In the weeks since an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, an unarmed US citizen and mother of three young children, federal officers have met protesters in Minneapolis with a tunnel vision of violence. These men have smashed car windows, tear-gassed kids, hauled off screaming women on their way to the doctor. They went […]
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Sargent: Two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski, have now called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. This angered Donald Trump greatly. He lashed out at them as “losers” and “terrible senators.” But in truth, Noem’s tenure suddenly does look very shaky. A new review of the killing of Alex Pretti undercuts Noem’s initial account. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has declined to express confidence in Noem. And Stephen Miller even undercut her. It’s very clear this whole thing has gotten away from Trump and his advisers and has taken on a momentum that is now highly unpredictable. We think this is just the beginning of GOP panic. So we’re talking to New Republic contributor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been documenting the backlash against ICE among ordinary people about where this is all going. Virginia, nice to have you on. Virginia Heffernan: I’m so glad to be here, Greg. I’m a fan of the show. Sargent: Thank you very much. Well, Senators Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski both called for Noem to step down this week. Others, like Susan Collins, are calling on her to pause the surging of enforcement in Minnesota and Maine. A number of other Republicans are calling for a real investigation into the murder of Alex Pretti, and some are admitting that the video is damning.Virginia, something seems to have broken here among Republicans in a way that even the murder of Renee Nicole Good, as horrific as it was, didn’t seem to. What do you think happened here?Heffernan: I think that this is a story about guns and video. The fact that Pretti’s phone—the fact that his camera—was first described as a gun by Kristi Noem is kind of no accident. And the fact that there’ve been intimations that protesters will not be allowed to use cameras, or that when they pull out their phones, that that’s a provocation.So why is that important? That’s important because everybody saw the many videos from many different angles of this murder of Alex Pretti, and they would not accept Noem’s ludicrous propaganda. I mean, she didn’t bother to extenuate it even the way the LAPD did when they beat up Rodney King. Like, she didn’t seem to have watched the video before she invented her story about it.She was told to call him an “assassin” by Stephen Miller. They regularly blamed—they blamed him as a “terrorist,” as they had Renee Nicole Good. And we had just been through this with the Renee Nicole Good video. And people do not like when they watch the video—and you know how people are on TikTok, on [Instagram] Reels—they do close analysis of the video. No one who looked at that video thought that anything had happened except that a guy with a phone, who was trying to protect someone, was wrestled to the ground and then shot in the back.Sargent: Well, we had Trump erupt over all this. He called the two senators “losers.” Then he said: “They’re terrible senators. One is gone and the other should be gone. Murkowski is always against the Republicans anyway. And Tillis decided to drop out. So he lost his voice once he did that.”Virginia, that last reference is to Tillis retiring. I don’t know—Trump doesn’t really seem to have his fastball here. My strong sense is that he’s having trouble defending Noem, and he knows he’s having trouble defending Noem as well. What do you think? Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, it’s just been the cascading problems for him. And it’s true that he maybe doesn’t have his fastball. It’s not even clear that he would know how to throw a ball if he had it in his hand right now. I mean, his ... lunacy, dementia, whatever it is, there’s clearly a mad king who’s falling apart, who’s in decline in this central place. And he ever since the Epstein files turned some Republicans against him, his refusal or failure to release them and lies around them. And now up to Tillis and Murkowski with very little to lose, Tillis especially. I mean, Tillis is very sharp. He sounds very witty right now. Sargent: Yeah. And in fact, let’s listen to how Tillis responded to this whole thing, to Trump labeling him a loser. Reporter (voiceover): The president called you a loser, I believe. Senator Thom Tillis: I am thrilled about that. That makes me qualified to be Homeland Security secretary and senior adviser to the president. Sargent: Tillis also ripped the incompetence of Miller and Noem and said they’ll make officers’ jobs more dangerous. Virginia, you don’t often hear Miller described as “incompetent.” Extreme, fascist, racist, yes—but not incompetent.Yet I think it is clear that Miller has catastrophically miscalculated. And I’ve got to say, Miller is more responsible than any human being alive for Trump completely throwing away his advantage on the immigration issue. I think there should be a public conversation about Miller’s incompetence and his recklessness and his endangering of officers and the public, no?Heffernan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it may begin with his outlandish promise that he would arrest, detain, and deport 3,000 people a day—that that’s what the administration would do.I just want to talk about numbers a little bit because the president keeps saying—to explain why they’re in Minneapolis and doing this surge and why it’s so important—that they’ve taken (and this is quoted uncritically by ABC News and other places) thousands of, he says, “hardcore criminals,” something like “hardcore, stone-cold criminals,” off the streets, including murderers in Minneapolis.And then he thinks that Walz and the people of Minnesota should thank him for their amazing job getting the thousands of stone-cold criminals. I just decided right before we talked to look up on DHS’s own page who these “thousands of stone-cold criminals,” including murderers, are. They list—and this is their propaganda—they list eight people.Of those eight hardened criminals: two are thieves, one had a DUI, one wrote a bad check, there’s a child endangerment case, and one is admittedly a registered sex offender, meaning he’s in the system. And all of them are undocumented, which as we know is not a criminal offense. All of them have been arrested. That is eight people.Sargent: Well, I just want to underscore what you said there, because it’s really important and it’s sort of an obsession of mine as well. They want to get the numbers up. The most important thing to Stephen Miller is removing as many immigrants from the country as possible because he’s doing an ethnic re-engineering of the country in his own head.And the only way you get the numbers anywhere near what Miller wants them to be is to go after the non-criminals. It’s the only way to do it—both because there aren’t enough criminals—but also it’s a lot easier to scoop up a bunch of guys at a Home Depot parking lot than it is to go after a hardened criminal that you’ve been targeting. And so all of this that we’re seeing here is the direct result of this ethnic-engineering obsession of Miller’s. It all flows from the effort to get those numbers as high as possible, every last bit of this. Heffernan: Yeah, I’m glad we’re aligned on this because there is a numbers game that you see in fascism generally, which is like, clicking through his brain: what the population is, how many white people there are, what the replacement numbers are, all that eugenics stuff. And that’s how you get to numbers and not people.What’s amazing to me—and Greg, I don’t know if you are equally shocked—I actually thought that they could busy themselves for six months, a year, 18 months, by finding actual people who had committed crimes: child abuse, those kinds of things, actual crimes. Maybe not murder, but crimes who are also undocumented. I know that the administration has trouble finding people when it’s tried to single out people, but if they had ICE, all the surveillance of Palantir, I was sure they would find a lot of them. They promised they would find a lot of them.Sargent: Maybe Miller really is incompetent. Maybe that’s the story that everyone’s missing. So a few other quick things here showing that Noem is on shaky ground: DHS put out an initial review of the shooting of Pretti that didn’t mention any gun or any intention to “massacre law enforcement,” as Noem had claimed.Stephen Miller also undercut Noem, saying that the Customs and Border Protection officers involved in this might not have followed protocol and saying, in effect, that DHS was responsible for initial assessments that led him and others to smear Pretti. Virginia, no honor among fascists.Heffernan: I mean, they are going to turn into a circular firing squad like they always do, and Kristi Noem, it does look like her time is up. I mean, as much as Trump—he’ll be 1,000 percent behind her until he isn’t.Sargent: Virginia, I want to go to your piece now because I think the serious story here is that Miller and Trump came into all this brimming with hubris. They thought they had this absolute lock on public opinion on this issue. Miller could just shriek that immigrants are criminals, and he could put up mugshots of migrants along the White House driveway and the public would accept anything, no matter how authoritarian, that Miller and Trump did.But the persistence of ordinary people has turned this debate around and proven that to be false. You wrote about that. You talked about the “wine moms” and white women who are horrified by this whole thing. And the white female vote is a tricky topic, for sure. But what you got at there is what I’m talking about, which is that this amazing heroism and courage and persistence is really becoming a big story. Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, I think Dahlia Lithwick wrote recently that for a long time, most of us in the media, when asked what to do to defend democracy, said something somewhat bloodless. We spoke in legal terms about opposing gerrymandering and this and that.And now she says on the streets of Minneapolis—the Twin Cities, I should say—we’re actually seeing the amendments to the Constitution defended in real time, including One, Two, and Four. And it’s almost like seeing it rebuilt before our eyes by actual people, including Renee Good, including Alex Pretti, including everyone there.Because Minnesota has this great tradition of these kind of Tocqueville-like associations, it’s just incredible to see how quickly they ramped up this capacity to protect people in schools, to get food to places, to do mutual aid, to do these kind of comical protests with brass bands, and use the weather to their advantage.And all that plays very well on these videos and is so different from what you could have heard from Stephen Miller. It just looks—it looks American. It looks American. The people look American and they are a standing reprove to the idea that no one is virtuous or that no one cares about democracy.I wish it didn’t have to come down to bloodshed. I wish that they had listened to what someone derisively called the “pussy hats” 10 years ago, saying that this was fascism and we needed to oppose this because we might have stood in the way. I mean, the second most of us heard “grab him by the pussy,” you were like, I don’t want that guy ruling the country, running this country. It was so easy.And there are people before that who said, Well, the Central Park Five or the discrimination lawsuit in the 1970s—I’ve seen everything I need to know that this person should not be president. But lots of people apparently didn’t see everything they needed to see. But I think that’s changing, as you said.Sargent: Yeah, I think the wine moms deserve enormous credit. They’re constantly sneered at by people all over the ideological spectrum, each camp having their own dumb reasons for sneering at them. But the wine moms really got Trump right, in a way that a lot of people did not.And just to your point about how this all looks very American: I do think that when you see these kinds of very diverse crowds turning out and showing great courage and heroism and putting themselves at risk, it just looks like an affirmation of American constitutionalism, in a sense.What we’re seeing from Miller—the kind of mind-numbing propaganda, the up-is-down propaganda, the secret police, the masked police, the military vehicles parading through urban boulevards, the snatchings, the demanding of papers—that all looks totalitarian to ordinary people. Heffernan: I wish it never had to come to this, obviously. And they have overplayed their hand so much on the aesthetics. Bovino walking around like Il Duce in the streets of Minneapolis is just—that’s going to bother anyone with any memory or who’s ever seen a movie set in the twentieth century.Sargent: And their lunatic base sees the video of Bovino striding along and they have these camera crews recording these Black Hawk Down moments where they’re just going in with blazing guns and knocking down doors, and then they just pull out a couple migrants and some kids.Heffernan: They pull out the children, and then there are all these images that make him look very short and small, and he’s easily parodied. And then also, if you haven’t ever seen a movie about Mussolini—there are another group of conservatives, especially out west and in and around those red states, who remember Ruby Ridge, or they remember Waco, or they remember the threat that jackbooted government thugs would come.Why do so many of them have guns? Because of this constant kind of threat that’s been kindled online and has been unrelentingly kindled by the NRA and other groups. And now, it’s coming back to bite them.Sargent: Well, just to close this out, what do you think is going to happen with the Republicans? It’s very clear that the discomfort is extremely palpable. I think a lot of it is political, obviously, because they now see that this is a catastrophe potentially for them in the midterms. Do you think this gets worse among Republicans for Trump, or do you think there will have to be actual changes or not?Heffernan: Epstein, Venezuela, and now Minneapolis are the real losing subjects for Trump. So I think if Republicans see a center of gravity that has switched so that these are the loser subjects—these are the subjects that make them look like they have blood on their hands, and maybe also that they have a hard time morally squaring.It’s like when you said Trump didn’t seem to have his fastball—looking at people who do have their fastball—Thom Tillis and Marjorie Taylor Greene still are making sense when they talk. They don’t sound like doublespeak Soviets trying to explain things. They sound like they have a clear vision, and that suggests it’s something worth sticking with.Sargent: I’ll say. Well, Virginia Heffernan, thanks so much for coming on. Folks, if you really enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Virginia’s Substack, Magic and Loss. Virginia, great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.Heffernan: So good to talk to you, Greg. Thanks.
The White House fails to warp reality around Alex Pretti’s murder, Marco Rubio gets spanked on Capitol Hill, and MAGA’s new power couple is... Donald Trump and Nicki Minaj. 🤢
The US leader narrowly lost Georgia in 2020, and alleged election fraud.
Scott Bessent’s remarks came after Mark Carney denounced Washington’s “rupture” of the global order.
Trump-aligned tech barons are now set to control nearly all major US social media platforms.
The Trump-McMahon education edict: You will cooperate as we destroy the tradition of intellectual exploration that has endured for a thousand years — or we will starve you.
Taylor, an Iowa-based artist, had been sharing political posts and information on social media long before January 7, when they posted about ICE agents shooting Renee Good in Minneapolis. They mainly use their social media accounts to sell mugs and support their small business, and after they posted about Good’s death someone messaged them to say that they shouldn’t get political. “Somebody got mad at me in my D.M.s and said, you know, you’re supposed to be posting about mugs. I want to see a mug,” they said.That just made Taylor angry, and they doubled down. They posted a video to the main Instagram grid, saying that if anyone watching supported ICE, voted for Donald Trump, or didn’t think that trans people deserve to live happy and healthy lives, “I don’t need your money. Maybe if you stop supporting fascism, I’ll make you a mug or something one day.” The post went up on January 8 and went viral. They said that while a handful of people sent violent messages in response—which is part of the reason they don’t want their social media accounts named—the response was overwhelmingly positive. They said it just felt honest to start posting more about politics. “Artists will talk about this a lot, about where their items end up, you know, where the things that they make end up,” they said. “And I don’t really want my work in the house of an ICE agent. You know what I mean? I don’t want to make them happy. They make me sad. Why would I want to bring them joy with art?”I spoke to several social media content creators and influencers who all experienced a similar shift in recent weeks. ICE’s actions around the country, especially in Minnesota, were a tipping point for all of them. It wasn’t just that these creators felt that they should weigh in, it’s that it felt impossible not to—especially if they used social media to support their work or charity. It all speaks to a specific moment in U.S. history in which our personal, working, and political lives are all entwined, the boundary between public and private has collapsed, and we’re watching the government commit atrocities that are videoed and shared on the same social media platforms. People are trying to make their business and volunteer dreams come true—writing recipes and making mugs and rescuing dogs—on the same apps where they’re seeing fellow Americans bravely standing up to an increasingly authoritarian regime. There’s no place now that’s free of politics.This is by no means new. Since the 2024 elections, I’ve noticed the social media accounts that I follow across Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms that aren’t explicitly political—furniture repair, baking, dog rescue, hiking—wade more into politics. Some of these posts started only tepidly political, as when the DIY accounts I follow posted about how the rescission of the Inflation Reduction Act early in Trump’s second term would impact homeowners and renovators who care about green energy. A friend and I joked they were soft-launching their liberalism.In the past month, as the federal assault has worsened, the posts have gotten angrier, more persistent, and more widespread. There’s even an easily adaptable meme to explain the jump into political content: “Reminder that this is a bourbon account but I can’t drink bourbon if ICE shoots me in the face,” is the common example, often set to the swelling, angry chorus of Mumford & Sons’ “White Blank Page,” but sometimes set to a song that makes fun of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, by another creator named Chelsea Gods. Many are angry. “If you support ICE, my content is not for you. I don’t want my recipes bringing joy to fascists,” said one baking account. It’s not just ICE, either; people have been weighing in on the Epstein files and other recent events too. An influencer in Maine posted an angry rant she taped in her car with the caption, in all caps: “I’d rather be sharing my banana bread recipe too babe.” Instead, she said she’s had to use her history degree, with a focus on World War II studies, to explain how everything that’s been happening is worthy of alarm. “So, yes, I desperately wish that I could go back to making silly goofy videos of my favorite fucking casserole,” she said, her voice rising, “but unfortunately I have to use my degree to teach a 40-year-old person that apparently this contentious issue of whether or not an adult should have sex with children, is somehow up for debate???”Even an account about huskies called eight_fluffytails posted on Threads that they had tried to stay apolitical in order to provide viewers with a little bit of an escape, but invited any followers who welcomed the rising authoritarianism to leave. “The huskies are very good judges of character, and they’d hate you, too.”Cynically, this could be read as an attempt to jump on an increasingly popular bandwagon: After all, the people doing the posting are enmeshed in social media algorithms that connect them to more followers who agree with them, thus increasing their reach. Taylor said they gained 30,000 followers across platforms; their waitlist for products was already full before the influx, and they’ve had to explain to new followers that they can’t make their mugs fast enough to meet the sudden spike in demand. But it genuinely feels honest. People are shaken and angry, and they want to say so.Rachel Brenke, an attorney who advises content creators and posts on social media herself, says that creators often ask her about what they can say legally, but they’re already eager to post. “There’s a human element. There’s a human behind the social media posting the business, etc., and so they feel convicted, they want to educate, advocate activism, and put it out there,” she said. She thinks this is also just the nature of online life today: Businesses are used to putting a human face and voice to their social media accounts, and it feels dishonest not to say something.Emily GF, who asked not to be fully identified, runs a ranch for senior and rescue horses in Idaho, works in health care, and has a small business on the side where she runs the social media accounts of other businesses. “My life is very … there’s not clear, defined buckets.… I have the horses, I have marketing. I’m in health care. It’s hard to express all of that on one page. It kind of all bleeds together,” she said. Emily GF specifically wants her local representatives to share their plans about what they will do if—or more likely, when—immigration enforcement officials descend on Boise.She first became political online about public lands issues, for which she she has a particular passion. As her feeds filled with political content and stories, she felt more and more compelled to speak out. She thinks that this is what’s happening with other content creators, as well. “This very specific video that was like physically pounding in my head, of [an ICE] officer in Minneapolis going in … to a Thai restaurant and demanding to speak to the owners, with gun drawn the whole time,” she remembered. “Just a restaurant full of people eating. And it really just hit me as so reminiscent of a dark and terrible time. It just really made me think in direct lines to visiting Dachau, visiting the Anne Frank house,” she said. Being political in public is not risk-free—Emily GF didn’t want to talk about her health care work because she didn’t want her clients targeted. Other content creators have day jobs that aren’t always amenable to their being outspoken about current events. But with each new video, and so many people in Minneapolis and other cities across the country taking brave actions every day, no one felt worried enough to stay quiet. In fact, they felt more worried about staying silent.Stephanie McKenna has a 9-to-5 day job but also posts travel content on social media, and she’s been trying to grow that into a business. She said she has been very vocal. “I told my husband, I was like, I’ve been yelling and screaming about this for 10 years, and friends have told me that I’m crazy, and my family’s told me that I’m being melodramatic,” she said. She decided to take a break after the election to grow her brand, but the respite she’d planned for herself didn’t last long. “Then everything that happened in Minneapolis just kind of changed. And I didn’t want to be, not only on the wrong side of history publicly but also, it just felt that I can’t be a part of the problem in any way, shape, or form, and by not speaking up, I felt that I was being a part of the problem, even though I violently disagree with it.”This is of a piece with what I’ve heard in my personal life, as well. People are upset and want to do something but don’t always know what. “Not everyone can be on the front line; not everyone can fly out to Minneapolis right now,” said Adrian Lott, a therapist in Seattle who runs an account focused on finding loving homes for senior dogs. She posted a series of photos of her old dogs with comments about the Trump administration’s misdeeds and the slide into fascism. “I’m a big fan of, let’s meet people where they’re at, and where a lot of people are at is on the internet, for better or for worse.… If I can meet people where they’re at and try to engage, I think that’s valuable.”Some people hope to change minds, but many have come to find that their posts seemed to mostly end up in an echo chamber, drawing engagement mostly from others who were of the same mind and relieved to read a post with which they agreed. But many felt that if they took the opportunity to speak up, it might encourage others to do the same. Mainly, they all came to discover that the work they do in their lives—be it travel, art, or animal rescue—was inherently political in ways they hadn’t previously realized. That there was no separating their work from the impacts of Trump’s policies and actions in Minneapolis and cities around the country. Armed with these insights, they felt compelled to make those connections explicit. “I think it’s a good idea to be yourself, and if yourself is angry, then you might as well put it on,” Taylor said. “It’s an art account. You know, art is political. Just full stop, that’s the end of it.”
Near the village of Combe Hay, a few miles south of Bath (and close to where I live), there is a sloping field that has been preserved as a wildflower meadow. At the moment, it’s as bleak as the winter weather, but in a few weeks’ time there will be a scattering of primroses and other first signs of spring. In the middle of the meadow is a young oak tree, now about 20 feet high, at whose foot is a small enamel tablet, which reads:This tree was planted | in loving memory of | Lt. David A.G. Boyce | 1st Queen’s Dragoon Guards | Killed in action in | Helmand Province Afghanistan | 17 November 2011 | Aged 25I thought of David Boyce when I heard the president of the United States say that British and European troops had “stayed a little off the front lines” during the Afghan War. And I also wondered how Boyce’s family must have felt.We’ve all had plenty of opportunities to get used to Donald Trump’s outbursts, his malignity and malice combined with complete unpredictability. In his weird way, he will say or do anything, however hysterical or irrational, however offensive to friend as well as foe. Of course he has no sense of decency, but he has no sense of irony, either, or sense of the ridiculous. The Great Draft Dodger never hesitates to deride people who have fought and died in action. And while Trump seems to have forgotten the British and other European troops who fought in Afghanistan when the NATO treaty had been invoked following September 11, 2001, he now says that the United States “should have put NATO to the test: and vote Article 5, and forced NATO to come here and protect our Southern border from further invasions of illegal immigrants.” No, you really never can tell what this man will say next.European leaders—all of them, really, but Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, most of all—have tried dealing with Trump through what the Bible calls the soft answer that turneth away wrath, not to say with gross flattery. Starmer thought he could win Trump’s friendship by inviting him to the grotesque “state visit” last September, when the president was sealed inside a security cocoon around Windsor Castle lest he should be seen in public and jeered at. Once again, Trump displayed all the true military swagger and bluster of a draft dodger, standing stiffly to attention and saluting as the Foot Guards marched past, while King Charles, who has actually served in uniform in the Royal Navy, knew not to salute. And then there was the grandiose state dinner, with a fascinating cast list, from Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff (of course) to Rupert Murdoch and Sam Altman. Two royal families were well represented, with the king’s wife, sister, and elder son, and the president’s current wife, daughter, son-in-law, wife’s chief of staff, and crypto czar. The wines were a symphony of sycophantic symbolism, a 1945 vintage port since Trump is the forty-fifth president, and a cognac from 1912, the year Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, all of which was rather lost on a president one of the most disturbing things about whom is that he doesn’t drink. It was British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who said that, when dealing with monarchy, you must lay on the flattery with a trowel, as he did so successfully with Queen Victoria. It has finally dawned on Disraeli’s successor at 10 Downing Street that, however much Trump may see himself as a kind of royalty, the trowel doesn’t work with him. You can lick Trump’s boots, and he’ll still kick you in the teeth. Now the worm turned at last. As a spasm of disgust was felt in England, with the mothers or widows of soldiers who’d fallen in Afghanistan saying in blunt terms what they thought of Trump’s “a little off the front lines,” Starmer himself called those words “appalling.” Of course, Trump can say something outrageous and then immediately contradict himself, as he did the next day when he said, “The GREAT and very BRAVE soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America! In Afghanistan, 457 died.… The U.K. Military, with tremendous Heart and Soul, is second to none (except for the U.S.A.!). We love you all, and always will! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”There might have been something behind the Donald’s latest tergiversation. A return visit to the United States by the king and queen this year is planned, or at least penciled in. King Charles is head of state and head of the British armed forces. Apart from his own time in the Navy, his lamentable brother, formerly known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and now as plain Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, did once serve with distinction as a naval helicopter pilot in the 1982 Falklands conflict, and his turbulent son Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, presently embroiled in another kind of battle with a London newspaper, also served bravely, in Afghanistan. Had Trump’s “a little off the front lines” been allowed to stand, it’s hard to see how the royal visit could have gone ahead. There seems to have been a discreet communication through channels from Buckingham Palace to the White House that prompted the insincere and over-effusive “tremendous Heart and Soul.” We had already seen a masterpiece of Trumpery in his rambling and incoherent speech at Davos. He might have to take Greenland by force, or then again he wasn’t going to use force. He might have to wage ferocious tariff war on Europe, but then on a whim he said he wouldn’t be using tariffs. Not to mention his insisting that control of Greenland was essential for American interests, while repeatedly referring to it as “Iceland.” There’s no use trying to parse his utterances or base a response on what he might say next, since that’s quite unforeseeable.Whatever with Greenland, Ukraine, or the Gaza Riviera, we English and other Europeans watch from afar with horror events in Minneapolis and elsewhere in America. There’s an acute apprehension that a grave and possibly irrevocable change is coming over your country. It has never seemed to me helpful to compare Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler—Trump quite lacks Hitler’s single-mindedness—or suggest that the United States will become a fascist country, although watching the ICE goon squads at work this month, there’s a hint of the squadristi fascisti, Mussolini’s thugs who used to beat up his opponents. But it seems more than possible that the United States will cease to be a Rechtsstaat, a country governed by a rule of laws not men, and that it might not only drift away from the Atlantic Alliance but cease to be part of the comity of those we can call, with all their faults and hypocrisies, civilized nations. To put it bluntly, we can now imagine the U.S. as an international pariah.Do we have any recourse? Even after Trump’s palinode with respect to British soldiery, it might be very difficult for the royal visit to go ahead while innocent people are being shot on the streets of America. There can’t be any doubt that King Charles finds Trump acutely distasteful and would be relieved if his visit were postponed for as long as possible, if not indefinitely.And there’s one other possibility. This summer’s World Cup is being played in North America, some games in Mexico and some in Canada but most in the U.S., for the second time following the 1994 World Cup. A condition of granting the World Cup to the U.S. that year was that a proper domestic soccer league should be set up in the country. This was done, although with only moderate success, we can say more than 30 years later. Even now, domestic viewing figures for the World Cup final on July 19 will be nowhere near those for the Super Bowl on February 8. One American won’t be attending the Super Bowl: Trump has announced that Santa Clara is too far away (and California is hostile territory). But he’s longing to strut his stuff at the World Cup. The Nobel Peace Prize has so far eluded him, to his great rage, as he told a bemused Norwegian prime minister. And yet he had already received a “peace prize” from the hands of Gianni Infantino, the smirking scoundrel who is head of FIFA, the body that controls international football. It has been suggested that European fans might boycott the World Cup—and maybe more than fans. If London bookmakers’ odds are any guide, eight out of 10 of the best teams in the competition are from Europe. Should Trump renew his threat to Greenland, they could withdraw and wreck the tournament. There are precedents, after all. In 1980, the United States led many other countries that boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow after the (as it happened ill-advised and ill-fated) Russian invasion of Afghanistan. This would be an unhappy outcome, and not very nice for all concerned. But then Europe has tried making nice with Trump, and look how well it has worked.