It is ashame that Osvalorama is no longer posting here as i wonder what he would have made of Trump today. Absolutely shocking. The petulent comments about the Nobel Peace Prize were as staggering as they were ignorant.
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Interesting sub-stack read on the Welsh Senedd polling. Basically saying that Reform's polling isn't dropping, just that there are less don't knows and they are moving for reform a lot less than the others which of course means their % drops without their numbers actually going down.
I suspect this substack is from a Labour (maybe formerly?) leaning position although that could be wrong.
Would be unwise to say that Welsh "trend" might transfer to a UK election but who knows. anyway this was a very interesting point in it:
willhaywardwales.substack.com
I suspect this substack is from a Labour (maybe formerly?) leaning position although that could be wrong.
Would be unwise to say that Welsh "trend" might transfer to a UK election but who knows. anyway this was a very interesting point in it:
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Behind Reform's drop in the polls
Plus we go to the Welsh town where less than a third of people vote
willhaywardwales.substack.com
Starmer has now been publicly humiliated by Trump on the Chagos Islands deal. I accept that Trump is unpredictable at the best of times but just the day before he was boasting about his great relationship with Trump. Now he's been completely undermined by him. Such a weak PM.
Or a Gaslighter for a President?
EDIT: FWIW I do agree with you, but can't help but think he has been stitched up
Possibly, but Starmer has allowed himself to be.
Maybe the Greenlanders should change the name of their home to Epstein Island. He won't mention it again then.
Yes and no. Trump is purposely trying to stoke the fire in the UK by saying this to distract from what is really a hostile takeover of a sovereign nation. Like a child, he can't get his own way, he throws all his toys out of his pram.
I think that there needs to be a counter narrative that Hawaii should be handed to China due to American threats to the Pacific. After that , maybe suggest Russia takes back Alaska.
There are areas where you could call him weak, but this isn't one. Every major World leader is having the same problems with that tosser, Starmer has arguably done a great job to get this far before its gone south.
This is bait to divide the position on Greenland - Badenoch and Farage should not take it, if they use this as an immediate base of attack then they are damaging the unity we need at this moment in time. There will be another time to debate Chagos.
Note he was also posting private messages from Macron on Truth Social this morning.
Also re the Chagos Islands, the US wanted us to do the deal. Honestly we should turn round to the US military and say 'reign him in or you lose your base'.
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I wanted to scream as I read today's news. Trump suddenly yells that a deal he supported is now an act of madness on the part of the UK. It's so clearly a load of horseshit but the leader of the the opposition jumps on the bandwagon. Her defence spokesperson urges the government to break the deal on the island and 'spend the money on defence.' It's £101m a year allegedly. Enough for a fully armed landrover and a couple of packets of Wagon Wheels, hardly likely to fill the gap we clearly must fill. But let's not let the opportunity for an anti Starmer sound bite go begging.
As I understand it Mauritius is a sovereign country and owns the islands in question. We might get into a debate about how countries 'own' bits of land, but it didn't stop the UK fighting a war to protect its ownership of a islands populated by sheep and penguins in 1983. Move on. So if Mauritius says to its formal colonial power that it wants to have its islands back they have every right to. If the UK and US want to keep a base there they should pay for it. Trump is a deranged lunatic who says whatever he thinks sounds good. I was just coming to the conclusion that Badenoch was capable of rational thought and going beyond party politics. I note that Priti Patel supported Starmer's stance on Greenland and I thought just for a moment sense had broken out at Westminster. But today the Tories have again taken up the absurd call that the islands shouldn't have been 'given away'. Surely they weren't ours to give. If Wales were granted independence from England, but the English insisted on keeping Anglesey for defence purposes the Welsh would tell them to do one, but maybe agree to lease them RAF Valley. As I see it, this analogy (for all its warts) is where we are. The Uk should collectively tell Trump he's got it wrong We don't need the leader of the Conservative party looking for a chance to make a cheap political point.
As I understand it Mauritius is a sovereign country and owns the islands in question. We might get into a debate about how countries 'own' bits of land, but it didn't stop the UK fighting a war to protect its ownership of a islands populated by sheep and penguins in 1983. Move on. So if Mauritius says to its formal colonial power that it wants to have its islands back they have every right to. If the UK and US want to keep a base there they should pay for it. Trump is a deranged lunatic who says whatever he thinks sounds good. I was just coming to the conclusion that Badenoch was capable of rational thought and going beyond party politics. I note that Priti Patel supported Starmer's stance on Greenland and I thought just for a moment sense had broken out at Westminster. But today the Tories have again taken up the absurd call that the islands shouldn't have been 'given away'. Surely they weren't ours to give. If Wales were granted independence from England, but the English insisted on keeping Anglesey for defence purposes the Welsh would tell them to do one, but maybe agree to lease them RAF Valley. As I see it, this analogy (for all its warts) is where we are. The Uk should collectively tell Trump he's got it wrong We don't need the leader of the Conservative party looking for a chance to make a cheap political point.
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Humiliated howso? Any excuse for a bit of Starmer bashing, it's Trump being a gobshite talking bollocks contradicting himself and looking the twat that he is. He'd previously endorsed the deal.
Worth reading about the international pressure the UK was under and how badly the islanders were treated.
FACTBOX Key facts about Chagos Islands deal signed by UK and Mauritius | Reuters https://share.google/USwhPKrCV9rm1LPDt
"Britain signed the multi-billion dollar deal after a last-gasp injunction was overturned, which secured it a lease for the strategically important UK-U.S. air base on Diego Garcia over the next century.
THE DEAL
Under increasing international pressure, Britain agreed in October 2024 to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a former colony that gained independence in 1968. The deal, however, drew criticism from lawmakers as well as Britons born on Diego Garcia.
In May 2025, Britain said it would pay Mauritius 101 million pounds ($136 million) per year - calculated to be worth 3.4 billion pounds over the lifetime of the deal - to secure the future of the Diego Garcia military base under a 99 year lease.'
"At the time, the U.S. said it "welcomed the historic agreement", commending both countries' leaders for their vision. In February 2025, ahead of the signing, Trump also expressed preliminary support for the deal.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India have also backed the agreement."
'UN COURT'S VIEW
Britain split the archipelago off from its colonial island territory of Mauritius in 1965, three years before granting independence to Mauritius - minus the islands.
In 2019 after a request by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding ruling calling on Britain to give up control, saying it wrongfully forced the population to leave to make way for the base."
I assume the septics will be paying for some of the costs.
Just for extra emphasis on what a bunch of treacherous bellends the US Government are, this position on the Chagos Islands is still on their government website.
https://www.state.gov/u-s-support-for-uk-and-mauritius-agreement-on-chagos-archipelago
Maybe we can interpret this as them serving notice on Diego Garcia, i'm sure their military and intelligence leaders would love that.
https://www.state.gov/u-s-support-for-uk-and-mauritius-agreement-on-chagos-archipelago
Maybe we can interpret this as them serving notice on Diego Garcia, i'm sure their military and intelligence leaders would love that.
Bullshit. Less than a year ago Trump agreed that we had no choice over the Chagos deal.
HIGNFY
After several days of his increasingly childish behaviour, Denmark have finally offered Trump Greenland and his response was “no it’s too late now I don’t want it”
After several days of his increasingly childish behaviour, Denmark have finally offered Trump Greenland and his response was “no it’s too late now I don’t want it”
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This posted on what is mockingly known as 'truth social' days after the US delegation agreed with Danish foreign minister for talks to be conducted behind closed doors, and not through threatening messages on social media. Let's blame Keir Starmer.
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Cheap, extremely poor attempt at political point scoring by Badenoch, Farage and Tom.
Nonsense. This interpretation of events only makes sense if you give credence to the ravings of a madman.
This is a bit misleading. The islands were never "owned" by Mauritius........ever! They were uninhabited until the Dutch landed there and then passed to French ownership then to us when we defeated Napolean in a bundle with Mauritius. It was us that then separated them from the bundle and gave Mauritius independence.
So all these implications of "giving them back" ignore that they were never part of Mauritius in the first place because it was the Europeans that bundled them together when they colonised.
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Great piece by American historian Heather Cox Richardson:
Today's Heather Cox Richardson:
Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”
International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.
This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”
“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”
In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.
In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.
Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.
This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”
The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.
And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.
Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.
Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.
Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.
He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.
Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.
Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.
Today's Heather Cox Richardson:
Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”
International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.
This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”
“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”
In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.
In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.
Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.
This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”
The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.
And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.
Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.
Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.
Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.
He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.
Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.
Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.