It is not just the moral horror. It is the political logic.
People are dying in American concentration camps, unseen. And people are being executed on American streets, seen by all of us. This is enough. The radical is the pragmatic.
The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages. ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries.
But we have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny. It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness.
In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.
One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.
Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.
And just what is Trump doing now? By his own admission, as well as by the admission of cabinet members, he is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on an American state of his choosing. It is not legal to attack a city because its policies work. It is not legal to threaten a state to gain information about its voters.
The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened. The wedge is the lie.
The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.
One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.
And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.
They are violating it.
It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”
The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.
This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.
Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.
Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.
The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.
There are a lot of questions, so you’ve got a nice long Q & A to curl up with in the snowpacalypse! I’m going to publish this before the electricity and my mind give out. As Lonnie Johnson sang in 1938, “My brains is cloudy, my soul is upside-down.” On that note, let’s kick it off with thoughts on sin and Sinners:
Frank G: It seems there has been very little cultural reaction to the US becoming an authoritarian, oligarchic, severely economically stratified nation in the past 10-15 years. Other repressive eras in our nation’s history produced huge cultural responses in music, art, literature and film, but it seems to me we are not really seeing this now. Am I reading the situation correctly and, if so, what do you think is the reason for this?
SK: Like politicians, entertainment companies have stopped trying to win us over: they instead focus on inserting things we don’t want (like AI) without our permission. The merger of Big Tech with Hollywood is one of the worst things to happen to American pop culture. The rot brought on by AI, algorithms, and “anti-DEI” racism is notable given the creative richness and diversity of the last two decades. The industry that boosted a show like Reservation Dogs just a few years ago is gone.
But cultural responses are still there. People still make art to reflect our time: it’s just a matter of whether their efforts are heard and recognized. I got your question on a rare day: the day Sinners got a record number of Oscar nominations. Sinners — a tale of vampiric white supremacists and Black cultural resistance during Jim Crow — is a commentary on our current era and its historical precedent. In the 1930s, Black music was an act of rebellion. Making Sinners is an act of rebellion now. Singing the blues is bearing witness; juke joints spit at the idea of white corporate control; and Sinners takes on race, crime, law, and other heavy issues in a wildly entertaining way.
In repressive eras, horror is where the unsaid can be said (see The Twilight Zone in the censorship-heavy early 1960s). The two movies that best respond to the political culture of the past ten years are Sinners and Get Out: another Black horror film. These films combine sharp political critique and visceral thrill and do so with vivid, original style. Their impact is one reason the Trump admin and its Hollywood backers deploy their racist “anti-DEI” policies: they’re afraid, and not of the supernatural.
You’re right that the last few years have felt flat and dull. Peak TV ended after decades of shows reflecting on the moral crisis of the US (Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.) We’ve been flooded with boring shows about the ultra-rich; this shift started around 2022. The downfall of TV was preceded by the downfall of the music industry: the murder of radio, MTV, and the musical pop monoculture — and with it, the counterculture that had formed in reaction. Like streaming TV, digital music is siloed and repressed by algorithms. Politically conscious songs exist but are hard to find. Americans still long for them: that’s why the “Fast Car” duet in 2024 entranced the nation.
World leaders are gathered at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which is taking place from January 19 to January 23. Trump is scheduled to go to the meeting in person for the first time since 2020, although now, with him still in the U.S., his social media account has been posting wildly.
Just after midnight, the account posted that Trump had “a very good telephone call with Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, concerning Greenland. I agreed to a meeting of the various parties in Davos, Switzerland. As I expressed to everyone, very plainly, Greenland is imperative for National and World Security. There can be no going back—On that, everyone agrees!” Shortly after, the account posted an AI image of world leaders sitting in front of Trump’s desk in the Oval Office with a large picture of North America entirely covered with stars and stripes to indicate American ownership—including Canada, as well as Greenland. The flag also covers Venezuela.
Then the account posted an image of Trump with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio next to him as he stands on what looks to be an arctic landscape, holding a U.S. flag waving above a sign that reads: “GREENLAND—US TERRITORY EST. 2026.”
Later on, it would post private text messages to Trump from Rutte and French president Emmanuel Macron, mocking their attempts at diplomacy, and repost a message reading: “at what point are we going to realize the enemy is within [angry emoji]. China and Russia are the bogeymen when the real threat is the U.N., NATO, and [Islam].”
And then the account posted: “No single person, or President, has done more for NATO than President Donald J. Trump. If I didn’t come along there would be no NATO right now!!! It would have been in the ash heap of History. Sad, but TRUE!!! President DJT”
But seizing Greenland was not the only thing on the mind of administration officials. The account’s posts suggest they are worried about Trump’s declining popularity. It launched an attack on Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, whom the administration is targeting for alleged mortgage fraud, just before it claimed that Trump was lowering mortgage rates. Later, the account would post a short video of Trump under which the chyron read: “I AM STANDING UP FOR AMERICAN AUTOWORKERS,” although the video was of him promising to stop all federal payments to “sanctuary cities” on February 1.
Then it bopped over to claiming that the people resisting ICE violence in Minnesota are “agitators and insurrectionists. These people are professionals! No person acts the way they act. They are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave, like lunatics, in a certain manner, just like they are doing. They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country.” The first to go, he said, should be Democratic governor Tim Walz and Democratic representative Ilhan Omar, both of whom he called corrupt. Later, the account insisted that Democratic governor of California Gavin Newsom is also corrupt.
Later, the account posted that “[t]he Department of Homeland Security and ICE must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing and taking out of the system. They are saving many innocent lives! There are thousands of vicious animals in Minnesota alone, which is why the crime stats are, Nationwide, the BEST EVER RECORDED! Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW. The people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE, instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”
Then the account turned to reposting long-debunked lies about the 2020 presidential election. It reposted claims that there was voter fraud in Nevada (there wasn’t), that Dominion Voting Machines flipped 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden (they didn’t), that China had rigged the voting for Biden (it didn’t). It appears someone is thinking about the fact that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will be testifying in public on Thursday, January 22.
In Washington today, in a long, rambling speech before reporters, Trump appeared to try to bring his social media post directly to the media. The speech was supposedly to outline the accomplishments of his administration, and he brandished a large sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip, labeled “ACCOMPLISHMENTS,” both of which he later threw on the floor.
But Trump turned from it almost immediately to insist that agents from Immigration and Customs enforcement are not arresting and detaining American citizens, although they very publicly did so on Sunday, breaking into the home of U.S. citizen ChongLy “Scott” Thao without a warrant, holding him at gunpoint, marching him outside in subfreezing weather in just sandals and underwear, driving him around for an hour or two before dropping him back at his home, and then lying that members of his family are on the registered sex offender list.
Trump denied such abuses, claiming that in Minnesota, ICE is apprehending “bad people.” To illustrate his claims, he held up one photo after another of individuals above the label “WORST OF WORST” as he mumbled about how bad they were: “many murderers, many many murderers, people that murdered.” Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who has watched and clipped Trump’s speeches for years, commented: “folks, this is some really weird sh*t. the president is not well.”
From there, Trump was off with the usual litany of complaints about former president Joe Biden, and familiar stories like this one:
“I should’ve gotten the Nobel Prize for each war, but I don’t say that. I saved millions and millions of people. And don’t let anyone tell you that Norway doesn’t control the shots, ok? It’s in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They’ll say, ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ It’s a joke. They’ve lost such prestige. Got all—that’s why I have such respect for Maria doing what she did. She said, ‘I don’t deserve the Nobel Prize, he does.’ When she got it, they named—they said, ‘Wow that’s amazing, I thought President Trump would get it.’”
Trump also had words about Jack Smith: “Deranged Jack sick Smith. He’s a sick son of a b*tch. They gave me the worst of the worst.”
Trump’s threats against Greenland and his promise to hit Europe with high tariffs if governments there don’t support his seizure of Greenland drove the U.S. stock market sharply downward today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 870.74 points (1.76%), the S&P 500 was down 2.06%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.39%, the worst day for all three of these major indexes since October.
Yesterday Tom Fairless of the Wall Street Journal reported that, contrary to Trump’s repeated assertions, U.S. consumers and importers—not foreign countries—are the ones who have paid for Trump’s tariff war. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, echoed the findings of Yale and Harvard Business School economists, confirming that American consumers and importers have absorbed 96% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs.
Trump’s threats against Europe are an entirely different kettle of fish, for as Konrad Putzier, Chao Deng, and Sam Goldfarb of the Wall Street Journal explain, the European Union is the biggest trading partner of the U.S., its largest investor, and its closest financial ally. European leaders are discussing whether to retaliate against the U.S. using the EU’S Anti-Coercion Instrument, nicknamed “the Bazooka,” which can restrict imports and exports to any country trying to coerce an EU member and can limit U.S. investment there.
In The Atlantic on January 18, Robert Kagan wrote that “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II” and warned they “are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength” and “have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way.”
European and Asian allies have cooperated with the U.S. on both defense and trade, while the power of those alliances has prevented serious challenges to that order. Global trade has generally been free, and oceans have been safe for travel both by humans and container ships. Nuclear weapons have been limited by international agreement. “Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely,” Kagan wrote. “They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”
In Davos today, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, told the world, “We are in the midst of a rupture.” The rules-based international order is no longer an automatic route to prosperity and security, he said, as the world’s most powerful nations now use that system’s economic integration to coerce other countries.
In its place, Carney offered a different vision than the “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence that Trump and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin are trying to build.
If “middle powers” pursue a system he called “variable geometry,” he said, they can rebalance the world and help solve global problems while still building strength at home. His vision is a version of the “diplomatic variable geometry” of former U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken, but Carney’s vision decenters the U.S., noting that middle powers must work together to be at the table to avoid being on the menu. Under a system of variable geometry, countries can develop infrastructure and trade at home, strengthening their own nations, while negotiating new international agreements, as Canada has done recently with China, Qatar, India, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc made up of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
But for international affairs, variable geometry means creating international “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests,” “coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.”
“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
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
