Trump oil and more signs of things to come

It’s not a good week. First, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the certification of President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral College win, a devastating spectacle. Four years after Trump sparked an insurrection to cling to power, Harris called Monday’s results a “good day” for democracy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good day.

Of course, Harris really had no choice but to prove victory over her opponent. But since she was not wrong to identify Trump as a fascist in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Monday was not a day to celebrate. After all, if the outcome had been different, if Harris had won, does anyone believe Trump would have accepted his defeat gracefully? Does anyone believe that his hateful armed mob, some of whom have spent the last four years terrorizing election officials and threatening to bring death and destruction to his political opponents, won’t take to the streets and try to storm the Capitol again? ? Does anyone really believe that a Republican-led Congress won’t do everything in its power to disrupt the proceedings?

But for Democrats, whose opponents have been hollowing out and plotting the final campaign for years, they insist on being dealt with in a system where, most importantly, they show civility. It brings to mind the polite, upper-class passengers on the Titanic, who listened to chamber music played by the ship’s musicians and who desperately tried to keep their passengers calm as the ship began to get into trouble: honorable, decent, but ultimately completely futile.

Then wildfires were fueled by 100 mph winds and erupted in Los Angeles due to a lack of rainfall. As I write this column, on Thursday night, at least 10 people have died, thousands have been left homeless, tens of thousands have been evacuated, and many of Los Angeles’ most beautiful coastal properties have been reduced to piles of ash. I must have driven around the Pacific Palisades area hundreds of times in my life. As the Sunset Strip stretches into the Pacific Ocean, the beautiful landscape transforms overnight into a scene of apocalyptic destruction. This is disastrous.

Again, it really wasn’t a quality week.

There are also growing threats against lawyers, judges and elected officials seeking to hold Trump accountable for his misconduct over the past four years. Over the past week, Trump has called for the imprisonment of politicians involved in congressional hearings on the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. (He has previously said special prosecutor Jack Smith should be expelled from the United States.) He also called for the “disbarment” of New York Judge Juan Merchant, who presided over his hush-money trial. Also this week, Trump pledged to fire National Archives personnel who reported his theft of classified documents to the Justice Department.

And, with no one holding him accountable, he is rewarded time and time again for his vile words and actions. This week, Merchant made it clear that he would not impose any penalties in the hush money case, despite the jury finding Trump guilty on more than 30 counts. Days later, shameless judge Aileen Cannon, now more of a shill than a judicial figure, blocked the release of Smith’s report as evidence leading to charges in the secret documents case.

Meanwhile, as Trump refines his inner circle, the incoming president’s followers are eager to deploy U.S. troops against domestic protesters and potential asylum seekers and unleash a series of shows using the full power of the Justice Department. It seemed commonplace in mid-century totalitarian Europe. He’s doing this in a media environment where tech moguls like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are lining up to kiss the ring, by reshaping fact-checking rules so that they are largely exempt from any efforts to curb far-right propaganda, and Provide Trump with a wealth of information.

Meanwhile, X’s owner, unelected President Elon Musk, has turned into a full-blown fascist. After calling on Germans to elect the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany to power in December, he declared that Britons should jail Prime Minister Starmer, free far-right firebrand Tommy Robinson and invite the United States to “liberate” them from their rule come out. It’s not exactly business as usual in how the United States intends to interact with its closest allies. In fact, Musk’s behavior was so outrageous and despicable that senior British politicians called on Starmer to request a meeting with the US ambassador to express Britain’s displeasure at the tycoon’s interference in Britain’s domestic affairs.

Finally, Trump threatened at a press conference on Tuesday to wage war and destroy the economies of Panama, Denmark and Canada (the latter two countries are NATO allies and could trigger Article 5 of NATO if the United States attacked them). They immediately rolled over and ceded territory and sovereignty to meet Trump’s increasingly arrogant demands. Almost as an afterthought, he promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of the Americas”, to which Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum responded by proposing to rename North America “Mexican America” ​​or “Mexican America” ”. well played.

Why does Donald Trump want vast, icy Greenland (population 56,000)? Possibly because, although he denies climate change, he knows that in a warming world, Greenland’s vast reserves of rare earth elements such as yttrium, scandium, neodymium and dysprosium will become increasingly scarce in the coming decades. Easily accessible, Greenland will become increasingly important given its geostrategic asset. It also hosts the world’s sixth-largest uranium deposit, which the Greenlandic government has banned from mining but which the nuclear powers clearly covet. Additionally, the Arctic region contains some of the world’s largest untapped oil and gas deposits. Moreover, as Arctic waters melt, it will eventually control vital shipping lanes for global maritime trade—making Trump’s case for seizing the giant island the same as that used by British grand imperialism to protect Singapore, Gibraltar, and the Falklands. different.

As my old friend Anders Krab-Johansen (born in Greenland to Danish parents), CEO and publisher of Danish media company Berlinske Media, explained to me: “ Greenland is of great strategic importance to Denmark, the United States and Europe around the world. Greenland is home to rare minerals and is key to Arctic trade routes.

In Trump’s worldview of might makes right, this means that this is an asset that the United States should seize.

In many ways, Trump’s America First policy is taking shape. If anyone seriously thought that version two of his presidency would be about lowering egg prices and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates, they’re in for something else. All this economic populist campaign rhetoric is, to use a phrase, a Trump painting, an optical illusion that hides his true intentions.

Sure, he would put pressure on the Fed on interest rates and might even succeed in driving down egg prices, but that would be a sideshow. The real story is unfolding into a brutal domestic and international power struggle.

We’d better take Him at His word this time, just like we should have done eight years ago. At the time, many commentators assured those of us who were genuinely alarmed by what Trump’s presidency portended that his promises were just bluff. Then he got elected and did exactly what he said he would do: impose a Muslim travel ban, separate families at the border, cut off immigrants’ access to many forms of public assistance, and more. This time, he promised an America First policy, threatened to destroy the century-old alliance and reshape the United States into a naked imperialist power, demanding habitat and bowed down on all sides.

Instead of harping on about how acquiescence and cooperation are good for democracy, Democrats must offer some principled, fiery opposition to this increasingly hubristic agenda. Things will only get worse from here, and the world needs principled opposition from the United States.