The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

After the extraordinary pushback on President Donald J. Trump’s bizarre demand for Greenland, he has responded with what economist Paul Krugman called “a howl of frustration on the part of a mad dictator who has just realized that he can’t send in the Marines.”

In a long screed this morning, Trump’s social media account said the president is placing tariffs of 10% on all goods from the countries currently protecting Greenland after February 1, and that the tariffs will increase to 25% on June 1. The post says the tariffs will be in effect “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

This post is bonkers on many levels. On the most basic: where is he thinking he’s going to find the money for “the complete and total purchase of Greenland?” And besides, the countries involved—Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—are all U.S. allies. Economist Justin Wolfers notes this trade war will include the entire European Union, for “[a] trade war with one EU country is a trade war with the entire EU.”

The post also makes explicit that Trump is trying to use tariffs not to nurture the American economy but to force other countries to do his bidding. The question of whether his tariff wars are constitutional because they address what he claims is an economic emergency is currently before the Supreme Court. Two lower courts have found that the president does not have the power to levy the sweeping tariffs he has been announcing. Today’s tariff announcement does not refer at all to economic need but rather is about economic coercion.

Finally, in its insistence that only the U.S. can “protect” Greenland, the screed echoed Russian president Vladimir Putin’s promises to “protect” Ukraine. Ignoring the reality that Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the world’s strongest defense alliance, it said that Greenland and Denmark, of which Greenland is a part, “currently have two dogsleds as protection, one added recently.” It also added that the protection Trump insists only U.S. ownership of Greenland can provide might also include “the possible protection of Canada.”

As huge demonstrations of solidarity broke out today in Copenhagen and Nuuk, the capitals of Denmark and Greenland, respectively, both the European Council, made up of the heads of state or governments in the European Union, and the European Commission, the primary executive branch of the European Union, weighed in on Trump’s threats.

President of the European Council António Costa and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen issued a joint statement, underlining that “[t]erritorial integrity and sovereignty are fundamental principles of international law. They are essential for Europe and for the international community as a whole.” The two leaders reiterated that they are committed both to dialogue with the U.S. and to standing firm behind Denmark and the people of Greenland.

“Tariffs would undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral,” they wrote. “Europe will remain united, coordinated, and committed to upholding its sovereignty.”

The European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas—the EU’s chief diplomat—wrote: “China and Russia must be having a field day. They are the ones who benefit from divisions among Allies. If Greenland’s security is at risk, we can address this inside NATO. Tariffs risk making Europe and the United States poorer and undermine our shared prosperity.”

Representatives from the twenty-seven countries in the European Union are holding an emergency meeting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the EU say they will not ratify a new trade agreement the European Commission and Trump signed last July. Some lawmakers are talking about using a trade “bazooka” against the U.S., a range of measures outlined in the E.U.’s Anti-Coercion Instrument that punish trade rivals trying to coerce the E.U. Those include trade restrictions and restricting investment in the E.U.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported today that Trump appears to be trying to set up his own organization to rival the United Nations. The administration has sent letters to leaders from several countries inviting them to be part of a “Board of Peace” led by the U.S. The board would first tackle the crisis in Gaza and then go on to take on other crises around the world.

Bloomberg reported today that the draft charter for the proposed organization makes Trump the board’s first chair and gives him the power to choose a successor. He would decide what countries can be members. Each member state would get one vote in the organization, but the chair would have to approve all decisions. The draft says that each member state has a term of no more than three years unless the chair renews it, but that limit doesn’t apply to any member states “that contribute more than USD $1,000,000,000 in cash funds to the Board of Peace within the first year of the Charter’s entry into force.” The draft suggests that Trump himself will control that money.

Last night, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez in Minneapolis prohibited agents from the Department of Homeland Security from retaliating against or arresting peaceful protesters or using pepper spray or other less-lethal weapons against them. Menendez also prohibited agents from stopping or detaining people following their vehicles.

The descriptions in the decision of how agents have treated protesters are detailed and damning. The plaintiffs submitted sworn testimony. In contrast, the judge notes, the agents “did not provide sworn declarations from immigration officers (or others) who witnessed or were themselves directly involved,” but instead relied on the declaration of the acting field office director for the ICE St. Paul Field Office, David Easterwood—who was not present at any of the incidents—that the agents said the protesters had obstructed their activities.

Yesterday Fox News broke the story that the Department of Justice is investigating both Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey on criminal charges for allegedly impeding the work of law enforcement officers in the administration’s surge of agents to their state.

Trump’s reliance on bogus investigations to establish a narrative is well established. This tactic of launching investigations to seed the idea that a political opponent has committed crimes has been a staple of the Republican Party since at least the 1990s. As the media reported on those investigations, people assumed that there must be something to them. Trump adopted this tactic wholeheartedly, most famously when he tried to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden—not actually to open the investigation, but simply to announce it—before Trump would release to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated it to help it fight off Russia’s invasion.

The Trump administration is trying hard to project dictatorial strength and power, but the narrative is slipping away from it.

For all of Trump’s bluster about U.S. trade, the world appears to be moving on without the U.S. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada visited Beijing this week, the first visit of a Canadian prime minister to China since 2017. On Friday, Canada broke with the U.S. and struck a major deal with China, cutting its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for China’s lowering its tariffs on Canadian canola seed. Carney posted on social media: “The Canada-China relationship has been distant and uncertain for nearly a decade. We’re changing that, with a new strategic partnership that benefits the people of both our nations.”

Trump’s triumphant narrative is not working at home, either. A new CNN poll released Friday shows that fifty-eight percent of Americans believe that Trump’s first year in office has been a failure. Americans worry most about the economy, but concerns about democracy come in second. The numbers beyond that continue to be bad for Trump. Sixty-six percent of Americans think Trump doesn’t care about people like them. Fifty-three percent think he doesn’t have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president.

Sixty-five percent of Americans say Trump is not someone they are proud to have as president.

In Virginia today, former representative and former intelligence officer Abigail Spanberger took the oath of office as the commonwealth’s seventy-fifth governor, the first woman to hold that position. In her inaugural address, she celebrated the peaceful transfer of power and called for Virginians to work together to make life more affordable and embrace progress, writing a new chapter in the state’s history.

“As we mark 250 years since the dawn of American freedom: What will our children, grandchildren, and their descendants write about this time in our Commonwealth’s history—this chapter—50, 100, and 250 years from now?” she asked.

“Will they say that we let divisions fester or challenges overwhelm us? Or will they say that we stood up for what is right, fixed what is broken, and served the common good here in Virginia?

Today, we’re hearing the call to connect more deeply to our American Experiment—to understand our shared history, not as a single point in time, but as a lesson for how we create our more prosperous future. And so I ask—what will you do to help us author this next chapter?

When President Donald Trump told protesters in Iran that “help is on its way,” they took heart. Their hopes rose further on Wednesday, with news that the Pentagon had ordered some non-essential personnel from its largest Middle East air base, a move seen as preparation for battle. But on Thursday, when Trump reversed course, announcing that Iran’s regime had agreed to stop killing its people in the streets, protestors felt betrayed, they told TIME.

“He's not only yellow on the outside, he's also yellow inside,” said an arts teacher in Tehran.

“After he said the Iranian authorities had told him there won’t be any more killings and executions, everyone was just stunned,” said an Iranian interviewed Friday, after traveling out of the country. “Everyone was enraged; they just kept saying this bastard used us as cannon fodder. Iranians feel that they were played, that he fooled them, deceived them.”

“Trump is worse than Obama,” said a 40-year-old businessman in Tehran, who said he called friends and relatives to give them the good news after Trump’s “help is on its way” post. “He screwed up. He pulled the rug from under our feet.”

The interviews were conducted after Trump appeared to back down from carrying out long-threatened military action against Iran this week. But the President added to the uncertainty again on Saturday by calling for an end to the rule of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran,” he told POLITICO, after reportedly reading a series of posts from the Iranian leader blaming Trump for the deaths of protesters. “The man is a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people,” he added.

His comments may not be enough to bring protesters back out onto the streets, however. Trump, who ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear program in June, had urged on the latest protests nearly from the start. The demonstrations began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on Dec. 28, in response to the abrupt, catastrophic devaluation of Iran’s currency, then grew steadily across the country. In the past—2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022—Iran’s authoritarian regime had crushed mass protests. But five days into this outbreak, on Jan. 2, Trump made an explicit promise on Truth Social: “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protestors, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Iranians took heart. On Jan. 8, at the start of the Iranian weekend and following calls by Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi and other opposition groups, millions took to the streets across the country.

'Trump is responsible'

The regime, in turn, responded with extreme violence. First, as it has done in the past before directing live fire into groups of its own citizens, it disconnected the nation of 90 million from the internet, then cut cell phone, SMS and land lines. Security forces then mounted an onslaught that left “thousands dead”, according to Khamenei, in remarks carried by the state TV Saturday.

“When I saw the man a few metres ahead of me fall backwards, I didn’t understand what had happened,” said the businessman, describing a scene on Jan. 8 on a Tehran street. “When we gathered around him, all I could see in the dark night was a red spot on his forehead. It was only when the blood from the back of his head pooled at our feet that we realized he’d been shot by a sniper.”

While the Iranian regime ordered the attacks, “Trump is also responsible for the death of these 15,000,” he said, quoting one estimate of the dead. “Because many of the protesters took to the streets when they saw his post that the US is locked and loaded.” He said that the U.S. must have made a deal with the Islamic Republic “to betray Iranians like this."

The killings occurred across the country. In the northern city of Zirab, a 39-year-old man said that, on the next day, Jan. 9, protestors were forced down a street only to see the way ahead blocked, with security forces at their back. “Then the streetlights went out, and machine guns started shooting,” he said. “Nothing could be seen, everyone was falling down, either from bullets or not seeing ahead of them, trying to get away.” The resident said he doesn’t know how many were killed, but that in the next few days there were as many as 17 missing in the city of a few thousand.

Iran’s rulers publicly gloated over Trump’s reversal. On Friday, Trump thanked them for promising to stop the planned executions of 800 protestors, the assurance he had offered as grounds for withholding the military action so widely expected that international flights steered around Iranian airspace.


Iranians gather while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran on January 9, 2026. Middle East Images—AFP via Getty

"Trump says a lot of nonsense and gibberish,” Tehran’s prosecutor, Ali Salehi, replied on Saturday, according to state TV. “Our reaction will be forceful, preventive and swift. Indictments have been issued for numerous cases and sent to courts."

Iranians say they are already living with the consequences of Trump’s reversal. “It’s already martial law,” said a woman in Tehran. “Now, after Trump went back on his word, they’ve become even more brazen. I saw a checkpoint on Marzdaran Boulevard where they were checking the cellphones of people.

“I’ve lost all hope,” she said. “Trump’s not going to do anything. Why should he? He doesn’t care about us.”

'He is tricking the regime'

Others say they retain hope that Trump still might act. “My husband believes that this is Trump’s usual pattern, to confuse them [the Islamic Republic],” said the Tehran resident. “He says if Trump does not attack, how can the regime be toppled? Iranians are doing everything they can, but the regime is just too savage.”

“He is tricking the regime,” said an engineer in Tehran, who also sees Trump’s reversal as tactical. “He’ll attack, and attack hard. He’s going to go after Zahhak himself,” the engineer said, referring to the name of the most evil character in Iranian mythology, used by protestors to describe Khamenei. “There can’t be any other option,” he added. “It's different this time.”

The businessman also hopes that this uprising will be different, so much so that he stayed behind in Iran when his wife and child flew out of the country on Thursday. But he says the protesters would need help. “The people on the streets did all they could do. We were facing machine guns on pick-up trucks, empty-handed. The only way we can win is with foreign intervention, like Kosovo or Bosnia."

Whatever Trump ultimately decides to do, most people in Iran agree that the protests have gone underground.

“Right now the uprising is paralyzed,” said the man from Zirab, who put the blame on Trump as well as the brutality of the regime. “I don’t know if it will ever recover.”

Iranian Protesters Say They Were Betrayed By Trump

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has tried to position himself as a bridge between Trump’s Washington and Europe, used some of his strongest language to date to condemn the president’s threats. “Applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong,” he said in a statement Saturday.

While the German government issued a muted statement promising to coordinate a response with European allies, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said Sunday: “We will not be blackmailed.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is considered one of Trump’s closest allies in Europe, described the tariffs as “an error.”

Because the European Union is a single trading and customs bloc, the imposition of tariffs against some would effectively mean tariffs on all 27 nations, European officials said.

The scope of Europe’s response will be a key test for its diplomats as they balance the need to stand up for European sovereignty, manage delicate relationships with Washington and consider political and economic pressures at home. Cyprus, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the E.U., said European ambassadors will convene Sunday afternoon in Brussels to discuss next steps.

“European leaders including the UK have tried not to provoke Trump,” Bronwen Maddox, director of London’s Chatham House think tank, said in a text message Sunday. “But this is such an offense against their principle and interests that they will stand up to say so and may hit back with sanctions, too.”

The threat to grab a sovereign territory of Denmark against its will risks fundamentally breaking the NATO defense alliance, which European diplomats said would divide the West and embolden Moscow and Beijing. “China and Russia must be having a field day. They are the ones who benefit from divisions among Allies,” Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s top diplomat, said Saturday.

On Monday, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen and Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt are scheduled to visit NATO’s headquarters in Brussels for a preplanned meeting with Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Absurdly, his speech is entitled ‘How can we cooperate in a more contested world?’

We define most presidents by their biggest moments: the agonizing judgment calls, the signature legislation, speeches that shape public sentiment, treaties that reshape the world.

But it’s the little gestures that tell the truth of President Trump, like the middle finger that he raised to a heckler during his tour of a Ford factory in Dearborn, Mich., last week.

That one flipped bird showed so many of Trump’s feathers.

For starters, it captured the consistent triumph of his pettiness and puerility over any bearing that fits the old definitions of “presidential.” Trump doesn’t even try for dignity. He has his tantrums in public, and his sycophants peddle those outbursts as authenticity or even boldness; in their telling, he has the confidence and honesty to eschew phony courtesies and be true to his emotions — no mask, no manners. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, responded to Trump’s Michigan meltdown by more or less praising it. He released a statement that said that a “lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the president gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.”

Unambiguous? For sure. Appropriate? Only if you believe in answering ugliness with more ugliness, bile with bile, and only if your conception of leadership is acting no better than anybody else but indulging your snits and staging your fits from a higher pedestal, with a louder megaphone. Only if you believe the antonym of — and antidote to — elitism is vulgarity. That’s what Trump and so many of his abettors seem to think. Or, rather, it’s how they rationalize behaving however they like.

The footage of what happened in Dearborn is crude, but apparently one of the men whom Trump passed while walking through the factory shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Trump reacted not only by gesturing obscenely but also by mouthing something at the man. You needn’t be much of a lip reader to make it out. It’s just two words. Two syllables. The first seems to begin with the letter F.

The F-bomb is Trump’s idea of muscular vocabulary. It’s part of the acronym that accompanied an image that the White House circulated after the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro. Trump, looking suspiciously young and slim, strides toward the camera; below his knees, it says, “FAFO.” If you’re unfamiliar with that threat, the first letter stands for a verb that rhymes with muck, the second is for “around,” and the final two are for “find out.” Add a missing “and” in the middle, and you have Trump’s message to the world — not a summons to freedom but a command to obey.

Trump’s middle finger is the exclamation point punctuating his inability to tolerate any dissent, receive any criticism, shrug off any insult. Coupled with that defensiveness is an insatiable need for affirmation and adulation. He complained so publicly and frequently about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize that its most recent recipient, María Corina Machado, presented him with hers during a visit to the White House on Thursday. There, there, Mr. President. Stop your sobbing. You can share mine!

Nobel officials saw that ridiculousness coming and felt compelled to speak up and clarify that Machado didn’t have the authority to pay the medal forward or split it in two. But that didn’t end Trump’s pouting, nor did it shame him into politely declining Machado’s munificence. He posed for a picture with her that commemorated her theatrical but meaningless transfer of the honor. How utterly mortifying. How quintessentially Trump.

I’ve read that he doesn’t actually type his splenetic social media posts, but if he did, it would clearly be with his middle finger only. He rants at and curses his opponents, even on the holidays. His 2023 Christmas musings included these tidings for the “SICK thugs” who accused him of wrongdoing: “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.” He channeled the same generous spirit last month. “Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country,” he wrote. Grab some eggnog and a loved one. The president has holiday-season reflections for you.

Many of his predecessors at least performed a pantomime of concern for the Americans who hadn’t voted for them. Those presidents claimed to understand that they represented the whole of the country and owed everyone a measure of respect. They issued pleas for unity and spoke of common ground. Empty words, perhaps, but important nonetheless — they recognized an ideal.

Trump rejects it. “I hate my opponent,” he said in September at a memorial for Charlie Kirk. A month later, in response to the nationwide No Kings demonstrations, he posted an A.I.-generated video in which he wore a crown, piloted a fighter jet with the words “King Trump” emblazoned on it, flew over American cities and dumped rivers of feces on the protesters below. He’s a scatological spin on Marie Antoinette. Let them eat excrement.

And since the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, he has done nothing to acknowledge so many Americans’ horror over what happened, to persuade them that he’ll get to the truth of the matter, to calm the unrest. He has chided those critics for disobedience, cast them as enemies of the state and threatened to use ever more force to subdue them.

He can’t extend his right hand in fellowship. One of the fingers on it is otherwise occupied.

I see no reason for optimism on that front.

A real shellacking in the mid-terms might shake things up by restoring the ability of Congress to do its job. But who knows how much damage he can cause by that time – he's definitely going to try to do as much as he possibly can. I don't think he can actually cancel the elections as he's suggested, but having an armed presence at polling stations, commandeering ballot boxes, and doubling voter suppression efforts could really make the situation even worse.

Blair, Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán: the names of those invited to serve say it all. And it's about so much more than Gaza

The fate of the Palestinian people offers a warning about the future of humanity. When I recently visited the West Bank, Palestinians kept impressing the same point on me: Israel has turned their land into a laboratory. The technology of oppression that it has deployed – including in its genocide in Gaza – ranges from hi-tech surveillance to military drones and AI on the battlefield. These technologies have been exported to oppressive states across the world. And it doesn’t stop there.

This brings us to Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, now set to rule Gaza. In the sleepy Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay, where George Orwell lies buried, the ground itself ought to be shaking. This isn’t peace. It’s naked neocolonialism.

Not a single seat is reserved for a Palestinian, let alone a survivor of Gaza. Trump will serve as chair in an individual capacity rather than as US president – in other words, as Gaza’s emperor. Its invited members include Tony Blair, who is despised across the Middle East as an architect of the illegal invasion of Iraq. If you’re curious about his skill set when it comes to rebuilding ravaged Arab territory, recall what the Chilcot inquiry concluded about that catastrophe: “the UK failed to plan or prepare for the major reconstruction programme required in Iraq”.

Who else? At least two property developers, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who once boasted of the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property”. Hungary’s far-right autocrat Viktor Orbán. An Israeli billionaire, Yakir Gabay, and an American private equity tycoon, Marc Rowan. Vladimir Putin, who helped pioneer reducing predominantly Muslim lands to rubble in Chechnya, also has an invite, according to the Kremlin. Sure, Israel isn’t happy, presumably because the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been invited. Nothing but total control of Gaza would satisfy them – but that is little consolation for its traumatised Palestinian population.

The clues about where this is heading are hardly subtle. Trump is demanding $1bn from each country to be a permanent member, and the draft of the charter appears to suggest, as per Bloomberg, that he will control the money. A year ago, he proposed permanently resettling Gaza’s population: ethnic cleansing. He posted an AI-generated video showcasing Gaza as a luxury resort, featuring a giant golden statue of himself.

It would be naive to assume that he has abandoned such plans, even if pressure from Arab states appears to have had some effect last year, when he said “nobody is expelling any Palestinians”. That was clear in little-noticed comments he made at a recent press conference with
Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli prime minister wanted by the international criminal court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Trump suggested that if Gaza’s population “were given the opportunity to live in a better climate, they would move. They’re there because they sort of have to be.”

He leaned on polling suggesting almost half of Gaza’s population would leave. Hardly surprising: the territory has been reduced to apocalyptic ruin, its survivors living in tents, deprived of life’s essentials.

When Netanyahu says Palestinians will “be allowed to exit,” as he did last year, he clearly anticipates they will not return. At the beginning of the genocide, he privately backed “voluntary migration” in principle, perhaps knowing his army was going to make Gaza unliveable. “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” he told his allies two years ago.

Note, then, that Israel recently recognised Somaliland. Somalia’s president suggested it had intelligence that the breakaway republic had agreed to take refugees from Gaza in exchange. Somaliland denies it, but its foreign minister didn’t rule it out last March. Gaza is a devastated wasteland, now destined to be a money-making scheme for property developers and Trump’s courtiers.

But this isn’t just about the Palestinian people. The “board of peace”’s charter doesn’t even mention Gaza. It reads as an attempt to build an alternative to the UN: a blunt instrument for Trump to exercise American power. In other words – here is a template, with Gaza merely acting as a trial run.

Yet if Trump believes this will serve the interests of US hegemony, a brutal collision with reality awaits. Western dominance was founded on three pillars: military supremacy, economic dominance and moral superiority. The first was slain in the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The second was discredited by the 2008 financial crash. And moral superiority? This was always a con, of course, as the torture chambers of US-backed dictatorships in Latin America or the peeling skin of Vietnamese children hit by American napalm can testify. But, unlike older rivalries between great powers, the cold war was sold as a clash of universal philosophies: democracy and freedom v socialism and equality. The Soviet collapse was presented as the triumph of the western creed.

As the US military incinerated Afghan wedding parties, and American soldiers were photographed with rictus grins as naked Iraqis were piled into a human pyramid at Abu Ghraib prison, those moral claims disintegrated. When US Democrats armed and facilitated the liquidation of Gaza, American moral bankruptcy was exposed as a bipartisan affair.

What is striking about Trump is that he has abandoned even the pretence of moral superiority. On Venezuela, he openly boasts that US companies are going to “take back” the country’s oil. Gone are claims that US hegemony is driven by a desire to protect the freedom of all humanity – “a country that would be a light unto the nations, and a shining city upon a hill,” as Ronald Reagan put it.

Trump’s crude honesty merely hastens the fall of US power. Moral supremacy was always a deception, but it was a useful lie. It bought at least some support and acquiescence. Now it is dead, the world will be ever more eager to turn the page on its failing masters.

Late last night, Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. The message read:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Faisal Islam of the BBC voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin’s post, writing: “Even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggle to comprehend how the below letter on Greenland/Nobel might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist… this is what I meant by beyond precedent, parody and reality….” Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real and posted on X: “Incredible… the story is actually not a parody.”

International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.

This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” “They owe it to the American people,” she writes, “and to the world.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”

Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”

“We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done,” journalist Garrett Graff wrote: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.”

In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries, and tried to guarantee that global trade, bolstered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings.

In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.

Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”

And therein lies the rub. The post–World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine’s eastern industrial regions.

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”

The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.

And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country.

Trump’s increasing frenzy is likely coming at least in part from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions.

Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened.

Trump’s fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize: the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights for the Black population in the U.S. He accepted it “with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president sixty years later, saying that “what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”

Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.

While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump’s ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-makes-right world. On Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland.

He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S.—as well as global—prosperity since 1945. With his claim that “American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe,” Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us. It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising: it is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together, to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves.

Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated.

Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America.