In less than 40 minutes today in snow-covered Washington, D.C., a joint session of Congress counted the certified electoral votes that will make Republican Donald Trump president of the United States at noon on January 20. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the session in her role as president of the Senate, announcing to Congress the ballot totals. The ceremony went smoothly, without challenges to any of the certified state ballots. Trump won 312 electoral votes; Harris, who was the Democratic nominee for president, won 226.
The Democrats emphasized routine process and acceptance of election results to reinforce that the key element of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. Before the session, Harris released a video on social media reminding people that “[t]he peaceful transfer of power is one of the most fundamental principles of American democracy. As much as any other principle, it is what distinguishes our system of government from monarchy or tyranny.”
But at the session, the tableau on the dais itself illustrated that Republicans have elevated lawmakers who reject that principle. Behind the vice president sat the newly reelected speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (R-LA), who was a key player in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election: he lied about fraud; recruited colleagues to join a lawsuit challenging the election results from the key states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia; and, after the January 6 riot, challenged the counting of certified votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania.
After the session concluded, Harris told reporters: “Well, today was…obviously, a very important day, and it was about what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted, which is that one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.
“And today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which included, today, performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America, the voters of America will have their votes counted, that those votes matter, and that they will determine, then, the outcome of an election.
“I do believe very strongly that America’s democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it—every single person, their willingness to fight for and respect the importance of our democracy. Otherwise, it is very fragile and it will not be able to withstand moments of crisis.
“And today, America’s democracy stood.”
Democracy stood in the sense that its norms were honored today as they were not four years ago, which is no small thing. But it is a blow indeed that the man who shattered those norms by trying to overturn the will of the American voters and seize the government will soon be leading it again.
It did not seem initially as if any such a resurrection was possible. While MAGA lawmakers and influencers tried to insist that “Antifa” or FBI plants had launched the riot that made congress members hide in fear for their lives while Secret Service agents rushed Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, to a secure location, that left at least seven people dead and at least 140 police officers wounded, and that did about $3 million of damage to the Capitol as rioters broke windows and doors, looted offices, smeared feces on the walls, and tore down an American flag to replace it with a Trump flag, there was little doubt, even among Trump loyalists, as to who was to blame.
All four living presidents condemned Trump and his supporters; Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all suspended him; members of his cabinet resigned in protest; corporations and institutions dropped their support for Trump.
Indeed, it seemed that the whole Trump ship was foundering. Trump advisor Hope Hicks texted Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff that the Trump family was now “royally f*cked.” “In one day he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boy’s chapter,” Hicks wrote. “And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed. I’m so mad & upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.” “Not being dramatic, but we are all f*cked.”
Even then–Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered a blistering account of Trump’s behavior and said: “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.”
But McConnell appeared reluctant to see Trump impeached. He delayed the Senate trial of the House’s charge of “incitement of insurrection” until Biden was president, then pressed for Trump’s acquittal on the grounds that he was no longer president. Even before that February 2021 acquittal, then–House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)—who had had a shouting match with Trump on January 6 in which he allegedly begged Trump to call off his supporters and yelled that the rioters were “trying to f*cking kill me!”—traveled to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago to get him to support Republican candidates in the 2022 election.
Their hunger to keep Trump’s voters began the process of whitewashing Trump’s attempt to overturn our democracy. At the same time, those Republicans who had either participated in the scheme or gone along with it continued to defend their behavior. As time passed, they downplayed the violence of January 6. As early as May 2021, some began to claim it was less a deadly attack than a “normal tourist visit.”
When the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol began to collect testimony and evidence, Trump and fellow Republicans did all they could to discredit it. As it became clear that Trump would win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, they worked to exonerate him from wrongdoing and accused the Democrats of misleading Americans about the events of that day.
In February 2021, McConnell defended his vote to acquit Trump of inciting insurrection by promising the courts would take care of him. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen,” he said, “still liable for everything he did while in office, [and] didn't get away with anything yet…. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
But while more than 1,500 people have been charged with federal crimes associated with the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and many of Trump’s lawyers and advisors have been disbarred or faced charges, Trump has managed to avoid legal accountability by using every possible means to delay the federal case brought against him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
And now, with the help of a compliant Supreme Court stacked with three of his own appointees, he has gained the immunity McConnell said he did not have. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court handed down the aptly named Donald Trump v. United States decision, establishing that sitting presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within the scope of their official duties. Before the new, slimmer set of charges brought after this decision could go forward, voters reelected Trump to the presidency, triggering the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
As Republicans whitewashed January 6 and the legal system failed to hold Trump to account, the importance of Trump’s attack on our democracy seemed to fade. Even the Trump v. U.S. Supreme Court decision, which undermined the key principle that all Americans are equal before the law by declaring Trump above it, got less attention than its astonishingly revolutionary position warranted, coming as it did just four days after President Joe Biden looked and sounded old in a televised presidential debate.
As the 2024 election approached, Trump rewrote the events of January 6 so completely that he began calling it “a day of love.” He said those found guilty of crimes related to January 6 were “political prisoners” and vowed to pardon them on his first day in office. Dan Barry and Alan Feuer noted in the New York Times today that Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, referring to “the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th,” claims that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.”
And yet, today, Trump’s lawyers wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding he prevent the public release of the final report written by special counsel Jack Smith about Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. They say it would disrupt the presidential transition by “giving rise to a media storm of false and unfair criticism” and interfere with presidential immunity by diverting Trump’s time and energy.
Having reviewed the two-volume report, the lawyers objected to its claim that Trump and others “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort,” that Trump was “the head of the criminal conspiracies,” that he hatched a “criminal design,” and that he “violated multiple federal criminal laws.” They also took issue with the “baseless attacks on other anticipated members of President Trump’s incoming administration, which are an obvious effort to interfere with upcoming confirmation hearings.”
They conclude that releasing Smith’s report “would not ‘be in the public interest.’”
The move will end a third-party fact-checking system and rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts. It is likely to please the incoming Trump administration and its conservative allies.
Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.
Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video statement that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. On the company’s current fact-checking system, he added that it had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Mr. Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk has also increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.
The move is likely to please the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.
Since Mr. Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives.
In late November, Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trump, would join Meta’s board.
Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”
This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.
Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.
Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.
Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.
This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.
Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.
Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.
Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.
Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”
Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.
For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.
By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.
Another four years of deregulation and corporate ass-smooching and the online world will be unrecognizable.
hightor wrote:Another four years of deregulation and corporate ass-smooching and the online world will be unrecognizable.
I wonder what will be next, the likeliest current forecast is: something that Elon decides.
We all live in the Muskoverse now.
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, as he declared U.S. control of both to be vital to American national security.
“I’m not going to commit to that,” Trump said, when asked if he would rule out the use of the military. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.” He added, “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”
The Kingdom of Denmark, or simply Denmark, is a sovereign state consisting of a collection of constituent territories united by the Constitutional Act, which applies to the entire territory. It consists of metropolitan Denmark—the kingdom's territory in continental Europe and sometimes called "Denmark proper" (Danish: egentlige Danmark)—and the realm's two autonomous regions: the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and Greenland in North America.
The Manifest Destiny of MAGA.
The Gulf of Mexico has been named the Gulf of Mexico since before the United States of America was named the United States of America. Since, that is, before there was a United States of America.
You can see that name used on old maps, like one produced in France in 1717: Golfe de Mexique, the expanse that sat between Mexico and the French- and Spanish-controlled lands that are now the American Gulf Coast. George Washington wasn’t born until more than a decade after that map was made.
And yet, in a few months, the gulf might carry a new name, at least in the eyes of U.S. officialdom: the Gulf of America.
“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” President-elect Donald Trump said during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, “which has a beautiful ring — that covers a lot of territory.
“The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name,” he continued. “And it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) agreed; she quickly announced that she would immediately introduce legislation changing the name — at least when it comes to the U.S. government. There’s no viable mechanism for making other countries, including Mexico, call it that, any more than Indonesia can dictate what China calls the South China Sea.
But this isn’t a reorienting of geography akin to when Trump, during his first term in office, drew a black line on a map of the southeastern United States. It is, instead, part of a much less innocuous pattern, one that has Trump extending his “America First” mantra to suggest that this nation has dominion over territory that it doesn’t currently control.
In recent weeks, with increasing frequency, Trump has mused publicly about annexing or assuming power over several geographic areas. Canada, for example, which he has suggested should be added to the United States as one, giant state. He revived quiet discussion from his first term about wrangling Greenland away from Denmark. He has also stated repeatedly that the United States should regain control of the Panama Canal, which he claims is now controlled by China rather than Panama.
As is often the case with Trump’s more exotic pronunciations, he has often offered them as jokes and his supporters have received them in that way. Dominance, real or performative, is a central part of Trump’s political appeal, and he and his supporters have enjoyed taunting their opponents with his expansionist riffs. Outgoing liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been portrayed as an inept lackey whose land is ripe for the plucking. Donald Trump Jr. traveled to Greenland on Tuesday in the Trump-branded jet to tromp around and hand out MAGA hats.
During that Mar-a-Lago news conference, though, Trump made clear that he is not entirely joking.
“Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?” a reporter asked.
“No,” Trump replied. Asked to explain his plan, he continued: “You’re talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.” He added that he wasn’t “going to commit to that” — not using the military, specifically — “now. It might be that you’ll have to do something.” Despite Denmark being a NATO ally.
Later, he was asked if he was considering using military force to subjugate Canada, too. Good news for our northern neighbors: Trump said he was only considering “economic force” to do so.
The president-elect’s stated willingness to use military force to seize foreign territory is striking because his 2024 campaign was predicated significantly on the idea that he abhorred foreign entanglements. He and his allies attributed the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to President Joe Biden despite the lack of American military involvement in those conflicts. Trump presented himself on the campaign trail as the only president not to begin new wars, even as he excoriated Biden for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
But that was then. Now, Trump’s presentation of the inevitable dominance of America has expanded from rejections of the opposition party, and beyond using tariffs as a vehicle of economic pressure, to actual troops.
Trump offered a predictable explanation for his desire to seize Greenland and the canal: They are needed “for economic security.” Security (geopolitical rather than economic) was one of the rationales Russian President Vladimir Putin used as he prepared to invade Ukraine three years ago. Trump, who has a well-established affection for Putin and Putin’s autocratic leadership, has in the past described the Ukraine invasion as smart and explained Putin’s interest in annexing its neighbor.
It is likely that, in four years’ time, the territory under American control is no larger than it is today. It is likely, too, that any legislation establishing the “Gulf of America” would be reversed by another future Congress, in the same way that Trump has announced his intent to reverse the renaming of Mount McKinley to Denali.
It is possible, though, that Trump’s not-joking pronouncements establishing a new Manifest Destiny will lead to actions that trigger international condemnation or conflict. When your mantra is “America First,” it’s almost inevitable that your foreign policy will lean toward the expansionist.
And Trump has already spent weeks getting his base of millions of supporters to cheer for it.
Trump also vows to change the Gulf of Mexico's name.
In recent weeks, with increasing frequency, Trump has mused publicly about annexing or assuming power over several geographic areas. Canada, for example, which he has suggested should be added to the United States as one, giant state.
Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”
Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.
The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.
While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.
Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.
Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.
Those eager to get their hands on the land use the word “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”
But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.
Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.
Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.
In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.
In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.
Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.
Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.
Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.
But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.
Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.
But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.
Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”
The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.
It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.
