Donald Trump has done many things that are unprecedented. He is the first President to be impeached twice. He is the first convicted felon to be elected President. He is the first President to encourage a violent insurrection to overturn the election that he lost.
So many firsts.
But this one takes the cake. It’s the biggest grift of all. It’s the definition of chutzpah.
In the 250 years of this nation’s history, no President has ever sued the government for damages to his reputation.
NBC News reported:
The lawsuit, filed Thursday at a federal courthouse in Miami, says Trump is suing in his personal capacity, not as president. The other plaintiffs include two of Trump’s sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — and the Trump Organization.
“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” the complaint says.
The Treasury and IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday night.
A former IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 after he pleaded guilty the year before to leaking Trump’s tax records to The New York Times. The Times published exclusive reporting in 2020 that showed Trump had paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.
Trump is also suing the Justice Department for $230 million its investigations of his role in the January 6 insurrection and his withholding of documents.
How vigorously do you think Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi will fight their boss in court?
Would taxpayers have standing to sue to oppose any settlement?
Gene Nichol, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, wrote a rousing article in an effort to awaken the citizens of his once-progressive state to the dictatorship that Trump has built in the past year. He refers to him as King Donald the First.
Personally, I think that Trump operates not as a king but as a Mafia boss. He extracts protection money from universities and law firms. He threatens our allies (but strangely not our enemies). He takes campaign contributions in exchange for pardons. His sons invest in lucrative real estate deals with nations that want an entree to the President. He tears down the East Wing of the White House to build a gaudy ballroom, without going through any of the steps required to make changes in a historic building. He slathers the austere and beautiful Oval Office with tawdry gold ornaments befitting the Godfather’s crass taste.
Actually, Professor Nichols agrees with me. In the article, he compares Trump to Al Capone.
We have launched a war against Venezuela — apparently because we can. We have provided no justification, no rationale, no candor. Their oil, we claim, is now ours. We’ll sell it and, Donald Trump explains, the “money will be controlled” by him. If the Venezuelans don’t bend quickly enough to our command, we’ll kill more of them. It’s like a video game to us. You know, like blowing up the boats. The U.S. military has proven its mastery — in an illegal and blatantly unconstitutional and brutal cause.
Next, Trump explains, “we’re going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.” If we “don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” Cuba and Mexico are, perhaps, after that. As Stephen Miller oozes — who is going to stop us? It’s a real world out there. “You can talk about international niceties, but we live in a world governed by strength, by force, by power,” Miller says. The strong, apparently, take what they want and the weak, in turn, bear what they must. (I think the ancient Greeks said that.)
The Western Hemisphere is reportedly ours. So is any other nation that has anything we want. The only limit is Trump’s moral compass. Imagine, if you can.
ICE continues to terrorize Democratic cities — killing a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, because, in this new era, that’s how you look manly, lethal. We advertise for agents on TV. Give ‘em signing bonuses. Le mercenaire.
The president of the United States extorts like Al Capone. Universities, law firms, corporations, media folks, researchers, artists, nonprofits, cities (Democratic ones), states (blue ones) and countries (weak ones). If you don’t do what he wants, he’ll bring bombers and gunships to your shore to see if that changes your mind. Maybe he’ll take the money, or maybe he’ll give it to his family. The corruption is so outlandish, we’ve quit keeping track. A surpassingly gutless House and Senate bless the effort. Their only apparent actual oath is to Donald J. Trump. A supine Supreme Court utters immunity. There is, literally, nothing beyond his power. And if there was, he could hire goons to do it and then pardon them.
We have fretted, as a nation, over whether Trump would become a dictator. He has. Donald The First. Anyone who thinks he and his crew will surrender power is three shades past delusional. At least the mystery is gone. The only question is whether he will be cabined, suppressed, rejected — legally — by the constitutional democracy he seeks to undo. That will require an actual Congress, resolute state governments, faithful and independent federal courts, but, most of all, a massively engaged, courageous and patriotic citizenry. It’s not yet clear whether we can manage to deliver these undoubted and foundational requisites. I wish I knew the answer. I do know it’s the most important question we face. Maybe that we’ll ever face.https://a13dfb665532302bfc5f824632f0e1ca.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0
Surveying my home — a state that I love and that counts for the nation — the North Carolina Republican Party must now denounce President Trump. If they don’t, all Tar Heels, citizens and officeholders, must abandon the party. This day. There could be no stronger proof that an institution is unfit to govern than the continued embrace of Donald Trump — the gravest single threat to constitutional democracy in American history. No patriot can support dictatorship. And no honest human can any longer pretend that’s not what is happening here.
Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Making it all worse was Trump’s long, rambling, and indulgent speech delivered to the global good and great. It was filled with exaggerations and falsehoods, insults and threats, and more than a few strange detours and digressions. He confused Iceland with Greenland multiple times. The speech disparaged European leaders and Europe’s sacrifices and contributions to the common defense. (“We’ve helped them for so many years, we’ve never gotten anything.”) There was no mention of NATO invoking Article 5 in the aftermath of 9/11, and no mention of the more than 700 European soldiers who died alongside Americans in Afghanistan.
Trump was not content to target foreigners. He repeatedly criticized his predecessor. He also went after the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a man he appointed. He announced his intention to prosecute individuals for rigging the 2020 election even though there is no evidence it was rigged. What came to mind was the title of the 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, The Ugly American.
One last point. The speech was isolationist as well as unilateralist. “What does the United States get out of all of this work, all of this money – other than death, destruction, and massive amounts of cash going to people who don’t appreciate what we do? They don’t appreciate what we do. I’m talking about NATO, I’m talking about Europe. They have to work on Ukraine, we don’t. The United States is very far away. We have a big, beautiful ocean separating us. We have nothing to do with it.”
Such thinking ignores the lessons of history, from World War II and the Cold War to 9/11, Covid-19, and climate change. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are decidedly not moats. Growing disorder in other regions can and will affect U.S. prosperity and security alike. The United States may choose not to engage the world but the world will find us all the same.
The Guardian said that Trump’s speech was “racism-drenched:”
Donald Trump turned up in Davos wielding an insult bazooka. He mocked Emmanuel Macron’s aviator sunglasses, chided Mark Carney (“Canada lives because of the United States”), asserted that the Swiss are “only good because of us” and had a dig at Denmark for losing Greenland “in six hours” during the second world war.
But beyond the fractious rhetoric, the US president brought a deeper message on Wednesday that sought to unify the west rather than divide it. It was his most dark, insidious and sinister project of all.
Trump surmised: Yes, we might have our internal squabbles, but I am bringing tough love because we are all in this together. We are the standard bearers of western civilisation. We must resist the barbarian hordes. We must save the white man.
The ageing president, who in 2024 complained, “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” told the World Economic Forum that he was “derived from Europe”, namely: “100% Scotland, my mother; 100% German, my father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilisation.”
He lamented that “certain places in Europe are not even recognisable, frankly, any more”, blaming culprits that included “unchecked mass migration”. Trump said: “It’s horrible what they’re doing to themselves. They’re destroying themselves, these beautiful, beautiful places. We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones.”
What came next was pure racism as Trump reflected on immigration to his own country, where he has made the Somali community a special target of his deportation rhetoric after recent government fraud cases in Minnesota in which a majority of defendants had Somali roots.
“We’re cracking down on more than $19bn in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits,” he said. “Can you believe that Somalia – they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. I always say these are low-IQ people. How did they go into Minnesotaand steal all that money?”
Then he got to the heart of the matter: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that 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.” (Somalia does, in fact, have a government, though not democratically elected.)
He launched a bitter tirade at Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born Democratic congresswoman who is a US citizen. Then he insisted: “The explosion of prosperity and conclusion and progress that built the west did not come from our tax codes. It ultimately came from our very special culture.
“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.”
Trump’s speech had the fingerprints of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of his draconian immigration policy, all over it. It chimed with an entire discourse of white identity politics festering on the US right.
It is there in the “great replacement” theory, a conspiratorial notion that demographic change is engineered to replace white majorities with non-white populations, undermining traditional culture. It is there in Trump’s decision to grant asylum to white South Africans because of a fictitious “white genocide” said to be taking place in their country. It is there in the rabid ideology underpinning Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) thuggish assault on immigrants in Minneapolis.
It is also there in Miller’s worldview, which has long promoted racist fears of demographic replacement of white people and civilisation decline. He has become the editor who turns Trump’s pub chatter into “Make America great again” scripture.
The Guardian said:
The message: I am still the great white hope.
Bear in mind that Davos draws leaders from around the world. Not only Europeans, but Africans, Asians, Hispanics, the Middle East, and everywhere else.
Former President Bill Clinton released the following statement about what’s happening in Minneapolis and other places, as Trump unleashes the armed, masked ICE agents to arrest, harass, and murder our fellow citizens in pursuit of undocumented immigrants .
Well said. Where are other retired Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Senators?
Please speak up, Former Presidents Bush and Obama.
The video is startling. Between 3-6 armed, masked ICE agents surround a man, wrestle him to the ground, throw punches at him while he seems to be completely immobilized.
As is well known, the day after the first #No Kings Day, Trump began demolition of the East Wing of the White House. He announced that he was adding a huge ballroom that would be almost twice the size of the White House. He didn’t bother with required reviews and approvals from “independent” commissions, which are required by statute.
Before anyone could absorb the shock, the East Wing was gone. Reminded that he needed to go through a formal approval process, Trump fired the members of the two commissions and replaced ed them with his loyalists. Approval, even post facto, would be no problem, thanks to his lapdogs.
But the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which he does not control, filed a lawsuit to stop work.
A federal judge expressed deep skepticism Thursday that the White House has legal authority to construct President Donald Trump’s massive new ballroom without express authorization from Congress.
US District Judge Richard Leon said during a hearing in a challenge to the project that the White House was attempting to “end-run” Congress’ role in the historic undertaking. Leon appeared ready to at least partially side with the nation’s top historic preservation group in a lawsuit it brought late last year.
The judge said government lawyers defending the project were adopting “a pretty expansive interpretation of the language” of a federal law they’re leaning on in the case. That law, which authorizes the president to spend taxpayer dollars to maintain the People’s House, is meant to cover “very small sized projects,” Leon said, pointing to air conditioning and heating, lighting, and other standard maintenance.
“It’s not (for) $400 million worth of destruction and construction,” the judge told Justice Department attorney Yaakov Roth.
As Roth pointed to two other White House projects that didn’t receive congressional approval, Leon quickly pushed back and accused the lawyer of downplaying the significance of the ballroom project, which is expected to dramatically expand the size of the building.
The other projects Roth cited – Gerald Ford’s swimming pool and cabana and a tennis pavilion overseen by first lady Melania Trump during the president’s first term – did little to advance their arguments, the judge said.
“The ‘77 Gerald Ford swimming pool? You compare that to tearing down and building a new East Wing? Come on. Be serious,” the judge said.
The sprawling ballroom project has an estimated size of approximately 89,000 square feet, according to lead architect Shalom Baranes. By contrast, the primary White House structure, the Executive Mansion, is just 55,000 square feet.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation seeks a stop-work order and a determination by Congress to hear from the public and review the project.
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 Cyclenewsletter:
“‘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.
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.
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 