The Ugliest American 😱🤡 ✡️🌻😱🤪 👿 

One Year In: Yesterday while speaking in the British Parliament, MP Ed Davey called Trump a corrupt international gangster and a bully.  Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada’s relationship with the US no longer works and that the US led world order is ruptured. Last night on his MSNOW show, Lawrence O’Donnell, the talented wordsmith who once wrote scripts for The West Wing, went with my favorite, calling Trump an “open sore of narcissism.” Those are just a selection of the things being said in public about Trump and his actions, no doubt what’s being said in private is far worse. These public remarks, especially the ones from international leaders, have been triggered by Trump’s increasingly loud threats to annex Greenland by whatever means he deems necessary.   O’Donnell is convinced that those threats are mostly about distracting from the Epstein files rather than Trump’s actual intentions.  If we’re lucky, O’Donnell is right but since Trump has bolstered his saber rattling with threats to impose increasingly onerous tariffs on many of our European allies, including a 200% one on French champagne, a lot of the damage has already been done.  Yesterday, as Trump took to the White House press room to brag about his 365 first year accomplishments, a list that was ridden with his usual lies and exaggerations, including one about how awesome his economy is, especially when compared to the one that he got from favorite punching bag, Biden, the DJIA dropped 870 points probably because Wall Street investors like champagne but intensely dislike tariffs and though many of them could care little about Greenland, assuming before last week they could actually find it on a map, they are anxious about disruptions in the world order, particularly when those disruptions impact Treasuries and corporate profits.  In summary, our president who the NY Times estimates has turned his office into a personal moneymaking machine, pocketing $1.4 billion since last January, is 👿 and 🤪 The WSJ Editorial Board, hardly made up of radical lefties, believes he is seeking to annex Greenland so he can add growing the size of the US to his epithet (Trump the Green Lunatic?) even if the cost is empowering the ambitions of Xi and Putin. And now, despite a delay caused by an Air Force One electrical issue he’s made it to Davos where he’s likely to say more offensive, threatening, and insane things to an international audience, some of whom will try to figure out how they can profit from his greed and insanity while pretending to respect him while the rest do their best not to vomit onto the seats in front of him.  It’s growing increasingly clear that the US cannot survive three more years of this. Neither can NATO.

Minnesota Madness:  Despite a US District Judge’s order blocking federal agents from detaining or using nonlethal force against peaceful protesters and Kristi Noem’s assertion that US citizens are not being rounded up by her thugs but if they are they deserve it, Stephen Miller and Trump’s personal militia is still going after citizens and peaceful protestors. This week, they dragged a barely dressed innocent Hmong man, a naturalized US citizen, from his home and drove him around for an hour before “realizing” that he’d done nothing wrong and then returning him to his home. Naturally, Noem’s team then claimed that they went after him because he was harboring sex offenders because they felt compelled to make up an excuse.  Recent reports are that Noem’s thugs have started “accidentally arresting” off duty Minneapolis policeman, their crime, being Black men of Somali descent. The Department of Justice has added Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, not so coincidentally the first Muslim Congressman, to the list of Minnesota politicians being investigated all while Jonathan Ross, the INS official who shot Renee Good four times remains in the clear.  Trump now says that Renee Good, who everyone in his orbit has attacked as a radical, may not have been all bad because someone told him that her father voted for him.  Note to the rest of us, be prepared to mention the name of a relative who voted for Trump, real or fictitious, if you’re ever pulled over by the immigration police because just asserting you are a US citizen is no longer enough.       

Beauty Queen Out:  Yesterday, a Trump appointed judge ruled that the “charade” of Lindsey Halligan “masquerading as the US Attorney” for the Eastern Virginia District was in “direct defiance of binding court orders and must come to an end.” The judge added that the written argument that the DOJ had provided in defense of her continuation in her US Attorney role had “contained a level of vitriol more appropriate for a cable news talk show”  falling “far beneath the level of advocacy expected from litigants in his court particularly from  the DOJ.  In anticipation of that ruling, the Judges in her district had already started advertising for her replacement.  Last night, AG Pam Bondi announced that Halligan had left the DOJ, or at least is gone for now because in Trump world Halligan types keep reappearing in other roles.  Does the new Board of Peace for Gaza need an ambassador?

More 💩:  It turns out that despite all those denials, some of the DOGE-niks who were embedded in the Social Security Administration did share our records with an outside entity, part of an effort to ferret out the vast number of nonexistent non citizen voters.  Remember when Trump said that he wanted to turn Gaza into a Trump themed resort, we still don’t know if the resort part is true, but he’s selling seats on his Board of Peace for Gaza for $1 billion a pop, although not everyone is expected to pay that amount and its not clear where that money will go.  Some of the countries that have signed on include Middle Eastern and bordering nations like Israel, Egypt, Morocco, the UAE.  Others include Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Belarus, Hungary and Canada who says it has no plans to ante up the Trump “initiation” fee.  Russia says they’ve been invited too, something that the Trump administration confirms, kind of odd since Trump claims that one of the reasons he needs to grab Greenland is to defend against Russian encroachment. A number of other countries, including Norway and Sweden say they’re holding off joining due to Trump’s Greenland mishegas.  It’s not really clear what the Board of Peace is really all about though its suggested that Trump is trying to usurp NATO and the UN’s usual roles and maybe he is or maybe he’s just pocketing the money, into the same account in Qatar where some of  Venezuela's oil revenues are being deposited?  Okay, I am just spitballing but who really knows?