O Canada! "A Rupture"

As Donald Trump celebrated the first anniversary of his Second Coming (Congratulations to all us, by the way, for making it through) … the world recoiled, the alliances cracked, prelates of the Church pushed back on his immorality, the Dow dropped 871 points, and we were subjected to a rambling, incoherent presidential rant¹ that reminded us why this whole thing was a genuinely terrible idea.

Happy Wednesday.

The images are, of course, fake. But this was real: The President of the United States posted these bits of MAGA troll-porn on the eve of the conference in Davos.

Hilarity ensued. But Canada (and the rest of Europe) got the message, and it is beginning to dawn on them that appeasement may not be the golden road to safety or security that they imagined. Via the Wapo: “Trump’s Greenland crusade pushes European allies to a breaking point.”

After a year of European leaders trying to charm President Donald Trump with flattery and dealmaking — lucrative promises to purchase U.S. goods including weapons, visits with royals and gifts such as a custom-engraved golf club — Trump’s insistence on controlling Greenland has pushed transatlantic relations closer to a breaking point than leaders or analysts say they have seen in their lifetimes.

Some of America’s once-closest allies say they see no choice other than to hit back, and hard.

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Canada’s Mark Carney set the tone with a remarkable address that history may regard as the moment the West hit its breaking point. “Carney’s World Economic Forum Speech Warns of Global Breakdown”- The New York Times

“I will talk today about the breaking of the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraint,” said Mr. Carney, who used a mixture of French and English in his address in Davos, Switzerland.

“Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry,” he said. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

He added, “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

Mr. Carney, who received a standing ovation, spoke not long after Mr. Trump posted an A.I. image on social media that included a map of American flags superimposed over both Canada and the United States.

You can read the full text here (and it is very much worth your time.)

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As I write, Trump is speaking at Davos, and I think it is safe to say that his performance is doing nothing to allay the fears of a world that thinks the United States has lost its fuqqing mind. (“VIDEO: Trump Confuses Iceland and Greenland in Davos Speech.) Remarks Tom Nichols:

No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.

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But let’s go back to Canada for a moment. This morning, Trump said that he did not intend to take Greenland by force, but the rest of the world is already beginning to think the unthinkable.

This story reminds us that we have crossed through the looking glass: “Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion” - The Globe and Mail

FFS.

Nota Bene

Don’t miss Julia Ioffe’s remarkable account of a congressional visit to Denmark:

On Sunday, a handful of U.S. senators and House members who had traveled to Copenhagen to show support for Denmark, a NATO ally, returned to Washington even more depressed than when they’d left.

“They’re all shaken up,” one Senate aide told me. “Being there and absorbing that emotion is really intense. You expect it in an adversarial country, but this is a country that loves us.” The CODEL had come together at the last minute: The largely Democratic group, which included Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, had originally planned to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos. But with President Trump threatening to seize Greenland by force, they decided to make a stop in Denmark as a show of solidarity.

Members of the CODEL told me they were utterly shocked and embarrassed by the extent to which Trump had alienated the Danish people. A country that once prided itself on hosting the largest Fourth of July celebration outside the U.S. now has a popular app that helps Danes identify made-in-America products to boycott. Near the U.S. embassy, they witnessed a massive anti-U.S. protest, which further mortified them. They were frequently approached by Danes expressing shock and anger at the U.S. president, as well as gratitude for the members of Congress who had come to demonstrate their support.

Rep. Sara Jacobs recalled how a Danish man, who had just returned from studying in the U.S., thanked her for coming. “It honestly felt surreal,” Jacobs told me. At a speech at the University of Copenhagen on Friday night, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was approached by a constituent who now lives in Denmark and is raising four dual-national boys there. One of them is 16—two years away from Denmark’s mandatory draft age. The woman told Shaheen that she was afraid her son could soon be fighting against the U.S.

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‘Morally acceptable’ for US troops to disobey orders, archbishop says

Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio is one of a chorus of Catholic leaders questioning the administration’s use of force. His comments also underscored the mounting concern being voiced by the first American pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, as well as his top cardinals in the United States, over the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

“Greenland is a territory of Denmark,” Broglio told the BBC Sunday. “It does not seem really reasonable that the United States would attack and occupy a friendly nation.”

Asked whether he was “worried” about the military personnel in his pastoral care, Broglio replied: “I am obviously worried because they could be put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable.”

“It would be very difficult for a soldier or a Marine or a sailor to by himself disobey an order,” he said. “But strictly speaking, he or she would be, within the realm of their own conscience, it would be morally acceptable to disobey that order, but that’s perhaps putting that individual in an untenable situation — and that’s my concern.”

As Christopher Hale notes:

The statement landed with force precisely because of who delivered it.

Until recently, Broglio was known as a cautious institutionalist — a Vatican-trained diplomat, a protégé of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, an outspoken opponent of abortion, and a reliable representative of the U.S. bishops’ conservative wing. Elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2022 with strong conservative backing, he was widely viewed as someone unlikely to confront a Republican White House directly.

Yet here he was, on the BBC, suggesting that obedience to conscience may require disobedience to presidential authority.

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And… exit Lindsey Halligan. The former pageant star’s turn as a DOJ enforcer came to an end after two federal judges called bullshit on her “masquerade” as a US Attorney. Via Adam Klasfeld:

“At the end of the day, Ms. Halligan’s response asserts that she is free to act in an unlawful capacity, because she disagrees that she does so unlawfully. But that’s not how our legal system works,” U.S. District Judge David Novak, a Trump appointee, ruled. “By having continued to exercise a position to which she was unconstitutionally appointed, including by signing the indictment in this case as ‘United States Attorney,’ Ms. Halligan exercised ‘power that [she] did not lawfully possess.’”

Hours before Novak’s ruling, the Chief Judge of the Eastern District of Virginia separately posted a job listing for her replacement.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie disqualified Halligan and dismissed her cases against James Comey and Letitia James on the grounds that she was unlawfully and unconstitutionally appointed.

Halligan, a Trump White House aide with no prosecutorial experience, remained in the job and continued to sign her name on indictments and legal pleadings.

Judge Novak ordered Halligan to explain why he should not strike the “United States Attorney” affiliation from her signature line and refer her for disciplinary proceedings.

With the Justice Department’s full backing, Halligan defiantly signed a brief ridiculing Novak’s inquiry as an “inquisition” and accusing the judge of making “rudimentary” and “elementary” legal errors. Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche co-signed the brief.

Novak noticed.

The judge wrote that Blanche, Bondi and Halligan’s filing “contains a level of vitriol more appropriate for a cable news talk show and falls far beneath the level of advocacy expected from litigants in this Court, particularly the Department of Justice.”

Judge Novak found it “inconceivable” that the Justice Department “would repeatedly ignore court orders, while simultaneously prosecuting citizens for breaking the law.”

“The Court cannot tolerate such obstinance, because doing so would undermine the very essence of the Rule of Law,” he wrote. “If the Court were to allow Ms. Halligan and the Department of Justice to pick and choose which orders that they will follow, the same would have to be true for other litigants and our system of justice would crumble.”

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And finally…

Year One: How’s it going?

Via the Economist:

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Wednesday dogs

Auggie is on watch.

1. Via Mediaite:

Trump marked the first anniversary of his second term with a presser in the White House briefing room that lasted more than 90 minutes. The president repeated wild 2020 election conspiracy theories, raged at former CNN host Don Lemon, baselessly claimed that a witness to a fatal ICE shooting this month was a “paid agitator,” alleged that “pirating ships,” is the “only thing” Somalis are “good at,” said people in Washington, D.C. “can act like a real lover” after he deployed the National Guard there, dunked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith, and declared that “God is very proud” of the president’s first year back in office, among other wild moments.