I continue to be delusional or lost in an illusion - Trump represents not us, but only himself. That he is the worst that America has produced, instead of what the majority of the country believes.
Today in the group session, the program is back to discussing either/or thinking and tribalism, He mentioned left and right for politics. I do not think that applies nowadays. I think the difference is between those with empathy and those without.
Some of these items have been hanging around in the tabs of my Zen browser, so I am putting the dates I came across them.
Atlas No More (Quillette, 13 Jan 2026)
It’s important to understand that this looming abdication was not forced on the United States by forces beyond its control. It has been wilfully chosen by its highest officials, as the administration’s recent National Security Strategy makes plain. Until quite recently, such an insouciant announcement of a reduced American place in the world would have been hard to fathom. It was only eight years ago that President Trump, guided by seasoned foreign-policy hands and a clutch of Republican internationalists, laid out a National Security Strategy that acknowledged the need for vigorous global activism to check the authoritarian bloc of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. A world of great-power rivalries threatened to bring down the liberal order and replace it with one that, it was still assumed, would be far less conducive to American interests and American ideals.
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With revisionist powers collaborating in both word and deed to mount a strategic challenge to American hegemony, the meaning of the new NSS is that America will prematurely bow out of that contest. Henceforth, Washington will have little inclination to cooperate with our erstwhile friends to prevent military aggression. It will not forswear destructive tariffs that encourage a beggar-thy-neighbour mercantilism. Instead, global territory and interests will be demarcated between and among great powers, divvying up this geopolitical harvest on the basis of spheres of influence. As Anne Applebaum has observed, a striking feature of the emerging Trump doctrine is “its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill.” Competition is out, collusion is in.
Only strength can save Greenland (The New Statesman, 14 January 2026) proved prescient.
After the downfall of Nicolás Maduro, Europe’s leaders seem finally to have grasped that Trump is not kidding about his determination to “get” Greenland. The provisional strategy is twofold: convince the US president his security concerns can best be resolved within the existing alliance, and that if he attempts a military takeover, he will be responsible for bringing down Nato.
The problem with this approach is that if Trump was genuinely motivated by anxieties about Arctic security, he would not need to buy or seize Greenland to bolster America’s military presence. Under the existing agreement with Denmark, signed in 1951 and renewed in 2004, the US already has the right to surge forces to Greenland and even build new bases there. Instead, Washington has reduced its footprint from more than 10,000 troops and dozens of facilities at the height of the Cold War to around 150 troops at the dilapidated Pituffik Space Base in the north-west of the island.
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So it is probably a mistake for Nato allies to put too much faith in Trump’s interest in preserving an alliance he has repeatedly derided, when weighed against what he appears to regard as a legacy-defining opportunity to redraw his beloved maps in America’s favour, and exploit the mineral wealth buried beneath.
The most optimistic scenario for Greenland is that Trump gets distracted by his many other foreign policy priorities, such as bringing down the regimes in Iran and Cuba, and his new role as “acting president of Venezuela”. Trump’s greatest constraint has often been his own attention span. But the other consistent feature of his leadership is that he prefers quick wins. When China punched back against his trade war, he backed down.
Trump like to denigrate the IQ levels of others, but this threatening to destroy NATO over Greenland is truly dumb.
Morning Bid: US picks a fight with its biggest creditor (Reuters, January 19, 2026)
Linking the tariffs directly to sovereignty, and all that entails for nation states, makes it harder for either side to TACO on this one, and throws into doubt all the trade deals already agreed. The EU has already paused ratification of the U.S.-EU agreement, and the U.S.-UK deal has to be in doubt.
At least Trump is using tariffs rather than an actual military invasion against a fellow NATO member, risking the end of the alliance, the loss of U.S. bases and air access in Europe, intelligence sharing, billions in defence sales etc etc.The market reaction has been moderate risk-off, with S&P futures down almost 1% and EU stock futures 1.1%. Gold and silver scaled fresh peaks, while the dollar lost ground to the safe harbour Swiss franc and yen.It's even down on the euro as analysts note European investors own $8 trillion in U.S. stocks and bonds. Starting a trade war with your biggest creditor is a bold play, Cotton.
What did we for all of Trump's blather? Nothing we didn't have before other than alienating our allies.
Greenland PM Tells People to Prepare for Possible Invasion (Bloomberg, January 20, 2026)
Meanwhile, Canada’s military has modeled how it would respond to an American invasion after Trump publicly talked about the country as a potential 51st state, according to a report in the Globe and Mail, which cited unidentified officials who stressed they consider a US invasion to be highly unlikely.
In a move to shore up security of the territory, Denmark and seven other NATO countries last week deployed a handful of officers on the island as part of the Operation Arctic Endurance. Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command will now expand the military exercises to potentially run year-round, a Greenlandic newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Europe must break from America (The New Statesman, 19 January 2026)
If Brexit was the first blow against the EU from a new Europhobic movement in America, we now face a second and far more serious attack. As the ideological worldviews prevalent in Europe and America continue to diverge, there is an obvious risk that the military and technological dependencies Europeans have allowed to develop may be used against them. For many decades, the West functioned as both a political and emotional community. In such a community, mutual dependence is not exploited, and partners refrain from anything that could jeopardise a shared destiny. But without the West as a political community, that logic disappears. I am told that German policymakers now lie awake at night worrying about what would happen if Trump decided to turn off the spigot of liquefied natural gas crossing the Atlantic. Germany is now more dependent on the US for energy than it ever was on Russia.
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The alternative scenario is that Europeans recognise the threat and respond accordingly. This could trigger a chain of events capable of fostering a common European consciousness and, perhaps, even the birth of a European civilisational state. In reality, national or civilisational consciousness tends to emerge in opposition to other nations or civilisations – and neither Russia nor China fulfils that role. They are too distant, too weak to present what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a historical “challenge,” the psychological mechanism by which new civilisations are born. They are too foreign, too removed from European life, to compel a reckoning with fundamental questions of identity and values. America, by contrast, is a challenge – perhaps the preeminent challenge facing Europeans today, forcing them to ask what values they stand for and what sets them apart from the rest of the world.
It is in this effort to preserve itself against American power that Europe can, at long last, become Europe. First, it would need to affirm its full sovereignty in the face of the threats and ultimatums emanating from Washington. Events last year – particularly the American climbdown on tariffs on 12 May – demonstrated that only China, and perhaps India, were capable of such a stance. Scale matters: only a united Europe can safeguard European sovereignty. Second, a strategic break with the US would compel Europeans to take every existential decision into their own hands. Suddenly, the narcissism of small nations, to paraphrase Freud, would have to give way to a genuinely shared sense of belonging. American protection and tutelage have long prevented this process of consolidation.
The Great Divorce (The Atlantic - 1/23/26)
A more adult kind of relationship between the New and Old Worlds is possible and desirable. Providing that affection and mutual respect persist, unillusioned marriages are often the most durable ones.
Greenland galvanizes Europe to confront new US reality (Reuters, 1/23/26)
European leaders believe Trump backed down in part because - in contrast to their more accommodating stance in last year's tariff negotiations - this time they made it clear he was crossing a red line by asserting that Greenland's status as an autonomous territory of Denmark was non-negotiable."All this shows that you cannot let the Americans trample all over the Europeans," said a European Union official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about U.S. ties."We did the right thing to push back, to be firm in what we said, but it is not over. My sense is that we will be tested constantly on issues like this," the official told Reuters.While Europe may have learned the value of standing up to Trump, the challenge is ensuring it is less exposed next time.
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After the signing of the EU-Mercosur pact this month - the largest in EU history - European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it is now "on the cusp" of a deal with India.However, nobody is saying Europe can redress the imbalance with the U.S. overnight, particularly on security.Despite European commitments to a defence spending surge and even calls for an EU army, analysts say it will be years before its military might is up to tasks which now include bolstering Arctic security.The question is whether the past few weeks provide a catalyst for Europe to start reducing its U.S. dependencies."All this is not surprising," Swedish deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch said of Trump's showing in Davos."The EU needs to toughen up," she told Reuters.
Destruction for the sake of destruction, without profit to the country, is what Trump has accomplished in Europe. He is also turning that destructiveness onto this country.
Mark Carney has made his mark on world history as no other Canadian Premier has.
Read the full transcript of Carney’s speech to World Economic Forum (World News, January 20, 202, video)
Canadian PM Carney fires back at Trump over claim that 'Canada lives because of the United States' (Fox News)
During his address on Tuesday, Carney did not mention Trump by name, but rather he said that "rules-based order is fading," referencing the U.S.
He admitted that there were benefits to US. leadership on the world stage, but painted the entire concept of a rules-based international order as a falsity that is actively failing. Additionally, in his address, Carney urged middle powers, like Canada, to assert themselves and take the opportunity to "build a new order that embodies our values."
The occupation of Minneapolis: how residents are resisting Trump’s ICE 'invasion' – video (The Guardian, video, 1/23/26)
Clergy arrested, businesses shutter as Minnesotans protest Trump's surge in immigration agents (Reuters, 1/23/26)
MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Local police arrested dozens of clergy members who sang hymns and prayed as they knelt on a road at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport as part of a day of protests and walkouts on Friday against U.S. President Donald Trump's deployment of thousands of immigration enforcement officers in the Twin Cities.The protest was part of an "ICE OUT!" day of action, with organizers and participants saying scores of businesses across Minnesota closed for the day and workers headed to street protests and marches in what they described as a general strike.
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Trump, a Republican, launched the Minnesota crackdown in part in response to fraud allegations against some members of the state's large community of people of Somali origin. He has called Somali immigrants "garbage" and said they are to be removed from the country as part of his effort to expel more immigrants, including some admitted into the country to seek asylum and other lawful residents, than any of his predecessors.Minnesota residents have responded with anger, making noise in the streets day and night with whistles and musical instruments. Some agents and protesters have yelled obscenities at each other, and agents have deployed tear gas and flash-bang grenades to scatter crowds. The Trump administration says some protesters have harassed agents and obstructed their work.
American Psycho: How Donald Trump Brought the “Bateman Doctrine” to the World (Literary Hub, 1/23/26)
What Donald Trump has done to the Rule of Law, and to international relations more broadly, cannot be explained by ideology or even corruption alone. It makes more sense when viewed as narcissism elevated to doctrine. Not strategy. Not realism. Performance. Validation. Domination for its own sake. The self as the organizing principle of the state.
This is where Patrick Bateman stops being a literary monster and becomes a governing metaphor.
Bateman does not believe in rules. He believes in surfaces. Business cards. Reservations. Who is winning the room. The law exists only as background noise, something that applies to other people, lesser people, invisible people. When consequences appear, they evaporate under scrutiny. No one wants to see. No one wants to know. The system itself collaborates in his impunity because acknowledging the truth would implicate everyone.
Trump governs from the same interior logic.
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This is not chaos. It is coherence of a different kind.
Bateman’s violence is not driven by rage. It is driven by boredom and entitlement. He hurts people because he can, and because doing so confirms his reality. Trump’s dismantling of legal and diplomatic norms follows the same pattern. He breaks because breaking proves power. He lies because lying demonstrates that truth no longer restrains him. He humiliates allies because humiliation clarifies hierarchy.
Foreign policy, under this logic, becomes an extension of the mirror.
International law assumes actors who at least pretend to believe in restraint. It assumes shame. It assumes reputation matters over time. Narcissism collapses time into the present moment. What matters is today’s headline, today’s crowd, today’s assertion of dominance. Long term consequences are abstract and abstraction is intolerable to a personality organized around constant validation.
Patrick Bateman does not plan futures. He performs scenes.
Trump’s approach to NATO, to trade, to diplomatic norms follows the same script. Loyalty is personal, not institutional. Agreements are revocable on impulse. Threats are theatrical. Praise is currency. Policy becomes indistinguishable from mood.
This is why attempts to explain Trumpism through conventional political analysis often feel inadequate. They assume motivation where there is impulse. They assume strategy where there is appetite. They assume belief where there is only self regard.
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A society that cannot confront narcissism at the level of power will normalize it as character. A legal system that treats bad faith as noise will slowly surrender meaning. An international order that relies on norms without enforcement will discover that some actors never believed in the game.
Trump did not invent this condition. He revealed it.
Sooner or later, he will turn on MAGA. He will bring down Götterdämmerung on us all. Narcissism cannot get enough validation any other way.
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