely, of synthesizing all the relevant evidence on a question.

There are also equity issues. Some tools are only available in certain countries, or behind paywalls, raising the prospect of a widening gap between high-income countries that can afford the newest systems and manage the largest databases, and low- and middle-income countries that cannot.

Implementing AI tools in reviews without addressing these risks could be disastrous, mixing an illusion of scientific credibility with poor-quality outputs. In turn, this could further erode public trust in scientists and scientific inquiry—including confidence in the safety of vaccine recommendations—where it’s already disturbingly low.

But there are ways (at least in theory) of mitigating the risks, even if doing so will require substantial work: The AI tools could be built to support a high level of reproducibility and transparency, and broader pushes for open databases could help ensure that everyone has access to the full evidential record.


I asked Shokraneh whether he thinks these tools will eventually replace him as a reviewer. “I hope so,” he said. “I may end up in the street because I will have no job. But that’s okay if that means my mom will live ten years longer.”

I hope for a future where good evidence is produced faster and more people have access to it—where I can ask a detailed question about health or economics to an app on my phone and trust that it returns a scientifically sound synthesis of the relevant available research. But we are not there yet. And until scientists have rigorously evaluated current tools, placing too much trust in their output isn’t a good idea.

Still, when I heard that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the nation’s health and human services secretary—claimed that the statement “Vaccines do not cause autism” is “not supported by science,” I decided to check with Elicit. In a long, scientific-looking report, it told me that studies “consistently found no association between vaccination and autism spectrum disorders.” I rephrased the question multiple times and the answer remained the same. Days later, on January 5, 2026, the federal childhood immunization schedule was revised, narrowing routine recommendations for several vaccines. 

AI evidence synthesis tools still have many limitations. But maybe some policymakers could already benefit from using them. 

The Crisis Year for Journalism Is Here - 2026-01-19T11:00:00Z

Days into the new year, as stuffed suit Tony Dokoupil was readying to take the helm as the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, the network rolled out a much-mocked set of five guiding principles that went heavy on the sort of pseudo-intellectual fluff that’s long been a calling card of new editor in chief Bari Weiss.

Of this set of milquetoast slogans, what most drew public attention was the fourth pronouncement, which began with “We love America.” But what caught my eye was point three, which noted, “It’s our job to present you with the fullest picture—and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue. We trust you to make up your own minds.”

This seems like an explicit embrace of the so-called “view from nowhere” approach to journalism, a once-dominant strain that has lost cachet as it’s become clearer that it primarily serves powerful interests. I found this particularly telling in the context of the broader story of the right-wing billionaire David Ellison’s takeover of CBS News and the consolidation and cowing of this and other storied journalistic institutions. What was probably intended to sound like a bold statement instead had the distinct ring of capitulation.

In-depth reporting is difficult work. It’s not easy to unearth hidden information on the one hand and parse avalanches of it on the other—much of it offered in bad faith—on deadline, especially as newsrooms have shrunk in tandem with the growth and entrenchment of PR and spin. There are real dangers to hubris, too, and I think there’s good reason to approach most political actors and perspectives with some level of openness, if not exactly good faith, barring some obvious examples (e.g., open racists, though that seems like a lesson the media has to periodically relearn). I want to add one more caveat here, a point I think to be obvious but which seems to need explicit stating: The news media has a right to self defense.

There’s the matter of physical and digital security, which journalistic organizations seem to intuitively understand, including in-house security teams at the largest publishers. I think our duty here extends beyond that, to understanding that we have a responsibility to our audience to safeguard our ability to do journalism, meaning that we must understand explicit efforts and policies to undermine that ability and destabilize journalistic practice as attacks, and those perpetrating those attacks as enemies, and I don’t just mean in the opinion pages.

We are under no professional obligation to treat with even-handedness the would-be architects of our demise. I suspect that a lot of people were not aware that Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for the second Trump administration, laid out a plethora of ideas geared specifically toward destroying the news media; many, like the destruction of the Voice Of America system and making it easier for the DOJ to subpoena journalists, have already been put into effect. This was right alongside planks to target academia and the administrative state, but while many news organizations covered the latter, I suspect that they focused less on their own targeting out of the sense that this would be somehow improper, making themselves part of the story, a deep fear of a lot of institutional journalism.

Unfortunately, putting your hands down in a fight doesn’t make you the referee. As increasingly emboldened interests amp up efforts to buy, sue, steal from, and use official power to coerce the news media into submission, we have to embrace a self-defense posture that won’t interfere with our news gathering but will acknowledge that we can’t continue news gathering if we’ve been knocked over by the powers we’re meant to hold accountable.

We are going to have to punch back, and that will mean refusing, when possible, to provide an unchecked platform to the people involved in these efforts. It also means adopting a position of reflexive hostility and open opposition against them, and maintaining a consistent, forceful, and unified message in favor of our ability to do our jobs. Don’t let an on-the-record conversation with, say, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr end without a forceful denunciation of his efforts. Don’t leave audiences to forget these specific threats. Instead, allow them to understand how each would threaten their own ability—their right—to learn more about the world around them via a robust news media. Don’t treat our responsibilities as self-evident; convey to audiences why we do what we do and how it affects their lives. If we’re “making ourselves the story” in this instance, well, it’s because hostile entities are intent on making us a cautionary tale. If it is biased to be instinctively in favor of the First Amendment and news gathering as a principle and practice that must be actively fought for, then it is our duty to be biased.

A bit of antipathy between the press and the political, business, and religious elites of the world is to be expected, and in fact desirable. The consequences of excessive coziness (see: the Iraq War) or veneration (see: the 2000s tech press) are unfortunately well documented and widely understood. Still, there’s a distinction between rhetorical jousting or throwing barbs and active efforts to constrain what reporters can cover, as the Pentagon tried to dictate to its press corps, or weaponizing official entities like the FCC to actively shift the fundamental missions of news organizations.

I’ll acknowledge that there’s bound to be some discomfort with this realization. Industry conversations around the correct approach to things like intent have simmered continuously since journalism really professionalized around the turn of the twentieth century (before which it was more of an openly partisan and factional affair). The last decade has marked a shift, largely a generational one, through which institutional journalism educators like me tend to no longer teach a balance model but a fairness one, with the latter holding that while a journalist should give a full and fair hearing to all views, our job isn’t to just repeat them. We have a crucial additional role, a curatorial one, where we, as something like an agent of our audiences, use all our reporting and expertise to parse which position, if any, is closest to the actual truth and which will best help audiences make decisions. To rise in our own defense against a force motivated to destroy our institutions is only an extension of the impulses that guide our best work and compel us to keep the public thoroughly and thoughtfully informed.

There’s really no other profession that I can think of where it is considered a professional mandate to passively engage with direct threats to long-term viability of the job, and it makes even less sense when that job is fundamental to a democratic system. Editorial leaders, tasked among other things with ensuring the survival of their newsrooms, should start getting comfortable with a vision that includes self-defense as a specific and intrinsic plank of our work.

Who Are the AWFULs? Trump Hates Them, So They’re Doing Something Right - 2026-01-19T10:59:00Z

Nomenclature is potent. Donald Trump loves a nickname, and there is power in naming things. Once a thing has a name, it can be categorized, judged, explained, and perhaps satirized and belittled. Over the last decade, Trump has had wild success with giving names to his rivals. Most are on about the eighth-grade level, but they have often subsequently flattened these rivals, sucked their power right out of them—Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe. This naming phenomenon wasn’t limited to individuals. Groups often gave themselves nicknames: the KHive (Harris supporters), Pantsuit Nation (Clinton supporters), MAHA (RFK Jr. supporters), and of course MAGA (Trump supporters).

And sometimes these groups were given pejorative nicknames: Karens (humorless women) and now AWFULs (affluent, white, female, urban liberals). The first time I saw someone use the acronym to describe this group was on election night 2024, when internet commentator Erick Erickson tweeted: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals. The AWFULs radicalized a lot of people against them. Nichole Wallace, Rachael Maddow, and most of the rest of the women at MSNBC really have played a powerful role in what is happening tonight” (misspellings of Nicolle and Rachel: Erickson’s, not mine).

He was blaming Kamala Harris’s loss on the women of MSNBC, who he decided had radicalized viewers against Harris—a statement that seems inadvertently hilarious considering the channel reaches fewer than five million people in a country of 330 million. Besides, the people who watch MSNBC (or MS NOW as it’s now called) are largely the people who agree with it.

As an AWFUL myself, I can absolutely attest to it being true that educated white women have always been a problem for Trump. The really rich among them may delight in the tax cuts, but for many educated and merely well-off women, the crass sexism that Trump and his base delight in disgusts us. We may be living in a cycle of backlash to backlash, but those of us who were born in the late 1970s with more rights than our own daughters currently have understand what we’ve lost with the overturning of Roe.

Even onetime MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene complained about the “MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization,” telling The New York Times, “I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women. I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts.” Young men may love the hyper-sexualized look of your typical Mar-a-Lago female habitué, but I wouldn’t want that for my own daughter or for myself. There are class elements at play here too, as Trump has always been a faint mimeograph of a wealthy person.

As an AWFUL who is also a mother, I readily admit that we often feel bulletproof, protected from the kind of traffic stops and police violence that our nonwhite counterparts are subjected to. Conservative pundit Will Cain charged on Fox News the other night that we possess “a weird kind of smugness in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority.”

Oh well; sticks and stones, as they say. But this—the aftermath of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good—is different. This is the first time they’ve strenuously defended their right to murder one of us. “I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement—a lunatic fringe—against our law enforcement officers,” Vice President JD Vance told a press pool last Thursday. This was akin to chastising a sexual assault survivor for believing in premarital sex. Good’s last words were, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” She was then shot three times at point-blank range.

White women are, for Trump’s purposes, actually two distinct groups separated by an important split, which is not actually the “urban” in AWFULs. Rather, it’s their educational level. There’s a diploma divide between white women with a college degree, who are more likely to be liberals, and white women without a college degree, who are more likely to have voted for Trump. AWFULs refers to the college-educated variety of white women who have wandered into the MAGA crosshairs and now find themselves MAGA enemy number one. How we got here is no great mystery. Ever since the 2020 George Floyd protests, we’ve seen some white women use their (somewhat) protected status to ally themselves with their protesting brethren and sistren.

The trope of white women being of a (relatively) more protected class than other members of the diversity, equity, and inclusion consortium is certainly true. But this is relative. More protected, but still subjected to any number of punishments and inequalities, including domestic violence, which complicates the idea of a protected status. Last weekend, social media was filled with the Margaret Atwood quote, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

But some of these white women seem to be using their protected status to face off with (often masked) ICE agents. In two different recent videos, a masked border patrol agent warns a white woman not to “make a bad decision,” and in another he says, “Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?” And so these women, a group so coveted by advertisers and media companies, find themselves deemed AWFULS by MAGA.

You might think that killing an unarmed mother crosses a Rubicon of sorts, and polls would say you were right. But one of the weird truisms of Trumpism is that Trump tends to only care about governing for the base, which is why one of their most common moves is to double or triple down on controversies. We saw this with Trump’s rhetoric after Venezuela. We see it now with respect to Greenland. And we saw it in Minneapolis, despite very poor polling (only 28 percent of Americans think ICE agent Jonathan Ross was “justified” in putting three bullets into the mother of three).

It’s pretty unusual to see numbers like that, especially if you factor in that 35 percent of voters are these intractable members of Trump’s base who will sign off on almost anything MAGA world desires. Trumpworld was out defending the indefensible full throttle, starting with JD Vance, followed by border czar Tom Homan telling NBC News’s Kristen Welker that Good’s “hateful rhetoric” was the cause of her murder, and finally capped by Customs and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity: “Hats off to that ICE agent. I’m glad he made it out alive. I’m glad he is with his family.”

They can carry on like that all they want, but what happened to Good may be a breakthrough moment. There is something uniquely disquieting about the murder of a mother in her car—and, let’s face it, of a middle-class white mother. It is one of those things that’s not supposed to happen in America. It echoes other killings that broke through, that pierced the membrane. The murders of four college students, committed more than 50 years before at Kent State University, on May 4, 1970, when Ohio national guardsmen shot 13 unarmed college students protesting the war in Vietnam. Four of the kids died, and one was paralyzed.

College kids were supposed to be a protected class, but they were shot dead just like anyone else. Instead of quieting dissent, these murders unleashed an inexhaustible rage. Kent State was a moment that set into motion a sea of protests; waves and waves of students started a nationwide strike. Part of the problem with living through history is that one never knows what will matter and what will disappear.

We’ve never lived in an America where the government is defending the murder of white mothers. The thinking here, the lie the administration is selling, is that somehow this mother was a radicalized leftist. The idea that someone’s political beliefs could render them undeserving of due process, indeed of life itself, is something we haven’t seen from our government in a long time, not since wartime. Trumpers may consider these women awful, but educated urban women are the structure holding up much of American life, and they’re definitely deep in the fight against Trump. The fact that Trumpworld is so threatened by them means they’re probably doing something right.

The Residents of Minneapolis Are Fighting for All of Us - 2026-01-18T11:00:00Z

For as long as Donald Trump has deployed his ICE brownshirts in the “Democrat” cities he so despises, Americans have been out in the streets, confronting his masked goons and making sure the rest of the world sees what’s going on. One of the first witness videos I saw was in Washington, D.C., in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where my father grew up. A woman espied three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents loitering in the area, harangued them, ran them off their roost, and then followed them around until they finally piled in their car and drove off.

ICE confrontations have necessarily evolved since then, as agents have become more wantonly violent. The New Republic has been chronicling the community response to ICE, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. But one thing we haven’t done, and which I feel compelled to do, is simply say this: I think the people risking their lives and livelihoods to protect their neighbors are the best of us, and I feel like we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

I’m thankful for all the people who’ve filmed ICE agents slipping and falling on Minneapolis’s icy streets. Fascism is more a set of aesthetics than it is a legible system of political beliefs, so it actually matters that we make fun of these jabronis—humiliation pushes our lines forward. Creativity is needed, as well. I’ve thrilled to the sight of Minnesotans gathered outside the hotels harboring these hoodlums, banging on drum kits late into the night. And ordinary citizens seem very composed and ready to protect their city. One especially inspiring sight came this week when ICE agents pounded on the door of the Wrecktangle Pizza shop in Minneapolis’s Lyn Lake neighborhood: There’s a “tweet tweet” blast on a whistle, and suddenly scores of people swarm the sorry ICE agents and run them off.

While we should be rightly delighted by these sights, they might be occluding a darker part of this story. The murder of Renee Good has engendered a righteous fury in the people of Minneapolis, but if my friends there are any guide, it’s also sparked genuine sorrow and spiky, persistent fear. People that I know normally to be rocks of confidence are communicating a despair that I’ve never heard them express.

In my group chats, I’ve been told about restaurant workers who’ve disappeared from their workplaces. Those friends of mine with kids have had to go to exhausting lengths to protect them. One told me about how his daughter’s preschool had to close because the Methodist Church that hosted it was tipped off that ICE would be executing a raid on its property that day—the day of the church’s food pantry. And the reason ICE was rumbling Wrecktangle Pizza, I was told, was because the chain raised $85,000 to help area restaurants cope with the strain of their agents’ presence in the city. ICE knows who the most vulnerable Minneapolitans are, and also the ones who’ve done them the most damage, and they are targeting both, with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and the tacit permission of the Trump administration to terrorize.

Minneapolis truly can be likened to a city under siege from a foreign threat. As The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, the Trump administration’s plans to deploy as many as 3,000 ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents to the Twin Cities would make the occupying force “equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.” Moreover, they report, it would be “close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.”

This is an important side of the story to tell for many reasons, not the least of which is that ICE cannot deploy enough people to put every American city in check. So for the moment, Minneapolis is really taking it on the chin for most of the rest of us. The reason the streets of my own dense liberal enclave are not ringing out with shouts and whistles is because Trump’s “day of reckoning” isn’t being fought here—yet. When this fight does come to our own neighborhoods, we will have Minneapolitans—like the Chicagoans, Portlanders, Los Angelenos, and Washingtonians before them, among others—to thank for cheering our hearts, deepening our knowledge of how to fight back, and making these ICE deployments more costly.

The people of the Twin Cities feel isolated and alone; local officials have lamented that they are literally outgunned, and politicians in Washington have offered little respite beyond the occasional galaxy-brained idea. We owe a debt to the people of this besieged city. We should take some time to comfort friends and loved ones who are under fire. We should share their stories, good and bad, widely, with an eye toward building a repository of evidence that a future federal government can use to prosecute lawless ICE agents and those who gave them marching orders. In the meanwhile, to everyone putting your bodies on the line in this fight, you have my thanks. And to the ICE agents out there causing violence and mayhem, let me say—from the heart—get fucked.

For those interested in ways to help the people of Minneapolis, there are a number of organizations to which you can donate. Unidos MN has been helping to train Minneapolitans to observe and report on ICE activity and run the city’s rapid response hotline. Take Action MN is constructing a hub for mutual aid groups in the city. Families Helping Families has organized 120 parents to do grocery and rent relief, student transportation, school patrols, and more. Isaiah is a multiracial organization of faith communities that has organized rallies to remember Renee Good. There are a number of national civil rights organizations operating in the city, including the Immigrant Defense Network, the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee. There are a number of legal aid organizations, as well, including the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, and the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Stephen Miller Has a Truly Rancid Star Trek Opinion - 2026-01-17T11:00:00Z

Following American politics these days forces one to read a dizzying array of bizarre social media posts by President Donald Trump and other members of the Trump administration. Some of them are worthy of news coverage; most aren’t. But there was one on Thursday night that I could not let go unremarked upon.

Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of Trump’s mass-deportations plan, expressed dismay about a new Star Trek series that debuted this week on Paramount’s streaming service. In the post, Miller shared another post by an account named “End Wokeness” that featured a 15-second clip from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. The account captioned it with the vague description “Star Trek 2026 … Beyond parody …”

“We’re near the Badlands, Captain,” one character, a half-Klingon, half-Jem’Hadar woman, remarks to the academy’s chancellor, played by Holly Hunter. “Subspace instability may be creeping in, and we’re the first to chart it.” Another crew member, presumably a science officer from her uniform, enters the scene. “This would make an excellent practical study module for the spacial harmonics lab, Captain,” she tells the others. “Alright, but let’s not total the ship on the first try,” Hunter replies.

That’s it. I rewatched the clip a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed something more subtle. Even casual fans know that Star Trek is famous for its progressive themes and messages, but this clip didn’t even have that. It’s literally just three characters talking about spacial anomalies. I’ve seen nearly identical scenes dozens of times in the hundreds of Trek episodes that have been aired over the last six decades. Nor can it be said to be “beyond parody”—Trek’s reliance on “technobabble” for the sake of plot advancement has been widely parodied for decades.

Miller apparently saw something that had eluded me and issued a call to action. “Tragic,” the top White House official declared. “But it’s not too late for [Paramount] to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with [William Shatner] and give him total creative control.” He did not elaborate on any further steps, as if the rest of them were simply too self-evident to mention.

In another context, this might be an amusing post. Fans of Star Trek have been trying to “save” the franchise for the last 60 years. Past generations of fans bemoaned Star Trek: The Next Generation when it first aired; it turned out to be a massive success and is now widely considered to be one of the best television series of all time. I have personally enjoyed parts of the streaming-era Trek shows and disliked (sometimes strongly) other creative decisions. That’s fine. It’s a big universe, and it can’t make everyone happy.

But Miller’s is no normal fan complaint. Miller’s “reconciliation” comment suggests that Shatner is somehow on the outs with Paramount or the broader Star Trek community. It’s true that Shatner has not appeared in any Star Trek productions since his character was killed off in the 1994 film Star Trek Generations, which unsubtly passed the film saga’s torch to the Next Generation crew. (Kirk’s death, which involves him dying on a random planet to help save a civilization that isn’t even shown on-screen, was panned by fans and Shatner himself.) But there is no rift between him and the broader Trek community.

Giving Shatner “creative control” over Star Trek is also a bizarre suggestion for “saving” Star Trek. For one thing, the actor is 94 years old. He appears to be active and in fairly good health, but that is quite an age to ask someone to run a production company’s most famous franchise for the foreseeable future.

Miller’s premise appears to be that Shatner will save Trek from “wokeness.” Consider me skeptical. Shatner, unlike some of his former crewmates, is not very politically outspoken. Part of the reason may be that he is Canadian and lives in the U.S. as a permanent resident. That said, when Trump suggested last year that he wanted Canada to join the United States as a fifty-first state, Shatner publicly rejected the notion by suggesting that the U.S. become Canada’s eleventh province.

This is also the same William Shatner who famously took part in the first interracial kiss in U.S. television history, during Star Trek’s original run in the 1960s—a milestone that is unremarkable today but was momentous in the civil rights era. Shatner later said in interviews that he pushed for the kiss to be filmed and included, overcoming resistance from network executives who feared a revolt by Southern stations and affiliates. (In her biography, Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols wrote that she and Shatner conspired to flub their lines in the alternative cuts of the scene in which they did not kiss that the show’s producers requested, in order to ensure their preferred take was aired.)

We also need not speculate what Shatner would do if he had control over the entire Star Trek franchise. He co-wrote and directed one of the Star Trek feature films in the 1980s. In his original draft for what would become Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Kirk and the Enterprise crew would square off with a televangelist of sorts, modeled after the kind who flourished in Reagan-era America, whose version of God turns out to be Satan. (Substantial rewrites left little of his original vision in the final product.) This was not exactly a MAGA-friendly storyline.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Shatner translated his frustration over his character’s fate into a series of non-canonical Star Trek novels exploring Kirk’s post-Generations resurrection. Fans have (somewhat affectionately) dubbed them the Shatnerverse. In the books, Kirk is brought back to life by the Borg and saved by the Next Generation–era crew. He then marries a half-Klingon, half-Romulan woman—something that the anti-woke folks would hardly tolerate today—and fights his counterpart in the Mirror Universe, who happens to be the cruel, arbitrary emperor of a fascist version of the Federation.

This is characteristic of Stephen Miller’s overall approach to governance, driven by fear and disdain. He sees something that he doesn’t like, comes up with a knee-jerk response to it that makes things worse, and moves on. The White House saw reports of fraud by immigrants in Minnesota, some of which were pushed by misinformed right-wing influencers, and sent thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents to roam Minneapolis and terrorize its residents with random, arbitrary arrests.

What is really reprehensible here isn’t that Stephen Miller doesn’t know ball—or whatever the Trek equivalent of that would be—but the utterly mundane nature of the clip in question. The “wokeness” isn’t anything from Star Trek that might obviously touch a right-wing nerve today. It’s not a scene from the 1992 episode where one of the main characters, who is typically depicted as a ladies’ man, falls in love with what would now be described as a nonbinary character. Nor is it a clip involving the Deep Space Nine character whose experiences with changing genders have resonated among transgender viewers.

It’s just three women talking. That’s all. That’s what they consider “wokeness” and “beyond parody.” If they said this at a Star Trek convention, they would be mocked and jeered for how pathetic they sound. What we have instead is a top White House official publicly urging a company whose owners have close ties to the president to scrap a television show with women and minorities in the case, so that a 94-year-old white man—one who probably isn’t even interested in the job—can take over. They cannot conceive of a world that does not cater to their every whim, and they will burn ours down to slake their own insecurities.

Trump’s Newest Voters Are Abandoning Ship - 2026-01-17T11:00:00Z

A year ago, Donald Trump was riding high. The man who had lost the presidency four years earlier, then led a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was now about to be inaugurated again after improbably winning a nonconsecutive second term. Almost everyone seemed to agree something seismic had just occurred. Trump was no longer just the leader of a powerful movement. He had “remade the electorate,” as CNN’s Harry Enten said in February: Republicans were surging not only with men—particularly those without college degrees—but also with young people and Latinos.

Armed with a supposed mandate from voters, Trump and his allies began the year with a wave of destruction—of immigrant communities, the federal government, foreign aid, and more. Democrats, cowed by the election results and terrified by the administration’s blitzkrieg, largely kept their heads down and wrung their hands over how to rehabilitate their tarnished brand.

What a difference a year makes. Today, that widely accepted consensus about the 2024 election seems absurd. Trump hadn’t reshaped the electorate at all—he had simply won another toss-up election. Yes, he narrowly won the popular vote this time, but by a margin—in both popular and Electoral College terms—that was not historically impressive. And now, those new voters he brought in have already abandoned him. A Friday CNN poll found that he is 29 points underwater with independents and 30 points down with both Latinos and young voters. Trump’s new coalition is already in tatters—and there is no sign that these voters will be coming back to the president or his party anytime soon.

There was, of course, another explanation for Trump’s shocking return to power, and it had little to do with him or his movement. Joe Biden’s presidency was quickly deflated by stubbornly high inflation. He and his party bore little responsibility for the problem, which largely stemmed from post-pandemic supply shocks, but to the public that hardly mattered. And there was the problem of Biden’s advanced age, which his team tried to deal with by hiding him from the public. By the time he bowed to pressure and ended his reelection campaign, it was too late: With no time for a competitive primary, the only plausible Democratic candidate was Kamala Harris, his vice president, who of course was synonymous with an administration many blamed for high prices.

Trump’s success with low-propensity voters played a decisive role in his victory, but those are the precise voters who are currently fleeing the sinking ship. Fifty-eight percent of the electorate already sees his second term as a failure. He receives failing marks from a majority of voters in every policy area, including the two—the economy and immigration—that played the most decisive role in his 2024 victory. A clear majority of voters see his presidency as one that has failed in its core objectives and that has overstretched its power. It’s a message that largely aligns with the one many Democrats, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have been pushing: that Trump’s fascistic immigration policies are coming at the expense of their overall well-being.

Only three in 10 voters view the economy favorably—a number roughly similar to what it was two years ago. High on their own supply after winning back the White House, Republicans quickly forgot that they actually just got lucky. Voters were so frustrated about inflation and stubbornly high prices that they were willing to give Trump another shot; most of them, it seems, would have voted for anyone who wasn’t a Democrat. But Trump and his allies immediately turned to other priorities: ramping up a fascistic deportation regime, gutting the federal workforce, and launching an imperialistic wave of military bombings and interventions.

Trump, of course, simply chooses to ignore information that challenges his worldview. One of the biggest differences between his second term and his first is that he is surrounded by people at every level of his administration who have adopted a similar mindset. They are still behaving as if they have a mandate to reshape the nation, even though their support has rapidly collapsed. There is nothing that can restrain an administration like this, at least for now. But polls like this suggest a reckoning is coming, and soon. Trump is remaking the electorate again—by pushing voters into the arms of Democrats.

Virginia Democrats Pass Major Amendment Amid GOP Gerrymandering Wars - 2026-01-16T20:53:02Z

Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature just got one step closer to victory in the battle against Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme.

The commonwealth’s Senate passed an amendment Friday that would allow the state to redraw its congressional map before the upcoming midterm elections, potentially netting Democrats, who already control six of the state’s 11 districts, an additional three or four seats.

The measure, which will amend Virginia’s Constitution to allow lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map if another state does the same outside of the typical decennial cycle, can now be slated to appear on a special election ballot sometime before April 16. If voters pass the amendment, that gives Democrats a major step up come November.

Earlier this month, Trump told Republican lawmakers that he needed the party to maintain control of the House and Senate in order to avoid being impeached.

Unfortunately for him, this seems increasingly unavoidable, as in a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party pretty consistently loses ground. Those basic odds, coupled with Trump’s dismal approval rating and Democratic candidates’ growing momentum is a particularly bad sign for the president, who has started babbling about potentially cancelling the midterm elections altogether.

So far, five red states have redrawn their congressional maps at the behest of Trump in order to hand a potential nine seats to the Republican Party: Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah. California also revamped its district lines to hand five seats back to the Democrats.

Judge Accuses Trump, Rubio, and Noem of “Unconstitutional Conspiracy” - 2026-01-16T20:18:56Z

A Reagan-appointed federal judge says the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian activists is an “unconstitutional conspiracy.”

U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, criticized Trump’s draconian crackdown on people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, whose only crimes were being vocal supporters of Palestine, while announcing his plans to issue an order to prevent those kinds of targeted deportations from happening again.

“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government—Cabinet secretaries—conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States,” Young said, alluding to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”

Young even compared the administration’s larger deportation policy to people catching and returning enslaved African Americans under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

“I’ve asked myself why—how did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to infringe the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? And I’ve come to believe that there’s a concept of freedom here that I don’t understand,” he said at the same hearing. “The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the president of the United States, have a fearful view of freedom.”

Young plans on releasing a formal ruling sometime next week.

“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,’” he said. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”

Americans Say Trump Is Failing on Nearly Everything, Brutal Poll Shows - 2026-01-16T19:32:15Z

A majority of Americans said that President Donald Trump’s first year back in office was a failure, according to a humiliating CNN poll published Friday. No kidding.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans called Trump’s first year a failure, according to the poll, which showed Americans had found a new floor for the president’s dismal economic performance.

One year of Trump’s so-called “Golden Era” for America has landed him the worst approval rating on the economy in his entire presidential career. Just 39 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 61 percent disapproved, landing him a net rating of -21 in the latest poll. In Trump’s first term, his worst net rating was -5 in 2017, with a 44–49 split.

A 55 percent majority said that Trump had worsened economic conditions, while just 32 percent said they’ve improved. And a whopping 64 percent of respondents said that Trump hadn’t done enough to lower the price of groceries. (Despite Trump’s lifeless promises to lower the price of groceries, healthy whole foods still remain out of reach for average Americans.)

The new year has only brought about more pessimism regarding the economy. Just over 4 in 10 respondents said that they expect the economy to improve a year from now, down from 56 percent from last January.

As economic anxieties have blossomed, more and more people have begun to believe that Trump has lost touch with the average American. Only thirty-six percent of respondents said he has the right priorities, down from 45 percent at the beginning of his term. And in a new all-time low for Trump, only one-third of respondents said they believed the president actually cared about them, down from 40 percent last March.

Again, is anyone actually surprised? As the president throws lavish parties, Americans struggle against the weakening job market, soaring prices, and steadily increasing inflation—and our cities fall into chaos at the hands of masked federal agents. But no, the president should really have a new ballroom.

Looking back on the many promises he made during his inaugural address, most respondents felt that he’d not made any progress toward actually achieving them.

Notably, the promise that the most respondents thought Trump had made progress on was “restoring safety to the United States.” But only 35 percent felt that way, while 38 percent thought he’d made things worse. And that was his best result. Thirty-five percent.

Meanwhile, the promise the most respondents felt he’d failed at was “being a peacemaker and unifier.” Just 25 percent of respondents said they felt he’d made progress on being a peacemaker, while 47 percent said he’d made things worse. This comes after Trump has launched a campaign of extrajudicial military strikes on boats the government claims—but won’t prove—are smuggling drugs, threatened multiple countries with military intervention (including our own allies), and weakened diplomatic ties with his ridiculous approach to foreign policy.

Trump’s Own Advisers Suddenly Unnerved as ICE Raids Take Horrific Turn - 2026-01-16T19:18:35Z

In a startling development, some of President Trump’s advisers have suddenly realized that unleashing heavily armed government militias on American cities to terrorize American citizens with abandon just might be a tad unpopular with Americans.

Yep, it’s true. Axios reports that Trump’s team recently viewed private polling that shows “support for his immigration policies falling,” raising concerns about Trump’s “confrontational enforcement tactics.” Some advisers are talking about “recalibrating” that approach.

Which means it’s apparently necessary to state the following point: No recalibrated or sanitized version of the assault that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now, most prominently Minneapolis, is available to them or anyone else. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror: The policy is the terror, and the terror is the policy.

Note how Axios describes these internal deliberations. Trump apparently has misgivings about the “optics” of ICE tactics. One adviser says this:

“I wouldn’t say he’s concerned about the policy,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”

“There’s the right way to do this,” that adviser added. “And this doesn’t look like the right way to a lot of people.”

But is there any “right way” to carry out these policies within this adviser’s intended meaning of the phrase? The idea seems to be that one could achieve the full scale of mass deportations that Trump and Miller want, albeit in a way that would achieve wide public support. And there are huge problems with this notion.

For one thing, the core idea of removing this many undocumented immigrants—and the classes of them now getting deported—is itself deeply unpopular, even as an abstract goal. The Marquette Law School poll precisely gauges this by asking if respondents favor the deportation of people who have jobs, no criminal record, and who have lived here for some time. In November, it found that 56 percent of Americans oppose this. Trump’s nosediving overall approval on immigration—an Associated Press poll has him down to 38–61—almost certainly reflects this.

The dream of sanitized, popular mass deportations seems to rest on the idea that they can be carried out without mass societal disruptions—not to mention without the shocking imagery of roving paramilitary thugs tear-gassing, beating, and killing people. Accomplish this, and mass removals would no longer be unpopular even in the abstract.

But this doesn’t work, either. Miller’s articulated goal is to remove 3,000 people a day, or one million per year. Recall that last spring, Trump admitted that mass deportations are depriving farmers of good workers and sought to exempt them from removal. Miller privately opposed this plan, and it quietly died.

In other words, Miller’s agenda is that removing the “right” number of people—3,000 per day—must be done regardless of the societal disruptions it unleashes. The fact that mass deportations are causing such turmoil is inescapably embedded in the deeper priorities here—in the privileging of high removal numbers over all else; in the privileging of Miller’s ethnic reengineering project over the economy and even over public safety.

In short: If you drop the goal of high numbers, you’re dropping mass deportations. And that won’t happen. As it is, Miller is well short of that quota, and he’s scaling up ICE recruitment to hit his targets. So the societal disruptions will only get worse—of necessity.

Meanwhile, a ProPublica investigation finds more than 40 examples of immigration agents using banned choke holds and other horrifyingly violent tactics. And more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained. Inescapably, all this is the direct outgrowth of flogging agents to meet high arrest quotas, which drives them deep into communities to root out longtime residents. Here again, the disruptions are baked into the broader ideological project itself; those disruptions will also get worse as ICE metastasizes.

Finally, the Trump-Miller agenda cannot be cleanly hived off from the rampant paramilitary thuggery we’re seeing. The terror is an essential piece of Miller’s project. Most obviously, it’s meant to encourage mass self-deportations. But it’s intended to send a message to countless Americans too.

You can see this in Miller’s constant use of phrases like “outside agitators” and “insurrectionists” to describe the everyday Americans turning out to protest against ICE raids in Minnesota. The fuzziness of this language is deliberate: The whole point is to send a warning, not just to people who are doing something illegal but also to ordinary people who are showing solidarity with the immigrant victims of Trump-Miller stormtrooper raids.

“ICE is a terror agency masquerading as an immigration enforcement agency,” Will Stancil, a Minneapolis resident who’s been observing protests up close, told Liberal Currents editor Samantha Hancox-Li. Those who think that’s hyperbole should ask themselves this: Is there any denying that federal immigration enforcement has in a very real sense been repurposed toward some sort of larger ideological goal that harbors violence and sadism at its core?

The other day, the Department of Homeland Security’s official social media feed featured this:

Who are those 100 million people, exactly? Given the estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants in this country, one can only assume that group includes the millions and millions of people who are related to them, support their presence here, or perhaps even protest on their behalf. This isn’t a statement of government policy, but it is a statement that the government’s enforcement apparatus regards many of us as vaguely suspect and subject to expulsion if the ideal political conditions arise.

As Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times writes, the unleashing of agents to “brutalize ordinary citizens” is inseparable from the treatment of “half the country as conquered territory.” Ask yourself this too: After the horrific shooting of Renee Good, why have so few, if any, administration officials bothered to publicly reassure the country that they are taking meaningful steps to ensure that such killings don’t happen again? They could have done this while simultaneously (if wrongly) defending the officer. Why didn’t they?

All this violence, disruption, and terror is intrinsic to Trump-Miller’s ideological aims. It’s a feature, not a bug. It will continue until all of us, the agitators and the insurrectionists, put an end to the entire project, once and for all.

Trump Snubs Machado After Explaining Why He Took Her Nobel Prize - 2026-01-16T19:01:25Z

It seems that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s ultimate show of fealty to President Trump will get her nothing.

Machado met with Trump on Thursday and brought along her Nobel Peace Prize, offering it to the president. It was clearly a last-ditch attempt to earn a larger role in any upcoming regime change effort in the wake of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping. But Trump couldn’t care less.

“You just called Machado a ‘very nice person,’” reporters asked Trump Friday afternoon. “Why align yourself with [interim President] Delcy Rodríguez and the remnants of the Maduro regime, not with Machado, who has the support of the Venezuelan people?”

“Well, if you ever remember a place called Iraq, where everybody was fired, every single person. The police, the generals, everybody was fired,” Trump said. “And they ended up being ISIS. Instead of just getting down to business, they ended up being ISIS.... But I’ll tell you I had a great meeting yesterday by a person who I have a lot of respect for … and she gave me her Nobel Prize.”

When asked why he would want someone else’s Nobel Prize, Trump replied, “Well, she offered it to me.”

Trump Still Only Has “Concepts of a Plan” for Health Care Reform - 2026-01-16T18:15:50Z

Barely two weeks into the new year, Americans are really feeling the crunch.

The enhanced subsidies that made the Affordable Care Act more affordable for 22 million Americans last year expired at year’s end. Initial Obamacare enrollment has already dropped by 1.4 million people, and that number may be bleaker now that the final enrollment period has ended in most states. People trying to maintain their insurance coverage face significantly higher premiums, and that even includes those with employer-provided insurance.

What are the Republicans, who fully control Washington, doing about this crisis? Most of them are doing nothing at all—because they don’t consider it a crisis. Just 17 GOP members of the House of Representatives joined Democrats last week in passing a three-year extension of the enhanced subsidies, and negotiations on the bill have stalled in the Senate. And on Thursday, President Donald Trump pretended to take action by unveiling “The Great Healthcare Plan.”

It is not “great,” to say the least; even calling it a “plan” is generous. It’s more like “concepts of a plan,” as Trump famously said when asked during a September presidential debate whether he had a plan for replacing Obamacare. “We have been trying to analyze the Trump health ‘plan’ but I worry that unless Congress puts something real together we are analyzing air,” Drew Altman, president and CEO of the health news and research nonprofit KFF, said on Bluesky. There are few details in the GHP, and it’s missing a rather important one: Trump doesn’t call on Congress to extend the enhanced subsidies. The ideas it does contain likely wouldn’t do anything to help people who are struggling with rising costs right now.

First, Trump wants pharmaceutical companies to charge government insurance plans the cheapest prices they charge other countries for prescription drugs. Trump struck deals with Big Pharma last year to lower the prices of some drugs for some Medicare and Medicaid patients, but he’s now calling for “codifying” those deals. But this would only impact a small portion of Americans’ medical care costs—and it’s worth noting that last year’s deals didn’t stop prescription drug prices from going up, on average.

As an alternative to the enhanced subsidies, which lowered the cost of monthly premiums for eligible ACA enrollees, Trump wants Congress to fund health spending accounts that people can use to buy health insurance. “The government is going to pay the money directly to you. It goes to you, and then you take the money and buy your own health care,” he said in his video announcement, sounding a bit like a Home Shopping Network salesman. It’s not clear, of course, how generous the funds would be for those accounts, or who would qualify.

Trump also wants insurance companies and providers to be more transparent about the costs of services. In theory, that’s fine. Hospitals and doctors’ offices charge different prices to different insurance companies, and often charge still different prices for uninsured patients paying on their own; the same procedure can cost wildly different amounts even in the same hospital, depending on who’s paying. It’s a confusing system that both hospitals and insurance companies employ hundreds of workers to negotiate and navigate. But publishing what providers charge insurance companies is just as likely to drive costs up as down because insurers, being motivated by profits, are always trying to negotiate the highest rates possible. If an insurer sees that another insurer is getting paid more for a particular procedure, then it will demand that rate as well (and if negotiations go sour, patients could find themselves locked out of their preferred health care provider).  

The idea of posting prices is also based on a false hope: that patients will shop for the cheapest care, driving costs down. But that’s not how medicine works. People choose their doctors based on factors like convenience, trust, and quality, not just price. They form relationships with their doctors; the longer the relationship, the better the doctor understands their patient’s medical history. So patients are often reluctant to switch, even if it lowers their costs. (Some people might be weirded out by the lowest prices: They want the best health care for themselves, not bargain-basement care.)

Factors besides price and quality shape costs for bigger players in the industry too. Research shows that even nonprofit hospitals often reward their CEOs for company growth and increased earnings more than the quality of the care they provide. Even savvy negotiators, like the CEOs of major companies buying large plans to cover their workforce, haven’t been able to keep prices for plans from rising: The costs of employer-provided plans have tripled since 1999.

None of Trump’s ideas, however vague, address these basic problems. And none of them will help people afford insurance today, as simply extending the enhanced subsidies would. In fact, introducing this health care “plan” now has added more confusion than anything else. This is not how the government is supposed to work. The president himself shouldn’t be playing lead dealmaker with the entire health care sector, and doing so only nibbles around the edges of the fundamental problem. Health care is obscenely expensive, and only wholesale change to the system will fix it. But that will require action from Congress, which can’t even agree on something as simple, and obviously beneficial, as the enhanced ACA subsidies.

Republicans Say Trump’s Greenland Plan Is “Dumbest Thing” Ever - 2026-01-16T17:07:19Z

At least six high-profile congressional Republicans have voiced their staunch opposition to President Trump’s desire to take over Greenland.

“I’ll be candid with you: There’s so many Republicans mad about this,” Nebraska Representative Don Bacon told the Omaha-World Herald. “If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: The off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”

It’s the “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Bacon later told Politico.

“If there was any sort of action that looked like the goal was actually landing in Greenland and doing an illegal taking … there’d be sufficient numbers here to pass a war powers resolution and withstand a veto,” Senator Thom Tillis threatened.

Senator Lisa Murkowski argued that Greenland “needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset,” and even Senator Mitch McConnell stated that any incursion on Greenland would be “an unprecedented act of strategic self-harm” that risks “incinerating” NATO diplomacy.

Even so, the Trump administration still seems to be committed to seizing Greenland. On Friday, the president threatened countries who oppose his Greenland takeover with tariffs.

Fox Airs Shockingly Deceptive Edit on Minneapolis Amid ICE Takeover - 2026-01-16T16:57:10Z

Fox News host Laura Ingraham used a deceitfully edited clip of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in order to push the lie that he wants the police to take up arms against ICE officers.

Speaking about Frey’s press conference following yet another shooting involving a federal officer, Ingraham claimed Thursday that the mayor had urged people to “fight ICE” agents, when he actually said the exact opposite.

“Jacob Frey told the insurgents not to take the bait in responding to ICE. In another breath, he said this—” she said, leading into a short clip of the mayor’s remarks to the press.

“We have residents that are asking the very limited number of police officers that we have to fight ICE agents on the street, to stand by their neighbors,” Frey said in the clip, which was bannered with the caption: “The Left Wants More Violence.”

“Frey says, ‘Fight ICE,’” Ingraham concluded. “Urging police to fight ICE agents. Again, this is insanity, but not if this is what you want,” she continued, laughing incredulously.

Ingraham is right about one thing: It is insane. But that’s probably because it didn’t actually happen—the clip of Frey was taken out of context as he described how bad things had gotten in his city.

“This is an impossible situation that our city is presently being put in. And at the same time we are trying to find a way forward, to keep people safe, to protect our neighbors, to maintain order. And we’re in a position right now where we have residents that are asking the very limited number of police officers that we have to fight ICE agents on the street, to stand by their neighbors,” he said. “We cannot be at a place right now in America where we have two governmental entities that are literally fighting one another.”

He described the conduct he’d seen from federal immigration officers as “disgusting” and “intolerable,” and accused them of “causing chaos” in Minneapolis. But then he said this: “For anyone that is taking the bait tonight, stop. That is not helpful. Go home. We cannot counter Donald Trump’s chaos with our own brand of chaos.”

“For those that are taking the bait, you are not helping,” he added. “And you are not helping the undocumented immigrants in our city. You are not helping the people that call this place home.”

Clearly Ingraham would rather back up the Trump administration’s false and misleading claims about the leaders in Minneapolis, while federal agents there continue to escalate tensions. Ingraham’s blatantly dishonest reporting is insanity, but not if more terror is what you want.

ICE Attacks Car Full of Kids, Leaving 6-Month-Old Baby Unconscious - 2026-01-16T15:36:50Z

A 6-month-old baby was hospitalized after federal law enforcement agents in Minneapolis struck a car full of children with a flash bang, before flooding it with tear gas.

Parents Shawn and Destiny Jackson told Kare11 that they were driving their six children home from a basketball game Wednesday when a protest stopped them in their tracks.

At least 200 protesters had begun to gather after a federal agent shot and injured a Venezuelan immigrant fleeing from a traffic stop Wednesday. Federal immigration officers appeared to use flash bangs, tear gas, and pepper balls in order to disperse the crowd.

Destiny told Kare11 that she watched a law enforcement officer throw a flash bang under her car, and it detonated. “Literally, all we heard was boom, and our car went up and we came down, and every air bag deployed out of the car,” she said.

As the parents urged their children to get out of the trapped vehicle, tear gas began to seep into the car. Destiny recalled her eldest telling his mom, “I can’t, Mom, and I can’t breathe.”

“Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car.… My 6-month-old can’t even breathe. This was flipped over,” Shawn told Fox9, referring to his child’s car seat. “My car filled with tear gas, I’m trying to pull my kids from the car.”

As bystanders rushed the children to the safety of a nearby house, they had to go back for the 6-month old who had stopped breathing. “He was the last person to come in, he was just like, lifeless, like, he had like, foam, like, around his mouth, and you can, he had tears coming out of his eyes,” Destiny told Kare11.

Destiny said she performed CPR on the child while others called emergency services, who arrived shortly after. “While we were in the ambulance, they were still throwing those bombs,” Destiny told Kare11. “And I remember the ambulance people were just telling my kids, like, ‘It’s OK, you’re safe in here.’”

While the Jacksons were OK physically, the terrifying experience has left its mark on her children. “My 11-year-old, who is autistic, keeps talking about it,” Destiny told Kare11. “He was talking about it all night. I couldn’t sleep because I was scared.”

The Trump administration has been actively provoking unrest in Minnesota, deploying an additional 1,000 federal immigration officers after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three. After the protest Wednesday, President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the U.S. military to Minnesota—a move sure to escalate tensions, not assuage them.

Although the Jacksons have never attended a protest, Destiny said she was now inspired to join the demonstrations. “My kids were innocent, I was innocent, my husband was innocent, this shouldn’t have happened,” she told Fox9. “We were just trying to go home.

We’re Nearing the Day When ICE Thugs Just Open Fire on Crowds - 2026-01-16T15:25:19Z

Next up for the very fine people of Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Maine. President Donald Trump, in his speech in Detroit Wednesday, signaled that the Pine Tree State was in his sights. Why? Well, no doubt partly because he’s never won the state in three tries (although he has carried the rural 2nd district each time, and Maine is one of two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district). But mainly because Maine has something notable in common with Minnesota. Can you guess? Yep: a sizeable Somali population.

“They’re scammers,” Trump said, just putting the plain old racism out there for all to see. “They always will be, and we’re getting them out. In Maine, it’s really crooked as hell, too.” In response, Democratic Governor (and Senate candidate) Janet Mills released a video in which she made her position plain: “To the federal government, I say this: If your plan is to come here to be provocative and to undermine the civil rights of Maine residents, do not be confused. Those tactics are not welcome here.” The key word there, of course, is “residents” (as opposed to “citizens”).

The several thousand Somalis who have settled in Maine since the 1990s are based chiefly in Portland and Lewiston. They’ve been on alert since at least mid-December, when Trump referred to Somalis as “garbage.” Hundreds of Mainers gathered at a December 15 rally in Lewiston to support the Somali population—who were notably absent from the rally because, in the words of one Somali resident, “people were afraid of, ‘OK, what if somebody shoots us, or something happens?’”

As Americans, our minds are trained by involuntary habit to assume, when we see excess and violence, that the government will step in and bring order. Things get a little crazy at a protest, the cops break it up. Yes, there have been times when it’s the cops themselves who incite violence, like in Chicago in 1968. But when that has happened, the state has usually seemed at least a little sorry afterward.

Certainly, there were and always are reactionary forces working to throttle such examinations, and sometimes they succeed. But at least the impulse to investigate has generally been there. Indeed, a government commission appointed after the ’68 confrontations between cops and protesters during that year’s Democratic convention had a staff of 200 conducting thousands of interviews; in its report, it actually used the phrase “police riot.” That’s how things work in the United States—there exists a shared assumption that violence of that sort is undesirable, and that when it happens, some gesture toward accountability is what a democratic society requires.

Well, there existed such assumptions. All that’s out the window now. Now the federal government is the unapologetic bringer of violence. And it’s further important to understand: No amount of criticism, no amount of forensic or video evidence, no poll expressing mass public disapproval will change this. In fact, precisely the opposite. Any and all criticism will just be taken by Trump and MAGA world as further proof that they are right. Evidence will be dismissed and countered with fake “evidence,” like the video Vice President JD Vance trumpeted that purported to show that Renee Nicole Good had it coming. Bad-news polls will be dismissed as fake. The Trumpian state will dig in its heels. The only question Stephen Miller will ask himself will be: How can we turn up the heat?

This is what makes what’s happening in this country today different. The state is the perp. The government is beyond the law. The United States is now closer to Bashar Al Assad’s Syria, or perhaps even today’s Iran, than to anything we recognize as fitting within the understood norms of American history. That’s a pretty big statement, I realize, but it is not an exaggeration.

True—the Trump administration isn’t killing people by the thousands. It isn’t dropping those hideous barrel bombs on its own people. But mentally, psychologically, we as a country are edging in that direction. Until Minneapolis, I would have told you that as bad as Trump is, he’s not capable of ordering ICE agents to shoot people (citizens or not) at random, and that as bad as ICE is, they’d refuse such orders. Now I no longer believe either of those things. This man and his government are clearly capable of mass violence against immigrants and all who support them. It seems only a matter of time now before some of these thuggish ICE agents, under orders from the thug president, shoot some people down.

Remember, ICE is still on a hiring spree. And it’s not simply that ICE is recruiting—it’s how they’re doing it, and what kind of recruits they’re targeting. Earlier this week, The Intercept reported that just two days after Jonathan Ross executed Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruiting effort on Instagram using the phrase “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” The background music in the post was a song of the same name by a group called Pine Tree Riots. The song’s lyrics, the story reported, have been cited by extremists and neo-Nazis in the past. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Pine Tree Riots “is a little-known a cappella group affiliated with the Mannerbund, which the [SPLC] has previously listed as a white nationalist group.”

The Pine Tree Riot was an uprising by some New Hampshire colonists against the British in 1772. The Pine Tree Flag has recently been linked to Christian nationalism, and at least one was carried by January 6 insurrectionists. And more recently—just so you know how deeply MAGA marinates in this stuff—an official at the Department of Education had one set up outside his office. It’s also the same flag that was spotted outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s vacation home a few years ago. And now, ICE is using if not the flag itself then the same far-right sentiment it evokes to recruit people to whom it is, after the most minimal training possible, handing masks and Glock 19s.

And Trump himself? Soon, in Minnesota or somewhere, he will invoke the Insurrection Act against the will of local elected officials and send in the military. It’s hard to say where that will lead. But no place good. Again—all evidence that it isn’t working will be rejected as fake, and Americans who disapprove will be dismissed as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase that allegedly describes people like you and me.

We’re the sane ones. The only Trump Derangement Syndrome is that of Trump himself, and his supporters, and it is destroying the country we thought we knew. 

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

New Evidence Reveals Renee Good Was Still Alive When ICE Blocked Medic - 2026-01-16T15:08:05Z

Renee Good was still alive when ICE agents were blocking a physician from tending to her.

New records from emergency responders obtained by The New York Times show that Good was not breathing but had an irregular pulse when local medics arrived at the scene, and had no pulse by the time they removed her from her car. This comes after an initial video captured by bystanders showed ICE agents screaming at a medic who offered help as Good lay dying in her car.

“Can I go check a pulse?” a man said after Good was shot, his hands in the air.

“No! Back up!” an ICE agent told him.

“I’m a physician!”

“I don’t care!” the agent replied, before another came up and said they had their own EMS on the way. They arrived and performed CPR on Good—who had two gunshots in her chest and one on her arm—before taking her to the hospital, where she later died.

While it’s unclear if those extra seconds would have helped, it’s abundantly clear that Good shouldn’t have been shot and killed in the first place.

Machado Leaves With Petty Gift After Giving Trump Her Nobel Prize - 2026-01-16T14:24:12Z

It looks like Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado traded her Nobel Peace Prize for a bag of Donald Trump merch.

Machado was spotted walking out of the White House Thursday with a large red paper bag with Trump’s signature scrawled across it.

X screenshot Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids It gets even more embarrassing for Machado….she went to the White House to give Trump her medal and left with a Trump merch bag 🤣

This isn’t the first time Trump has touted his dictator merchandise to foreign dignitaries, who are forced to exit the White House through a humiliating gift shop filled with hats adorned with slogans like “Four More Years,” “Gulf of America,” and “Trump Was Right About Everything,” among several others.

Machado told reporters Thursday that she “presented” her medal to Trump during their meeting, though she had already dedicated her prize to the U.S. president when she won last year. The Nobel Committee clarified over the weekend that just because someone gives someone else their prize, that does not transfer the title of Nobel laureate.

Man’s Death in ICE Custody Set to Be Ruled a Homicide - 2026-01-16T14:09:36Z

It appears that ICE choked a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant to death in a Texas detention facility.

A medical examiner told Geraldo Lunas Campos’s family that, unless a toxicology report comes back with something, he will likely rule his death a homicide, according to a recording reviewed by The Washington Post. But the Department of Homeland Security claims that Lunas Campos died taking his own life.

“Campos violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life.... During the ensuing struggle, Campos stopped breathing and lost consciousness,” a DHS spokesperson said, using very passive language. “Medical staff was immediately called and responded. After repeated attempts to resuscitate him, EMTs declared him deceased on the scene.”

Witnesses told the Post a very different story.

Fellow detainee Santos Jesus Flores watched at least five guards struggle with Lunas Campos after he refused to enter his unit, complaining that he was without his required medications. Flores then said he watched guards choking Lunas Campos while he said, “No puedo respirar” over and over, Spanish for “I can’t breathe.” Medics tried to resuscitate him for an hour before removing his body.

“He said, ‘I cannot breathe, I cannot breathe.’ After that, we don’t hear his voice anymore and that’s it,” Flores said.

If what Flores says is true, then McLaughlin’s previous explanation—that Campos just somehow “stopped breathing and lost consciousness”—is damn near malpractice. It’s unclear whether anyone will face any kind of repercussions for killing this man, given ICE agents’ total lack of accountability. An estimated 280 people have died in ICE custody since 2004, and four have died already this year. A just society would not allow this killing to go untried. But based on these killings—from Campos to Keith Porter Jr. to Renee Good—we’re far from that ever being a reality.

“I know it’s a homicide,” said Jeanette Pagan Lopez, the mother of two of Campos’s three children. “The people that physically harmed him should be held accountable.”

Transcript: Trump Press Sec Snaps at Media as Polls on ICE Turns Dire - 2026-01-16T11:09:05Z

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

At a press briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly lost her temper with reporters. It’s no accident that what triggered Leavitt were perfectly legitimate questions about ICE’s extraordinary abuses of late. Tellingly, White House officials aren’t even trying to reassure anyone that they recognize that things are less than perfect. This comes as a new report suggests ICE is violating its own protocols pretty seriously and as polling is diving again for Trump on immigration.

Which all raises a question. Where does Trumpworld see all this going? With ICE recruitment set to explode, do they see ICE waging an ever-growing Forever War against Americans? Today we’re talking about the long view with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which has a great new report on Trump’s ballooning migrant detention system. Aaron, good to have you on, man.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Thanks for having me back.

Sargent: Let’s just start with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. A reporter notes here that Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem had previously said that ICE is doing everything correctly. Then he asks Leavitt to square ICE’s record with that. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year. One hundred and seventy U.S. citizens were detained by ICE, and Renee Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent. How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?

Reporter (voiceover): Are you asking me my opinion? Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.

Leavitt (voiceover): Oh, okay. So you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.

Reporter (voiceover): What do you want me to do?

Leavitt (voiceover): Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You’re posing in this room as a journalist. And it’s so clear by the premise of your question. And you and the people in the media who have such biases but fake, like you’re a journalist, you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat. But you’re pretending like you’re a journalist, but you’re a left-wing activist. And the question that you just raised and your answer proves your bias. You should be reporting on the facts. You should be reporting on the cases. Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens who ICE is trying to remove from this country?


Sargent: So I believe that reporter is Niall Stanage, who’s not a liberal flamethrower by any stretch. Aaron, what’s your reaction to all that?

Reichlin-Melnick: Well, I think his question really goes to the fact that a lot of Americans have seen this video and they don’t like what they see.

And in fact, polling so far suggests that a majority of Americans think that the shooting was not justified. And it’s really crucially important to understand, of course, that there is a difference between legally justified within the very narrow line of whether or not a police officer used their force lawfully and the sort of more basic question of should the officer have shot Ms. Good rather than simply stepping aside.

And so that is why the American public are asking this question and trying to figure out whether there’s going to be any accountability at all.

Sargent: Right, and Leavitt is just really frustrated because these questions aren’t going away. I want to bear down on one point about this exchange, though. Note that the reporter asked about the following things: deaths in ICE custody, arrests of U.S. citizens, and the killing of this woman by an officer whose life was not remotely in danger.

Now, as you say, everybody’s seen the video. We all know that the killing of a woman was entirely unjustified. But the other things are real problems as well. We’re talking about deaths in ICE custody, which are soaring, and we’re talking about arrests of U.S. citizens, which are also soaring. Can it really be the White House’s position that asking about those things is illegitimate?

Reichlin-Melnick: Right, of course it’s not. And deaths in ICE custody are worse than ever. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention, driven by a massive expansion of the detention system as we tracked in our new report, as well as the shoddy standards that people were put through in brand-new detention centers being brought online. And 2026 is looking no better. It’s January 15, 2026, and already four people have died in custody this year. So that suggests 2026 is going to be the deadliest year yet.

Sargent: It sure looks that way. I want to get into the polling a bit because the public is just roundly rejecting all this stuff. We’ve got a bunch of new data. A new AP poll taken entirely after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis has disapproval of Trump on immigration up to 61 percent. Extraordinary. With 38 percent—only 38 percent—approving of his handling of immigration, his “best issue.”

A CNN poll finds that 56 percent of Americans say the shooting was an “inappropriate use of force,” and a majority, 51 percent, say ICE actions are making cities less safe, while only 31 percent, less than a third, say ICE is making cities safer. Aaron, if you listen to Stephen Miller and other administration officials, all you hear is that ICE agents are heroically facing criminals, gang members, all sorts of scourges. But nobody believes anything they’re saying. Fewer than a third in this country think this is making anyone safer. I find that extraordinary.

Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, and that’s basically what was always going to happen when you did any kind of mass deportation like this. And you actually had me on more than a year ago when we put out a big report estimating the economic and fiscal costs of mass deportation. We estimated at the time it was going to cost over $800 billion. And the other thing that we looked at is what that would actually look like on the ground. What does mass deportation look like? And it looks like militarized law enforcement invading communities, thousands of new officers fanning out across the country, doing things that no administration has ever done before.

And we predicted at the time that this was going to be unpopular, and lo and behold, the administration got $75 billion from Congress to actually start carrying out mass deportations. And it looks exactly like what we said it was going to look like, increasingly police-state tactics, because you cannot round up 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the relationship Americans have with their law enforcement.

Sargent: If you kind of look down the road, they want to deport one million people a year. They’re well short of that in 2025. Can you just quickly give us the numbers on that? How many do you think they removed in the real world in 2025? And how far are they going to get? They want to get to at least four million total. What’s your reading of it?

Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, we don’t have exact numbers, but from what we see, some very limited public data is put out by the administration on this. And from that data, it suggests about 350,000 to 360,000 people were deported by ICE last year. An unknown number of additional people were apprehended at the border and rapidly deported without ever going into ICE custody.

So excluding those, really focusing on the population of people who were arrested and detained by ICE and then deported, we’re looking about 350,000, 360,000. And in the last few months, they are on track to average about 450,000 a year.

So at that rate, if they don’t manage to increase it at all, it would still take over 30 years of this to actually deport 14 million people. But even presuming they do significantly increase those numbers, we’re still talking about years and years and years of this.

This is not something that they’re going to have done in a few weeks and then everybody can go back to normal. They’re saying, We want cities to look like this for the foreseeable future.

Sargent: Absolutely. And so basically right now they’re under half their target. And I think you told me the other day for a piece that we ran at TNR.com about Stephen Miller—you told me that you didn’t think they would be able to get to even half of the amount that they’d like to remove in Trump’s full term.

Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, I mean, if we say that they wanted to have a million deportations a year in year one, well, they’re not even halfway there. As I said, I think they were sub-400,000 in their first year. If they managed to hit 500,000 or 600,000, they might get to a million deportations total by the end of the second year. And then they still would have to then average very high numbers to get anywhere near it.

That said, when I first did this analysis over a year ago, we didn’t know what Congress was going to give them, how much money they were ultimately going to get. And they have bullied and bulldozed their way through a lot of the barriers to carrying out these deportations that we had initially thought that they would have more trouble surmounting.

And they’ve done that really by breaking the law in a lot of cases, by purging the civil service of people who could oppose them. And by doing that, they have been able to get up these deportation numbers higher than expected, but the long-term costs of that are really just starting to be felt.

Sargent: Right. And I think at the end of the day, no matter what happens, there are still going to be millions and millions and millions of undocumented immigrants in this country come 2029.

Reichlin-Melnick: That’s right. I think after four years, the idea that he will have deported everybody is a fairy tale. There will still be multiple millions of people here. And I will say, especially the people who have been here for many years already. As of 2022, nearly nine million people had been in the country for more than 15 years.

So we’re looking at a population of long-term residents, many of them married to U.S. citizens, many of them who have U.S. citizen children or U.S. citizen parents, many of them who are working jobs and have been working them for many years, who have very deep ties to the community, and while they are terrified, in many cases they’re not going to give up the United States and the lives they’ve built here because a lot of them feel that they can still survive in this.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think everybody knows at this point already that it’s just not worth the cost, and it’s really not going to be worth the cost when we just have years of civil conflict and violence and ICE killings and so forth.

I just want to get to a New York Times report on ICE protocol, which was very interesting. Instructions to agents, according to The New York Times, a document they obtained, say that in dangerous encounters they’re supposed to use “minimal force” when trying to pull people out of cars and deliver commands in “professional” tones.

Here’s a quote directly from the document: “First step in arresting an occupant of a vehicle is not to reach in and grab him unless there are specific circumstances requiring that action.” Now, I don’t know, it sure sounds to me like they’re violating these directives on a regular basis. Is that right?

Reichlin-Melnick: It certainly seems like it. And I think that thing The New York Times obtained is a sign that there are still professionals inside the agency who are trying to impose some form of discipline.

It’s very easy to say, of course, these are untrained officers, but at the start, the administration already had thousands of officers who had been on the job for a long time. They have standards and use-of-force policies. There are conscientious people inside the agency who are trying to get their officers to follow the rules.

The problem now is that you have political leadership that is essentially encouraging officers on the ground to ignore what their supervisors are telling them or what the trainers have told them to do.

Sargent: Well, I think that’s 100 percent true. You’ve got Stephen Miller out there essentially saying officers have immunity, which is a really dodgy and misleading thing of him to say because in reality they don’t have absolute immunity and that’s the implication. You guys had this great report that really sort of explained the detention system.

I want to highlight two numbers and then ask you to just talk about what you found. One of them is that we’re essentially hitting 70,000 immigrants in detention right now, which is the highest ever. And the other is that over time, with the funding that they’ve now got, they will be able to get those numbers up to 135,000. That is an immigrant carceral state, a ballooning immigrant carceral state. Can you talk about what your report found along those lines?

Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, that’s right. So when we think about the scale of ICE detention, you know, it’s important when we say 70,000 people, it’s not like the prison system where that 70,000 people is pretty static—though, of course, within prisons, there’s always some people leaving and some people going, but people generally stay in prison for a long time.

With immigration detention, the goal of the administration is to shuffle people through the system as quickly as possible, or if they do stay in there, to pressure them into giving up their case so they just choose to accept deportation. So the bigger the system is, the more people they can cycle through it with the goal of getting them to be deported, because if there’s no beds, they may have to eventually release some people and let them attend their hearings outside of detention.

So right now, Congress gave ICE $45 billion, and ICE’s annual detention budget before that was $3.4 billion. So when you take the money that they have from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and you look at it over the four years this money is in effect, because this money has to be spent by the end of fiscal year 2029—on October 1, 2029, any money they didn’t spend by then disappears. So we looked at that money and we say, how much is this actually going to fund? And if you average it out, it’s $15 billion a year. By comparison, the entire federal prison system, their budget is less than $9 billion a year. So we could be looking at an ICE detention system as large or potentially even larger than the entire federal prison system.

Sargent: That’s just incredible. And so just to return to this concept of a Forever War against Americans—that’s basically what this is becoming. Trump ran against Forever Wars, but I guess he only meant foreign ones. He wants a domestic Forever War, that’s the funny thing.

And so when you watch Karoline Leavitt in that situation, snapping at a reporter for asking legitimate questions about major ICE failings, you realize that they have no intention whatsoever of changing course. This is only going to get worse. Where do you see it going in as visceral terms and as human terms as possible? How bad is this going to get?

Reichlin-Melnick: It’s going to get bigger, it’s going to get crueler, and it’s going to get less accountable, at least for now. Right now there is very little pushback from anyone who has power. We’ve seen the GOP and Congress more interested in holding hearings into things that happened years ago. We see the Trump administration—as we chronicled in our report—actually slashed internal oversight bodies.

The DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties [was] cut 85 percent; the DHS Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, a specific office created by Congress to oversee the ICE detention system, has been slashed by 90 percent of their staff. So that means that there are fewer eyes into the detention system and fewer people inside the government who can say, Hang on, there are rules, you have to follow them, due process still matters.

That might change, though, because if the House changes hands next year, and theoretically if the Senate changes hands as well, you might get some pushback. And the example I’ve been giving on this here, to say this money can be taken back, is the Inflation Reduction Act and that money for the 87,000 IRS agents. That became a huge issue on the right.

And as part of an annual appropriations fight, Congress actually cut tens of billions of dollars of that funding and clawed it back. Well, Congress can do that again, and so I’m going to be keeping a very close eye on the budget fights that we see should there be a change in hands of Congress coming up in 2027.

Sargent: That is such an interesting point, Aaron. I just want to remind people we had representatives Dan Goldman and Eric Swalwell on the show the other day. They both said Democrats have to strike a really hard line in the upcoming funding fights, and especially when Democrats control the House.

One last question on this, though. A Democratic House can also bring some serious oversight to ICE in a way that is just gone now. You were talking about the detention system and how oversight is just being completely gutted. It’s also nonexistent over ICE itself, both within the agency and from Congress. But Democrats can change that. Can you talk about that problem?

Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, this is where the power of Congress really shines. Right now, the power to subpoena the federal government is in the hands of the Republican Party. And they are using that authority, but they’re not using it to really investigate the Trump administration’s actions.

So should the control of Congress shift hands, I think you would see the power of the subpoena—the congressional subpoena—being used by Democrats to look at a wide variety of things that the Trump administration is doing, immigration being one of them.

Now, whether that means Kristi Noem is going to be hauled in front of Congress, I don’t know, but the biggest thing there is the ability to get information into the system, to claw out information, claw out data on how many people they’re arresting, how many U.S. citizens have been picked up, what they’re doing with this data, and also to potentially ... if they can pass any legislation over a potential presidential veto. That’s obviously the biggest challenge here in a must-pass bill, potentially actually putting teeth into the oversight process.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Aaron, that’s going to get very interesting, and we’re going to have to absolutely demand that Democrats mount some major opposition to this horror that’s developing.

Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out the American Immigration Council’s new report on the detention system. It’s a great piece of work. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.

Reichlin-Melnick: Thanks for having me back.

The Subtle Mysteries of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother - 2026-01-16T11:00:00Z

“Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,” intones the eponymous hero of Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, about a New York City hit man who has styled himself as a sort of time-warped expatriate of feudal Japan. He lives humbly among his pigeons and under the dual sign of the I Ching and the Wu-Tang, wielding katana and karma alike as precision instruments. Study Jim Jarmusch’s blade and you’ll find that he also likes to cut things fine, rhythmically and philosophically, to the point that his meticulously oscillating movies sometimes barely seem to penetrate his own consciousness, much less the spectator’s.

This is not a put-down: Among the contemporary American filmmakers who might be best categorized as conceptualists—or plausibly proffered up as poets—Jarmusch is surely the gentlest, a surgeon who doubles as his own anesthesiologist. The old cliché that a certain kind of movie—slow, contemplative, and probably not starring The Rock—manifests as a “meditation” on its theme actually applies in Jarmusch’s case, with his love for koans and incantations, be they stilted, sotto voce, or gloriously full-throated. Recall the compulsive needle drops of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” in 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, a laconic, bohemian comedy of manners that doubled as the first, and arguably still the most charming, iteration of Jarmusch’s particular sort of sorcery.

The seeming sleepiness of a movie like Jarmusch’s new and prize-winning triptych Father Mother Sister Brother is deceptive and also instructive. The film’s selection as the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival over more superficially bold—and overtly topical—art house fare like Bugonia, No Other Choice, or The Voice of Hind Rajab was seen in some quarters as puzzling (or perhaps as a sign of jury president Alexander Payne’s parochial—i.e., American—taste). But there’s something to be said for art that swaps out sensory overload for a more subliminal sort of programming. The effect of Father Mother Sister Brother’s three vignettes—each about 35 minutes long, and each concerning a family whose members are unhappy in their own ways—is simultaneously surreal and recognizable, in a way that intensifies, rather than deadens, our identification. To paraphrase our old pal Ghost Dog, who places stock in the idea that life is but a dream, the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

The opening sequence of Father Mother Sister Brother finds Jarmusch on familiar geographical as well as rhetorical turf; the frozen tundra of exurban New Jersey, the backdrop of Jarmusch’s lovely 2016 drama Paterson. That film, for my money one of Jarmusch’s best, cast Adam Driver as an NJ Transit driver seemingly named after his birthplace; while circumnavigating Paterson, New Jersey, by bus, the taciturn Paterson (no surname given) scribbles verses in his notebook in homage to William Carlos Williamson’s five-part modernist epic titled (you guessed it) Paterson. Here, Driver’s character, Jeff, is once again behind the wheel; he’s ferrying himself and his older sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) to the isolated, dilapidated cottage where their unnamed father (Tom Waits) lives alone. Jeff has been in touch with his dad, and Emily hasn’t; she’s dubious about the older man’s mental health, and about how he’s guilt-tripped his son into subsidizing his existence as an unemployed and intransigent widower. Father doesn’t say much about his life, except to list all the drugs, legal and otherwise, that he swears he’s not taking, and nor does he have much curiosity about theirs. Apparently, he’s getting by.

I say “apparently,” because while the siblings’ visit mostly proceeds according to script—compressing years of alienation and estrangement into a self-fulfilling prophecy; photo albums and small talk over ice water precipitating loaded silences and a hasty exit—there are so many small, weird details, pertaining to both the decor of Father’s place and to his behavior, that this banal series of exchanges starts to vibrate on a more enigmatic frequency. Gradually, small things become matters of great concern. Why is Waits wearing a Rolex? Is it real, or a fake? What about the character’s hermit-like remove from the world? Is that real, or fake? Is he genuinely happy to see them, or just counting the seconds until they depart? Does it have to be either-or?

The mystery train has always been Jarmusch’s preferred mode of conveyance, and lest this description make the opening of Father Mother Sister Brother sound somehow sinister—a thriller about what’s buried behind the proverbial cabin in the woods—the anxieties being mined are distinctly quotidian, though no less unsettling for that. Jarmusch has made quantifiable horror movies before, with the elegant vampire riff Only Lovers Left Alive and zombified satire of The Dead Don’t Die, and if there’s a genre element in Father Mother Sister Brother, it lies in the quasi-science-fictional quality of the proceedings. After part one’s abrupt conclusion with the revelation of a previously hidden object, the film proceeds into a series of twilight zones.

The setup of part two, which shifts the scene to Dublin, is conspicuously similar: two adult siblings (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) journeying to visit an older, single parent. This time, though, the host is Mother (Charlotte Rampling), a successful romance novelist who likes things just so. The daughters arrive separately, one in her own broken-down car, the other in an Uber driven by her girlfriend; the reason they have to park down the block from the house is that, apparently, Mother doesn’t approve (of the Uber or the girlfriend).

Again, “apparently”: The triangulation of motives and relationships in this segment is so bizarre—with Rampling (like Waits’s character, unnamed) acting at once domineering and diffident to Blanchett’s dowdy bureaucrat Timothea and Krieps’s fashionista influencer Lilith, so that even an attentive viewer could be forgiven for admitting a certain bafflement. (Compounding the confusion is Lilith’s pathological dishonesty, a veritable blizzard of little white lies.) Again, though, the details—the curated array of props, wardrobe, and pet phrases—are so specific that they cut through the befuddlement, doubly so because they’re so obviously borrowed from the previous episode. The more the women withhold information and emotions from one another, the less we worry about conventional disclosures, the more we begin watching their lavishly appointed yet desultory high tea from somewhere in the back of our minds. There’s something Pavlovian going on, with Jarmusch patiently training us to recognize, if not master, his patterns, like a high-definition Rorschach test.

The result is a movie that operates according to the principle of accrual; the effect of its gamesmanship is cumulative. If the return appearance of that fake(?) Rolex watch or a gaggle of spectral, slow-motion skateboarders—or the utterance of incongruous but nagging idioms like “nowheresville” and “Bob’s your uncle”—are uncanny the second time around, the experience of wondering when and how they’ll be deployed in the final third is as close to white-knuckle suspense as Jarmusch gets.


That final installment, which takes place in Paris, is at once the sweetest and the most troubling, pushing death to the forefront; it uses Father and Mother as dearly departed structuring absences. Sister and Brother, meanwhile, are a pair of mixed-race hipster twins, Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore), in Paris (via New York) to collect their parents’ effects from their now-empty apartment in the 11th Arrondissement. Their evident physical and emotional closeness, beautifully acted by Sabbat and Moore (who give the finest performances in a movie of conspicuously A-list stars) belies the unevenness of their duties as caretakers. Billy, it seems, has been doing the literal heavy lifting of boxes into a storage locker, while Skye apologizes—earnestly, if a bit evasively—for being MIA even as she confesses to having not much going on.

Whereas the first two sections are calibrated for cringe comedy with finely tuned tinges of ambiguity, this final part lays its cards on the table (again, literally) in the form of the private items bequeathed to the twins. The melancholy nature of this inheritance—not just of photos and ID cards, but information that contextualizes them—is complicated by the matter of whether Bob and Skye’s folks would have actively chosen to pass these things on had they not died in a plane crash. Would they, like the elders played by Waits and Rampling, have instead remained tight-lipped about themselves and their hidden selves until the end?

As a piece of craftsmanship, Father Mother Sister Brother is predictably impeccable, from the selective angularity of the camera setups to the obvious falseness of its rear-projected driving scenes (Alfred Hitchcock, no slouch at fractured family dynamics, would have been proud). There’s pleasure in the presences of the actors, whether they’re charter members of Jarmusch’s repertory (Waits and Driver) or new to his stable (Blanchett’s full-bodied gormlessness, exacerbated by a comically unflattering coif, has to be seen to be believed). What the pile-up of minor key synchronicities amounts to is, of course, wide open to interpretation, and that’s how Jarmusch likes it. Forty years into a career spent engineering movies that sit snugly side by side along a narrow yet paradoxically spacious corridor—as adjoining compartments on the mystery train—he’s apt to leave things ajar.

The closing images of Billy and Skye exiting the darkened storage complex into the afternoon light suggest either liberation or a suspended sentence—as they both assert repeatedly, a reckoning with the leftover objects in the locker is coming, but they don’t have to worry about it right now. It’s not important, until it is—this attitude is the flip side to Ghost Dog’s and Jarmusch’s unsentimental minimalism. “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.” Father Mother Sister Brother is a throwaway that’s also a keepsake.

Trump Is Running a “Global Mafia” - 2026-01-16T11:00:00Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can view a transcript here.

President Trump has sometimes been described as antiwar or isolationist. That’s totally wrong, says Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy. He was also a top foreign policy aide to Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign. What Trump really opposes is long wars, Duss argues. Trump is fine with overthrowing the Venezuelan government and making threats against Colombia, Greenland, Mexico, and numerous other countries, but likely wouldn’t try to do nation-building in any of those places. Trump’s foreign policy approach is akin to a “global mafia,” says Duss. Democrats should offer a clear alternative vision for foreign policy, Duss argues. That vision should be rooted in “rules” that all countries follow and an emphasis on the United States cooperating with other nations on challenges like climate change. The Biden administration failed this test, says Duss, by ignoring human rights violations by the Israeli government during its military campaign in Gaza.

Elizabeth Warren Is Right About the Democrats’ Big Problem - 2026-01-16T11:00:00Z

Elizabeth Warren gave an excellent speech January 12 (text; video) urging Democrats not “to sand down our edges to avoid offending anyone, especially the rich and powerful who might finance our candidates.… When Democrats water down their economic platform to appeal to wealthy donors, whether the transaction is explicit or subtle, we squander trust with working people, and the money just isn’t worth it.”

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait disagrees. “The Democratic Party,” he wrote three days later, “is completely unified on the merits of raising taxes on the rich and spending more on benefits for the poor and middle class.” That’s not true. Chait also wrote that it was “revealing” that Warren “did not cite any Democrat who holds this supposedly influential belief.” That’s not true, either. Warren cited Kamala Harris and former Senator Kyrsten Sinema. There are also many others, whom I’ll discuss in a moment.

Before proceeding, let me disclose that Chait and I are friendly acquaintances and that our views are sufficiently similar that in 2011 he successfully recommended me to succeed him as this magazine’s TRB columnist. (A baby tech tycoon bought the magazine the following year, fired me, then later fired himself by selling the magazine to its present owner.) There is, however, some disagreement between Chait and myself about how far left the Democrats should go on economic policy—he’s more cautious than I am—and we’ve aired that disagreement before.

Warren’s speech was refreshing not because it was original (others, including me, have made the same argument) but because it emanated from a politician. Warren relies on wealthy political donors just like other pols; between 2019 and 2024, when she ran for reelection, 42 percent of her campaign funds came from large donors. She even accepted super PAC money in her 2020 presidential campaign. But Warren has consistently criticized the role big money plays in politics, and now she’s criticizing it not only for advancing extremism among Republicans but also for advancing excessive moderation among her fellow Democrats. To which I say: Bravo.

I don’t dispute that moderation is a virtue in politics, as it is most everyplace else. I agree with Chait, and with John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? that the Brahmin left’s cultural vocabulary (genderqueer, intersectionality, Latinx, and so on) is a political liability that’s best avoided. Democratic candidates ought to (and usually do) steer clear of anything that voters will hear as faculty-lounge virtue signaling. Instead, they should preach a Rawlsian doctrine of mutual tolerance, though they shouldn’t call it that. If this be “moderation,” let’s have more of it.

But even moderation can be pursued immoderately, and that’s often the case when Democratic politicians address economic inequality. Polls show the public favors much bolder policies on government redistribution than most Democratic officeholders are willing to support. The working class strongly favors taxing the rich and empowering workers, and the haute bourgeoisie favors it even more. That’s a departure from the policies of the past half-century, but not from the hugely prosperous postwar era that preceded it, when the New Deal was in flower.

With regard to the latter, one might argue that advocating more aggressive redistribution is conservative. Brink Lindsey wittily observed 20 years ago (in The New Republic, no less) that “the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.” Indeed, fully 20 percent of working-class voters who supported Trump favor a millionaire tax, an increase to the minimum wage, and higher spending on Social Security and public schools.

Chait writes that “the Democratic Party is completely unified on the merits of raising taxes on the rich and spending more on benefits for the poor and middle class.” I’ll agree that Democratic politicians pay lip service to these principles, and try to avoid positioning themselves too conspicuously against them. But these Democrats are also expert in watering down or sidelining redistributionist policies before they see the light of day, and sometimes after.

It was a Democratic Congress that rejected President Joe Biden’s modest proposed increase in the top marginal income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. It was a Democratic Congress that rejected Biden’s proposed increase in the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. It was a Democratic Congress that killed Biden’s attempt to eliminate the carried interest loophole.

It was a Democratic Congress that rejected Biden’s proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. Instead, the Democratic House Ways and Means Committee scaled the proposed capital gains rate back from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. The Democratic Congress then scotched that too, so the capital gains rate remains 21 percent. It was a Democratic Congress that rejected Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate tax to 28 percent after the Ways and Means Committee scaled that back to 26.5 percent. The corporate tax rate therefore remains 21 percent.

A Martian visiting Planet Earth might conclude that no pressure group exerts greater influence over Democrats than dead rich people, even though cadavers seldom vote. The Ways and Means Committee killed outright a long-overdue Biden proposal to eliminate the “angel of death loophole” shielding estates from paying capital gains tax at death (Biden had exempted the first $1 million in capital gains). Biden also tried and failed to get a Democratic Congress to lower the estate-tax exemption from $11 million to $3.5 million. Former Democratic Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitcamp of North Dakota publicly opposed this last, and 13 rural House Democrats lined up with them.

Granted, Biden enjoyed only a narrow majority in the Senate, allowing two pro-business conservatives within the Democratic caucus, Sinema and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin—both of whom eventually quit the Democratic Party—to veto much of Biden’s redistributionist agenda. But Sinema and Manchin didn’t sit on the House Ways and Means Committee, nor were they among the rural House Democrats mentioned above. Let’s name them: Representatives Cindy Axne, Jim Costa, Cheri Bustos, Josh Harder, Salud Carbajal, Angie Craig, Antonio Delgado, Kim Schrier, John Garamendi, Julia Brownley, Tom O’Halleran, Abigail D. Spanberger, and Kurt Schrader.

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly joined Sinema and Manchin to oppose Biden’s appointment of David Weil as Biden’s Labor Department wage and hour commissioner. As I explained at the time, Weil was judged too left-wing based on his (greatly exaggerated) views on liberalizing wage/hour regulations to crack down on corporate evasions. Just this past week, a handful of Republican opponents managed to kill three proposed conservative wage/hour bills intended to create more opportunities for corporate evasions. I’m inclined to scoff at any notion that Republicans will someday steal labor issues from Democrats, but, putting this week’s events together with the House’s passage last month of a bill restoring collective-bargaining rights to federal employees, I feel less certain about that.

Warren mentioned in her speech that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who donated $7 million to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, tried to persuade Harris to pledge that if elected she’d fire the antitrust champion Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Harris did not make that pledge, but, as Warren pointed out, Harris didn’t pledge to keep Khan, either. Warren might further have noted that Harris positioned herself to Biden’s right on taxes, proposing a capital gains hike to 28 percent rather than 39.5 percent. “Kamala Harris is listening to business people and getting their feedback on what’s fair and what will lead to more investment in business,” Harris’s billionaire adviser Mark Cuban crowed at the time. Nobody in his right mind believes that if Harris had only lowered her proposed cap gains hike to 25 percent she would have won the election.

These are all examples of Democrats watering down their economic platform to appeal to wealthy donors. Maybe Chait thinks such watering down appeals to voters as well as donors, but that’s not what he said, and anyway polling contradicts that. On the merits, I would guess Chait favored every Democrat-defeated Biden proposal that I’ve mentioned here, so why does he dispute Warren? The tyranny over Democrats of the donor class is a very real problem. We all need to take it seriously.

Transcript: Trump Is Running a “Global Mafia” - 2026-01-16T11:00:00Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.


Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined this morning by Matt Duss. He’s a fellow at the Center for International Policy, and he was also Bernie Sanders’s top foreign policy adviser during his presidential runs. Matt, thanks for joining me.

Matt Duss: Glad to. Good to see you.

Bacon: So I want to talk broadly—we have a lot of foreign policy news. Let me ask you two questions, just to think about them broadly.... I’m not a foreign policy expert, I assume a lot of our viewers are not, listeners are not.

Why did the U.S. decide to go into Venezuela and remove its leader? And why are we talking about invading or taking over Greenland? These are not things Joe Biden was talking about doing. They’re not things Mitt Romney would have done, I don’t think. So talk about, just generally, what is motivating these two actions.

Duss: They’re also not things that Donald Trump talked about doing.

Bacon: Yes. Correct.

Duss: He ran for president—he ran for president proclaiming himself as a pro-peace president. Ran in many ways to the Democrats’ left on issues of national security. Going back to 2016, he opposed endless wars.

Now, his first term certainly didn’t reflect that, but I think what we’ve seen since June—since the Israeli war, which Trump joined in June against Iran—we’ve seen a number of interventions, so he’s certainly not an anti-war president. What he has been is an anti–long war president.

But to answer your question, I think there’s a number of different constituencies in the administration and in Washington who have different goals here. If we’re just focusing on Venezuela, if you look at all the different justifications that were offered—Is it about drugs? Is Maduro a narco-terrorist? Is it about terrorism? Is it about immigration? Is it about corruption? Is it about boxing China and Russia out of the Western Hemisphere? Or is it about the oil?

Now, for Trump, he’s been pretty clear. It is about the oil. Which is, in many ways, refreshing. I don’t want to treat it too kindly, but one of the things about Donald Trump in general is the way he just makes subtext into text. So it’s just straightforwardly about the oil.

Bacon: You say there are multiple justifications, but if the president is saying it’s about oil—I think Marco Rubio has his own views about Cuba and dictators and so on. But ... do we think this is a multifaceted issue? Or do we think Donald Trump—because Donald Trump is the one person, his view does matter the most—but we don’t really think he’s driving policy in that exact way.

Duss: He’s the one who has to call the shot when it’s time to send troops in, and also support the preparations. And there were extensive preparations for the operation to, essentially, abduct Maduro.

I think it’s about the oil, but also with Trump, it could be any number of things. This is what he said. It’s clear that he was just annoyed by Maduro essentially trolling him, constantly. Like, making these defiant statements. It’s hard to say how much that stuff mattered, but we know with Donald Trump; in the moment, he can become obsessed with something very quickly.

But no, this is not something he just decided overnight that he was going to do. This took a lot of preparation. So this was clearly an administration-wide—there was support for this, as you noted, [from] Marco Rubio. For Marco Rubio, it’s basically about Cuba, cutting off an important ally and supporter of the Cuban government.... Marco Rubio, as a Cuban American who came up from this community, this has been his obsession for a long time.

It’s the obsession of the South Florida community that enabled his own political rise. And then you’ve got just, again, other parts of the administration and the kind of Washington foreign policy establishment for whom this serves different purposes.

Bacon: Talk about Greenland. Why are we, what is going—that one is even more bizarre on some level.

Duss: Again, multiple arguments. There are folks like Tom Cotton and others who have been arguing for a long time: We need Greenland. It’s in our national security interest to control this massive piece of real estate. Control of the Arctic ... is becoming increasingly important.

Or just, for someone like Trump, I think he just likes doing big things. So the idea that he could just expand the geographic footprint of the American empire and be remembered as the president who did that—as far as I can tell, that’s argument enough. Who knows how deep into the weeds Donald Trump actually gets [as to] what Greenland actually does for us. He’s just like, Wow, Greenland’s big. I’d like to grab it.... But Denmark, as a member of NATO, this would ... if not end the NATO alliance, it would do really mortal damage to it.

So there are lots of things being floated: We’d like to buy it. Denmark has made clear that no one is selling. People who actually live in Greenland are like, We have no interest in becoming part of the United States. I think that, for any reasonable person, should pretty much end the debate. But we’re talking about Donald Trump and Washington hawks here. So these are not reasonable people.

Bacon: Is one of the goals, though—we’ve talked about Trump and Russia for all this time, and some things have been proven and some have not.

But one of Putin’s goals is to destroy NATO. Is that—does that drive—I agree with you that if the U.S. takes over Greenland for no reason ... and no one did anything about it, that does make NATO weakened, maybe ruined.... So is the goal here NATO, we think? Or are we not sure?

Duss: Yeah, the U.S. violating the sovereignty, essentially invading another NATO member … it’s tough to call that a functioning security alliance when that happens. Now, yes, of course, I think Vladimir Putin has made clear that he sees NATO as a threat.

Rightly or wrongly, he—and not just he, I think elements of the Russian political and security establishment have for many years, going back to the nineties—sees the expansion of NATO closer and closer to Russia’s borders as a source of real concern.

Now, I don’t think that is the overriding driver of what we’ve seen Putin doing, especially in Ukraine. But it’s clearly a part of that. I don’t think Trump is doing this because he thinks it helps Putin. I think he clearly would like to have a better relationship with Putin. But I also think there are people who get out there who say, Oh, he’s just acting as Putin’s flunky. I don’t think that’s productive. I don’t think that’s right.

I think that’s actually a distraction for what Trump is doing. I think Trump just sees multilateralism in general as a problem. He doesn’t believe in it. He believes ... he has a very zero-sum approach, whether in business, in real estate, or in politics and in foreign affairs.

So I think this is the consistent through line. Multilateralism is based on the basic concept that, listen, we can all benefit from a set of rules, a set of agreements. Even if we give up a little bit, in the longer term we’re going to benefit just by coming to these agreements and finding ways to work on shared challenges according to an agreed-upon set of principles.

And Donald Trump just has discarded that entirely. His whole approach is:
I win, you lose, and if you’re benefiting, clearly I’m getting screwed. And that’s how he sees NATO. That’s how he sees the European Union. That’s how he sees international agreements in general.

Bacon: So he was never anti-war, right?

Duss: No, he’s anti–long war. He sees these long invasions, these occupations—Afghanistan, Iraq—as wasteful. They didn’t produce much. And again, we found out in 2016—a lot of Americans agreed with him. I think back to that primary debate—I think it was one of the first primary debates back in 2015 when he’s on stage with, like, 20 other candidates. And he said that the Iraq War was a huge disaster, [that] George W. Bush really screwed us with that one. And the only people who were shocked by that were on the stage with him. Most Americans were like, We agree with that. What’s shocking about this?

But it speaks ... he’s not anti-war. Look at what he’s actually done during this term, during the first term. In this term he’s staged interventions in at least seven countries that we know about.

So again, he’s not anti-war, but he did recognize that there is a strong constituency of voters who are anti-war. And I think that’s what’s important because you do need to give Trump his due. He does have a kind of political intelligence. He does really have a sense of what voters are angry at and how he can mobilize that anger and that grievance, and opposition to Washington’s expansive military interventions is one of them. And that’s something I think Democrats should take a big clue from.

Bacon: So, good—you brought up Democrats, so how have you felt—what should the response be from Democrats to Venezuela? And in your view, what has it been so far?

Duss: I think we’ve seen some good responses from people like Chris Murphy—Senator Chris Murphy, Congressman Ro Khanna, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who have come out and opposed the invasion, called it out as illegal, and also noted that what Trump is doing here is basically seizing the resources of another country to benefit his rich buddies and himself.

That is always going to be a part of anything Trump does. The question is: How is Trump using this move to benefit him and his organization and his wealthy friends? That’s always a part of anything that Donald Trump does.

You’ve seen a number of other Democrats who are like: Yes, this is bad. And it’s bad because it’s taking the eye off the ball in terms of affordability and other things. And I think that’s true. I think that’s important. It’s important to ... focus on the fact that this is not helping Americans.

Like, Donald Trump promised to deal with questions of inflation and the cost of living. This does nothing for that. This is actually going to turn out to be a very expensive intervention when you consider how much it’ll cost American taxpayers to bring Venezuela’s oil infrastructure back online.

We just saw a report today that Trump will not be using U.S. troops—he will be using U.S. security contractors, essentially, to secure these facilities and secure the country, which is to say the U.S. will in fact have boots on the ground. We’ll just be paying a lot more for those troops than if they were U.S. military. And of course, that money will be going right into the pockets, once again, of Donald Trump’s oligarch buddies.

So again, the way that this screws the average American is important, but I do wish we would see more Democrats just standing up and speaking up for the rule of law.... This invasion clearly violated the U.S. law—it was not authorized by Congress—and it clearly violated international law. Venezuela did not pose a threat. There was clearly no international legal basis for this invasion. And Donald … the administration has tried to get around both of these things by proclaiming [Maduro] was part of this massive narco-terrorist cartel that was essentially facilitating an invasion and killing Americans through the importation of drugs and all these things.

And they used this arrest warrant, this indictment in a U.S. court, as justification. It’s like, well, that has no international legal validity. It’s not nothing, OK, but this does not give a justification to invade a sovereign country. Like Maduro or not—and I don’t, no one should, he’s a corrupt, repressive dictator—but there are lots of those around; many of them are allies of the United States. I think they’ve used this argument that, Oh, this is just a legal action, not an act of war, to avoid having to come to Congress and make their case as the Constitution requires them to do for making war on another country.

And unfortunately, we saw just last night the Senate War Powers Resolution fail because of huge pressure from the administration on a number of Republicans who had voted for it initially [but then] voted against it. It did require Vice President Vance to come in and make a tie-breaking vote to vote it down. And that’s depressing, because there’s just no question that this is a violation of the Constitution, in terms of taking the U.S. into war in a way that is not authorized.... In addition to being a violation of international law, which I also think is important.

Bacon: I think the Democrats on the Hill have pretty strongly opposed doing anything in Greenland, pretty consistently. I don’t think there’s much to discuss there. They’ve been pretty—I guess one thing I’ve been thinking [about is] the term imperialism. Is Trump an imperialist?

Duss: I think in the most basic sense, yeah. What else can you say? Again, I don’t want to quote myself, but, for a long time I and others have been pushing back on the idea that he’s an isolationist. This is one of those terms you’ve seen thrown at him by the Washington foreign policy set. And isolationism is … there’s no one in American politics—or at least very few—who even really merit that term. It’s just kind of a slur.

It’s like a term of derision that is thrown at people who don’t believe America should be the global hyperpower always getting into people’s business. It’s essentially just a code word that’s used by the Washington establishment to say, This guy isn’t part of the Washington foreign policy cool kids’ club. It’s not accurate. It’s never been accurate. And I think hopefully people will clearly see that, because what he’s doing is just, as you [said], it’s imperialism.

It’s almost more blatant than that. It’s essentially just a global mafia. He’s saying: Listen, we’re powerful. We run the neighborhood. If you want to be part of the protection racket, you need to pay tribute. We see this sort of reflected in the National Security Strategy, where they just straight-up say: Listen, the Western Hemisphere is our yard. We’ll control it. No other country, no other power has any business here.

That’s clearly thinking about Russia and China, and China having created a lot of relationships over the past few years, in various ways: building infrastructure, providing processing for rare earth minerals, et cetera. And so that’s where that’s pointed, but it’s also an acknowledgement—essentially a tacit acknowledgement—that other great powers like Russia and China do have the right to determine outcomes in their own spheres of influence.

Even though Trump clearly sees the United States as still being the first among these great powers. So the United States will remain the top mob boss amongst the various families.

Bacon: Let me jump back. I think I met you in 2019, when you were working for the Bernie Sanders campaign, working on that early on.... I don’t think most people think of Bernie Sanders in terms of foreign policy—he talks a lot about Medicare for All and domestic issues—but talk about the vision for foreign policy, in a broad sense, that you were developing with him.

Duss: Sure, and I can point to a few speeches he gave. There was one—the first, I think, big foreign policy speech that I worked with him on was one he gave in September of 2017. There were a few others that came after that.

But basically, it’s based on principles that he has been talking about for a long time: that we do have an interest. The goal of any government, whether it’s in foreign or domestic policy, is to take care of its people. But there’s an element of solidarity, an element of understanding that we shouldn’t export violence and insecurity and poverty onto others.

And I think this goes to his basic sense of just what it means to be a human being: that everyone, every human being, has value. And there are ways to promote our own security and prosperity that don’t come at the expense of others. But getting into more specifics, he was one of the few Democrats who spoke out against the Iraq War at the time.

There should have been way more. I think everyone understands that he was right now, in part because it was just a blatant violation of international law. It was clearly based on false pretenses, outright lies by the Bush administration. And because, as with many other military interventions over the past decades, it has produced lots of unintended consequences.

It was a failure on its own terms. It killed hundreds of thousands of people. It created millions of refugees, both inside and outside of Iraq. It killed thousands of American service members. It wounded tens of thousands, as he says, both in body and spirit.

And that’s had an enormous impact on our country, on those communities. And it’s also bad for our politics. When you promote this kind of hawkish mentality—this idea that America not only has the right, but the obligation to be out there intervening and policing the world—it creates a political environment in which authoritarianism and xenophobia and hatred thrive.

And we have absolutely seen that, not just in the United States, but in other countries around the world. I think the general approach that he supported and that we worked on—and that I would love to see more Democrats adopt—is to say: Listen, America clearly is powerful. We have enormous influence. We have an amazing network of allies and partners. That’s important. These are huge assets in advancing our shared goals. But we also have an interest in a world of rules, in a world where it’s not just “might makes right,” because we can look to multiple examples in history where this kind of approach just inevitably led to conflict.

And unfortunately, that is where Trump is leading us. And it also really undermines, if not outright destroys, our ability to address real crises in the moment, whether it’s climate, whether it’s pandemics—which there will be more of—whether it’s just crises that follow on from those things, like irregular migration.

So we’re really, just by taking this go-it-alone approach—the way Trump is doing [it] is to say, Just by virtue of our power, we get to tell everyone else what to do. That is going to provoke backlash. It already has done that. It’s going to hurt our own security and our own prosperity in the future.

Bacon: You use the term rules. You didn’t say “rules-based order,” but is ... that, for you, a defining idea of foreign policy? That we follow the rules, and people follow them, including us?

I’m going to come back to ... if Joe Biden did that or not. But his administration had the phrase “rules-based order.” Do you think having some set of rules is important?

Duss: I think it is. I would like a rules-based order, but for real. For real, by which I mean: that was not what we saw from Joe Biden. For Joe Biden—and this is a place where Joe Biden was actually very representative of the way that I think the D.C. foreign policy establishment thinks about the “rules-based order,” which is that the U.S. gets to make the rules. There’s one set of rules for our partners and friends, and there’s a different set of rules that must be imposed and enforced against our adversaries and enemies.

And you couldn’t ask for a better example of that than comparing Ukraine to Gaza. I think it’s hard to think of a social science experiment one could devise that would show this hypocrisy and these double standards more clearly than opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine—which I agree with; it was a clear violation of international law—opposing the war crimes that Russia has clearly committed in Ukraine, while supporting those same war crimes day after day after week after month after month in Gaza.

This was catastrophic, not just for the people of Gaza, for the region, I think it’s catastrophic for the United States and for the idea of international cooperation.

So again, when I talk about rules, I think about Gandhi’s quote when he was asked about Western civilization. He said: I think it would be a great idea. If you ask me about the rules-based order, my response is the same. I think it is a good idea; we should endeavor to build something like that. But that requires the United States really agreeing [to] and upholding the rules for ourselves and for our friends when they violate them, and not just give them a pass.

Bacon: Last question. If you were advising somebody running for president in 2028, give me two or three—two or three ideas or principles—that should guide their foreign policy.

Duss: I think invest in the idea of multilateralism—make the case that engaging within the international community, international organizations is not just something nice to do; this is how we advance America’s interest. This is how we keep Americans safer and more prosperous.

I think the second thing I would say is: really start to build a better relationship with China. I think the Biden administration, in my view, unfortunately adopted the previous Trump administration’s approach, that just saw China as a threat and sought to contain that threat. Interestingly, the second Trump administration has not been as hostile to China, but still is very invested in American primacy, including in the Asia-Pacific region.

But China is going to continue to be influential and powerful. It has a huge population. It has a very powerful economy. It has built relationships all over the world, including in the Western Hemisphere. And China has a role to play in shaping the global agenda. And so I think building a better relationship with China … it’s going to be frustrating. Certainly, China’s going to do things that we don’t like, and it’s already doing that. But that’s a hugely important relationship. And there needs to be multiple channels of communication.

And the last thing I would say is: I would love a Democratic nominee to really focus on the idea of accountability. Real accountability. Not just in foreign policy, but in general.

We face a crisis of political legitimacy in this country. That is part of what we’re facing right now. Americans have lost faith in American government, in the political process, in our leaders. In part because they haven’t delivered, but also because they see, time after time, powerful people pay no price.

This is something that Donald Trump has very successfully exploited. When Donald Trump says the system’s rigged, he gets traction with that because the system is rigged. The system is rigged on behalf of people like Donald Trump and his powerful friends.

But you can name Republicans and you can name Democrats who have committed egregious offenses, both of corruption and foreign policy, who have simply skated ... faced no consequences whatsoever.

So I think bringing some real accountability to this process and back to American politics, dealing with the fact that our political system is essentially a form of legalized corruption. I think addressing all of these things is really essential for rebuilding—or building—a new, shared kind of political consensus about what the American Project really is.

Bacon: Let me drill down. What would accountability look like? Do you mean, like, the ICE officer who killed the person in Minneapolis is in jail? What do you mean when you say accountability?

Duss: For example, I want to see—going back to Gaza—I want to see all the reports about what we knew, because I know that the Biden administration really did know Israel was violating international law, and yet continued to give them weapons in violation of U.S. law. I want to see those reports. State Department reports. Other reports declassified.

I want those officials to have to answer for what they did in Gaza in a real way—not just in softball interviews on CNN or elsewhere—

Bacon: Or podcasts sponsored by—

Duss: Exactly, on their own podcasts where they pretend to think about what they actually did. That’s one of—for starters.

Bacon: With that—oh, let me ask you a last thing. What did you think about what happened in New York City, the election? What did you make of Zohran’s victory, how it happened? Because you are ... in policy, and it seems like Gaza had some role, but he talked about affordability.

It seemed like the Bernie Sanders campaign, but almost advanced a little bit—that’s how I felt about it. He learned the right lessons, is how I saw it, but I’m curious as to how you saw it.

Duss: I think he was really focused on just the struggles of everyday people. Affordability is the new keyword. But that’s important. I think that was something that was a through line we saw not just with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, but also with Spanberger here in my state of Virginia. We saw that with Sherrill in New Jersey, and others. It’s just connecting your campaign—and I think what Zohran did was inspiring in so many ways because: He’s very talented, he’s a great communicator, he had a great media team, but it was also based on real policy that addressed the real lives and the real struggles of people in New York.

And I think the role that Gaza played was … this is clearly a very important issue for the progressive base—and I would say beyond the progressive base. It is an issues that ... stands in for a broader debate about American foreign policy, and about the role that America should play in the world. On what principles, on what basis, according to what laws.

But also for people, I think, who don’t really even pay that much attention to foreign policy, it was just an issue that gave him credibility because he took so much heat. Let’s remember: He is not the one who injected Gaza and Palestine and Israel into this campaign. It was his opponents—

Bacon: Eric Adams and Cuomo—

Duss: —pressing on him on this. And the fact that he stood strong on this issue of principle, I think, gave him credibility across a whole range of other issues. Because people see that and they’re like: This guy is pretty outstanding[ly] firm. He’s speaking clearly about this important issue. Maybe I can believe him on all these other things.

I would say I think it worked in the opposite direction for Kamala Harris, for example. She had some pretty good policies, but then when she had to speak on Gaza, she just regurgitated the same old talking points about, “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “too many people have died.”

I think when people saw that, they’re like: Oh, OK. She’s just saying the usual stuff. I’m not buying it. Maybe if she can be pushed on this, she can be pushed on other things. So I think that’s the lesson Democrats should learn here.

Bacon: Matt Duss, great conversation. Thanks for joining me. Good to see you. Take care.

Duss: Very glad to. Thanks, Perry.

Trump Press Sec Erupts in Fury at Media Over ICE as Polls Spiral Again - 2026-01-16T10:00:00Z

After fielding a perfectly legitimate question about ICE abuses on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost her temper. She smeared the reporter as a “left-wing hack.” She then broadened her indictment to the whole “fake” media. She also angrily ridiculed another journalist for asking why Trump recently “joked” that we shouldn’t have midterm elections. That Leavitt was triggered by questions about ICE again shows the White House is refusing to admit error of any kind. This comes as one new poll has Trump’s disapproval on immigration soaring to 61 percent, and another one finds a majority thinks ICE is making our cities less safe. We talked to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, which has a great new report on Trump’s migrant detention system. We discuss the heartening public rejection of Trump, ICE’s coming explosion in recruitment, and why the refusal to change course means ICE is set to wage a Forever War on the American people. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Venezuela’s Machado Presents Trump With a Nobel Prize After All - 2026-01-15T22:33:55Z

Donald Trump on Thursday finally got his greatest wish: to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize.

He didn’t earn it, of course. Last year’s actual recipient, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, told reporters that she “presented” her medal to Trump during a meeting the two had at the White House.

“I presented the president of the United States the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize, and I told him this,” she said. “Two hundred years ago, General Lafayette gave Simon Bolivar a medal with George Washington’s face on it. Bolivar since then kept that medal for the rest of his life.… It was given by General Lafayette as a sign of the brotherhood between the United States, people of the United States and the people of Venezuela in their fight for freedom against tyranny.

“And 200 years in history, the people of Bolivar are giving back to the heir of Washington a medal, in this case the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize, as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.”

Machado had already dedicated her prize to Trump when she won it last year. And just because she gave it to him does not transfer the title of Nobel laureate to him, as the Nobel Committee clarified over the weekend.

It’s highly likely that Machado’s decision to give her medal to Trump is an attempt to win favor with the new self-declared leader of Venezuela. After directing troops to storm Caracas, nearly two weeks ago, and kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that Vice President Delcy Rodriguez would take over as interim president.

He notably passed over Machado, saying that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader” because she lacked sufficient “respect” in Venezuela. And it appears that Machado’s gamble may not pay off, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said ahead of Thursday’s meeting that he had yet to change his mind.

80 Democrats Move to Impeach Kristi Noem as ICE Terror Grows - 2026-01-15T22:00:41Z

More than 80 House Democrats have co-signed articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The bill, introduced by Illinois Representative Robin Kelly, comes amid ratcheting tensions in Minnesota, where ICE agents’ aggressive tactics have led to multiple shootings involving federal officers and widespread protests in Minneapolis.

“Noem’s gestapo-style tactics and reckless leadership have left communities and families devastated,” Kelly wrote in a post on X Thursday.

Dozens of Democrats lent their name in support of the measure, including all four Democratic representatives from Minnesota: Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, Betty McCollum, and Kelly Morrison.

Omar, a regular target of President Donald Trump, said casting her support behind the measure was a means of seeking justice for Renee Good, the mother of three who was shot and killed by an ICE agent last week.

“Renee Nicole Good should be alive. We’ll continue to fight until we achieve real justice and accountability,” she wrote in a post on X. “That begins with impeaching Kristi Noem and ensuring no federal agent can act as judge, jury, and executioner in our streets.”

Rather than turn down the temperature following Good’s killing, Noem oversaw the deployment of even more immigration officers to Minnesota after the deadly shooting.

Other high-profile Democrats who co-sponsored the impeachment bill included Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Maxwell Frost, Eric Swalwell, and Jasmine Crockett.

“Kristi Noem has been a complete and total failure at her job. She has violated her oath and has allowed ICE agents to terrorize our communities,” Crockett wrote in a post on X.

Kyrsten Sinema Sued Under Rare Law for Being a Home-Wrecker - 2026-01-15T21:47:17Z

A new federal lawsuit alleges that former Senator Kyrsten Sinema had an affair with her married bodyguard, Mark Ammel, marked by drug use, countless concerts, international travel, snide comments about colleagues, and more.

Mark Ammel’s ex-wife, Heather Ammel, is seeking $25,000 in damages on the grounds that Sinema and her ex-husband’s affair incited divorce, ending their 14-year marriage. This is possible under North Carolina’s “alienation of affection” law, which allows ex-spouses to sue the third party they allege interfered in their marriage. Only five other states in the nation still have this law on their books.

Heather Ammel’s complaint alleges that Mark and Sinema traveled alone together to Napa Valley in 2023, outside of Ammel’s security detail duties. He then began to join Sinema at other events, like a U2 concert in Las Vegas, a Green Day concert in Washington (where he brought his young child with him), a Taylor Swift concert in Miami, and more.

In 2024, Heather discovered Signal message exchanges between her husband and Sinema that included a photo of Sinema wrapped in a towel, as well as multiple messages that revealed the lack of seriousness in which Sinema held her job.

In those messages, Sinema offered to help Ammel through his mental health and PTSD challenges from his time in the military, and even told him to bring MDMA, or molly, on an actual work trip so that she—the sitting senator—could “guide him through a psychedelic experience.”

In another message in 2024, Sinema told Ammel that she was skipping the State of the Union address that year because she didn’t want to hear “some old man, President Biden, talk about the legislation she wrote.” When Ammel messaged Sinema about missionary sex with the lights on, the then-senator replied, “Boring!”

Earlier that year, Ammel admitted that Sinema was “handsy” with him at an event, holding his hand and touching him. They then traveled to San Francisco in a work capacity—until Sinema invited Ammel into her hotel room, where he stayed “for hours.”

In April, Ammel spent time alone with Sinema in her Washington, D.C., apartment, and in May she paid for his “psychedelic treatment” in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ammel told Sinema he planned on divorcing from Heather that summer. That fall, Heather saw a message from Sinema to Mark that read, “I miss you. Putting my hand on your heart. I’ll see you soon.”

“Are you having an affair with my husband?” Heather responded. She and Mark separated that November, and Heather alleges that Sinema and Mark’s affair is still ongoing.

Before this, Sinema was most known for her “independent” heel turn, voting against workers’ rights and health care advances after campaigning as a next-generation progressive. Now she’ll be making headlines for the comments and actions revealed in this lawsuit.

Karoline Leavitt Gets Hysterical After Simple Question on ICE - 2026-01-15T19:52:55Z

According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, anyone questioning her about ICE’s wanton killing of Renee Nicole Good—or any of their violent acts—is a biased radical leftist.

“Secretary Noem spoke to the media and she said, among other things, that [ICE agents] are ‘doing everything correctly,’” The Hill’s Niall Stanage said to Leavitt at her Thursday press conference. “Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, 170 U.S citizens were detained by ICE, and Renee Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent. How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?”

“Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?” Leavitt asked.

“You’re asking me my opinion? Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably,” Stanage said.

“Oh, OK, so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion,” Leavitt replied, launching into her classic tangent to try to delegitimize the reporter rather than actually address the question—and the senseless killing the entire country saw on camera.

“What do you want me to do?” Stanage tried to ask.

“You’re a left-wing hack, you’re not a reporter, you’re posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question,” Leavitt said, wagging her finger. “You and the people in the media, who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist—you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat.... You’re a left-wing activist.”

“What was inaccurate with what I said?” Stanage asked while Leavitt went on.

“Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens who ICE is trying to remove from this country? I bet you don’t.… I bet you never even read about Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, or all of the innocent Americans who are killed at the hands of illegal aliens,” she said, referencing the same two murders the GOP has been talking about for over a year. “Shame on people like you in the media, who have a crooked view.”

Leavitt calling this man a hack—when the Trump administration has gone out of its way to fill its Cabinet and press corps with them—is beyond irony. More importantly, it appears that Leavitt and the general GOP plan to stick to their narrative of Good as some crazed antifa activist who was trying to mow down ICE agents with her car. That could not be further from the truth, and we know that. It is critical for leaders at every level to combat that rhetoric.

“[Press secretary Leavitt] can posture all she wants,” The New Republic’s Greg Sargent commented on X. “But asking how the following—tons of US citizens detained; many deaths in ICE custody; killing of Renee Good—square w/the claim that ICE is doing everything correctly is a perfectly legitimate question that she is plainly unable to answer.”

Why the Hell Is Trump “Joking” About Canceling Elections? - 2026-01-15T19:11:23Z

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt snapped Thursday at a reporter who didn’t buy her attempt to dismiss President Donald Trump’s repeated mentions of canceling elections.

During a White House press briefing, a reporter asked Leavitt why the president kept mentioning canceling elections. Trump had pointed out while speaking to Reuters that presidents never do well in the midterm elections, and bragged that because his administration has already accomplished so much, maybe the democratic process wasn’t necessary at all.

“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election,” Trump said. The president had made a similar remark while speaking to Republicans at the Kennedy Center last week.

“The president was simply joking,” Leavitt said. “He was saying, ‘We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously.”

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg posed a follow-up. “Are you saying the president finds the idea of cancelling elections funny?”

“Andrew, were you in the room? No you weren’t. I was in the room, I heard the conversation. And only someone like you would take that so seriously, and pose that in a question in that way,” Leavitt replied.

But Trump’s repeated threats to cancel essential democratic processes get more real all the time, as Democrats continue to gain momentum ahead of the midterm elections. Earlier Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which some have speculated he could use to seize control of the states—and even suspend elections.

Memo to Moderate Democrats: “Abolish ICE” Is Not a Fringe Position - 2026-01-15T19:07:27Z

How do we create liberal democracy in America? Notice that I say “create,” not “protect.” The old constitutional order is gone, and we should be straightforward about that. Nor do I say “return”; the system was clearly incapable of meeting the challenges of our age. We should not want to go back to the past. The past is what led to the present. 

Rather, we need a reconstruction agenda. And we need the entire anti-Trump coalition—from neocons to neo-Stalinists and everyone in between—to be, despite all our differences, fully signed off on it. 

This sounds daunting, but internet squabbling shouldn’t make us think it’s impossible. We achieved near-total unanimity that Trump should be impeached, both times. On other “reconstruction” issues, we’re working toward agreement: Supreme Court reform went from a fringe thing in 2020 to something like the majority position now.

It’s becoming obvious that, whatever else is on the reconstruction agenda, ICE abolition must be included. The agency is acting as a secret police force, ideologically loyal to the far right—perhaps even to Trump personally, like a latter-day Praetorian guard. They have, with the assistance of the executive branch and Supreme Court, arrogated to themselves the power to stop and detain any person for any reason. Unless stopped, it’s hardly insane to think that someday Immigrations and Customs Enforcement will functionally assert the ability to summarily execute American citizens in broad daylight, on camera, and in front of witnesses.

All this, however chaotic, seems to have been the plan all along. It’s a simple trick when you think about it: During fascism’s ascent, you endlessly insist on more immigration enforcement. More funding, more powers, more agents. Once in power, you then have a premade apparatus of violent control outside of the normal checks and balances, one institutionally and culturally set up not to see its victims—those who “aren’t supposed to be here”—as people. You don’t need to set up a secret police to go after dissidents or targeted racial groups; you just expand the definition of “not supposed to be here” to include them. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security recently called for “100 million deportations.” There aren’t anywhere near this many immigrants in the United States. Rather, it’s around the size of the country’s nonwhite population.

It is preposterous to imagine we will be able to create liberal democracy in the U.S. with the secret police of the current regime still in operation. Its overtly fascist recruitment targets far-right groups for its agents. Those agents very plainly see liberal America as, at best, occupied territory and, at worst, subhuman. The instincts driving ICE are not instrumentally rational. Like the institutional equivalent of a serial killer, it is driven by sadism, male insecurity, and the desire to dominate and humiliate. Like a serial killer, it will not stop until it is stopped. 

ICE agents in Michigan explicitly talk of the killing of Renee Nicole Good as a warning to others. They believe they are entitled to absolute obedience, and their only answer to not getting it is violence. Administration officials openly say that accusations of murder will be met with more murders.

And abolition is not enough. There must also be accountability. The crimes of this era cannot go unanswered. Not as a matter of vengeance, or even justice, but of survival. At present, those who commit crimes under a Republican president expect to go unpunished under a future Democratic one. But attempts to enforce the law under a Democratic one will lead to purges when power switches back. 

Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcome. And these are perverse incentives. Imagine a parent who discovers one of their children has abused another. They respond by saying this behavior is wrong but do not impose consequences on the perpetrator, instead punishing the victim for trying to speak up. What will be the result? Will the abuse stop, or get worse? This is how many families respond. Our dual legal regime is institutionalizing the same dynamic at a national scale. And the comparison is not a flippant one: This administration is staffed by abusers, they think like abusers, and they justify themselves like abusers. 

Democratic district attorneys need to arrest ICE agents who break the law. Convictions will be difficult to obtain, but at least attempting them is better than giving up in advance. More broadly, every Democrat needs to get behind disbanding and criminal investigations when they retake federal power. My fear is that if they go into government without a clear plan, some half-baked reform will pass—or perhaps nothing at all. And that won’t be enough.

The objection will be electability—that swing voters won’t go for it. Even if there were merit to it, this argument is de facto giving up on freedom in America and the possibility of its citizens leading dignified lives. ICE has to go. If we can’t sell the electorate on that, we’re not getting out of competitive authoritarianism and are likely on the road to worse. You might as well fight. 

And I’m just not convinced by this electoral defeatism on its own terms. The received wisdom is that immigration isn’t a “good issue” for Democrats. This is out of date—with the horrific consequences of nativism increasingly on display across the world, I think there’s much more opportunity to counterattack than concerned centrists realize. And the debate about ICE isn’t even really about immigration—we can replace the agency, or send its legitimate functions elsewhere. It’s about whether the United States should have a secret police. That’s the frame we should fight this in.

In a similar vein, I think many Democrats associate abolish with defund the police (which I agree isn’t an electoral winner). But they’re just not the same thing. Americans have too much affection for the police as an institution, a consequence of generation after generation of “copaganda” movies and police procedurals. Nothing like that exists for ICE, and there are parakeets older than the agency.

They certainly don’t poll the same: Most of what I’m calling for is already a majority proposition. Punishing ICE lawbreakers is popular: 53 percent of Americans think Jonathan Ross should face criminal consequences for shooting Renee Good. Total abolition of the agency was polling at 42 percent when I started writing this piece; it’s 46 percent now—and that’s before any significant campaigning has been done on it. 

When ordinary Americans are standing up to armed fascist thugs who can kill them with immunity, campaigning on a 46 percent issue is not too much courage to ask for from Democrats. And momentum is on our side; the more the public sees of ICE, the less they like it. Some politicians seem to have an aversion to the specific word abolish. Fine. Call it “replace.” Or anything really. As long as the end point is clear. 

The question I would ask is, are alternate phrasings being put forward to help skittish Democrats get where they need to be, or to urge them not to get there, to stop short of what must be done? The Searchlight Institute, a think tank that describes itself as promoting “a moderate voice” and urges Democrats to “get away from woke, identity politics” recently weighed in against abolish. It was “advocating for an extreme,” they claimed, linking it to defund and accepting the right’s disingenuous argument that it would leave the country without any immigration enforcement. Its proposed alternative—“reform and retrain”—isn’t meant to ease Democrats in; it’s meant to stop them going further. I’d add—and I say this simply as a statement of observable facts—that this worldview—what I call reactionary centrism—has been wrong about virtually everything in the Trump era. There really is no reason to listen to them.

I’m not someone who’s forever yelling at Democrats to “do something!” or blaming them for the crimes of the administration. A lot of energy is wasted arguing in general terms about whether the party is “meeting the moment.” Rather, we should judge them by specific policies. I propose that our praise, criticism, and primary votes be based on whether politicians commit to a reconstruction agenda that includes ICE abolition and accountability.

And I think, ultimately, they will. Leadership and many mainline representatives are making strong statements right now, but stopping well short of what’s needed. But things aren’t going to be getting better anytime soon; appalling crimes will continue to occur, public opinion will move further against ICE, and activists will continue to pressure politicians to take a harder line. I suspect they’ll evolve, step by step. Perhaps “more training” at first, more oversight, then maybe budget cuts. Calls for a congressional investigation, then maybe a criminal one. That is, after all, the same dance we saw done within the party on court reform. Small step by small step, coaxing politicians along so they never had to make too big a leap.

You know what would be nice? If we didn’t have to do that. If they could, for once, just get there. The coalition is ready: 85 percent of Democrats disapprove of ICE; 70 percent support abolition. And partisan signaling would boost both those numbers if the party fully committed. Bill Kristol called for abolition. This isn’t some fringe left thing.

I’ll take a terrified moderate over a fascist any day. But wouldn’t it be so much better to have people leading the party of liberalism who didn’t need to be nagged? Who were just there. Who instinctively understood their base—and hated those trying to kill us. Think of all the mutual frustration and acrimony we could save if the party leaders could, just this one time, lead. 

At any rate, those are the paths: Option A is the Democratic Party immediately gets to where their team already is. Option B is a long, slow, stupid dance of nagging, coaxing, and primaries. 

Option C is fascism.

What is happening in Minneapolis is just the start. Recall the proposed 100 million deportations. We’re not talking about population transfers (as horrific as that would be). Rather, Trump will expand the network of domestic concentration camps and prisons on foreign territory, similar to how much of the killing in the Holocaust occurred outside of Germany. And that will follow—deaths from abuse and neglect will increase, eventually transitioning into systematic mass murder. Eyeballing it, I’d say they don’t have the capacity to get to the scale of Nazi Germany right now. But the willingness is there. And if they can consolidate power, their capacity will increase. Either way, we’re looking at mass graves.

The instinct of many will be to instantly dismiss such a scenario. To say that the administration, in proposing 100 million deportations, is floating something approximating 10 Holocausts sounds like it simply cannot be true. But we’ve seen the same pattern repeat enough times now: From refusing to accept election results to purges, to killing in the street, again and again, the fascists have told us what they’re planning to do. Again and again, it’s been assumed they must be joking. Again and again, they’ve shown they are not. 

NATO Countries Send Troops to Greenland After U.S. Talks Collapse - 2026-01-15T17:50:34Z

NATO is rallying to protect Greenland from the United States.

Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden have all confirmed plans to deploy military personnel to Greenland, after diplomatic talks with the United States this week ended in disaster, CNBC reported Thursday.* 

French President Emmanuel Macron announced on X Wednesday that the French military would “participate in the joint exercises” organized by Denmark in Greenland called Operation Arctic Endurance. The BBC reported that senior French diplomat Olivier Poivre d’Arvor confirmed that initial deployment of  just 15 service members was intended to “show the U.S. that NATO is present.”

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also announced Wednesday that “several officers” from the Swedish Armed Forces had been sent “at Denmark’s request.” The BBC reported two Norwegian soldiers, one British military officer, and a Dutch naval officer had also been sent. 

Following a meeting Wednesday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and other U.S. representatives, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke said that he “didn’t manage to change the American position.” And Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who did not attend the meeting, said there was still a “fundamental disagreement” about the “American ambition to take over Greenland.”

Ahead of talks Wednesday, Trump proclaimed again that the United States “needs” Greenland in order to build his “Golden Dome” security system. 

* An earlier version of this article named a country that was not part of these military plans.

Trump Now Wants to Send U.S. Troops to Mexico - 2026-01-15T17:25:09Z

President Trump wants to put U.S. boots on the ground in Mexico to fight drug cartels, once again reinforcing his complete disregard for the concept of state sovereignty.

According to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump has been pushing for “the participation of U.S. forces,” even though Mexico says it’s not necessary.

Nonetheless, The New York Times has reported that the Trump administration prefers to send either Special Forces (green berets) or CIA officers to join Mexican forces while they raid suspected fentanyl labs. Trump first made the request early last year but raised the idea again after the U.S. military abducted Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

The Mexican government remains staunchly opposed to the proposition.

“We have highly trained army units and special forces,” Mexico’s national security chief, Omar García Harfuch, said last month. “What would they be needed for? … What we need is information.” Harfuch has overseen what he says is a fourfold crackdown on labs and cartels since Sheinbaum came into power.

This has been a long time coming. Trump has floated bombing and invading Mexico repeatedly since returning to office, and has certainly been emboldened by the brazen kidnapping of Maduro. Now, as he sets his eyes on Mexico, the popularity and legitimacy of Sheinbaum and her administration hang in the balance.

Washington Post in Uproar Over Jeff Bezos Reaction to FBI Raid - 2026-01-15T16:55:24Z

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has stayed noticeably silent after one of the newspaper’s reporters, Hannah Natanson, had her home searched by federal agents Wednesday—and the Post’s staff isn’t happy.

Status.news reports that several of the publication’s employees aren’t happy with their owner’s muted reaction to the raid. One called it “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event,” while another said they were “disappointed” but “not surprised.”

“If there was a moment to stand up for our journalistic values, this would be it,” a third staffer said.

The newspaper’s executive editor, Matt Murray, forcefully condemned the search, which resulted in a phone and a smartwatch being seized from Natanson’s home.

“This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Murray wrote in an internal memo. “The Washington Post has a long history of zealous support for robust press freedoms. The entire institution stands by those freedoms and our work.”

Bezos, though, hasn’t said anything, even as the Post’s own editorial board and other publications, such as The New York Times, have spoken out. That’s possibly due to Bezos’s efforts to cozy up to President Trump in his second term, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attending the inauguration in person.

Since then, Bezos has shifted the Post’s opinion section to the right, paid $40 million to first lady Melania Trump for the rights to a documentary, and has met privately with the president multiple times. All signs point to Bezos staying silent in order to keep Trump happy and protect his billions.

ICE Is Using a Terrifying Palantir App to Determine Where to Raid - 2026-01-15T16:19:46Z

How are ICE agents picking where to commit their next act of wanton violence? Well, Palantir has an app for that!

According to a user guide obtained by 404 Media, the app provides ICE agents with a digital map populated by potential deportation targets, each of which has their own detailed dossier, including information such as their name, date of birth, Alien Registration Number (a unique identifier assigned by the U.S. government), and a photograph of the target. The dossier also includes a “confidence score” out of 100 as to how certain the app is of the target’s address.

“Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” the user guide states.

The information comes from a number of sources, including the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and something called CLEAR, which could be an investigation software from Thomson Reuters, according to 404Media.

The app’s “Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab” allows ICE agents to select targets based on a number of criteria, including “Bios & IDs,” “Criminality,” “Location,” and “Operations,” the user guide shows. Using the app, ICE agents can select individual targets or multiple targets at once by drawing a shape around a selected area. During a sworn deposition earlier this month about a “dragnet” raid in Woodburn, Oregon, an officer with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Unit said that agents used the app to find target-rich areas.

“You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than … like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent … you’re not going to go there,” said the agent, who was identified as “JB” in the court documents obtained by 404 Media.

While the user guide does not explicitly state what company created the app, the app’s full name appears in a $29.9 million supplemental agreement with Palantir that started in September and is planned to continue for at least a year, 404Media reported.

ICE previously signed an agreement with Palantir in July to develop an ImmigrationOS platform, which would use artificial intelligence to identify and track potential targets. ICE has also assembled a team to monitor social media 24/7, surveying platforms including Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit.

Grave AI Recruiting Error Is Making ICE Even More Dangerous - 2026-01-15T16:07:21Z

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement used artificial intelligence to streamline its rush to add 10,000 more agents to its countrywide crackdown, according to NBC. This resulted in a grave technical error, as recruits were hired and assigned to field offices without adequate training.

The AI was supposed to simply scan résumés and identify recruits for the law enforcement officers, or LEO, program. The program requires four weeks of online training, while applicants who aren’t LEOs require eight. But most of all recent applicants reviewed were classified by the AI as LEOs, allowing them to forgo half of the required training even though they had no law enforcement experience whatsoever—a decision that could be dangerous for all involved.

The mistake was not identified until mid-fall, when ICE was through most of its hiring upswing. While it is in the process of correcting the mistake, how many of those 10,000 officers entered American streets with only four weeks of training?

“Another Tuskegee”: Leaked Docs Reveal CDC Is Funding Deadly Study - 2026-01-15T15:37:33Z

Update: A senior official at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that the study has been cancelled.

The Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding a heavily flawed vaccine trial in west Africa that is being described as “another Tuskegee.”

The health newsletter Inside Medicine obtained the protocols for a study receiving $1.6 million to experiment on babies in Guinea-Bissau. The experiment is a “randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of neonatal Hepatitis B vaccination on early-life mortality, morbidity, and long-term developmental outcomes,” according to a Federal Register notice. 

The comparisons to Tuskegee, an experiment in which the U.S. government let syphilis go unchecked in African Americans in Alabama from 1932 to 1972, came from an unnamed CDC official who spoke to Inside Medicine. 

“This is another Tuskegee,” the official said. “We are allowing children, infants, to be exposed to Hepatitis B when we could prevent it, and then follow them for five years to see what happens. That’s not long enough to see the long-term benefits, but might be long enough to find some non-specific effects.”

The experiment had raised ethical concerns at the time the funding grant was announced in December, with Professor Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine telling The Guardian that it “has set alarm bells ringing in the global health community.” The World Health Organization has recommended the hepatitis B vaccination at birth since 2009. 

But the experiment’s protocols not only legitimize those concerns, they raise them. Inside Medicine found that there’s no placebo in the trial, and that this experiment is studying  a vaccine known to be effective in order to find “non-specific effects” of vaccines. That’s language straight from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s echo chamber, as he and his fellow anti-vaxxers make unfounded claims that many vaccines have unknown harmful effects. 

The study is also flawed because hepatitis B causes serious problems later in life, not shortly after birth, so trying to measure mortality and morbidity is not likely to yield any useful conclusions right away. Plus, none of the vaccines in the study are FDA-approved, raising the question of why the CDC is funding a study of vaccines that aren’t available to Americans. 

Other issues in the trial include a lack of testing of mothers for hepatitis B, meaning that some of the babies at the highest risk for contracting it could be left without the vaccine, and that there’s no “stop” protocol in case the results are very bad for the participants. The Department of Health and Human Services is defending the study by claiming Guinea-Bissau isn’t mandating the hepatitis B vaccine until 2027 anyway.

However, the $1.6 million grant could instead be used to vaccinate Guinea-Bissau’s children for a decade against hepatitis B, calling into question the usefulness of this experiment. 

All of this seems to confirm that Kennedy’s views are now becoming U.S. government and CDC policy, with eugenics-style experiments being given the green light in an attempt to legitimize anti-vaccine views. How many experiments like this will there be, and how many lives will be lost? 

Trump Is Keeping Money From Venezuelan Oil Sale in Offshore Account - 2026-01-15T15:05:50Z

President Trump is keeping proceeds from the first sale of Venezuelan oil in an offshore bank account based in Qatar, according to reporting from Semafor. The sale was worth $500 million.

This unprecedented move is yet another middle finger to Venezuelan sovereignty and once again raises questions about the president’s cozy relationship with the Qatari government.

“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,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren told Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

That seems to be exactly what Trump is doing. Trump has vowed to “indefinitely” control Venezuela’s oil, claiming the proceeds will be given back to the U.S. and Venezuela.

Still, it remains unclear just how that money held in Qatar will benefit the Venezuelan people the administration claims to care about.

Trump Threatens to Invoke Insurrection Act to Stop Minnesota Protests - 2026-01-15T14:29:07Z

President Donlad Trump threatened Thursday to send the U.S. military into Minnesota, following the state’s second shooting involving a federal officer in as many weeks.

“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,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Protests in Minneapolis escalated Wednesday night after a federal agent shot and injured a Venezuelan immigrant fleeing from a traffic stop. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that the man and two others attacked a federal agent with a snow shovel and a broom handle, causing the officer to fear for his life. This claim has not been independently verified.

At least 200 protesters gathered near the apparent scene, launching fireworks at police officers, who deployed gas in order to disperse the crowd, but it didn’t work, The New York Times reported. Heavily armed Border Patrol agents arrived but were beaten back by protesters wielding snowballs, and unleashed a chemical gas on the crowd before they went. Shortly after, ICE agents arrived in an unmarked vehicle and sprayed chemicals in the protesters’ faces. One protester fired several fireworks toward the agents’ vehicle as they departed.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on X Wednesday that the so-called “Minnesota Insurrection” was the “direct result of a FAILED governor and a TERRIBLE mayor encouraging violence against law enforcement.” Addressing Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Blanche wrote that he was “focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”

This latest shooting comes just one week after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three, sparking widespread outrage at the killing of an American citizen. The Trump administration claimed that Good had been attempting to ram federal agents in an act of so-called “domestic terror,” but video evidence suggests otherwise. Trump most recently claimed her death was the result of being “disrespectful” of law enforcement.

It seems that the Trump administration has been actively provoking unrest in Minnesota, deploying an additional 1,000 federal immigration officers after Good’s death, targeting the states with racist smears about Somali immigrants, and suspending funding to childcare programs. In recent weeks, some have speculated that invoking the Insurrection Act was Trump’s plan all along, as part of a master plan to seize control—and even suspend elections.

This story has been updated.

ICE Shoots Another Man in Minneapolis as Crackdown Escalates - 2026-01-15T13:58:11Z

ICE has shot another person in Minneapolis, raising tensions in an already inflamed atmosphere.

The Department of Homeland Security said that an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan man in north Minneapolis Wednesday night after he attacked agents during a traffic stop. Following the shooting, a crowd of protesters gathered, setting off fireworks and throwing snowballs at federal agents. Law enforcement responded with chemical irritants, and Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told people to “leave immediately.”

The shooting took place about 4.5 miles away from where Renee Good was shot last week, according to a DHS statement. DHS said that they tried to stop the undocumented man, only for him to drive away and then take off on foot after crashing into a car. DHS claims that when they reached the person, two other people from a nearby apartment arrived and attacked an ICE agent.

“Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life,” DHS said. According to the city of Minneapolis, the Venezuelan man escaped with non-life-threatening injuries and was hospitalized.

The Trump administration seems to be bent on making the situation worse in Minneapolis. More agents are being sent to the city, even as many of them are miserable and feel the government is making things worse. Agents are reportedly going door to door looking for Asian immigrants, federal prosecutors are quitting rather than follow the administration’s orders, and even podcaster Joe Rogan has turned on the White House over ICE’s violence.

President Trump claims that a “DAY OF RECKONING” is coming for Minnesota. He may be right, but not in the way he thinks. The backlash is only growing larger.

Transcript: Mike Johnson’s Gaslighting on ICE Takes Truly Vile Turn - 2026-01-15T11:35:10Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 15 episode of The
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.


Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Folks, it’s getting worse. A young protester was left permanently blind after a Homeland Security agent fired at him at close range in Santa Ana, according to his family. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller made it 100 percent clear that ICE agents are wholly unaccountable to the law. House Speaker Mike Johnson just demonstrated that he feels no pressure to place any limits on ICE in the least and blamed Renee Good for her death in Minneapolis in a shockingly callous way. And on top of all that, some influential voices on the religious right are saying that it’s time to pray not for the victims, but for Kristi Noem and ICE. We think that last one is important. There’s simply no moral voice out there that is capable of reaching people like Trump, Johnson, and Kristi Noem. How is that possible and what does it mean? Our go-to person on these kinds of questions is Sarah Posner, who’s written several very good books on the religious right. Posner is launching a new podcast, Reign of Error, so we’re talking to her about all this today. Sarah, so good to have you on.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So we’ve just learned that the Justice Department sees no basis for an investigation into the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Let’s start with an exchange that Mike Johnson had with reporters in which he was asked to defend the administration’s labeling of her as a domestic terrorist.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): What I saw, the angle that I saw, was this woman was taunting ICE officers. She was impeding law enforcement; she was violating a number of laws in doing so. They were very patient and asked her multiple times to remove her vehicle and stop impeding their operation, and she refused. Her partner, whoever that was, was taunting the officer. It was a … it was a crazy set of circumstances. And from the angle I saw—this is my view; I’m not the investigator and I’m not the judge and jury—but I’ll tell you what I saw is that the vehicle … she revved, she hit the accelerator and hit the ICE officer, and he reacted in a split second.


Sargent: So that’s just crazy. In every way, he’s blaming the victim. Sarah, what do you make of that?

Posner: Well, to him, somebody on the left—or somebody that he perceives to be on the left—is the enemy of ICE, is the enemy of law enforcement. So that person can never be in the right; that person can never be innocent. That person can’t exercise her First Amendment rights. So to him, she’s not a citizen concerned about her neighbors. To him, she is a leftist who is out to harm and impede law enforcement.

Sargent: I mean, that’s just stunning, Sarah. This is a guy who’s supposed to be a moral leader of sorts, and he can’t bring himself to say that this is really a horrible thing that requires reform in any sense.

Posner: For Johnson, he represents only Republicans. In his mind, he doesn’t represent all American people. He thinks that he is on a mission from God to carry out a biblical or a Christian kind of government. And in his mind, that kind of government does not represent the ideals of, you know, helping your neighbor, welcoming the stranger—things that many people would think are biblical values.

But for him, the biblical values are a strong, powerful, militarized government that lays down the law and protects America from what he sees as America’s enemies: the left.

Sargent: I want to get into that big stuff a little later. I want to listen to a little bit more from Mike Johnson first. Listen to this.

Reporter (voiceover): Mr. Speaker, a lot of Democrats are saying that they want to add rioters or oversight to ICE funding in the Homeland Security bill. What are your thoughts about doing that?

Mike Johnson (voiceover): I think there’s a lot of Democrats playing games right now with national security and with law enforcement, and I think it’s dangerous. ICE is doing what ICE is designed to do. By its very name, it’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are enforcing federal law. They’re going and getting dangerous criminals, sometimes in sanctuary cities where they get too much resistance. We’ve seen the tragic consequences and effects of that. So I don’t think we need to be cutting funding right now. I think the American people want the law to be enforced. And I think we need to let law enforcement do its job.


Sargent: Now, this is really wretched. He’s very subtle about it, but note how he slips in this idea that the problem is too much resistance to ICE and that we’ve seen the consequences and effects of that. Again, blaming the victims of ICE violence for that violence; zero indication that Republicans have even the slightest bit of a problem with what ICE is doing. What do you think of that?

Posner: Well, they would like Americans to believe that the violence that we’re seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and elsewhere is caused by protesters, is caused by neighbors with whistles—not caused by the ICE agents themselves or the Customs and Border Protection agents.

And so to him, he would like America to believe that, yes, there are riots in the street. He used that word: riots. And to him, by definition, those are not caused by ICE, because ICE is carrying out a mission from God to defend America from an invasion of illegal immigrants—from the left who would harbor those illegal immigrants. That’s the kind of narrative that he’s trying to draw here.

So he would never even conceive of reining in ICE, of putting restrictions on what they can do with their weapons or in terms of detaining people. To him, they are carrying out a government and a God-given mission to protect America.

Sargent: Absolutely. And note how Mike Johnson also says that the American people want the law to be enforced and to let law enforcement do its job. Now, we’re seeing polls showing broad disapproval of ICE right now. And I think what most people are getting very clearly is that this is not really law enforcement any longer in any recognizable sense. You’ve been watching the videos. Is that law enforcement?

Posner: No, absolutely not. It’s like a death squad. I mean, you watched the video of the shooting of Renee Good, and it’s absolutely horrifying. Mike Johnson claims he watched the video too, and that what he saw was that she was impeding law enforcement and that she was violating a number of laws. That’s what he said. He said that.

What laws was she violating, right? She turned the car around when confronted by the ICE agent. She was not impeding him.

The idea that they’re carrying out a legitimate law enforcement mission is ridiculous because they’re arresting people who are U.S. citizens, they’re detaining people who are legally here, they’re racially profiling people based on their skin color or what language they’re speaking or even where they happen to be. And so, this is not law enforcement. This is state police trying to ethnically cleanse America.

Sargent: I think there’s no doubt about it. The Los Angeles Times is reporting on this other example, which is just horrific. This kid, a 21-year-old, Kaden Rummler, underwent six hours of surgery, and doctors found plastic, glass, and metal embedded in his eyes and around his face, according to the L.A. Times.

This is after he was shot by a non-lethal round at close range. This is a kid, right? And there’s just no way that kid posed any kind of serious threat. I think, Sarah, I think a lot of non-religious people have trouble understanding how anyone who professes to be a Christian could defend this kind of thing. So maybe you can explain how Mike Johnson views all of it and where he’s coming from.

Posner: Well, for Johnson, one of the few legitimate activities of government is law enforcement. And in particular, law enforcement that’s out to defend and protect his vision of what America should be: a country of compliant, white, Christian people who do not question authority. And so that’s why, for him, he picks up on this propaganda that ICE is actually carrying out law enforcement operations against illegal immigrants.

I mean, there is a procedure for deporting people who are undocumented. Obama did it and Biden did it. It’s the law. There is not a legal procedure for these heavily armed, masked, no-identification thugs to run around neighborhoods and terrorize preschools and Halloween parades and everything else, disrupting people’s lives like that.

If you have somebody who has a documented reason to be deported, there’s a process for doing that. That process does not include basically turning our cities into war zones.

Sargent: You would think not. And you’ve been looking at what some evangelicals are saying, and they’re telling their followers to pray for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE. Can you walk us through what you’re hearing and what it means?

Posner: Franklin Graham, who of course is well known for being the son of the iconic evangelist Billy Graham. And Jack Hibbs, who is a California pastor who is possibly best known for being close to Charlie Kirk. Graham went on the Christian Broadcasting Network and talked about how he and Hibbs had a conversation about how today at noon—at noon, whatever time zone you’re in, noon for you—was a day that you should pray. And you should pray because there’s a lot of chaos going on in the world right now.

I don’t think that anyone would disagree that there’s a lot of chaos going on in the world right now. Much of it is being inflicted by Donald Trump and his administration. But to them it’s more like, Well, it’s just a sign of the times. Maybe all this chaos is happening because we’re getting closer to the end times. That makes it even more important for you to pray right now.

And you’re supposed to pray for leaders in authority. This is a big thing with them: That you’re supposed to pray for leaders. So pray for President Trump, pray for Kristi Noem—who is a “great lady who loves God.” Franklin Graham said that on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

So to them, it fits right in with this idea that ICE and the Trump administration are protecting the real America from enemies, foreign and domestic. And that you need to pray for them because they’re doing a really tough job right now. That prayers mean something. They mean something to God. They mean something to the people that you’re praying for.

But it’s really a way of mobilizing followers around this idea that these people need to be prayed for because they’re under threat, and they need to be prayed for because they’re doing the right thing.

Sargent: Yeah, and I want to bring in something Stephen Miller said, because I think there’s an interesting through line between what Mike Johnson is saying and what Miller says here. Listen to this from Miller.

Stephen Miller (voiceover): To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties and no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.


Sargent: It’s really interesting to me how they’re really sort of saying the same thing, right? Mike Johnson is essentially saying: We will not hold ICE officers accountable. And this is a Christian authoritarian vision.

And with Miller, it’s just sheer authoritarianism, but there is a through line there. Can you talk about Christian authoritarianism and how there’s, like, a religious authoritarian and a secular authoritarian side to Trumpism?

Posner: Right. Well, I mean, Trump got elected—especially the first time, but also the second time—appealing to a coalition of voters that included straight-up white supremacists and racists and nativists and white evangelicals, many of whom believe the same things. But on the surface, their branding was more about faith and religious freedom and family and opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights and things like that.

But at the heart of it is this idea that there is authority, and then there are the people who are governed by the people in authority, and that it is your duty as an American, as a Christian, to be obedient to that authority. Now, recall that it works one way. It only works that way when a Republican, a white Christian, is in authority.

Because you can’t look at the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol five years ago and think that those people were obeying authority. They would say they were obeying a higher authority. They were ... on a godly mission to save America from the left. So this entire notion is created around the idea that the left—or anyone perceived to be on the left—are enemies of the true America.

So whether you see it from the perspective of Stephen Miller, who’s just a nativist racist, or you see it from the perspective of Mike Johnson, who contends that he is carrying out this divine mission to submit to God’s authority and restore America as a Christian nation it really has the same effect: that these ICE agents are untouchable.

And that if you are perceived in any way to be challenging them, that you deserve what you get.

Sargent: You know, if you think about Minneapolis, which is really Ground Zero for the Trump/Stephen Miller/Mike Johnson war on the America of the 21st century, you can really kind of see the way they think of Minneapolis as something that needs this kind of violent cleansing. That’s what I think is going through their heads.

Minneapolis is a den of iniquity—you know, protesters, a lot of gay people, a lot of—

Posner: Somali immigrants.

Sargent: A lot of Somali immigrants who are committing “fraud.” They are carrying out a Christian authoritarian cleansing. Isn’t that really the way to think about it?

Posner: Absolutely. And do not forget that Trump probably maintains a grievance against Tim Walz for calling him and his supporters “weird.” I mean, I think that that is also part of it.

He has a grievance against Walz. He has a grievance against Ilhan Omar, right? And so the idea that he could attack this particular city that’s ... governed by his former adversary, and is in the district of his sworn enemy, Ilhan Omar, and that he can portray the reason for it as being, Well, these Somali immigrants are looting America.

He has actually used that word, looting, and that word has got to be deliberate, because looting is a word—it’s kind of a trigger word for conservatives about what protesters do when there are “riots” in a city, right? And so all of this is, like, very much tied together in the idea that Trump is protecting America from illegal immigrants.

And not only are these people, he claims, here illegally, but they’re doing illegal things. They’re looting from America with this alleged fraud. And they’re not white. And so this just has the perfect stew for Trump to tap into a variety of these grievances that exist in his base.

Sargent: Yeah. So where does this end? Diverse, secular America—the one that exists in the actual Minneapolis, not the one that’s depicted on Fox News, not the fantasy version—that version of America is bigger than theirs. Is it not? Does that matter? How do we assert that vision of America?

I feel like Democrats maybe could be essentially asserting that that America is our America as well, in a way that they aren’t. Just to close this out: What should we all be saying along these lines to respond to people like Mike Johnson who recognize no moral authority that I can see?

Posner: Well, as you know, polls show that even though Republicans—a majority of Republicans—still support what Trump is doing and what ICE is doing, a majority of Americans overall do not. A majority of Democrats, a majority of independents, and very notably, he’s massively underwater with Generation Z. So the future of this country is not armed thugs roving the streets of our cities and terrorizing people and shooting them in the face. That’s not the future that anybody wants.

Mike Johnson can gaslight us all he wants that Renee Good was doing something wrong. But we’ve all seen the video. We’ve all seen what ICE is doing. And how many people really want to live like that?

I mean, maybe Republicans think this kind of operation will never come to their city because Trump is only punishing blue cities. But, you know, there are a lot of Republicans out there who have friends and relatives who live in blue cities. Is that what you want it to be like for them? Or when you go visit them? And I think that this is just un-American because it’s just inhuman. So it’s not just un-American. It’s horrific. It’s fascistic. And it’s not what Americans want.

And I think that rather than tiptoeing around ICE funding, or QR codes to identify ICE officers, Democrats really need to focus on taking the bully pulpit and saying: This is not America. This is not the America Americans want. We are a people who live peacefully with our neighbors, even if they’re different from us. And that’s who we are.

Sargent: Sarah Posner, that was beautifully said. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Sarah’s new podcast. It launches on January 22, and it’s called Reign of Error. I’ll be listening. Sarah, good to talk to you as always.

Posner: Thanks, Greg.

Authoritarianism Is Climate Policy - 2026-01-15T11:00:00Z

The Trump administration will stop counting lives saved in its cost-benefit analyses of air pollution regulations, and instead will only consider the cost to businesses. “It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the [Environmental Protection Agency]’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment,” The New York Times reported this week. “The change could make it easier to repeal limits on [fine particulate matter and ozone] from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country.”

Declaring the demise of climate policy is practically a weekly media event these days. “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in scale and scope,” wrote Axios’s Amy Harder in this week’s installment, noting that the president recently withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Whether this collapse in climate-change ambition proves permanent or temporary will shape the planet—which is still warming in unprecedented ways—and trillions of dollars in global energy investment.”

Of course, the “collapse” has not been stunning in any way: It is precisely what the Trump team promised, and the international repercussions are precisely what experts predicted. But more importantly, can one even call it a collapse? The vague phrase “the climate agenda” is doubtless intended to conjure Greta Thunberg and the Green New Deal, and yes, that agenda has been summarily abandoned by a lot of politicians of late. But Trump does have a climate agenda. It’s just a negative and bloody one, as it’s intertwined with his authoritarianism.

Consider the U.S. military invasion of Venezuela. However murderous and abusive Maduro’s regime, killing some 75 people to kidnap him and having no clear plan to stabilize the country—except to exploit oil reserves that would blow 13 percent of the global carbon budget by 2050, making life costlier and more precarious for everyone but oligarchs—is clearly not a humanitarian intervention. It’s an intervention, albeit a very clumsy one, on behalf of the business interests Trump’s chummy with.

It’s the same principle on display with Greenland. Trump is proposing a forced takeover of a sovereign territory in order to dictate the terms of extraction of rare earths and fossil fuels, while seizing a slice of the rapidly melting Arctic pie. The administration claims this is a matter of national security, but it’s hard to see how overturning the NATO table and smashing it to smithereens will make ordinary people safer—particularly if this unleashes Russia and China to pursue similarly imperialist plans. What it will do is enrich the companies that get lucrative contracts.

Authoritarianism is a response to climate change, as numerous people have warned for years. That includes imperialism and the race to secure resources, the criminalization of protest, and anti-immigration policy. It’s not an attempt to prevent global warming, but rather an attempt to protect a chosen few—to build a wall, whether figurative or literal, around a certain class of people.

The new EPA policy, which explicitly rejects lives saved as a lesser concern than business profits, exposes this line of thinking. You’ve heard it before, though. Fighting climate change would be too costly, so the narrative goes. Costly to whom? Not fighting climate change is already very costly to everyone else, whether in terms of affordability or lives lost.

Insofar as there is hope in all this, it lies in the mounting body of evidence that this approach is in fact extremely unpopular. Voters overwhelmingly oppose the Trump administration’s moves to shut down climate research. They oppose gutting the regulations limiting pollution. And they increasingly see the connection between the climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis. The authoritarian sales pitch has always been about convincing voters that they are to be a part of the protected class. More and more people are now saying they’re not convinced.


Stat of the week
13 percent

Current U.S. plans to exploit Venezuelan oil reserves would burn through 13 percent of the global carbon budget needed to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, the Guardian
reports.


What I’m Reading

RFK Jr. Forgot What Makes Us Healthy

The recently released inverted food pyramid has a lot of problems. Emily Atkin cuts to the heart of the matter.

This is my biggest problem with the new food pyramid. It treats food as a purely biological input rather than a public ecological choice—as if health exists on a separate plane from the land, water, and climate that make nourishment possible in the first place. Thinking this way may make sense for individual bodies in the short term. But in the long term, and in the aggregate, it’s deeply irresponsible.

You cannot build a healthy society on top of an unhealthy biosphere. The climate, water, soil, and land that produce our food are as important to our health as the food itself. Without them, all our talk of “healthy eating” becomes a kind of denial—pretending we can thrive while the systems that keep us alive break down.

Read Emily Atkin’s full essay at Heated.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

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