The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

The Middle East was braced on Wednesday night, but the anxious petitioning of Gulf states and Iran’s attempts to appease the US president appeared to win out – at least for the moment. No bombs fell on Tehran. After all his threats, and with military options under discussion in Washington, Donald Trump stepped back, announcing that “the killing [of protesters] has stopped”.

Despite the telecommunications blackout, it seems clear that a ruthless regime has shed still more blood than in previous protest crackdowns. Rights groups say that thousands have been killed and vast numbers arrested; one official spoke of 2,000 deaths. Witnesses compared the streets to a war zone. If the large-scale killings have indeed ebbed, that is probably because Iranians have been terrified out of the streets – for now, at least. Iran’s foreign minister chose Fox News to insist no hangings were imminent, in case the identity of the message’s one-man audience was in any doubt. But while retribution may have been postponed, it will not be cancelled as it should be: the calls for the regime’s downfall are seen as an existential threat. The Iranian authorities can wait. Mr Trump will move on.

Even as the threat of reckless military intervention in Iran receded, if only for the moment, the dangers facing Greenland were underscored as European troops flew in on Thursday. Meetings in Washington had failed to bridge the “fundamental disagreement” over its future, with Mr Trump reiterating that the US “needs” Greenland and Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, warning that the president is still set on “conquering” Greenland. Venezuela is on the back burner for now, after Mr Trump took his lap of victory for illegally snatching Nicolás Maduro. But he has already warned Cuba, Colombia and Mexico that they could be next. Alarmingly, the former anti-interventionist has concluded that foreign adventures have fewer costs than he anticipated and more gains. He hopes that menace, spectacle and diversion can work abroad as well as domestically.

Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” was that presenting him as uncontrollable and volatile would keep adversaries in line. But Nixon had a clear strategic framework and aims. While the same cannot be said of Mr Trump, it would be wrong to see him as irrational. Despite grandiose threats, he has often been cautious in military action. He does not need to follow through every time; he just needs people to know that he might. But his causes (resource grabs, imperial splendour, vengeance, “civilisational” supremacy and self-glorification) are alarming, his idea of victory is short-termist and egocentric, and caprice rules his court. He revels in unsettling his inner circle too.

As a leading analyst of Iran noted this week, policymaking has shifted from a clear, deliberative, strategic process to bureaucracy mobilising in response to off-the-cuff presidential comments. Post-Maduro, Mr Trump is emboldened – and more likely to miscalculate. It’s telling that Iran’s regional rivals were key in holding him back from a strike, fearing the destabilisation of the region, the strengthening of Israel or perhaps the emergence of a still more hardline regime in Tehran.

Addressing the French army in his annual speech on Thursday, Emmanuel Macron spoke of a brutal world “where destabilising forces have awakened”, with “competitors [Europe] never thought it would see”. He did not need to name names. Permacrisis is not just the cause and result of Trump – it’s his method too.

The US president delights in his inconsistency.

But his short-term victories have profound long-term costs for his country and the world

the consequences of his actions are actually matters of life and death for real people

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”

Legal analyst Asha Rangappa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posse Comitatus Act to permit troops to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then, she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws. Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly.

Governor Tim Walz has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to “turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are,” he wrote on social media. Walz also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops. “I know this is scary,” he wrote. “We can—we must—speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That’s what he wants.”

The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.”

The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act “spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country, elected officials who are using their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers who are encouraging left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters today that federal agents will ask Americans to “validate their identity” by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone federal agents allege has committed a crime. As CNN’s Kaanity Iyer reported, today, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show proof of citizenship “without some other basis to make a stop.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the U.S. that the party of a president who wins an election then loses seats in the midterms, and suggested he didn’t want to be in that position. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions in the United States during his presidency. He said polls showing popular opposition to his threat to take Greenland were “fake.” He said he doesn’t care that even Senate Republicans object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation’s financial system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said again, and falsely, that the economy was the strongest “in history.”

“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”

One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields.

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller of Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing strain of Trump’s poor poll numbers, popular anger over ICE, fury over threats against Greenland, Republican pushback over the investigation of Powell, and the December 23, 2025, decision of the Supreme Court suggesting Trump could not use federalized National Guard troops to enforce his power on Democrat-dominated state governments.

That strain is showing in the administration’s raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. The FBI executed a search warrant at Natanson’s home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor they say has illegally retained classified documents. But Natanson is a leading journalist covering the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees who might give her information about the workings of the administration. The agents seized her phone, two laptops—one personal and one issued by the Washington Post—and a Garmin watch.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, makes searches of reporter’s homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Bruce D. Brown called the search of Natanson’s home “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have discharged their weapons at least 16 times since President Trump and Stephen Miller launched their mass intimidation and deportation campaign last summer. Renee Nicole Good, who died last Wednesday in Minneapolis, is not even the first of these victims to have been killed.

We have been told by the Trump right that these are officers of the law struggling to do their jobs in the face of unlawful disruption. But when Americans catch glimpses of ICE agents on social media, they are not typically in orderly pursuit of undocumented migrants. Quite a lot isn’t really immigration enforcement at all, but moments of escalatory panic and rage — chaotic episodes in which often masked agents scramble to intimidate, coerce and ultimately pacify groups of civilians whose sympathies lie not with the state but with its nominal targets. Increasingly, what we are seeing resembles a war against the liberal resistance.

The spectacle looks from one vantage like a horrifying break with soft-focus American history. But there are also obvious continuities, not just with the country’s long history of vigilantism but also with a very recent period of militarism: empowered mercenaries treating the cities in which they’ve been deployed like intimidating war zones, seeing opposition and hostility around every corner and treating anyone who dares stand in their way as a terrorist or insurrectionist. This isn’t border enforcement; it is a kind of blundering counterinsurgency.

For more than two decades now, left-wing critics of the war on terror have warned about the possibility of what they often called the “imperial boomerang,” drawing on the work of Aimé Césaire, who argued that it was European colonial brutality that eventually enabled the rise of fascism at home, and Hannah Arendt, who endorsed the theory in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” (Michel Foucault later picked up the thread, too.)

Sometimes the prophecy seemed to suggest an element of karma — that in launching an open-ended war of choice America might reap what it had sown, with that cruelty and excess abroad returning from the imperial periphery not just in the form of soldiers’ trauma but also in the form of blood lust and violence, too.

But journalists, including Evan Wright and Radley Balko, and intellectuals, such as Chalmers Johnson and Julian Go, also offered some particular and pretty concrete predictions, including about the way that advanced military equipment, once purchased, would eventually find its way into the hands of domestic law enforcement officers, who would surely find something to do with all of it — helicopters and tanks, tactical gear and flash-bang grenades and sniper rifles. As the active campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan subsided, giving way first to less visible military operations and increasingly to remote-control warfare, the writers Noura Erakat, Connor Woodman, Richard Beck and Spencer Ackerman have warned of the paranoid logic of the forever war and the authoritarian drift of the state, and about the growth of repression and surveillance and the curtailment of civil liberties, the militarization of normal police action and the elevation of any conflict to a kind of “Clash of Civilizations” status.

And here we are, with an Iraq veteran in tactical gear, surrounded by comrades swarming a car partially blocking his way, firing point-blank at its driver. In the immediate aftermath, sympathetic nativists justified the shooting by describing a Minneapolis taken over by Somali refugees, but also by pointing to the victim’s divorce and sexuality, the social justice curriculum at her child’s elementary school and the obstinateness of liberal white women.

The crisis in Minneapolis began when the Trump administration sent ICE surging into the cosmopolitan city, which just five years ago had given rise to the largest protest movement the country had ever seen, not because there was some sudden burst of migration but to respond to a large-scale social-services fraud scandal, an obsession of the right-wing online ecosystem. This was the equivalent of dispatching the military to clean up a failed state, with “blue” now effectively a Trump administration synonym for “failed.” And the immigrants accused of perpetrating the fraud scheme were Somalis — many of them former residents of the quintessential failed state, a Muslim country in Africa that has been hit by more than 130 U.S. strikes since Inauguration Day. On the very day of Good’s shooting, the Fox News host Jesse Watters proposed to Vice President JD Vance that the Democrats in Minnesota have “a little bit of a Somali problem.” The vice president laughed, “America has a bit of a Somali problem.”
Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath

Over the last few years, noting pandemic-era peaks in crime and homelessness, it was possible for conservatives to demagogue blue cities as hell pits of social disorder, discrediting liberal governance of any kind. But crime has fallen so far and so fast that national murder rates are now lower than they ever were in records dating back to the 1960s. The migration surge that produced a spasm of American nativism is inarguably over, too. Since Trump’s second inauguration, actual border crossings have fallen close to historic lows.

But the logic of the forever culture war is that it must continue. In the last year MAGA has grown obsessed with government fraud, even after an empowered Elon Musk failed to find any meaningful major waste in federal spending. At the same time, it has embraced a throwback Islamophobia that has probably generated more references to Sept. 11, 2001, than we’ve heard in years.

In 2025, ICE has brought the border to blue strongholds quite literally, turning whole sanctuary cities into zones of open conflict — between state leaders and federal ones, city police and federal agents, resistance liberals and a descending force of outsiders who see a “The Future Is Female” bumper sticker and imagine the driver is a domestic terrorist.

Officers have already arrested and assaulted and harassed many dozens of citizens, many of them for the supposed crime of documenting ICE operations, as though journalism is a form of violence. They have arrested elected officials engaged in protest under false pretenses, too, as though political opposition has been criminalized. Agents have reportedly dragged pregnant women, pointed guns at children and left victims to seek out medical attention on their own. They have used banned chokeholds, according to ProPublica, at least 40 times.

Much ICE activity, though certainly not all, has unfolded within the distressingly capacious boundaries of American immigration law. But the shape of that immigration law, too, and the entire enforcement apparatus that has grown up to police it, is the result of the war on terror. ICE was created relatively recently, as part of the 2002 domestic legislative initiative that created the Department of Homeland Security, too — based on the logic that, given the imminent-seeming threat of terror, immigration enforcement would have to grow more expansive and sophisticated and militaristic in response.

Over time, what once looked like unstoppable war-on-terror jingoism soured into rage and regret, which destabilized American politics for a decade. Will ICE’s domestic campaign produce a similar blowback?

For the moment, Americans seem to be recoiling as they watch border-police vigilantism documented every day now, by citizen observers circling federal agents — each side filming the other in a kind of livestreamed mutual surveillance state. Last summer, support for immigration was at a record high. Recent polling from YouGov showed that abolishing ICE, once a widely mocked position of the online left, is now more popular than not abolishing it. By a 25-point margin, Americans believe the amount of force used in Good’s shooting was not justified; they oppose the use of military-grade weapons and the use of force against protesters by similar margins. Nearly 60 percent of the country supports the criminal prosecution of ICE agents who kill civilians, according to polling, and a similar share believes that what is happening in our cities can be fairly characterized as a conflict or war.

But just as alarming as what ICE has done in American cities in the first year of Trump’s second term is what the agency has in store for the next three — no matter the tide of public opinion. Last year Trump’s signature domestic policy law helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers and hiring 10,000 new agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.

Well, President Donald J. Trump finally has his Nobel Peace Prize. Yesterday, in a visit to the White House, Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado presented Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize medal the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded to her in October 2025. Although the medal commemorating the prize can change hands, the committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute have made it clear that “[o]nce a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others.”

Asked today why he would want someone else’s Nobel Prize, he answered: “Well, she offered it to me. I thought it was very nice. She said, ‘You know, you’ve ended eight wars and nobody deserves this prize more than—in history—than you do.’ I thought it was a very nice gesture. And by the way, I think she’s a very fine woman, and we’ll be talking again.”

With all its members dressed in dark blue suits and red ties—Trump’s usual garb—the Florida Panthers hockey team presented Trump yesterday with a jersey bearing his name and the number 47, two championship rings, and a golden hockey stick. At the ceremony, Trump looked over at the gifts laid out beside the podium at which he was speaking, and told the audience: “I heard they have a little surprise. Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s the stick and not just the shirt. That stick looks beautiful. That looks beautiful. Maybe I get both, who the hell knows. I’m president, I’ll just take ‘em.”

And then, of course, Trump says he wants Greenland, a resource-rich autonomous island that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. In a January 8, 2026, piece in the New Yorker, Susan Glasser noted that Trump dumbfounded his advisors in 2018 by suggesting a trade of Puerto Rico for Greenland and, in the fall of 2021, told Glasser and her husband, journalist Peter Baker, that he wanted Greenland as a piece of real estate.

“I’m in real estate,” he told them. “I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ ” He added, “It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.” (Observers note that map projections often either minimize or exaggerate the true size of Greenland: it’s about three times the size of Texas.)

Trump announced his designs on Greenland as soon as he took office the second time, but talk about it quieted down until the administration attacked Venezuela and successfully extracted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Then Trump turned back to his earlier demands.

Those threats against Greenland and therefore Denmark, a founding member of the defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), directly attack the organization that has underpinned the rules-based international order that has helped to stabilize the world since World War II. As NATO allies, Greenland and the United States have always cooperated on defense matters—indeed, the U.S. Pituffik Space Base is operating in Greenland currently.

In an interview with New York Times reporters on January 7, Trump explained that he wants not simply to work with Greenland, as the U.S. has done successfully for decades, but to own it. “Ownership is very important,” he told David E. Sanger.

“Why is ownership important here?” Sanger asked.

“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump answered. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.”

Katie Rogers asked: “Psychologically important to you or to the United States?”

Trump answered: “Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.”

In a different part of the interview, Rogers asked Trump: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” Trump answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”

“Not international law?” asked Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “I don’t need international law,” Trump answered. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people. I’ve ended—remember this, I’ve ended eight wars. Nobody else has ever done that. I’ve ended eight wars and didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty amazing.” After more discussion of his fantasy that he has ended eight wars,” Kanno-Youngs followed up: “But do you feel your administration needs to abide by international law on the global stage?”

“Yeah, I do,” Trump said. “You know, I do, but it depends what your definition of international law is.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country with which the U.S. has been allied for more than two centuries, is “extraordinarily dangerous.” Nichols suggests that Trump might simply declare the U.S. owns Greenland and then dare anyone to disagree (much as he declared he won the 2020 presidential election). That could create a disastrous series of events that would “incinerate the NATO alliance.”

With that collapse, Russian president Vladimir Putin might well begin attacking other NATO members, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (which together, Nichols notes, are about the size of Wisconsin.) If other NATO allies come to their aid, Europe would be at war, and “U.S. forces, like it or not, would find themselves in the middle of this bedlam.” Many of the countries are nuclear powers, and the chances of a “cataclysmic mistake or miscalculation” would grow greater every day. Meanwhile, China might reach for Taiwan, and South Korea and Japan would need to plan for the end of U.S. strategic power, likely with nuclear arms.

Trump is courting peril, Nichols writes. His obsessions “could lead not only to the collapse of [Americans’] standard of living but present a real danger to their lives, no matter where they live.”

Nichols’s concerns are not isolated. They echo those of Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, who warned that the U.S. seizure of Greenland would mean “the end of NATO.” Defense commissioner for the European Union Andrius Kubilius agreed.

And yet, on social media on Wednesday, Trump denied that his actions could hurt NATO. “Militarily, without the vast power of the United States,” his social media account posted, “NATO would not be an effective force or deterrent—Not even close! They know that, and so do I. NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES.”

Later in the day, Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenlandic foreign minister Vivian Motzfeldt met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, but the meeting left “fundamental disagreements” among the parties after Trump reiterated his conviction that the U.S. “really need[s]” Greenland.

Also on Wednesday, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden launched “Operation Arctic Endurance,” increasing their military presence in Greenland in order, as Germany’s defense ministry said, “to support Denmark in ensuring security in the region.”

An attack on Greenland is wildly unpopular in the United States. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this week found that just 17% of Americans approve of the U.S. efforts to acquire Greenland. Only 4% think it’s a good idea to take Greenland using military force. When asked about that poll on Wednesday, Trump called it “fake.” Bipartisan groups in Congress have tried to prevent any attack on Greenland by introducing measures that require congressional approval of such an attack, that prevent military action against NATO members, and that prohibit the use of federal funds for any invasion of a NATO member state or NATO-protected territory.

Democrats are outraged about Trump’s threats to undermine the entire post–World War II rules-based international order, and they note that Americans want lower health care costs and cheaper groceries, not Greenland.

Today eleven U.S. lawmakers, led by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), are in Denmark, where they met with Danish prime minister Frederiksen and Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen. Nine Democrats and two Republicans sought to “lower the temperature” by assuring Denmark that the U.S. would not try to seize Greenland. Coons thanked the delegation’s hosts for “225 years of being a good and trusted ally and partner.”

Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters that “support in Congress to acquire Greenland in any way is not there.” Her suggestion reflects the comment of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) after he met with the Danish envoys in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Wicker later said: “I think it has been made clear from our Danish friends and our friends in Greenland that that future does not include a negotiation” for the acquisition.

Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) went further, telling Wolf Blitzer of CNN that an attack on Greenland will lead to impeachment regardless of who is in control of Congress after the midterm elections.

“You don’t threaten a NATO ally. They’ve been a great ally. We’ve had bases on there since World War II. Denmark has fought with us—by our side—in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I feel it’s incumbent on folks like me to speak up and say these threats and bullying of an ally are wrong. And just on the weird chance he’s serious about invading Greenland, I want to let him know it will probably be the end of his presidency. Most Republicans know this is immoral and wrong, and we’re going to stand up against it…. I think it would lead to impeachment. Invading an ally…is a high crime and a misdemeanor.”

Not since the British occupation of Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War has an American city experienced anything like the blockade of Minneapolis and its surrounding areas by the federal government.

Acting under the pretext of immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has sent both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to terrorize the people of Minneapolis. Masked paramilitaries stalk streets, schools, businesses and other places of public accommodation in search of anyone deemed “illegal,” regardless of whether they’re citizens or legal residents. Using race as part of their criteria — a now-legal tactic, thanks to a recent opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh — armed officers go door to door through neighborhoods searching for Latino, Asian and African people to detain.

And then there is the violence. On Jan. 7, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good while she was in her vehicle. A video analysis by The New York Times of the footage from that day “shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over,” and “establishes how Mr. Ross put himself in a dangerous position near her vehicle in the first place,” eventually shooting into Good’s S.U.V. three times. Since then, we’ve seen multiple attacks on protesters and citizen observers, with ICE officers using flash grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets to harass and disperse demonstrators. We’ve seen evidence of vicious brutality against detainees; on Jan. 8, two U.S. citizens working at a suburban Target were arrested, with one of them seen bleeding and injured.

All occupations resemble one another in some way, and it is striking to read descriptions and accounts of the occupation of Boston in light of events in Minnesota. “Having to stomach a standing army in their midst, observe the redcoats daily, pass by troops stationed on Boston Neck who occupied a guardhouse on land illegally taken it was said from the town, and having to receive challenges by sentries on the streets, their own streets, affronted a people accustomed to personal liberty, fired their tempers, and gnawed away at their honor,” writes the historian Robert Middlekauff in “The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763 to 1789.”

“Harrison Gray, a prominent merchant and a member of the council, told soldiers who challenged him one evening that he was not obligated to respond,” writes Richard Archer of the same period in “As if an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution.” “They retaliated by thrusting their bayonets toward his chest and detained him for half an hour.”

Consider the language of occupation authorities as well. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and an architect of the administration’s immigration policies, has called protesters violent agitators and accused Minnesota state officials of fomenting an “insurgency” against the federal government. In the same way, the British general who oversaw the Boston occupation, Thomas Gage, described Bostonians as “mutinous” — “desperadoes” who were guilty of “sedition.”

It is also hard not to hear the echo of the Boston Massacre in the killing of Good.

Occupations are, as Americans should know from our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, brutally unpopular, too. So it goes for the response to the federal occupation of Minnesota. More than half of Americans, according to a recent CNN poll, say that ICE enforcement actions are making cities less safe rather than safer; 57 percent of Americans, according to a survey from Quinnipiac University, disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws, and 55 percent of Americans support ending mass ICE raids targeting immigrants, according to a poll conducted by YouGov for the A.C.L.U.

For President Trump, the overall effect of the events of the past two weeks has been to pull his numbers even further into the inky depths of unpopularity. Thirty-eight percent of adults approve of the president’s performance, according to a Marist poll released this week; 56 percent disapprove. The Associated Press finds 40 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval, while Reuters reports 41 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval.

Not only is Trump deeply unpopular, according to a new CNN survey that similarly shows 39 percent approval and 61 percent disapproval — 58 percent of Americans say that the first year of his second term was a failure. On virtually every issue more Americans say that the president has made things worse rather than better, and large majorities say Trump has gone too far in the use of presidential power to pursue his own interests.

One way to read the occupation of Minnesota is as a flex — a demonstration of the government’s power and authority. That, perhaps, is how Miller and Kristi Noem see the situation. I smell, on the other hand, a stench of desperation, an attempt to do with force what they can’t accomplish through ordinary politics. Faced with an angry public but committed to a rigid agenda of nativist brutality, the president and his coterie of ideologues are playing the only move they seem to have: wanton violence and threats of further escalation. They think this will break their opposition.

But looking at the ironclad resolve of ordinary Minnesotans to protect their homes and defend their neighbors, I think the administration is more likely to break on their opposition and learn, as the British did in Boston, that Americans are quite jealous of their liberties.

This is the only card Trump can play

Trump says eight European countries - Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland - face 10% tariff for opposing US control of Greenland.
Ten per cent from 1 February, Trump explained. From 1 June, tariffs are set to rise to 25 per cent if no agreement is reached on a complete US purchase of the island.