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Are The Losing Their Religion?

Published by digby on January 22, 2026

If you’re wondering why Trump is having a tantrum over the NY Times poll, here’s a gift link:

Less than a third of voters think the country is better off than it was when President Trump returned to the White House a year ago, with a wide majority saying he has focused on the wrong issues, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University.

A majority of voters disapprove of how Mr. Trump has handled top issues including the economy, immigration, the war between Russia and Ukraine and his actions in Venezuela. And significantly, a majority of Americans, 51 percent, said that Mr. Trump’s policies had made life less affordable for them.

All told, 49 percent of voters said the country was worse off than a year ago, compared with 32 percent who said it was better.

[See all of the latest polls measuring President Trump’s approval rating.]

The survey also revealed the extent to which Mr. Trump has polarized the nation into its furthest partisan corners, with more voters seeing him as on track to be historically bad or good than merely below or above average.

Some 42 percent of voters said he was on track to be one of the worst presidents in American history — and 19 percent said he was headed to be one of the best.

Only the most hardcore cultists (19%!) see him the way he thinks people see him from the way the GOP establishment treats him. No wonder he’s having a breakdown today.

Dan Pfeiffer offers an analysis:

The brand-new New York Times poll out today is notable because it paints a devastating portrait of Trump’s political standing—with real implications for the midterms and guidance for the Democratic strategy.

Here’s what you need to know:

In this poll, Trump is underwater on every single issue except securing the U.S./Mexico border, where he has a meager 3-point net approval. But it’s clear the economy is the driving force behind Trump’s numbers.

Nearly 70% of voters rate the economy unfavorably, and 68% say the economy is the same or worse than this time last year.

Trump is 18 points underwater on the economy and 29 points underwater on the cost of living. In 2024, Trump had a seven-point advantage on the economy over Kamala Harris in the New York Times’s final poll.

These are dramatic shifts on what used to be Trump’s strongest issue. And there’s further evidence that the economy is what’s pushing Trump’s 2024 voters away from him.

But that’s not all:

Democrats are currently debating whether to vote for a bill to fund ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. The party is also, once again, wrestling with the slogan “Abolish ICE.”

As we debate those matters, it’s worth noting that immigration—and ICE in particular—is no longer a political strength for Trump.

  • His immigration approval is 40–58.
  • 63% disapprove of ICE’s actions.
  • 61% think ICE’s actions have gone too far.

The chaos surrounding the ICE deployments has contributed to the larger sense that Trump is out of control—and not focused on what voters actually care about.

You can debate what role immigration messaging should play in our campaign strategy, but the idea that Democrats should remain silent or be afraid to speak about ICE is absurd and not borne out by the data.

The must. If they don’t they will appear as out of touch as Trump and his cronies are when they spew their “let them eat cake” commentary on the economy.

This poll is a reminder that Trump’s political strength was always more fragile than it looked. He didn’t win in 2024 because voters loved his agenda. He won because enough people were mad about prices—and willing to roll the dice on a guy promising to fix it.

Now they’ve seen what “fix it” actually means.

Trump isn’t governing like someone trying to lower costs. He’s governing like someone trying to settle scores, terrorize immigrants, and enrich himself—while picking bizarre fights that make the country weaker and more unstable. And voters are noticing.

This poll is vivid argument for why Democrats should be on offense.

Amen.

We’re The Baddies Now

Published by digby on January 22, 2026

Politico EU has a dispatch from the Davos train wreck:

European governments have reached a difficult conclusion: The Americans are the baddies now.

As leaders of the EU’s 27 countries assemble in Brussels for an emergency summit Thursday, that assessment is predominant across almost all capitals in Europe, according to nine EU diplomats. These officials come from countries which have varying degrees of historic fondness of the U.S., and they made clear that this way of thinking is particularly stark in places that have previously had the strongest ties to Washington.

The sense of dread and skepticism remains, and the summit will still go ahead, despite Donald Trump declaring late Wednesday that he’s struck a deal on Greenland and won’t impose tariffs on European countries after all — underscoring how the gathering has become more than just about the latest blowup.

The U.S. president’s designs on Greenland, which he set out earlier in the day in Davos, Switzerland, demanding “immediate negotiations” to obtain the island, have come as a last straw for many leaders. Throughout the first year of his second term, they had clung to the hope that their worst fears about the country that has underpinned European security since 1945 wouldn’t be realized.

But the moment for making nice “has ended” and “the time has come to stand up against Trump,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO secretary-general and ex-Danish prime minister, told BBC radio.

Several of the envoys that POLITICO spoke to for this article, all of whom were granted anonymity because of the sensitive nature of their work, said they felt personally betrayed, some having studied and worked in the U.S. or having advocated for closer transatlantic ties. “Our American Dream is dead,” said an EU diplomat from a country that has been among the bloc’s transatlantic champions. “Donald Trump murdered it.”

I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. The damage done by his antics this time is very serious and I think it is irreparable. If we manage to get through the next three years and can start to reform ourselves, perhaps we can find a way to reestablish a secure world order but it won’t be what it was for the last 80 years. It will probably be a lot more volatile and in the nuclear age that is extremely worrying. But what’s done is done.

Trump’s speech at Davos, during which he called Denmark’s self-governing island “our territory,” did nothing to dial down the temperature 24 hours before the leaders’ hastily arranged gathering in the Belgian capital to discuss their next response to the disintegrating postwar order.

While Trump ruled out the use of military force to seize Greenland, EU governments didn’t regard this as a climbdown because of the harshness of his language about Europe in general and clear confirmation of his intentions, according to two EU diplomats.

Trump did eventually walk back his threat of issuing tariffs on the eight European countries which he considered to be standing in his way on Greenland, but by that point, things were already too far gone.

“After the back and forth of the last few days, we should now wait and see what substantive agreements are reached between [NATO Secretary-General] Mr. Rutte and Mr. Trump,” Germany’s Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil told German broadcaster ZDF. “No matter what solution is now found for Greenland, everyone must understand that we cannot sit back, relax, and be satisfied.”

The moment the U.S. president threatened those tariffs on Saturday was when the schism “became real,” said an EU diplomat.

He thinks he can just threaten and blackmail the whole world and they will automatically capitulate or, if things don’t go as he wished, agree to just forgive and forget and carry on as if nothing happened. And he’s not wrong is thinking that since it’s what happened in his first term and over the course of the last year. That’s no longer the case. It appears that he finally crossed the line.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen summed up the mood during her Davos speech Tuesday.

“The world has changed permanently,” she said. “We need to change with it.”

And get a load of this:

The abrupt decline of U.S. standing has been particularly painful for Denmark, which Trump called “ungrateful” in Davos.

Copenhagen has been shocked by his behavior, having for decades been among America’s most friendly allies. Denmark deployed forces in support of the U.S. to some of the most dangerous combat zones in the Middle East, including Helmand Province in Afghanistan. The country suffered among the worst per-capita losses of life.

How can they ever forgive this kind of insult. It’s absolutely grotesque:

They did not stay off the front lines. Every country that participated suffered casualties. Denmark had more deaths per Capita than the US did. He is a disgusting piece of garbage for saying that.

The Guardian:

Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Trump said he was “not sure” Nato would meet the “ultimate test” of defending the US if it were under threat. “We’ve never needed them … They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines,” he said, adding the US has been “very good to Europe and to many other countries. It has to be a two-way street.”

Those remarks follow similar comments earlier in the week, when he described the alliance as “overrated” and questioned its members’ willingness to respond to a crisis.“I know we’ll come to [Nato’s] rescue, but I just really do question whether or not they’ll come to ours,” he said before attending the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A total of 3,486 Nato troops died in the 20-year conflict, of which the majority, 2,461, were US service members. Four hundred and fifty-seven British troops died, while another 2,000 military and civilian personnel were wounded in action. Canada, long the US’s closest ally and largest trading partner, suffered 165 deaths, including civilians. Canada’s 12-year deployment was the country’s longest combat mission, with more than 40,000 personnel, and the deadliest since the Korean war in the 1950s.

Other Nato allies, including Italy, Germany and France, also had soldiers who died. Trump has singled out Denmark, which controls Greenland – a territory the US president has said Washington “must” take over” – as being “ungrateful” for US protection during the second world war. Denmark suffering 44 combat deaths iin Afghanistan, the most per capita outside the US.

Unforgiveable.

How Embarrassing

Published by digby on January 22, 2026

Trump’s “Board of Peace” signing ceremony which they hastily put together earlier this week to give Trump a moment to appear to be running the world at Davos was a bust:

Some of the United States’ longest standing allies have scorned en masse a signing ceremony for Donald Trump’s new “Board of Peace” initiative. Not a single representative from a Western European country was present at the launch Thursday morning at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Fewer than 20 nations made an appearance, among them Gulf States like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, along with Argentina and Paraguay. The number stands well below the 35 anticipated by senior White House officials.

“Every one of them’s a friend of mine,” Trump said from the stage. “In this group I like every single one of them, can you believe it? Usually I have about two or three that I can’t stand.”

“They’re great people,” he added. “They’re great leaders.”’

As about a dozen world leaders sat stone-faced on the stage, Trump went on to brag that his new group would bring “glorious peace” to the Middle East. “For that region and for the whole region of the world, because I’m calling the world a region,” he said. “The world is a region.”

That sounds like a flub and it probably was. He said region and then quickly corrected. But there is an underlying truth. He does see the world as a region — his region. I suspect he really doesn’t like the idea that he’s confined to the Western Hemisphere. He sees himself as a world conqueror now.

Orange Julius Caesar.

This sad collection of tinpot dictators, middle east potentates and Russian vassal states makes it clear that he has a long way to go.

At several points throughout the signing ceremony, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to be the only person in the room loudly applauding before others slowly joined in.

Poor Little Donnie Is Having A Very Bad Day

Published by digby on January 22, 2026

The saddest things about all these polls are the interviews with Trump voters where they are brainwashed into believing that screeds like that are Trump “telling it like it is.” They have lost the ability to recognize what a childish, whining, liar sounds like (if they ever knew.)

That post is pathetic. The president crying about his poll numbers the same way he blubbered about the 2020 election because he is the sorest loser in world history and he can’t handle the truth. He has no dignity, no pride, no honor. And they see all that and see someone to admire. I’ll never understand it.

The polls are very bad and obviously he knows it. I suspect that most of the time they don’t show them to him but he saw today’s NY Times poll. And he’s made similar comments about how his PR people aren’t selling his accomplishments very well (says the salesman in chief….) He knows that the vast majority of the country is rejecting him and he can’t stand it. He’s a malignant monster but he wants people to love him. His damaged psychology knows no depths.

Update: Waaaaah!

Fault Not In Our Stars

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 22, 2026

But in ourselves

Someone on Wednesday mentioned that Donald Trump’s next book should be “The Art of Distraction.” He certainly expends more energy diverting the public’s eyes from the millions of still-unreleased Epstein files than he does improving the lives of the MAGAs who put him into the Oval Office twice. So, I thought it appropriate to remind people with one of my highway signs.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s an interesting post from Danish economist Lars Christensen on the wages of Trumpism. The fault for the current transatlantic turmoil, he believes, lies not with Donald Trump but with Americans who have “betrayed the international order that the US, with its Western partners, were the main architects of after the Second World War.”

I have have some nits to pick, but nevertheless:

The problem isn’t Trump. The problem is the US.

When the outside world observes Trump’s insane behaviour and his threats against allies, and we at the same time observe that there is no real action from the US public, Congress, the US Supreme Court, or the US media about this insanity, we will all have to conclude that the US accepts this behaviour.

The public in the US think the US is entitled to a certain position in the world where there is no room for decent behaviour and where there are no norms and rules.

That means that we all have to conclude that the US — not only Trump — has betrayed the international order that the US, with its Western partners, were the main architects of after the Second World War.

This is the conclusion that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney so clearly laid out in his speech at Davos yesterday. We simply cannot trust the US to play by the rules any more. Therefore, we also fundamentally have to ask ourselves — should we trust the financial and economic structure which is an integral part of the global rules-based order?

Americans live in the illusion that the US can do everything on its own, despite the fact that the US for nearly 20 years has lived beyond its means.

US private and government consumption has been funded by, among others, European central banks and pension funds. But we now have to ask ourselves — why would we trade in dollars? Why would we put our savings into US Treasury bonds?

If the US is not a rules-based society, we cannot trust the dollar to be a stable currency, and it would be insane to hold dollars. As domestic US institutions are eroded and governance structures destroyed, the US will be turned into an emerging market economy — or more accurately, a de-merging economy.

If the US threatens the territory of allies, then the US acts as an authoritarian bully nation. Nobody in their right mind would lend money to the US government. If the US doesn’t live up to its international obligations and respect the sovereignty of other nations, why would we expect the US government to honour its debts?

If Trump can tariff nations that will not give up their territory, then there is certainly no reason to believe that the US will not introduce capital controls. And if that is a risk, why would you risk investing in the US?

It is not a question about Europe standing up to the US. It is a question about being prudent with our investments — about reducing risks.

Every day Trump remains in office, distrust of the US increases, and the cost for the US will go up day by day. And this is irreversible. It takes years to build trust, but you can destroy it by your actions in minutes.

Europe has now completely lost trust in the US. And so has Canada. It is up to the people of the US to demonstrate that Trump is an ‘outlier’, and it is up to the American people to stop him.

If you don’t do that, we will have to assume that this is what the US is about — whether the name of the President is Trump or something else, whether the President is a Republican or a Democrat.

Americans are indeed entitled. Exceptionalism as a belief system supports that. As for living beyond our means, that depends on whom you ask.

At the risk of not-all-Americans-ing Christensen, there are indeed many of us who never drank the koolaid. Although Trump being elected twice is hard evidence that the collective fault lies in ourselves. But he’s mistaken to think that “there is no real action from the US public … about this insanity.” There is just not enough of it. Not enough of us have taken to the streets on a daily basis to push back. Many simply don’t want to face what’s happening. Creeping fascism is too frightening. We thought we were safe. We thought we’d put it in the grave in the last century.

Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. media, OTOH, have much to answer for.

As someone on Facebook noted this morning, the media “is under the control of the same class pretty much globally.” What Christensen sees in his feeds and doesn’t is curated for him by the people in Trump’s billionaire class to minimize the public seeing pushback, or limiting it to sterile polling results. Perhaps more so overseas.

I offer this anecdote to back up that assessment. I attended a weekly Indivisible protest in a small NC town this summer when a German tourist couple walked by. They were astonished to see us there. They’d seen coverage of the big No Kings 1.0 rally but had no idea that smaller, regular protests were occurring across the U.S. on a weekly basis. No coverage.

Get out there every chance you get.

Amplify This

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 22, 2026

Jack Smith testifies publicly this morning

These were credible people that the President relied on. And what I recall was Meadows stating that “I’ve never seen Jim Jordan scared of anything,” and the fact that we were in this different situation now where people were scared really made it clear that what was going on at the Capitol could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was.

Analysis from Donald Trump’s “performance” in Davos on Wednesday will tend to obscure the show starting in the U.S. House at 10 a.m. ET this morning. Don’t let it:

The House Judiciary Committee may be inviting former special counsel Jack Smith to testify Thursday in an attempt to undercut the legitimacy of Smith and his investigation, or in the attempt to catch him in a lie. Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has framed the hearing as necessary oversight of the longtime prosecutor’s decision to charge President Donald Trump with a multitude of federal crimes in 2023. But whatever House Republicans’ intentions, by inviting Smith’s public testimony, they’re giving him the public platform to make the case that juries never got to hear.

Expect Jordan to be in top bombastic form. He’s performing for an audience of one.

Smith will testify only on Volume I of his report on Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.

“A two-day snoozefest” is how MS Now’s Hayes Brown describes former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s 2019 public testimony on his investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia ties. Mueller decided he had no jurisdiction to indict a sitting president. But neither could he “totally exonerate” Trump as the White House spun Mueller’s findings.

Brown continues:

Smith, by contrast, successfully obtained multiple indictments against Trump. As he said in his closed-door deposition before the Judiciary Committee last month, his office “believed that we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt for all the charges and that we would have gotten convictions at trial.” And based on the transcript and video from that deposition, the committee’s Democrats will be more than happy to help Smith lay out the case that Trump successfully managed to delay long enough to get re-elected.

Democrats will have coordinated their questions in advance. Their questions in round after round will elicit answers to spotlight the most damning findings in Smith’s report. They hope to generate the kind of ratings that would make Trump envious.

Republicans led by Jordan will, of course, badger Smith, talk over him, cut him off, impugn his integrity, and as Brown suggests, set thinly disguised perjury traps in their questions. Expect them to refer Smith to the Trump Justice Department for perjury prosecution whatever Smith says today. Dear Leader insists on it. Fox and other right-wing outlets will fume about Smith’s “obvious” lies.

Recall that in Smith’s videotaped interview, he said (NPR):

“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” Smith said in the deposition, which congressional Republicans released on New Year’s Eve. “These crimes were committed for his benefit.”

Smith said the violent attack at the U.S. Capitol, which injured 140 law enforcement officers, would not have happened, except for Trump.

“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account,” according to a copy of Smith’s opening statement he intends to deliver to Congress Thursday. “So that is what I did.”

Brown again:

But unlike Mueller, whose stoniness worked against him when Republicans attacked his findings, Smith isn’t making himself an easy target for Jordan and his fellow Republicans. Over the course of the more than eight hours Smith spent testifying, the committee’s Republicans tried to catch Smith slipping on the minutiae of his decision to prosecute Trump, the origins of his appointment as special counsel and the work of his prosecutors. The results were laughable.

Watch Smith’s testimony today and help it spread across social media. We will likely find clickworthy moments worthy of virality. You know the cult and Russian bots will be doing their part.

Brown concludes, “If anything, the MAGA loyalists have given Smith a chance to highlight the yawning gulf between the story they tell about the 2020 election and the truth.” But in the aftermath of Davos, it will be a one-day story without your help. Amplify it.

Trump is still trying to suppress Volume II of Smith’s report, the section on Trump’s theft of secret government documents. Trump in his personal capacity asks the Palm Beach court “for an order prohibiting the release of Volume II of the Final Report prepared by so-called ‘Special Counsel’ Jack Smith and his office.” That would be a request to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon. She’s been running interference for Trump from the beginning of the documents case.

It's strange for the President of the United States to be litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs — but he's seeking an order barring "current, former and future" DOJ officials from releasing Jack Smith's second volume. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us…

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T23:38:16.502Z

Daily Beast:

The 19-page filing also requests that the District Court of the Southern District of Florida “permanently prohibit the release of Volume II,” requesting that “the Department of Justice, as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees,” should be barred “from (a) releasing, sharing, or transmitting Volume II or any drafts of Volume II outside of the Department of Justice.”

The release of the work would “lead to the public dissemination of sensitive grand jury materials, attorney-client privileged information, and other information derived from protected discovery materials, raising significant statutory, due process, and privacy concerns for President Trump and his former co-defendants,” it adds.

Investigators found boxes of classified documents taken from the White House at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. U.S. Justice Department

Trump was not this concerned about the exposure of national security secrets, was he?

Miller’s Strategy

Published by digby on January 21, 2026

This observation by the man who wrote the book on the militarization of the police, Radley Balko, is spot on:

For all their flaws, typical communications from police officials usually include a modicum of solemnity. There are assurances that there will be a fair and impartial investigation, even if those investigations too often turn out to be neither. There’s at least the acknowledgment that to take a human life is a profound and serious thing.

The Trump administration’s response to Ms. Good’s death made no such concessions. There were no promises of an impartial investigation. There was no regret or remorse. There was little empathy for her family — for her parents, her partner or the children she left behind. From the moment the world learned about her death, the administration pronounced the shooting not only justified but an act of heroism worthy of praise and celebration.

It isn’t just the lying; it’s that the lies are wildly exaggerated and easily refutable. All the evidence we’ve seen so far, including a meticulous Times forensic analysis of the available footage, makes clear that at worst, Ms. Good mildly obstructed immigration enforcement, disobeyed ambiguous orders or perhaps attempted to flee an arrest. None of those are capital crimes, nor do law enforcement officers get to dole out punishment in such cases. At one point, President Trump justified her shooting by claiming she’d been “very disrespectful” to immigration officers. That isn’t a crime at all.

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. They’re a projection of power.

That is exactly what it is and if you listen to Stephen Miller speak you will see that it is beyond immigration. These actions are a trial run for a policy of suppression of dissent across all of society:

Stephen Miller: “We are going to channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign to led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks … The organized doxxing campaigns. The organized riots. The organized street violence. The organized of dehumanization. Vilification. Posting people’s addresses. Combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God and as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

STEPHEN MILLER:  Every time we make an arrest, we are initiating an investigation into the entire domestic terrorist network. The president issued a national security presidential memorandum, an NSPM, making can clear that it is the national security priority of the United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks. And that is exactly what is taking place. It is what we are doing. It is what will happen.

Take him at his word. He’s the second most powerful person in the United States and the most powerful one is an addled old man who spends his time threatening foreign countries and redecorating the White House.

Update: FYI

Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.

The memo authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move that advocates say collides with Fourth Amendment protections and upends years of advice given to immigrant communities.

The shift comes as the Trump administration dramatically expands immigration arrests nationwide, deploying thousands of officers under a mass deportation campaign that is already reshaping enforcement tactics in cities such as Minneapolis.

For years, immigrant advocates, legal aid groups and local governments have urged people not to open their doors to immigration agents unless they are shown a warrant signed by a judge. That guidance is rooted in Supreme Court rulings that generally prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without judicial approval. The ICE directive directly undercuts that advice at a time when arrests are accelerating under the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Nice Little NATO You Have Here

Published by digby on January 21, 2026

Trump’s speech at Davos was as humiliating as usual. But you really have to appreciate the way he openly exposes his stupidity and talks like a Mafia don before the whole world. Here he is talking about Greenland (or Iceland as he repeatedly referred to it.)

“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.”

Sure, he’s fine.

Karoline Leavitt tried to say that he was referring to Greenland as a piece of ice but he said the above four separate times. He is addled. But at least he doesn’t have a halting gait like Joe Biden did, which has the DC press corps all atwitter so he’s fine.

But it looks like he had his tantrum and cried himself out and now he’s settled down with his binky.

The media is extolling his “art of the deal” magnificence and no doubt it will soon be conventional wisdom. But we all know he TACOed which basically means that once again he’s had the whole world running around at his neck and call for absolutely nothing. No one can possibly trust any country that would have this imbecile as a leader again.

Now watch the Republicans turn themselves in to pretzels telling him what a gargantuan dick his has, dominating the whole world like that. What a man, what a conqueror, what an emperor.

What a fucking joke.

If we survive this evil clown show, it will be an accident.

Killing The Golden Goose

Published by digby on January 21, 2026

If you read me regularly you know that I’ve often lamented the fact that Trump and his henchmen are so foolish that they are actually killing the golden goose out of sheer ignorance and hubris. But I’ve never seen it illustrated as clearly as Andrew Egger does today:

Growing up, I never really understood Aesop’s fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s a cautionary tale about greed and hubris: A farmer with a miraculous goose that lays a solid-gold egg every morning gets fed up with passive wealth generation and figures killing the bird will speed things along. But alas: He finds no store of eggs within and realizes he butchered his meal ticket for nothing. The moral’s straightforward, but it never really worked for me as a story. Like, come on: Nobody’s that stupid.

Well, almost nobody, I guess.

As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get over this pure, dumb fact: Trump told his fans he had to blow up the liberal order because it was the only way to secure the very benefits the liberal order was already bringing us.

Trump insists America needs Greenland as a strategic positioning ground from which to restrain Russia and China in the Arctic. But thanks to the liberal order, this was something we already enjoyed. Through the magic of multilateral cooperation, we were able to treat someone else’s territory as though it were our own for the purposes of military positioning—not by bribing or intimidating them, but because they agreed their interests and our interests aligned.

Trump insists America needs to blow up America’s preexisting economic relationships to ensure America gets an advantageous position in international trade. But America already had such an advantageous position: an orderly world economic system that had lavished previously unimaginable prosperity on America and to the entire globe, with us at the proverbial (and very profitable) head of the table.

It’s not just that Trump had the hubris to think he could hero-ball the country to a better deal by canceling a century of history and starting over. It’s that his own broken personality—his miserable meanness, his dispositional inability to cooperate with and trust others—has always prevented him from understanding what was good about the deal we had to begin with. The idea that multipolar agreements could be better for America, in some cases, than outright ownership—that, say, we already have everything we need from Greenland—he rejects as ridiculous. Ownership, he told the New York Times, is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success. . . . I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty.”

I’m not surprised that Trump would feel this way. He has the disordered mind of a psychologically damaged child. But the fact that so many of his henchmen who surely know better are still going along, perhaps because they think they can cash in before the whole thing implodes or just because they don’t trust their own knowledge or instincts in the face of what they see as Trump’s omnipotent ability to always come out on top, is the real mystery.

They have the most power in this culture when it comes to stopping Trump. They could have done it in a heartbeat and instead they decided to ride with this orange monster. It just proves, once again, that any idea that the Big Money Boyz are so much savvier and smarter than everyone else when it comes to the economy is a huge mistake. Their “animal spirits” run stronger than their brains and something about Trump apparently gets those spirits aroused.

Groyper Hero

Published by digby on January 21, 2026

I thought you;’d be interested to hear what millions of young incels (and the girls who inexplicably follow them) are hearing every day from their leader:

NICK FUENTES (HOST): We’re going to talk about Trump’s potential invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis. I wish he would. I wish he would. He keeps talking about it amid the unrest and riots in Minneapolis in response to the ICE deployment. By the way, nobody has been arrested. Do you know that? There have been all these riots happening in Minneapolis. Last night, you have an ICE agent — I think, actually it happened this afternoon. He shot a Venezuelan illegal because he was trying to arrest this guy and a bunch of agitators came out and hit him with shovels. And so ICE barged in, arrested everybody. 

But in Minneapolis, there’s straight up riots going on. They’re shooting fireworks at cops, taking over hotels. It’s mayhem.

… 

Do you know that Minneapolis police arrested zero people last night? So when you see these videos of fireworks blowing up and cops getting beat and the absolute anarchy that’s unfolding, nobody’s even getting arrested. So Trump says, “I’ll invoke the Insurrection Act.”

Bro, do it. Do something. Just stop chickening out. I’m just tired of the idle threats. “We’re going to bomb you,” “we’re going to tariff you,” “we’re going to invoke the Insurrection Act.” Always chickens out. Just do it. You’re the commander in chief. He does it every time. He did it during the BLM riots, he did it during the LA riots. Please pull the trigger. Please kill them, Mr. President. Please just kill them. Not actually. I don’t actually, I’m not actually wishing for violence, but please send in the military and restore order. This is your country. You are the commander in chief of the armed forces. You are the chief executive over this country and it is lawless. Take some responsibility, take the reins, send in the military. If this Jewish communist running the city won’t arrest these people, if this gay cuck governor, Tim Walz, doesn’t do it, send in the military. That’s why you were elected.

I don’t get it. This happened the last time in Minneapolis, BLM, summer of love. Trump kept threatening, “I’ll send them in. I swear I’ll do it. I’ll invoke the Insurrection Act.” Do it. Throw these people in jail. They are trash.

It’s not just Fox, folks. There is a whole generation of right wingers coming up on this stuff. They don’t watch the old people on TV. I don’t think they watch TV at all. THIS is what they are into.

There’s always been a fringe faction that thinks and talks like this. But this has scope. Fuentes is actually, as are the others of his ilk who are saying the same sort of violent stuff. They gather on forums like 4Chan, telegram and Discord and spend all of their time staring at screens with very little actual interaction with other humans in the flesh. ( Maybe it’s less threatening than it seems because of that?) But it seems to me that it’s a problem for these people if not for the whole society and I don’t have the vaguest idea of what to do about it.