Trump Slouches Toward the War He Wants
Farce dances once again with tragedy, as ICE faces a new investigation for murder; Donald Trump escalates his threats against Greenland, and spends the day preening over a fake prize he will never win.
On Thursday, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado ventured into the gilded Oval Office and handed over her Nobel to Trump, a man who believes that if you’re a superpower you can grab pretty much any country by the **** because they’ll let you do it.
Of course, Trump now pretends getting his hands on this golden bauble means he’s won some kind of an award. But, as the Nobel Committee noted pointedly: “Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others. The decision is final and stands for all time. A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”
It will come as absolutely no surprise to you that Trump doesn’t care. He has his Precious, which will now hang beside all the other bogus ornaments of his insatiable neediness.
Meanwhile, in a clear snub to the actual democratic opposition, Trump’s CIA director met with the Maduro-loyalist who is acting president of Venezuela. Apparently, the thugs get to keep the country; and Trump gets to keep the medal (and the oil).
Speaking of the oil: “US gets first $500 million Venezuelan oil deal, holding some proceeds in Qatar.”
Qatar? The country that gave Trump the fanciest lagniappe of all — a jumbo bribe on wings that will touch every one of Trump’s erogenous zones of avarice and excess?1
Why, yes, the very same.
Reports Semafor: The main account for the oil proceeds is in Qatar, which a senior officials described “as a neutral location where money can flow freely with US approval and without risk of seizure.”
And, yet, as you know, these stories hardly break the top 5 outrages of the day.
So Happy Friday. A note to readers:
This is the fight of our lifetimes, and the challenge of our generation.
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The Invasion of Minneapolis By the Numbers
On Thursday, Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis posted: “Minnesota needs ICE to leave, not an escalation that brings additional federal troops beyond the 3,000 already here.”
The Minnesota Star-Tribune puts this into some perspective: “A potential 3,000 federal agents from ICE and CBP is equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.”
It’s close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.
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The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser: “The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment”
On Tuesday, in a statement whose full import you might have missed amid all the other Trump-generated crises, the President warned Minnesota: “THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION & RECKONING IS COMING!” Yes, our revenge-obsessed leader seems to have put an entire state in his crosshairs. By Thursday morning, as protests continued to escalate in reaction to the increasingly violent presence of armed federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump issued an ultimatum: either the “professional agitators and insurrectionists” stand down from “attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.,” or he would finally follow through and invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the U.S. military….
The goal all along, it appears, was something like what’s happening today in Minnesota: a street-theatre carnival of violence, mostly instigated by the federal government itself, in an effort to create a genuine security crisis that Trump can then step in to resolve. And so we have begun 2026 bombarded with upsetting, awful images—of a masked man dressed in army green shooting a mom in a maroon Honda S.U.V. as agents screamed conflicting instructions at her, of Americans walking down the icy streets of their own city being stopped and interrogated about their citizenship for no reason except the color of their skin. How does one not shudder at the video of the woman who was dragged out of her car the other day, as she screamed that she was a disabled U.S. citizen on the way to an appointment with her doctor? Trump has sent more federal agents to Minneapolis—several thousand of them—than there are police officers in the city. It’s a fight he wants, and it’s a fight he’s got.
**
Indeed, Trump and his mini-Goebbels seem intent on finding pretexts to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow the deployment of active-duty military onto the streets of recalcitrant cities. Stephen Miller is now describing anti-ICE protests as an “insurgency.”
Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller called the anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota “an insurgency” on Thursday, just hours after President Donald Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act to use the military against U.S. citizens.
Miller was on the Charlie Kirk Show and said, “You only have to read their own words and hear their own words and judge their own conduct to understand that this is clearly an insurgency against the federal government. They are describing the federal government as an occupying force. Just think about that for a second.”
(As you know, I’ve been predicting for months that Trump will pull the trigger on the Insurrection Act: “Yes, Of Course, Trump Will Invoke the Insurrection Act.”)
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Meanwhile: Via the Wapo: “Medical examiner believes ICE detainee death was homicide, recording shows”
A fellow detainee says he witnessed Geraldo Lunas Campos being choked to death by guards at an ICE detention center in Texas on Jan. 3.
Minneapolis couple says ICE released tear gas under family vehicle with 6 children inside
Shawn and Destiny Jackson have an 11- and 7-year-old, 4-year-old twins, a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old baby boy. They were on their way home from basketball practice when they were caught between protesters and ICE agents….
he said the agents walked to the back of their vehicle and released a canister of tear gas under their vehicle.
“Within seconds, there was a big boom and our car was up in the air and we slammed down and all of our airbags deployed and all of our doors locked. And tear gas just started forming, a ball of gas just started forming around the car,” Destiny Jackson said….
When the tear gas was released, Destiny Jackson says panic set in.
“I managed to feel around and open up everybody’s, like, I unlocked everybody’s door and I hopped out, and I just started pulling as many kids as I could out,” she said.
Bystanders stepped up. Destiny Jackson said she was taken inside a house nearby, and total strangers began helping her children out of the smoke-filled vehicle.
“The last person to get out of the car was my infant child,” she said. “And when he came in, he was, like, lifeless. It was like foam or bubbles coming out of his mouth. I had to give him mouth-to-mouth and CPR. I couldn’t even breathe myself, and all I remember is between every breath, I was saying, ‘I’m going to give you every breath I have until you get yours back.’”
Trump Doesn’t Care
Some takeaways from the Reuters interview:
When told that a Reuters/Ipsos poll found tepid support among Americans for taking control of Greenland, Trump called the poll “fake.”
“I don’t care,” he responded when asked about the pushback by some Senate Republicans against the investigation into Powell. “I don’t care,” he said again, when reminded of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s concerns that White House interference in the Fed could harm the economy.
Inflation? Affordability?
When asked about Americans’ worries about high prices, Trump reiterated that the economy was the strongest “in history” and said he had to do a better job of promoting his achievements….
Elections?
The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Let Them Eat Broccoli
Via the HuffPo: “Conservative Pundit Mocks ‘One Of The Saddest Bits’ Of Trump Admin Spin Yet”
Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes on Thursday connected the dots on what he described as the Trump administration’s “Marie Antoinette” messaging.
Sykes, appearing on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” first slammed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent widely mocked $3 meal deal talk (in response to the cost-of-living crisis, which Donald Trump’s tariffs have not eased) as “one of the saddest bits of spin that I’ve seen in a long time.”
[Sykes] then explained how he believes it’s part of a wider pattern.
Rollins herself has previously suggested Americans could combat high egg prices by getting chickens and the president has argued people should be happy with just fewer toys and pencils, Sykes noted.
“Oh, happy days are here again if you get those things,” he sarcastically said.
“This is supposed to be the ‘Golden Age’ and this is coming from a guy who’s building himself a $400 million ballroom,” he added.
“What I see here is just the absolute tone deafness,” and Rollins “does not have her finger on the pulse of middle America, in any way whatsoever,” Sykes said.
You can watch the segment here:
Friday dogs
Snowy day here in Wisconsin. Auggie has some ideas for what we can do after I finish snow blowing.
Meanwhile (via our new trail cam), someone was checking us out. (Or, perhaps, watching over us.)
From last May:
Let’s not make this complicated.
Of course it’s a bribe.
Everyone knows it’s a bribe. The Qataris know it’s a bribe. Trump knows it’s a bribe. Even MAGA simps know it’s a bribe.
And you’re not crazy to think that it’s brazenly corrupt and illegal with hair on it. It’s exactly this sort of thing that the Founders had in mind when they wrote the Emoluments Clause.
The Qataris have been buying influence, access and clout for years, so they are veterans of payola. They could have given Trump piles of gold bars like the ones used to bribe Senator Bob Menendez; or envelopes of cash like Spiro Agnew pocketed. They could simply have purchased billions of dollars of $TRUMP meme coins. Or they could have given him secret accounts like the ones they used to finance Hamas and other terror groups.
Our marching orders:
“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
I have no respect for Machado—my god, she even had the thing framed in gold. I don’t care what her strategic reason was for giving him this. Two things happened: She dishonored the award, and she showed that she is no leader. That was a weak submissive move.