Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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…

— Lars Christensen (@MaMoMVPY) January 21, 2026

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.

Jack Smith testifies publicly this morning

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.

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

Domestic terrorism. https://t.co/070fSKR8iX

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 7, 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:

Wake up, America.

Stephen Miller has already publicly labeled the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization.

This isn’t about crime and safety.

It’s about dismantling our democratic institutions.

We cannot allow acts of political violence to be weaponized and used to… https://t.co/yqiJo1Oh7o pic.twitter.com/h9CvlhRTVQ

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 15, 2025

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.”

NSPM-7 will be applied to Portland, Trump's homeland security advisor Stephen Miller says.

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… pic.twitter.com/BJcMnPyjVH

— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 4, 2025

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.

Trump: "Usually they say, 'he's a horrible dictator-type person.' But sometimes you need a dictator." pic.twitter.com/Mi11DZx0u3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) 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.

Trump is now confusing Greenland and Iceland: "They're not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money." pic.twitter.com/Iu9CI6M2ku

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 21, 2026

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.

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.

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.

Give him a gold-painted award for World’s Dumbest

Donald Trump just finished his hour-plus speech to the World Economic Forum. Former Vice President Al Gore told CNN he does not envy the fact checkers.

“Is this the dumbest speech a world leader has ever given at WEF?“

Trump: "Somalia — they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. I always say, 'These are low IQ people.' How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?" pic.twitter.com/Wa1k0exhdD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 21, 2026

“Not only is this man crazy, he’s also a blazing idiot.”

Trump is now confusing Greenland and Iceland: "They're not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money." pic.twitter.com/Iu9CI6M2ku

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 21, 2026

“This is like listening to a drunk relative unhappily slurring through the unwrapping of presents at Christmas”

Trump on NATO: "We never ask for anything, and we never got anything. 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. Okay?" pic.twitter.com/AB5ltahWUl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 21, 2026

(The U.S. never got anything from NATO except our NATO allies — Denmark among them — invoking Article 5 after September 11, and sending their troops to Afghanistan to bleed and die for us.)

Is someone experimenting with using bullshit as a source of alternative energy? I’d like to invest.

Adapting to a new reality

If you haven’t watched Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the World Economic Forum from Tuesday, take 17 minutes to watch it while you sip your coffee.

Carney declares in Davos, Switzerland that the rules-based order of the post-war world is over. In fact, it never was. It was a fantasy we all accepted because it served our mutual interests.

A rupture, not a transition

American hegemony “helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” So we pretended that rules were rules while the hegemons violated them at will and the world looked away:

This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, 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.

What do we do now, Carney asks, when globalization has led to domination? Aim for greater strategic autonomy or a new model for cooperation? Canada is reevaluating its posture. The reality is that not every trading and alliance partner shares its values. (Looking at you, United States.)

We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

He outlines Canada’s recent moves. A kind of reset.

We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We’re doing something else: to help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry. In other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So on Ukraine, we’re a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.

Our commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering, so we’re working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic-Baltic Eight, to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground — boots on the ice.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

Carney does not mention Donald Trump or the United States by name in reference to tariffs or to Greenland, but his message is clear. The U.S. can no longer be trusted as guarantor of order and stability. The “middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

The cooks in this analogy are the United States, Russia, and China. And for Canada, primarily the U.S.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.

It’s a brave new world for the “middle powers,” with no going back. The nations in Davos must acknowledge the fantasy and face the new reality realistically, Carney argues. Whether the rest of the EU accepts Carney’s assessment that

The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.

Likely there are quiet planning meetings happening in Davos as states in attendance recognize that the United States they once admired and respected falls into fascism with imperialist designs.

Here on this continent (with Canada and Mexico), Americans have to sort out whether we will allow a madman to demand that the western world accede to his demands for obeisance lest he throw over the game board. That is, if there are enough of us with the right stuff to fight back against Trump and his gang of thieves.

We too have operated under a comfortable fiction that America’s stability over the years was built on our constitution, our laws, and our democratic traditions. Trumpism ripped that veil away to reveal how much the entire edifice of Exceptionalism was built on “norms.” It was only a gentleman’s agreement that our leaders behave like gentlemen, until the country fell for a con man and cult leader. Not once, but twice. Trumpism ripped the masks off neighbors who wave American flags, boast of their real Americanness, and loudly profess faith in Jesus, not Christianity as a system of values but as an authoritarian agenda. It was so much vapid branding.

“America isn’t the way it is because [Trump is] president. He’s president because America is the way it is,” as Canadian journalist David Cochrane explained two weeks ago. He seems to have anticipated Carney’s Davos speech.

The American challenge going forward is to examine our weaknesses, acknowledge them honestly, and adapt. There is no going back. Norms have failed us. We have failed ourselves. Barbarians are not at the gate. They are in the Oval Office and in the streets of Minneapolis. They are staged to invade Greenland.

Canada has figured it out. Americans seem the last to know.

Those of you who read this blog regularly will recognize this analysis by JV Last since it’s one that I’ve been discussing ever since Trump won back in 2016. This was not inevitable but the writing was on the wall from the beginning:

We are witness to something rare in human history: Abdication by the leader of the global order.

We have seen empires fall and civilizations crumble. But we’ve almost never seen a people renounce their leadership of the world—all at once, in full public view. That is what has happened in the 365 days since January 20, 2025.

Here’s what comes next.

The blinding of Five Eyes. The UKUSA intelligence sharing agreement—informally known as Five Eyes—has been in danger since Tulsi Gabbard was appointed director of national intelligence. But we’ve gone further than the possibility of having a Russia sympathizer atop the U.S. intelligence community: America’s allies now understand that we are—at best—a strategic competitor to Canada and the United Kingdom and at worst a threat to the other English-speaking countries. The days of intelligence sharing between America and our former allies are drawing to a close.

The death of NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was conceived as a way to tame Europe. By establishing the United States as the strategic counterweight to the continent, NATO (a) held the Soviets in check but also (b) removed the need for Germany to re-arm at a scale sufficient to tip the local military balance and menace its neighbors.

NATO is now a zombie organization. America has progressed from unreliable ally to overt threat to European sovereignty. Europe will re-arm. There is no longer any question on this point.

The new nuclear age begins. The world’s three largest nuclear powers are now expansionist predator states. This leaves the lesser nuclear powers no choice but to create their own umbrellas while buying time for smaller allies to join the nuclear club. Germany, Poland, and Canada will acquire nuclear weapons. So will Japan. Sweden, Australia, and South Korea may develop nuclear capabilities as well.

Europe + China. The Chinese communist regime is authoritarian. It does not adhere to the rule of law in any meaningful way. But while it is ambitious, it is stable, and it understands that stability is its biggest advantage. China does not threaten Europe as acutely as Russia and the United States do, and Europe needs some stability undergirding the next world order. Europe will draw closer to China and supplant the United States as China’s main trading partner.

Ukraine will join Europe. As Europe rearms it will need Ukraine’s defense industrial base; therefore it will draw Ukraine into its collective security arrangement (the EU’s, not NATO’s) once the Russo-Ukraine war draws to a close.

Greenland will become disputed territory. Greenland is about to become, like Crimea or Kashmir or the little islands in the South China Sea, disputed territory. The Republican party has made an unmistakable, irrevocable territorial claim on Greenland. There are only two possible ways to resolve this question.

There is much more at the link and I urge you to click over if you have a sub or get one if you have the means. I think many of the former conservatives are the most clear-eyed about what Trump is doing to us on the world stage right now and their alarm is palpable.

Also read this one (gift link) from Robert Kagan in the Atlantic. An excerpt:

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

None of this had to happen. People didn’t like the old man and the Black lady and the price of eggs was just too high. They ignored everything else he and his henchmen were saying. It’s was all there — Trump addled mind, his unquenchable thirst for vengeance and monuments to himself, the utter depravity of his Project 2025 and GOP leaders’ craven cowardice were all on display. Why would anyone think that the man who could not accept his loss in 2020 and incited an insurrection to overturn it would be anything but a tyrant?

The Wall St. Journal reports what we already knew:

Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the entire cost of U.S. tariffs, according to new research that contradicts a key claim by President Trump and suggests he might have a weaker hand in a reemerging trade war with Europe.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that his historic tariffs, deployed aggressively over the past year as both a revenue-raising and foreign-policy tool, will be paid for by foreigners. Such assertions helped to reinforce the president’s bargaining power and encourage foreign governments to do deals with the U.S.

[…]

The new research, published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a well-regarded German think tank, suggests that the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices.

The findings don’t mean that the tariffs are a win for Europe—on the contrary. German exports to the U.S., which have rocketed in recent years, have contracted sharply in the past year.

The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only a small fraction of the tariff costs were being borne by foreign producers.

We knew all that but I guess it has to be proven once again.

Trump is whining about having to pay the tariffs back to the US importers and manufacturers if the Supremes rule against his scheme. (It’s his mad money that he likes to use to buy whatever toys and people he wants to play with.) And, frankly, his henchmen already have other plans in place to use other authorities to continue to act like barbarians around the world dictating other countries’ policies with tariffs. So that may end up being meaningless.

But the ramifications of his batshit crazy behavior with threats of trade wars (and shooting wars) are going to bite in a big way. We may have seen that already today with the reaction of the markets and all kinds of investors from currency to bonds to long term interest rates. Perhaps they’ll all bounce back if Trump tacos again, but I have to wonder if it isn’t finally sinking in (especially after the Venezuela and Greenland nonsense) that three more years of this lunacy is intolerable. The party is being ruined by a big, orange bully who insists on beating he shit out of everything just because he can.