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Thom Hartmann: The ICE Raids are Not About Immigration Enforcement. They Are About Racial Control.

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2026 //
2

When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. Yesterday, he said:

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?”

At the end of this month, funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out. Congress is going to have to act and that makes this a very important moment, politically.

The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on October 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on September 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nurnberg Rally.

I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”

Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:

“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)

This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:

“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)

As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.

Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:

— Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
— Abraham Lincoln said that our Founders had created: “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”
— Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
— FDR simply used the name of our nation on December 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Across 220+ years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.

Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.

George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction. 

And here we are.

ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:

“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.

“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’

Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.

Thanks to Dean Blundell for compiling these images

— Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” Malcolm Nance noted: 

“This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMAN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”

— The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).

— Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.

Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base: 

As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cycle newsletter:

“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. … 

“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”

From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.

One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:

“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”

It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.

The police officers who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, for example, were all Klansmen, and that’s where Don Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.

Yesterday, Congressman Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?

“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out. 

We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.

Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.

If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out. 

It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.

Categories Immigration, International, Racism, Trump

The Idiocy of Seizing Greenland

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2026 //
6

Foreign Policy, a distinguished publication for leading scholars of foreign affairs, published an article by staff writers Keith Johnson and Christina Lu asserting that Trump’s lust to control Greenland is just plain nuts.

They wrote;

Seeking additional barrels of oil in Venezuela or digging for rare earths in ice-covered Greenland makes no sense from an economic or security point of view. And yet U.S. President Donald Trump persists, even though the costs massively outweigh the benefits.

In reality, naked resource grabs explain a lot about Trump’s dizzying foreign policy, perhaps even more so than other explanations that have been proposed. It seems Trump may have reached back even further in time for his guiding light than tariff-happy William McKinley and big-stick imperialist Theodore Roosevelt to the British and Dutch quasi-state mercantilist corporations that introduced much of the world to rapacious capitalism starting in the 17th century. The British and Dutch East India Companies did grab much of the world, usually at gunpoint. At least they got pepper, spices, and tea. All we have here is sulfurous oil and neodymium.

Gunboat diplomacy is back, only this time without the diplomacy.

Trump’s obsession with natural resources that the companies paid to extract them refuse to touch does raise several questions. Are these even the right resources to be grabbing? Is any of this legal? And most importantly, is any of this a remotely good way to promote the security of the United States?

WHEN IT COMES TO OIL, which has been a Trump obsession for decades, the answer is clearly no.

Oil demand is a tricky thing to project into the future. Some forecasters expect global demand for oil to peak within five years, while others reckon fast-growing developing economies will still be thirsty into the next decade, requiring more wells and more production. Either way, oil from Venezuela and Greenland is not the answer.

Venezuela’s oil woes have been amply demonstrated. It’s an expensive thing to produce in a place with little security and less rule of law, especially with oil languishing in the mid-$50s a barrel. The chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, told Trump at a White House meeting last week that Venezuela was “uninvestible.” Trump then said he would ensure that Exxon was kept out of any U.S.-led Venezuela ventures—and Exxon’s stock rose on the news.

Greenland, too, is rumored to have oil: billions of barrels of it. It’s not clear if that is actually the case, because decades of exploration have hit only dry wells, but on paper, Greenland could have 8 billion barrels of oil hidden under the tundra and the whitecaps, or nearly 3 percent of Venezuela’s unattractive reserves.

But there are some daunting challenges. Most of those estimated oil resources are north of the Arctic Circle, and mostly offshore. That is not easy to access, even with climate change stretching summer on both ends. Even the oil on land is not easy to tap. There are fewer than 100 miles of paved road on an island the size of Mexico. Deep water ports, airports, pipelines, oil-export terminals, housing, clinics—all are on somebody’s to-do list to build, but not that of oil majors.

Also relevant: Since 2021, Greenland has banned further oil exploration due to environmental concerns. The only current play, a land-based oil-exploration operation on the island’s east coast with U.S. backing, relies on a grandfathered lease from years ago. That legal stricture, in the absence of a complete annexation, could complicate further U.S. efforts to tap Greenland’s possible oil.

BUT WHAT ABOUT GREENLAND’S rare earths, which Trump officials have suggested are one of the primary reasons the U.S. president is so interested in the island?

While those who focus on rare earths mining simply say the plan is “bonkers,” the real issue is that rare earths are not rare—processing facilities and magnet factories are. Which makes a race for ice-bound dodgy mining prospects in somebody else’s territory all the harder to understand.

“It certainly doesn’t make any sense as a rare-earth story,” Ian Lange, a professor in the mineral economics program at the Colorado School of Mines, recently told Foreign Policy.

Rare earths, or a set of 17 metallic elements with obscure names like neodymium and samarium, have catapulted in geopolitical importance because they power everything from F-35 fighter jets to Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. China overwhelmingly commands their global supply chains, giving it powerful leverage in its ongoing trade spat with the United States.

Sure, Greenland may have some sizable rare earth reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey—but so do many other countries. And a big economic question hangs over potential operations in Greenland, where no rare earth mining has ever taken place and mining itself remains a fraught and divisive issue.

The biggest problem with Trump’s resource grabs is not their lack of economic foundation, which is nil, or their legality, which is none, but with what they do for U.S. security, which is little or worse.

Also, the bulk of Greenland’s land—a whopping 80 percent—is estimated to be covered in ice. All of those factors are certain to make establishing crucial mining and processing infrastructure, already a difficult and hefty financial endeavor, even more costly and challenging.

In his pursuit of rare earths, industry experts say, Trump will likely have an easier time looking elsewhere.

AND THEN THERE’S THE QUESTION of the legality of how Trump is going about his resource grabs. Abducting heads of government to seize resources is not anywhere sanctioned in the U.N. Charter, nor is threatening to invade a NATO alliance partner to forcibly annex their territory. But rogue states are hard to red team.

Trump has waved aside centuries of international law, telling the New York Times “I don’t need international law,” because his own “morality” was the only check or balance required.

It’s not an abstruse debate. For centuries, the West has sought to paint a patina of law over the anarchy of the international system, and even today, tomes are written about revisionist powers seeking to pervert international law for their own ends. Until very recently, the United States was not among the revisionist powers.

But there’s little to be done on that front. Trump’s installed successor in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro’s former vice president and now also acting president Delcy Rodriguez, who has been under U.S. sanctions since 2017 for human rights abuses, is according to Trump “a terrific person.” Also not entirely legal is storing the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales the United States has carried out in an offshore account in Qatar.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with Trump’s resource grabs is not their lack of economic foundation, which is nil, or their legality, which is none, but with what they do for U.S. security, which is little or worse….

The great advantage the United States had, until recently, was its network of alliances: NATO, Japan, South Korea, and a multitude of others. That’s all gone now, or nearly. It is surely a sign of bungled foreign policy when Sweden dispatches troops against you.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, History, Hypocrisy, Inequity, International, Stupid, Trump

James Fallows: A Primer on Greenland

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2026 //
3

James Fallows is a veteran journalist who has published widely and was a regular columnist for The Atlantic. Early on in his career, he was chief speechwriter for President Carter.

He visited Greenland in the past year and has some sage thoughts about the idiocy of trying to seize it.

He wrote on his Substack blog:

This morning on Fox, two well-matched intellects: Maria Bartiromo and Ted Cruz. Next to them is a Fox-produced map making Greenland look bigger than China, which in reality is more than four times its size. And on a par with the whole of Africa, which in fact is nearly 15 times as large. Fox is famous as the main source of real-time intel for the person who has assumed one-man control of US military, economic, and diplomatic relations with the world. What could go wrong?

This post includes a reprise of some previous items on Greenland, especially from this post one week ago. But as news has evolved, and as the insane idea of taking over Greenland has moved closer to alliance-destroying “reality,” and as a handy one-place guide to the main issues, I offer this update:

I’m not expert on Greenland. But at least I’ve been there, last spring for nearly a week. Which is a week more than the current US President, his Secretary of State (who is also his National Security Advisor), or his Secretary of Defense can claim, among them. And I’ve been reading about the place, and asking people about it, before that and ever since. Which I doubt any of them have done.

Here are my main suggestions if you find yourself in a “Wow, this Greenland situation, what do you think??” conversation any time soon.

1) This crisis is all coming from someone’s gut. Not from anyone’s brain.

Maybe you want to keep this to yourself, rather than leading with it in the conversation. But it’s worth knowing: Does the Trump-era obsession with Greenland seem completely irrational? That’s because it is—as no less an authority than Trump himself has told us.

The most self-aware part of Trump’s recent hours-long gabfest with NY Times reporters, and among the most self-damaging, was the “why Greenland?” exchange.

The Times team didn’t put it exactly this way, but the implied setup for their question was: With brutal war ongoing in Ukraine, with carnage in Gaza, with regime change in Venezuela, with upheaval in Iran, with federal troops occupying major cities, with tariffs upending world economies, and so on, why on Earth are you even talking about Greenland?

Here’s how the Q-and-A played out, with emphasis by me.

David Sanger [NYT]: Why is ownership [of Greenland] important here?

Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success…. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document…

Katie Rogers [NYT]: Psychologically important to you, or to the United States?

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

Give Trump credit, this one time, for honesty. Give him demerits on every other count. What he’s doing to all the rest of us is crazy. But, in a moment like Tony Soprano on the psychiatrist’s couch with Dr. Melfi, he’s looking into himself and seeing a deeper truth.

Because the feeling of ownership is “psychologically important” for this one damaged man, the US is throwing alliances and interests built over centuries into a bonfire. Great. But not what Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson had in mind.

2) The US has nothing to gain by ‘owning’ Greenland. Zero.

Actually less than zero, into the negative range.
The military bases the US might want, to patrol activity over the Arctic? Especially as melting ice opens more sea lanes? We already have treaty rights to operate as many bases as we could want.

The Chinese and Russian boats allegedly crowding the waters around Greenland? Bullshit. Check out MarineTraffic.com, VesselFinder.com, ShipFinder.co, etc (the rough maritime counterparts of FlightAware and ADSB-Exchange in aviation) to see for yourself.

The “rare earths” that are so prized? As mentioned before, the “mining” terrain in Greenland is about as challenging as any in the world. Even as glaciers melt at a quickening pace, the average thickness of the ice cap over Greenland is more than one mile. There are simply no roads in the country—none, at all—to connect potential mining sites with ports.
What you see in Greenland, apart from tiny settlements on the coast, is ice. Melting ice, yes.

But still a stupendous amount of it. Rare earth miners may eventually go to work there. But it will be a very long time. And the US doesn’t need to “own” this territory to buy their output. If and when there is any.

And this is not even to get into all the burden of maintaining Greenland, if the US took it over. Health care. Education. Food. Transport to remote locations. Adjudicating indigenous rights versus those of the central government.

People in the US grumble about the challenges of remote rural locations. This is on an entirely different scale.

Denmark already has agreed to open Greenland to every security and economic ambition the US might have. And meanwhile, Denmark is juggling all the challenges of this semi-autonomous state.
One man’s sense of what is “psychologically important, to me” might matter to him. It should matter less to us, than Tony Soprano’s did to his mob.

3) No one wants us there. Zero.

Greenlanders have complex feelings about their “mother” country, Denmark. The ties are deep. So are the desires for independence. Greenland is self-governing, and has its own flag, its own culture, its own ambitions—as we heard from everyone we met. But nearly everyone we met had studied in Denmark, and spoke Danish, and had relatives there.

That’s complicated. By contrast, the view of US takeover is simple. No!

There is more but you half to open the post and subscribe to finish it.

Categories International, Stupid, Trump

Anne Applebaum on Trump’s Deranged Letter to European Leaders

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2026 //
15

Anne Applebaum, journalist and historian, writes frequently about European politics. She has been a member of the Washington Post editorial board and is now a contributor to The Atlantic, where this article appeared. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book Gulag: A History.

She writes here about his latest missive, in which he said he was going to take Greenland (from Denmark) because he didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize (awarded by the Nobel Committee in Norway.)

Let me begin by quoting, in full, a letter that the president of the United States of America sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is:

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 a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any 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

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: 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.

The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.

Categories Insane, International, Trump

The Economist: After Maduro in Venezuela

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2026 //
8

Perhaps the strangest feature of Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is that he left the leadership of the regime in place, removing only Maduro and his wife. Four of the six Venezuelan leaders who were indicted for criminal activities are now running the country.

On the one hand, Trump avoids the problem of a renegade army and security apparatus, which can help repress the citizenry while the U.S. schemes to steal their oil.

On the other, the Maduro regime continues to be thuggish and corrupt.

The Economist magazine conducted a poll in Venezuela and found that most people were pleased that Maduro is gone.

The polling shows that Mr Maduro, who presided over torture and economic collapse and brazenly stole the presidential election in 2024, was deeply hated. Just 13% of respondents even mildly opposed his capture. Strikingly, more than half of them said their opinion of America had improved after the raid.

Its deputy editor Robert Guest wrote this commentary in the January 10-16 issue::

Outside a supermarket in Caracas a few years ago, I saw national guardsmen checking people’s identity before they were allowed in. The logic was that, courtesy of the revolutionary government, the state-owned shop sold essential groceries at below-market prices. So you needed men with truncheons and tear-gas to make sure shoppers only came in on their state-appointed shopping days.

Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship was one of the most thuggish in the world. It was also one of the most economically incompetent. When I walked into that shop, half the shelves were bare and none of the groceries that were supposed to be on sale for less than they cost to make were, in fact, available. A combination of price controls, socialist dogma and industrial-scale corruption had dramatically impoverished a once-prosperous country. The economy shrank by 69% under Mr Maduro—a swifter decline than would normally occur during an all-out civil war. Small wonder Venezuelans in Miami danced in the streets when Donald Trump kidnapped Mr Maduro and whisked him to a courtroom in New York. But they were not dancing in Caracas, for fear of being arrested and tortured. For though the despot is gone, the rest of the regime is still in place.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, International, Trump, Tyranny

Margaret Hoover Interviews Elliot Abrams About Trump’s Errors in Invading Venezuela

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2026 //
22

Margaret Hoover is host of a weekly program about public affairs every Friday night on PBS. It’s called “Firing Line,” the same title as William Buckley’s talk show of decades back.

Margaret, a direct descendant of Herbert Hoover, is a Republican but is not especially conservative.

On this program, she interviews Elliot Abrams.

Elliot Abrams is an expert on foreign affairs and national security. He worked for President Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, and President Trump, in his first term. Abrams is known as a hawk.

What’s fascinating about the conversation is that Abrams is highly critical of Trump’s invasion.

He acknowledges that Maduro was a ruthless, brutal dictator who ran the Venezuelan economy into the ground and caused millions of Venezuelans to flee the country. Some of maduro’s top leaders have hidden bank accounts in which they have stowed hundreds of millions of dollars.

He asks why Trump failed to consult Congress.

He wonders why Trump ordered the arrest of Maduro and his wife but not the others who were indicted and are now running the country.

He wonders why Trump left the leaders of this corrupt regime in place. He assumes they will wait Trump out and continue to reap the rewards of their corruption. Given the cost and difficulty of reviving Venezuela’s oil industry, he doubts that any of the major American oil companies will risk doing so.

It’s a fascinating conversation. I urge you to watch.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, International, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Making Sense of the Past Week

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2026 //
8

Heather Cox Richardson does a masterful job of drawing together the wildly disparate events of the past several days. Trump seems to be doing a good job of distracting the public, as he generates crises and then jumps into them.

HCR writes:

The news has seemed to move more and more quickly in the last week.

The story underlying all others is that the United States Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files—the files from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into the activities of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—no later than December 19, and it has not done so.

Epstein and President Donald J. Trump were close friends for many years, and the material the Department of Justice (DOJ) has released suggests that Trump was more closely tied to Epstein’s activities than Trump has acknowledged. Although Trump ran in 2024 on the promise of releasing the Epstein files, suggesting those files would incriminate Democrats, his loyalists in the administration are now openly flouting the law to keep them hidden.

Despite the clear requirement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that they release all the files by December 19, to date they have released less than 1% of the material.

Another part of the backstory of the past week is that the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the Trump administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, a decision that seemed to limit Trump’s power to use military forces within the United States.

Yet another part of the backstory is that on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. In that testimony—under oath—Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

With pressure building over the Epstein files and Jack Smith’s testimony, and with the Supreme Court having taken away Trump’s ability to use troops within the United States, the administration went on the offensive.

Only a week ago, on January 3, the military captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. After months of suggesting that he was determined to end what he called “narco-traffickers,” Trump made it clear as soon as Maduro was in hand that he wanted control of Venezuela’s oil.

Then, on January 6, the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters determined to keep Trump in office despite Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s majority of 7 million votes, Trump’s White House rewrote the history of January 6, 2021, claiming that the rioters were “peaceful patriotic protesters” and blaming the Democrats for the insurrection.

That same day, after the Supreme Court had cut off the administration’s ability to federalize National Guard soldiers and send them to Democratic-led cities, the administration surged 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis in the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever launched.

The next morning, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, and the administration responded by calling Good a domestic terrorist.

On Thursday, January 8, as protests broke out across the country, Republicans in both chambers of Congress began to push back against the administration. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the leading sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the DOJ to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. The House also passed a measure to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years.

The Senate advanced a bill to stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. And, just two days after Trump had reversed the victims and offenders in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that Capitol Police officers had been among the offenders, the Senate unanimously agreed to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating that the plaque be hung, but Republicans until now had prevented its installation.

Friday was a busy day at the White House.

On Friday, Trump threatened Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”

Trump’s threat against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally has had American lawmakers and foreign allies scrambling ever since. In a joint statement, the leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) released a video explaining that “what you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe. You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.”

Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the country in the future.

What oil executives did suggest to Trump on Friday was that they would quite like to be repaid for their losses from the 2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”

Yesterday the government made public an executive order President Donald J. Trump signed on Friday, declaring yet another national emergency—his tenth in this term, by my count—and saying that any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies “will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Specifically, the executive order says, such repayment would “interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela” and, by extension, jeopardize U.S. foreign policy objectives including “ending the dangerous influx of illegal immigrants and the flood of illicit narcotics;…protecting American interests against malign actors such as Iran and Hezbollah; and bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere more generally.” So, it appears, Trump wants to retain control of the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.

Tonight Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said he is under federal criminal investigation related to his congressional testimony about a $2.5 billion renovation of historic Federal Reserve buildings. On Friday the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve grand jury subpoenas.

Powell, whom Trump appointed, released a video noting that he has kept Congress in the loop on the renovation project and saying that complaints about renovations are pretexts. Trump is threatening criminal charges against Powell because the Fed didn’t lower interest rates as fast as Trump wanted, instead working in the interest of the American people. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.” Powell vowed to “continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do, with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people.”

The Federal Reserve is designed to be independent of presidents to avoid exactly what Trump is trying to do. The attempt to replace Powell with a loyalist who will give Trump control over the nation’s financial system profoundly threatens the stability of the country. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, appeared to have had enough. He posted that “[i]f there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.” He said he would “oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.”

Kyle Cheney of Politico observed that it is “[h]ard to overstate what a remarkable statement this is from a Republican senator…accusing the Trump White House of weaponizing DOJ to control the Fed.”

Over a picture of the demolished East Wing of the White House, conservative lawyer George Conway noted: “I also must say that it’s a bit rich that Trump and his DOJ think it’s a good idea to gin up a bullshit investigation about supposed illegalities in….{checks notes}…renovating a federal building.”

On social media tonight, Trump posted a portrait of himself with the title: “Acting President of Venezuela.”

—

Notes:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/10/what-the-big-oil-executives-told-trump-about-investing-in-venezuela.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/safeguarding-venezuelan-oil-revenue-for-the-good-of-the-american-and-venezuelan-people/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

https://substack.com/redirect/119b4481-d7a5-4e79-bec9-06b8e6aeee1a?j=eyJ1IjoicmxzOCJ9.pJwy2TTXEYwSmvNpP_gTSRSciwi41pWVFZ9UBZrPJHY

https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2026-01-09/sen-king-says-its-nonsense-that-u-s-needs-to-own-greenland-for-national-security

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/fed-jerome-powell-criminal-probe-nyt.html

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20260111a.htm

Supreme Court rejects Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard in Illinois

https://substack.com/redirect/2fda544c-e56d-42cb-96dd-7c8ea01feacd?j=eyJ1IjoicmxzOCJ9.pJwy2TTXEYwSmvNpP_gTSRSciwi41pWVFZ9UBZrPJHY

https://substack.com/redirect/109f24be-066d-4312-8c2a-2a4a48fbcc7a?j=eyJ1IjoicmxzOCJ9.pJwy2TTXEYwSmvNpP_gTSRSciwi41pWVFZ9UBZrPJHY

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/08/17-republicans-vote-to-restore-lapsed-obamacare-subsidies-00717497

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-republican-senators-venezuela-war-powers/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-sent-to-minneapolis-area-to-carry-out-largest-immigration-operation-ever-ice-says

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/01/08/congress/senate-unanimous-approves-jan-6-plaque-law-enforcement-00717799

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405/text

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/06/epstein-files-release-justice-department

Bluesky:

chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3mc4iyclym222

gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mc73ftktkj2w

gtconway.bsky.social/post/3luuiczrpis2e

federalreserve.gov/post/3mc6san2usk2g

justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3mc6wyjaqwk2g

muellershewrote.com/post/3mc6vzhk2dk2o

kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3mc6xpvvtez26

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, International, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson Speaks Out on the Lawlessness of Trump’s Strike on Venezuela

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2026 //
17

Heather Cox Richardson recorded a commentary on Substack about the very dangerous moment we are in.

If Trump can strike wherever he wants whenever he wants, the U.S. and the world is in deep trouble.

Which country is next? Cuba? Columbia? Greenland?

Trump is attacking the international rules-based, law-based order.

Categories International, Trump

Richard Haas Assays U.S. Invasion of Venezuela

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2026 //
15

Richard Haas was president of the council on Foreign Relations for 20 years, so he qualifies as an expert on foreign affairs, not a pundit.

He writes a blog called “Home and Away,” where he comments on international issues. Open the link to his post to see his links to sources. The only salient point he overlooks, I believe, is that Trump’s decision to kidnap Maduro and his wife is a huge distraction from the Epstein files, as well as a chance to raise Trump’s sagging poll numbers.

He wrote today:

Welcome to this special edition of Home & Away. It is hard to believe we are only four days into the new year. I find it even harder to believe that I committed myself to making this a dry January.

As you would expect, the focus of today’s newsletter is Venezuela. Nicolás Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, is being held at the famous or, more accurately, infamous Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. This is hardly the end of the story though. To the contrary, his ouster Saturday at the hands of U.S. Special Forces is best understood as the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.

To be sure, few in Venezuela, or anywhere outside of Havana, Moscow, and Beijing, will mourn Maduro’s removal. He was an autocrat who stole an election, repressed his people, ran his country’s economy into the ground despite possessing enormous oil reserves, and trafficked in narcotics.

But that does not mean that this military operation was either warranted or wise. In fact, it was of questionable legality. The United States also had other options. Maduro hardly posed an imminent threat to the United States. Make no mistake: this was a military operation of choice, not of necessity.

There are some superficial similarities between this operation and the one launched by President George H.W. Bush in 1989 to remove Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega from power. But there was a stronger legal case against Noriega, one involving not just drugs but also the killing of a U.S. serviceman. There were legitimate concerns about the threat to other U.S. military personnel stationed in Panama and the security of the Panama Canal itself. And U.S. motives were largely strategic rather than commercial.

The choice to target Venezuela is revealing of President Donald Trump’s motive. The main priority, Trump suggested during his press conference after the operation, was American access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. Secondary objectives included ending Venezuela’s involvement in the drug trade, helping those who left the country return home, and tightening the squeeze on Cuba, which is heavily dependent on subsidized Venezuelan oil to bolster its struggling, sanctioned economy.

But it would be premature in the extreme to declare the operation a success. It is one thing to remove an individual from power. It is another, fundamentally different and more difficult task, to remove a regime and replace it with something more benign and enduring. With regard to Venezuela, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” applies: we broke it, so now we own it.

Trump has declared that the United States will “run Venezuela.” Details are scarce. One thing, though, is clear, at least for now: the Trump administration prefers to work with remnants of the existing regime (it seems to have reached an understanding with Maduro’s vice president, who is now heading up the government) rather than empower the opposition. This aligns with a policy motivated by the prospect of commercial gain, not by a desire to promote democracy and safeguard human rights.

It is possible this leadership (rather than regime) change will suffice, and the new government will offer up oil concessions and rein in drug trafficking. But to assume this would be foolhardy. In addition, a breakdown in order is possible. Pro-regime elements will be active, and the opposition is anything but united and may well resist being shut out. The society has been ravaged by two and a half decades of brutal rule, while some eight million citizens have left the country, taking their skills with them. All of which is to say the Trump administration could find itself facing some difficult policy choices if developments were not to unfold as hoped for.

It is as well possible the Trump administration is exaggerating the commercial benefits likely to come its way. Yes, Venezuela has enormous oil reserves, but massive investment will be required to recover them given the poor state of the fields. Companies are likely to think twice given the cost, the low price of oil, and the uncertainty as to Venezuela’s future.

The operation captures the essence of Trump’s foreign policy. It was unilateral to its core. It paid little heed to legality or international opinion. It emphasized the Western Hemisphere rather than Europe, the Indo-Pacific, or the Middle East. The goal was commercial benefit, in this case access to oil reserves, and to strengthen homeland security, reflecting concerns over drugs and immigration. Military force was used, but in bounded ways.

The biggest downside of the Venezuela operation could be the precedent it sets, affirming the right of great powers to intervene in their backyards against leaders they deem to be illegitimate or a threat. One can only imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is calling for the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine and the removal of President Volodymyr Zelensky, nodding in agreement. Trump’s military operation in Venezuela makes a negotiated end to the Russia-Ukraine war even more remote than it already was.

A similar reaction is likely in China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province and its government as illegitimate. This is not to say that President Xi Jinping will suddenly act on his ambitions for Taiwan, but events in Venezuela could increase his confidence that he would succeed if he were to invade, blockade, or otherwise coerce the island.

The operation to oust Maduro makes clear that the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy should be taken seriously, and that the Trump administration sees the Western Hemisphere as a region where U.S. interests take precedence. Russia and China will welcome this as a sign that Trump shares their vision of a world divided into spheres of influence, where the governments in Moscow and Beijing have the upper hand in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, respectively. A global order that has endured for eighty years is on the verge of being replaced by three regional orders that are likely to be anything but orderly – or free.

As always, some links to click on. And feel free to share Home & Away.

Categories Accountability, International, Trump

Trump Salutes Putin’s Commitment to Peace as Zelensky Arrives in Mar-a-Lago

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2025 //
20

Trump had a phone call with Putin before Zelensky arrived to confer with Trump about a peace plan. Trump spoke to Putin for two hours before Zelensky arrived.

When Zelensky’s airplane landed, no American was there to greet him, only Ukraine’s Ambassador to the U.S. This contrasted with Trump’s warm welcome for Putin when they met in Alaska. Trump had Marines on their knees unfurling a red carpet for Putin, and Trump waited for Putin on the tarmac, greeting him with the joy of a boy for his beloved father.

The meeting takes place as Russia has stepped up the intensity of its nightly bombing of Ukrainian cities, with more drones and missiles than at any time since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Trump apparently believes that Russia wants peace, even as they daily target residential apartment buildings and power plants in Ukraine.

Trump and Putin are dear friends. Or, more likely, Putin plays Trump like a violin, praising him lavishly and inflating his giant ego.

I’m sorry to say it but Zelensky is wasting his time by counting on Trump. Trump has thus far asked Zelensky to accept “peace” on Putin’s terms. The U.S. is not Ukraine’s ally. He should rely on Europe because they don’t want the aggressor to prevail.

Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles wrote:

Trump and Zelensky had a press conference where both sides committed to keep working. Throughout the run up and the event today Trump and his team continued to repeat outlandish Russian talking points….

Listen to Trump here. The man negotiating the fate of the West is clearly unwell and delusional. Trump: “It’s funny, I settled 8 wars. Some were going on for 35 years. And we got them settled in a couple of days. Some of them — one was going on for 37 years. I settled it in one day. But this is a very complex one” (Via Aaron Rupar)

Listen to Trump here. The man negotiating the fate of the West is clearly unwell and delusional. Catch Zelenskyy’s facial expressions when Trump claims Putin wants Ukraine to succeed and is willing to help with reconstruction: 

Here’s that question again with a close up on Zelenskyy: 

Categories Democracy, International, Trump
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