Detail from the cover of Devo’s Freedom of Choice album.

“Insanity is contagious.”

― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Trump left for the elite meet-and-greet at Davos in one of his manic phases. He’d just spent the previous two days trash-talking, bragging about his Venezuelan coup, boasting over pocketing the revenue from Venezuelan oil in offshore accounts, lobbing invasion threats against allies, brandishing new tariffs as if they were hypersonic weapons, badmouthing his rivals, trolling his political enemies, and serial-posting of memes depicting himself as the latest conquistador of the New World. The Re-Conquistador.

Trump’s delusional conception of his own ever-expanding power, even as his poll numbers here continue to shrivel, now outpaces the megalomaniacal reveries of the Sun King of the Ancien Régime. After all, Louis le Grand only saw himself as the embodiment of the state (L’Etat c’est moi). But Trump envisions himself, through the magical hallucinogen of the Donroe Doctrine, as the Emperor of the entire Western Hemisphere (L’hémisphère occidental, c’est moi!) And he was flying to Switzerland to proclaim his new hegemony.

But a funny thing happened on his way to Davos.

The stock market collapsed. The Prime Minister of Canada cut a trade pact with China and urged other countries to do the same. Denmark told Trump to fuck off (literally). Unhelpfully for Trump, the Russians chose this week to publicly endorse his scheme to snatch Greenland from the Danes. The European Union, usually so timid and fractious, resisted his impetuous bullying and threatened to join military exercises in defense of Greenland and levy retaliatory tariffs of their own against the increasingly frail US economy.

Trump landed a deflated man. During his nearly incoherent speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump looked morose and sounded peevish. The words slurred, the fraying sentences trailing off into the ether. His insults lacked fire and punch. He rambled aimlessly. His cognitive decline, never a fall from alpine heights to begin with, was on full public display.

Was this the fearsome tyrant, so many had trembled in obeisance before? He looked like an old man, frail in body, infirm in mind. Not the new Sun King of his cult-stoked fantasies, but a patriarch deep into his autumn, struggling to find the words for retreat. Trump’s strategy (if you can call it that) for cultivating more enemies than friends was always doomed to backfire on him. The only question was how long it would take and how many he’d drag down with him.

So, Trump backed down. The intemperate bombast was spent, replaced by wheezing and stammering. He backed down on invading Greenland. He backed down on imposing new tariffs against European nations. He backed down in front of the elites he both despises and envies.

The humiliation will gnaw away at him for weeks, as he heads home, a weakened despot, to confront the escalating war he’s waging in American cities, against an increasingly rebellious population who’ve reached their own limits of tolerance for injustice and state violence.

During his desultory speech at Davos, Trump repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland (or Iceland with Greenland) to the point where people had to be wondering whether Iceland was now–along with Greenland, Canada and Venezuela–on his conquest bucket list: “They’re [Wall Street] not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money.”

Imagine the poor translators trying to make sense of this Trumpian gibberish about “Greenland” into Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), Icelandic or Danish…“Iceland, they love me. They called me ‘Daddy’ last time. A very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’”

I say, Iceland, you say Greenland
Iceland, Greenland, Greenland, Iceland
let’s call the whole thing off…

Bari Weiss memo to CBS News reporters and anchors: “Yes, Trump referred to Greenland as Iceland 7 times in his speech, but make clear that he referred to Greenland as Greenland 13 times.”

Trump: “That’s our territory. This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America.” The “unsecured island” actually has abandoned US military bases, all of them typically left contaminated with toxic waste, on Greenland, that it can reoccupy any time it wants under a lease largely without limits.

Trump claims that the US needs to annex Greenland to protect its assets from the Russians and Chinese. But it turns out the Russians are encouraging Trump’s quest to grab the glaciated island for himself because it buttresses Russia’s rationale for annexing the Crimea and Donbas from Ukraine and drives another fissure between the US and European nations. Here’s Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov: “I just want to highlight that the Euro-Atlantic idea of ensuring security and cooperation has discredited itself… As President Trump said, Greenland is important to the security of the United States. Crimea is no less important to the security of Russia.”

Trump put the future of the US alliance with Europe on racial terms, throwing some racist slurs against Somalis along the way:

The West cannot mass-import foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed—it’s not a nation. Got no government, got no police, got no nothing. Can you believe that Somalia, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. I always say these are low-IQ people.”

Look, I am derived from Europe, Scotland, and Germany. 100% Scotland, my mother, 100% German. My father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization. This is the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common, and we share it. We share it, but we have to keep it strong. We have to become stronger, more successful and more prosperous than ever. We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the West from the depths of the Dark Ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.

Jesse Walker: “Joe Biden is the man in the nursing home who spent all day silently staring at an unplugged TV. Donald Trump is the man in the nursing home who spent all day loudly arguing with a squirrel.”

You can see why so many Christian Nationalists think Trump is the Aquinas of our time, when it comes to his acute understanding of the teachings of the Gospels. His moral sensibility is simply unparalleled…

Renee Good still had a pulse when paramedics (who had to trek across the snow several blocks on foot because ICE blocked the ambulance from entering Portland Ave) reached her, more than 15 minutes after she was shot and ICE refused to allow a physician on the scene to treat her wound. They wanted the “fuckin’ bitch” dead.

The independent autopsy of Renee Good showed that she had 3 bullet wounds: one to the left arm, one in the right lung, and a fatal wound to the left temple that exited the right side of her head, meaning that the fatal shot was fired through the side window, when there was no threat to the officer who killed her. The MAGA argument that Good could have been turning her head when she was shot is undermined by the fact that the bullet hole in the windshield was on the lower left, well below Good’s head, even if it was turned toward the right, but directly at the level of her chest.

Trump’s threat to send federal troops into Minnesota without a single serious injury to an ICE agent makes whatever happened in the Gulf of Tonkin appear like a real “incident.” (Interesting footnote: The Doors’ Jim Morrison’s father was in command of the US Navy fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin. But it was also revealed (much) later that Rear Admiral Morrison told Navy HQ that he thought the second “incident” was false and the Navy brass never relayed this to LBJ, who used it as the pretext for war.)

ICE is shredding the Bill of Rights one amendment after another. Its agents now claim it would cause “chaos” to let people it arrested and detained see their lawyers…

The Wall Street Journal reports that ICE agents get bonuses based on their arrests, which they get to keep even if the person is released without charges.

With the support of many Democrats, the budget for ICE was tripled. Starting this year, it will have a larger budget than the FBI, DEA, ATF, and US Marshal Service COMBINED. Some, like Cory Booker, want to give ICE even more money in the name of “training.”

Adam Johnson on the (worse than) useless Cory Booker’s plan to give ICE officers “more training”: “The guy who killed Renee Good was a ten year ICE veteran who had been thoroughly “trained” by the US military, border patrol and ICE and Good’s murder was captured on three different cameras so what does any of this have to do with anything”

Trump has sent 13% of his immigration forces to Minnesota and is considering sending in the military. Yet Minnesota’s immigrant population ranks 23rd in the US, far behind red states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Utah. But most of Minnesota’s immigrant population is documented. For example, Minnesota has an estimated total immigrant population of 495,352, but only 77,836 are undocumented (16%) Compare that to the undocumented populations of Florida 1 million (20%), Texas 1.8 million (32%), Arizona 250,00 (25%), Georgia 374,000 (32%), North Carolina 325,00 (34%), Utah 100,000 (33%).

What part of the Constitution allows an ICE agent to bust into a Thai restaurant with his gun drawn in St. Paul, Minnesota, shouting at the terrified owners that he was “looking for a kid” he accused them, without any evidence, of “hiding”?

ICE conducted a warrantless raid on the home of an elderly US citizen named Chongly “Scott” Thao, dragged him out of the house into freezing temperatures in his underwear, perp-walked him in front of the press, and accused him first of being a child molester, then, after that libel fell apart, of housing two sex offenders–allegations which seem to have been completely invented to justify this abusive and unconstitutional home invasion, arrest and detention.

ICE wants you to believe they confused Scott Thao for the men in the wanted poster…

A Go Fund Me Page for the St. Paul snowplow driver who was racially profiled, arrested by ICE and transferred more than 1100 miles away to a detention prison in Texas, despite being a legal resident with no criminal record and an employee of the City of St. Paul. His wife is now afraid to leave her house and the family has no income. The detained man has a serious medical condition and ICE stopped paying its third-party medical providers in October, so many detainees with serious, and even critical, medical conditions aren’t receiving any treatment.

First they came for the Oglala, now the Navajo…(There was a very good reason Kristi Noem was banned from setting foot on any Lakota reservation in South Dakota when she was governor.)

Americans may finally be beginning to understand that when Trump tries to extort what he wants from foreign countries, it’s American consumers who pay the price. WSJ: “American consumers and importers absorbed 96%” of the cost of Trump’s tariffs in 2025. And that “echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School,” the Journal reported, writing, “Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.”

CNN on Americans’ attitudes on the deteriorating economy: “A 55% majority say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, with just 32% saying they’ve made an improvement.”

The Associated Press reported that ICE agents are being “trained” on how to break into people’s homes without a warrant.” Just think what other kinds of Constitutional mischief they could get up to if the Democrats’ plan to give ICE officers “more training” gets billions in funding…

AP’s Rebecca Santana: “For years, immigrant advocates, legal aid groups and local governments have urged people not to open their doors to immigration agents unless they are shown a warrant signed by a judge. That guidance is rooted in Supreme Court rulings that generally prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without judicial approval. The ICE directive directly undercuts that advice.”

DHS’s own handbook advises its field agents that such raids violate the Constitution. But according to Santana’s piece, the legal memo justifying the warrantless searches was kept secret from Congress and the public and only leaked after a whistleblower complaint was filed. It’s good to know there are some left at DHS.

Still, the Supremes will likely find........

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