We begin today with Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker and his comparison of the death of Renee Nicole Good with the murder of Viola Liuzzo in 1965 by the Ku Klux Klan.
Recent events have given renewed pertinence to the circumstances of Viola Liuzzo’s death. In Minneapolis, on January 7th, Renee Good, a thirty-seven-year-old poet and mother of three from Colorado, was killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fired at her car as she attempted to drive away. Good, who had just dropped her youngest child off at school, had been attempting to block the street as part of a protest against a sweeping icecrackdown that has besieged Minneapolis for weeks. Superficially, the circumstances of the two deaths, separated by more than sixty years, bore some resemblance: two white women of similar age, both moved by conscience to come to the defense of vulnerable communities, both killed in their vehicles amid a much larger societal conflict playing out around them.
Yet the more disturbing similarities lie in what happened after their deaths, and in what they conveyed about the crises in which they occurred. Liuzzo’s funeral, in Detroit, drew the leaders of the movement, including King and Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., as well as luminaries from organized labor, such as Walter Reuther and Jimmy Hoffa. Nonetheless, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. immediately launched a smear campaign against Liuzzo, falsely alleging that physical evidence suggested that she had used heroin shortly before her death and implying that she’d been drawn to Alabama not by deeply held principles but by the prospect of sex with Black men. The Bureau was likely attempting to distract the public from the fact that one of the four men in the car when Liuzzo was killed was an “undercover agent”—a paid informant—who had evidently done nothing to prevent her death. Hoover may have decided that, if Liuzzo’s character could be sufficiently impugned, then any potential backlash to the Bureau’s connection to an incident involving the murder of a married white mother could be avoided.
Iker Seisdedos of El Pais in English reviews Trump 2.0 Year One.
January 20 will mark one year since the United States embarked on a flight toward the abyss: Donald Trump’s second coming. Twelve months of dizzying authoritarianism followed that inauguration. The crossing of one unthinkable Rubicon after another without time to look back. A year in which the entire world has witnessed the deterioration — perhaps irreparable — of one of its oldest democracies, always at the mercy of the unpredictable mind of the most powerful man on the planet, who also happens to be one of the most capricious. [...]
Nearly 365 days later, the tide shows no signs of receding. There have been decisions that are (only) laughable in appearance — such as forcing an increase in shower pressure or banning cardboard straws — initiatives to lower the price of medicines or improve the diet of Americans, and, above all, measures with serious consequences for minorities, transgender people, scientific consensus, dissenting lawyers, culture that is critical of power, the way the United States portrays its history, and academic, press, and freedom of expression. [...]
In the spring and summer, the pressure on the Federal Reserve’s independence intensified, along with the tariff offensive, which, while shaking global trade and keeping the world on edge, hasn’t had as much of an impact on a resilient economy as analysts feared. And in the fall came the longest government shutdown in history, leading to the suspension of certain public services and salaries due to a lack of funding, and the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build a gigantic ballroom paid for by the president and his friends.
That White House project is the best metaphor for the dismantling of American democracy and Trump’s haste — with his real estate developer’s soul — to shore up his legacy. He has sought to do so by putting his name on everything, from the Kennedy Center in Washington to a new generation of warships, or by renaming geographic areas like the Gulf of Mexico (to America) or institutions like the Department of Defense (to War).
Paul Krugman says that TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is simply a myth that will not go away and business leaders had better beware.
Many business leaders...understood how dangerous Trump was — they knew he was the least qualified individual, intellectually, psychologically, and morally, ever to occupy the White House. In the aftermath of January 9, many Fortune 500 corporations announced to great acclaim that they would stop donating to Republicans. But after a few months of Republican threats of retaliation, those companies quietly turned the spigot back on.[...]
Granted, Trump sometimes appears to back down. We probably won’t be invading Greenland over the next few weeks. But this is only a temporizing tactic while he finds other means to escalate, such as imposing tariffs on countries that came to Greenland’s aid. Overall, Trump 47 is escalating, day by day.
The persistence of the TACO myth is part of the broader picture: Many people, especially in the business world, are still trying to convince themselves that they’ll do OK despite Trump’s craziness. Hey, the stock market is up, isn’t it? (It is, but US stocks, which are up 16 percent over the past year, have lagged stocks in other advanced countries, which rose 33 percent in 2025.)
Well, I have news for American business leaders: You will not do OK.
I have a feeling that Krugman may have hit the wrong number on the ten-key pad but point taken.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic thinks that the tacky shoe salesman’s letter to the prime minister of Norway should be “the last straw” but she knows better than that, doesn’t she?
...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. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.
Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.
For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear victorious matters much more than Americans’ prosperity and well-being.
Finally today, Heather Digby Parton of Salon provides an explainer of exactly what is up with this Greenland business.
The president apparently got the idea of annexing Greenland from cosmetic heir Ronald Lauder, who seems to have a special interest in mineral deals both there and in Ukraine, and has been pushing Trump on the notion for years. Lauder offered to be a secret envoy to Denmark to try to make the deal. During his first term, Trump even floated a proposal to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, as if he were playing marbles on the playground. At the time it was just another one of his kooky ideas that went nowhere, largely because the people around him were able to give him another shiny object to chase. But Trump obviously has never forgotten it, and over the past year he has shown a pathological determination to dominate the Western hemisphere, starting with his obsession for turning Canada into the 51st state, his recent incursion into Venezuela and, now, his renewed threats against Greenland, which have ratcheted up in the last few weeks. [...]
Trump claims that the United States has to have Greenland for national security purposes because the Arctic is under threat from Russia and China. The U.S., he has said, must possess the island in order to prevent them from taking it. But his administration is not the first to notice Greenland’s strategic value, which is why there have been friendly treaties and agreements regarding it between Europe and the United States for many decades. As a semiautonomous Danish territory, Greenland is protected by NATO, which would not only marshal the U.S. military to respond to any attack but would also rally the alliance’s other 31 countries. [...]
Perhaps everyone would ignore him as they have with his declaration that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. But there’s a good chance he would attempt to enforce his claims, which could set off a disastrous chain of events that could see the American military stretched around the globe and aggressors like Russia and China taking advantage of the opportunity, resulting in a war in Europe and possibly Asia. Irrationally tearing up alliances for no reason is a very dangerous game.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
