Month: January 2026

Trump announes to our allies that he has the right to seize another country

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

January 19, 2026

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.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

June Tabor “Mayn Rue Platz”

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“Mayn Rue Platz” (My Resting Place) is a famous Yiddish poem and song by Morris Rosenfeld, a “sweatshop poet,” commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire victims (1911), where a worker tells his beloved not to look for him in beautiful places but where “lives wither at the machines,” a powerful reflection on exploited labor, with various artists performing modern versions. 

A Shiny Mausoleum on a Hill

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Sarah Kendzior
 
 

Life, death, and the rampage of ICE.

By Sarah Kendzior | Jan 15, 2026

America is buried near a shining mausoleum on a hill.

Her grave is simple and white. She is surrounded by veterans of every war from the American Revolution to the Black Hawk Revolt to Vietnam. America lived in Illinois, which became a state when she was two. She died aged 53 in 1873, eight years after the Civil War ended. I wonder what she thought was coming.

The headstones surrounding America Myers are battered and worn. Some bear the scars of repair: patchwork tombs of broken remembrances. Others were long rendered indecipherable.

America is buried in Waterloo on a cliff overlooking the American Bottom.

It sounds like I’m making things up, but it’s real. I wasn’t in Waterloo, Illinois, seeking metaphors: I was looking for bald eagles. I didn’t see our national bird make his annual migration. Instead, I found a cemetery and wandered into an empty tomb.

I didn’t feel like writing this week, but God decided to lay it on thick, so here we are.

The American Bottom is an Illinois floodplain where one of the largest indigenous societies, the Mississippian People, lived in the 12th century. They built cities of such grandeur they outdid London in population. No one knows why they fled two centuries later. Today the region is known as Cahokia Mounds, and American Bottoms is a wastewater treatment plant.

Near the grave of America is a crescent of stone. “In Memory,” a sign says. “The stones making the patio in front of this bench, are made from the Tombstones of the many people buried here. LOST FOREVER IN TIME.” The patio was built by Columbia Boy Scout Troop 320. They did a good job.

Past America, past the heartbreaking graves of dead children, past the fallen tombs of forgotten soldiers and their wives, past the prairie grasses that grow defiantly above the poisoned soil, is the mausoleum. It was built by businessman Stephen W. Miles in 1859 for his family but now looms empty on a hill. An open doorway topped with a gargoyle invites you to enter.

I walked in and stood between rows of hollow crypts. Through the door, I watched clouds cast shadows and light burst through. I took photos, capturing crosses formed from slabs where bodies once lay. I felt safe and sad. The first feeling was novel; the second, a chronic condition of the 21st century. It was an honest place, this mausoleum on a hill. It was a hopeful place, restored with purpose, open to the sun.

When I posted a photo of the mausoleum, a man showed me a painting by a 14-year-old girl from Ukraine. She had painted a darkened doorway uncannily like the one in which I stood, down to the cracks in the floor. Her door looked out at the classic Ukraine scene: a golden field and a bright blue sky. This is what I saw in Illinois, too.

The images were so similar that I took them for an omen. I didn’t consider that the omen may have been for the US, also under invasion by a corrupt government, more than an omen of freedom for Ukraine.

I had forgotten that America was buried six feet under, surrounded by veterans who were assured that their sacrifice would prevent the tyranny under which we now live.

“People were free to select their own plot,” said a sign about the cemetery. I want to be free to select my own plot instead of living under unpunished treachery. I want my plot to be something more than a hole in the ground or a hole in the head.

* * *

In 2025, I saw the Mississippi River in Minnesota for the first time. That meant I had seen it in every state through which it flows, a feat I celebrated with unease. The goal of the Trump administration is to strip the US for parts. The Mississippi River is one part, and the Great Lakes are another.

I have seen the Mississippi River in every major city from its New Orleans basin to my St. Louis home to Minneapolis, which means I’ve seen it roll by police brutality and white mob violence in multiple places, as people have for as long as this country has existed, and well before.

Waterloo is near East St. Louis, Illinois, where a white mob slaughtered Black residents in 1917. Across the river in Missouri is Ferguson, where I ran from tear gas and police batons in 2014. Ferguson, which rid me of any illusion of how far the police would go, and how little most people would care after the initial outcry.

The Mississippi River is a migratory flyway, and not only for birds. Pundits and politicians fly in and out too. Minneapolis, where the George Floyd protests invigorated a mass movement for racial justice only to later be demonized, is familiar with fair-weather friends.

In December 1811, a record earthquake in Missouri made the Mississippi River flow backward. I thought of it in 2020 as Minneapolis rose up under police siege. I think of it now, as residents try to oust ICE and Minnesota mom Renee Nicole Good was shot dead by an ICE agent who called her a “fucking bitch.” Ferguson had rolled upstream.

People try to distinguish between ICE and police, but they operate as a tandem force. ICE is a new and unnecessary creation, formed in 2003, that wages a war of terror on civilians. ICE obeys the wishes of elites who seek to break the law. For everyone else, ICE promises only fear. Good’s crime was that she was not fearful enough.

Minnesota residents, determined to protect each other from ICE, are afraid — and brave. The two are not mutually exclusive. To fight on behalf of others in the midst of abandonment from officials, derision from the press, and the threat of fatal force: that’s not Minnesota Nice, that’s Minnesota Noble.

Minnesota police should be protecting residents from an invading federal force. But that is not what police do. Police have been trained to attack those whom they are tasked to serve and protect. They are told to back ICE — armed agents abusing and kidnapping their neighbors — and to fear punishment if they refuse.

This is not a civil war. This is a federal invasion by a mafia state.

The mafia state wants to strip the US and sell it for parts. The Great Lakes region, in the climate change era, is a valuable part. Minnesota, a Midwest Democratic stronghold, is an inconvenient part. Minneapolis, with its diverse immigrant population and history of police violence, is a strategic part.

ICE has been battering Americans and aspiring American citizens for two decades. It was rewarded for its brutality with an enormous boost in funding by Joe Biden. ICE funding was further increased by Trump, who also granted them explicit impunity.

It does not matter, in practical terms, whether ICE’s actions are legal. In mafia states, legal is a malleable notion. What matters is that they are wrong. What matters is how they can be stopped.

The gulf between law and justice is wide, but public understanding bends like the Mississippi River, the river where Dred Scott’s daughter was born stateless, the river that divided the enslaved from the free. Americans have been misled by pundits who proclaim the US a “nation of laws”. It makes no difference if the US is a nation of laws when courts are selective in their application. Autocracies are nations of laws, too.

The US is a nation of targets. A felon is the president and random civilians can be kidnapped without recourse. State-sanctioned violence was the inevitable result of the Biden administration countenancing sedition and refusing to prosecute Trump and other elites for crimes, no matter how brazenly they confessed them.

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They say you are defined by the company you keep. These days I am defined by ghosts. Since 2025, I’ve been roaming cemeteries to the point that their residents feel like friends. My worst fears can’t be realized here: you can’t kill what’s already dead.

But the mausoleum on a hill is alive. When I looked it up after returning home, I was horrified to see old photos of its white marble covered in graffiti, its cemetery a mess of overturned stones. The recent repair is more than aesthetic. Volunteers put the puzzle pieces of American history back together. Every cemetery is a road map of American life, a bulwark against the annihilation of memory.

I spent my childhood listening to Ronald Reagan call America “a shining city on a hill, teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace” while his friends planned our country’s demise in a scheme later christened Project 2025. The “city on a hill” ideal of freedom for all has been recited from the Puritan era to the present by politicians who refuse to honor its principles in practice.

I’ve abandoned the shining city on the hill. But the shining mausoleum on a hill: that I can embrace. The shining mausoleum on a hill is real. I’ve seen its decay and its revival. I’ve born witness to its recreation and redemption. I’ve studied its dead: the names, the dates. My fellow Americans fallen in Waterloo.

We go to cemeteries to grieve. I grieve for strangers because I don’t want the part of me that mourns tragedy and spurns injustice to die. In a country where officials act like death no longer matters, here lies a grand rebuttal.

* * *

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 
     

Household Saints and the Resurrection of Nancy Savoca

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Hosehold Saints

The recent Kino Lorber Blu-Ray marks the latest in a series of restorations of Nancy Savoca’s work. It’s a good reminder that all movies are miracles, some more than others.

by Sara Batkie

There’s a certain adage about film that’s probably been around since Edison captured Fred Ott’s sneeze, but regardless always feels true: “They don’t make them like they used to.” That constant churn of nostalgia is part of the appeal of the cinematic experience, but it’s also likely more than a little irritating to the filmmakers whose toil to get their work financed is invisible by design. And it must be infinitely frustrating for the many writer-directors like Nancy Savoca whose work was either unavailable or difficult to find for years. One of the first things out of her mouth in the documentary that accompanies Kino Lorber’s new Blu-Ray of Household Saints (1993) is that it’s not that her third feature couldn’t get made today; it couldn’t really get made then, either. Any film that reaches the screen is in some sense a miracle, and that word applies to Saints in more ways than just one.

Savoca was still in film school when she read Francine Prose’s source novel, which she loved so much she wrote the author a letter expressing her hopes to adapt it. Prose filed it away as a nice piece of fan mail but didn’t consider the possibility until she saw Savoca’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning debut, True Love. Like the novel, that film is set in a disarmingly specific New York milieu, in this case a group of Italian-Americans in the Bronx. While there’s the scaffolding of a plot – a newlywed couple tries to work out how compatible they actually are – True Love is much more communal in focus than that description suggests. Its hangout vibes surely appealed to Prose, whose novel shares a similar ramshackle curiosity about its setting. “I just started out with the card game,” she says in an archival interview included on the Blu-Ray. “Even I didn’t know where it would go from there.”

The card game is pinochle, a distinctly masculine pursuit. Like everything else in the tight-knit immigrant-dominated neighborhood of 1949 Little Italy, leisure activities are divided by gender. The players include Joseph Santangelo (a rakishly charming Vincent D’Onofrio), the local butcher, and Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), whose cinematic last name is not a coincidence. The plot, as much as there is one, is kicked off here when Lino drunkenly bets the hand of his daughter, Catherine (Tracy Ullman, much more subdued than usual), and loses to Joseph. “You think this is the old country? This is America,” Catherine shouts when she hears the news, but Lino is a man of his word. So, too, is Joseph, and he finds himself drawn to Catherine’s innocence despite the fact that she’s a hopeless cook – a potentially lethal quality for a woman in this community.

What follows is a sprawling narrative that gradually emerges as a generational story of three unusual women. Catherine and Joseph wed, and their connection proves deeper than the sordid origin story that follows them around. They live with Joseph’s mother, Carmela (the delightfully witchy Judith Malina), who holds tight to her Italian superstitions. In Savoca’s rendering, the past lives comfortably with the present, and a ghost is just another member of the household, regularly appearing to dispense advice. Carmela becomes convinced that Catherine’s first pregnancy is “marked.” When the baby dies in childbirth, the completion of the curse seems to drain Carmela as well. Her own death sparks a renewal for the couple that culminates in the arrival of a baby girl, Teresa.

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