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Donald Trump Is Frightened
New Republic • Jan 28, 2026

Donald Trump Is Frightened

The media verdict is in: President Trump has “softened” his stance on his paramilitary war on Minneapolis. He struck a “cooperative tone” in a call with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz. The administration hopes to “shift its strategy” on its ICE raids. Trump is executing a “pivot” and is attempting to “deescalate.”You get the idea: Trump is chastened by the backlash to the ICE murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. So he’s now recalibrating the government’s approach in an effort to appear to dial down the violent social conflict that’s been unleashed.So let’s stipulate some threshold questions: Will any of this change how ICE is actually conducting its operations in American cities that fundamentally do not want ICE’s presence among their populations? Is Trump reversing the underlying reality of these operations—that they have become akin to military occupations of enemy territory within the American nation? Will there be serious governmental efforts to investigate those shootings, mete out accountability for them, and address what went wrong?The answers to those questions sure look like “no,” “no,” and “no.” To wit, The Wall Street Journal reports that some Trump aides have realized that all this has become a “political liability,” so they’re in discussions over “how to continue deportations without clashing with protesters.” They’re also planning new steps to “improve ICE’s image.”Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Trump met with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for two hours amid “concern” about the shootings. But Noem’s job is safe. Trump has replaced the public face of the Minneapolis occupation, removing Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who swaggers around these scenes of occupation like a conquering general, with border czar Tom Homan, who swaggers around on Fox News like a conquering general.Note the problem here. Trump does apparently want to minimize clashes between government security services and protesters. But he doesn’t appear to want those heavily armed government militias to stop doing the things that are causing those clashes in the first place.What’s really going on here is this: Trump is looking to defuse anger among congressional Democrats for purposes that don’t portend a meaningful shift. An administration official gave away the game to Punchbowl News, admitting that these “de-escalatory measures” are about placating Senate Democrats so they don’t seize this moment to demand restrictions on ICE as part of any government funding package.The problem for the White House, Punchbowl reports, is that if Democrats successfully renegotiate new measures, the House might have to pass a new package—the House already passed funding that included money for DHS—and Republicans doubt that’s possible. So the show of de-escalation is about making it easier for Senate Democrats to support appropriations bills that don’t require another vote in the House.If anything, this should stiffen the resolve of Senate Democrats to demand major restrictions on ICE at a minimum. As Bill Kristol notes, Trumpworld is showing weakness—so it’s time to “increase the pressure.” The key point, however, is that all this is about avoiding an outcome where Congress seriously restricts DHS. The goal is to not change the overall approach.This is driven home by a new letter that Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, just sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi. The letter points out that the FBI does not appear to be investigating the shootings of Pretti or Good, as it typically does in such instances. It also notes that the feds obstructed state investigations into both killings.In an interesting move, Raskin demands information documenting who made those decisions and how they were made:DOJ’s coverup of these killings did not occur spontaneously or in isolation. Someone affirmatively ordered FBI agents to drop the civil rights investigation into Agent Ross. Someone affirmatively ordered federal law enforcement to instead investigate Ms. Good’s widow. Someone affirmatively ordered line agents to block state prosecutors from accessing key evidence. Someone is now taking the same actions with regard to the killing of another American citizen.Bondi will throw this letter in the garbage. But it nonetheless opens a window on all the heinous wrongdoing that remains to be exposed about this entire affair. A Democratic-controlled House can use subpoenas to investigate who ordered DOJ to refrain from seriously investigating these government killings and much more.Meanwhile, Raskin is openly inviting whistleblowers inside DOJ and DHS to approach House Democrats and disclose wrongdoing about the cover-up of the shootings and other use-of-force violations going forward.“We are now being far more direct in asking whistleblowers to come forward in providing information that government officials won’t,” Raskin told me. “We are hopeful that people in the Department of Justice and FBI will step forward to bring us information about what’s really going on behind closed doors.”We will really know that Trump is changing course if he allows a good-faith investigation into the government’s killing of U.S. citizens to proceed. And that isn’t happening anytime soon.Still, Trump has visibly been caught off guard by what he’s unleashed. He senses that Democrats now have unexpected leverage over him—hence his effort to placate them before they restrict DHS. He sees that the public has turned sharply against him over the occupations and the smearing of the victims—so he instructed press secretary Karoline Leavitt to distance him from Stephen Miller’s description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” and he now has his aides leaking word of his “pivot” and “de-escalation.”And Trump surely knows the DOJ cover-up of these killings is creating a wealth of new, sordid revelations for investigative reporters—and, possibly, a Democratic House—to unearth. He now claims to want an “honorable and honest investigation” that he personally will be “watching over.”There won’t be any such “honorable investigation.” Yet Trump, who is predisposed to smearing the victims himself but displays political canniness at unpredictable moments, clearly sees that the ethnonationalist ideologues around him—Miller and JD Vance, who harbor malice toward allies of immigrants and thus eagerly savaged the dead—are taking this to a politically perilous place.As Nicholas Grossman demonstrates at Liberal Currents, these killings have penetrated deep into information spaces that Trump and MAGA typically dominate. And Trumpworld is clearly aware of it. All this has seriously gotten away from Trump, taking on popular momentum that can no longer be channeled and controlled. And let’s be clear: Trump, the self-imagined master manipulator of popular passions, plainly knows this at least as well as anyone else does.

The World Sees Trump’s America as a Sad Joke
New Republic • Jan 28, 2026

The World Sees Trump’s America as a Sad Joke

Last week, as global elites met in Davos to celebrate hard power, the dance world marked the 122nd birthday, on January 22, of George Balanchine, whose life was the result of the greatest failure and collapse of hard power. That failure was caused by Joseph Stalin, who destroyed the Russia of Balanchine’s birth, and Hitler, who wrecked Europe so thoroughly that a life like Balanchine’s could only be lived in the United States—as an exile, an emigré, an immigrant. The coincidences, both on the calendar and with the current state of the world, matter. As is always the case with Trump, his wickedness distracted everyone from the way more important thing.Balanchine was brought to America relatively early: in 1933, under the auspices of Lincoln Kirstein, who would become one of the “monuments men” who rescued lost masterworks in the ruins of World War II. His greatest find, however, was Balanchine, a genius rivaling Bach or Mozart. One hundred and twenty-two years ago, Balanchine was born in St. Petersburg into the collapsing Russian Empire; his career—from a dancer at the prerevolutionary Imperial Ballet to a prodigy avant-garde choreographer working with Diaghilev and Stravinsky at the Ballets Russes in Paris and Monte-Carlo; to the inventing and perfecting, at the New York City Ballet, of the modern classical style that still animates and liberates dance to this day.In world culture, there are no small gestures. Movement is a root language of all things civilized—before humans could speak, we moved. Balanchine was the person who would bring movement into the twenty-first century, out of the ruins of the twentieth and the old world. His mastery began at a fundamental level, with an assertion of humanity: For centuries, dancers had held their fingers straight out, as if they were statues.Balanchine spread those fingers, tenderly, joyously, humanly—“God gave us four fingers and a thumb,” he said, “I want to see them all.” From this humble place, he revolutionized movement.Once, dancers controlled legs and arms only on the way up. For Balanchine, the entire arc was controlled—lightning-fast, creating a new way of being that encompassed everything from Harlem jazz to supersonic flight.“He was tuning their bodies to the speed and transmission of the car, the train, the plane,” wrote Jennifer Homans in her biography, Mr. B, “shearing the traditional symmetries and alignments of classicism and the Vitruvian Man into the curved, spherical and off-balance space of Einstein and an imagined fourth dimension—which he talked about constantly.”As art, this was transcendent. As politics? Ravishing. The Soviets were humiliated first by losing this genius, then by the two world-shaking defections that followed: Nureyev’s 1961 “leap to freedom” and then, in 1974, Baryshnikov, who found his way to New York City Ballet, where he awed the world by seeming to launch into the air from a pure zero position—no coil, no tell.What’s in a gesture? Everything. For America, the language of movement was the language of soft power, from art to science to sports. It was the original language of abundance, of prosperity. Consider: In 1953, Jackson Pollock danced over his canvases and manifested abstract expressionism, shifting the center of the art world from Paris to New York. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, a human body freed from gravity. But this was mere prelude to 1984, when America’s best-known athlete, Michael Jordan, shed gravity and birthed his famous Jumpman silhouette, which across the next 40 years would be a soaring trinity of limbs defying physics—through dance. Because Michael Jordan took ballet classes, and basketball’s signature image was in truth just ballet’s great showstopper, the flying grand jeté, perfected first in other courts: that of Louis XIV, himself a great dancer, and then of the Romanovs, before the Bolsheviks slaughtered them and closed their ballet academy, casting a young George Balanchine into the streets, where he survived hunting rats that would later take form on the stage of The Nutcracker in Manhattan.The Jumpman’s appeal was no accident but a refined image of imperial power that served America as the ultimate defector, movement and spirit pure. Jordan’s “Dream Team” conquered the world, the first step in welcoming the world to the National Basketball Association—which is now packed with emigrés. This was at one time what a great power could achieve.No longer. There is now a new pose, identifiable through the mocking laughter that trails it. It is the wrecked inverse of Jordan’s transcendent dance-flight, and yet—at least pharmacologically—just as avant garde. It is a quintessential and concise expression of what America has become ... the “fentanyl fold.”One hundred times more powerful than morphine, the addictive synthetic opioid fentanyl so overwhelms its greatest victims that their leg muscles lock rigid—“providing,” but more inflicting, structural stability even as the individual wafts in delirium. In a humiliating limbo, they can’t wake up, but unlike the drunk or the heroin addict are denied the dignity of collapsing to rise again.Last week, during Davos, the fentanyl fold went viral, performed on TikTok not by a Baryshnikov or a Nureyev but by two comically gifted Greenlanders bent on resisting the threats of American conquest with satire.It is a video lasting barely 10 seconds, to the soundtrack of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” that anti-anthem of Vietnam reborn for these dark times on social media, here playing against a blanketing blizzard. In the video, figures hang hunched over, jackknifed in that drug-borne pose now so familiar in American towns and cities—the rictus of crisis. The savage caption on the screen reads, “Bringing American culture to Greenland.”Their video was a massive hit, obtaining 15.8 million views as of this writing. It is a deserving reward for its creator, Inunnguaq Christian Poulsen, who rebuked a nuclear power and made Greenland the unlikely center of comedy by using the fentanyl fold to indict a country given over to oligarchs, that pleasant euphemism for warlords. Scathingly concise, Poulsen’s work damns all the agents of American anguish. There is still and always will be transcendent American culture. But I’ve never seen anything like this. For years, they called us fat—but bellies are made of pleasure, and the world still loved McDonald’s. For years, Europeans spoke of Ugly Americans: brash, impatient, loud. But it was that admiring complaint you have about your favorite son, your big brother. They also longed to visit us here in our great cities, as yet unoccupied by ICE goons and gauleiters.By identifying the new signature American pose with the opioid crisis, which has killed nearly 600,000 over just the last five years, the video damned our society the way only movement, as root language, can. It’s a portrait of soft power gone to mush, and of a crisis that singularly shows how the full spectrum of society has contributed to a declining America with her hamster judiciary, her zombie Congress, and her senile warlord in chief.This is the United States under Trump: folded, trapped in limbo for three more years of—exactly what the Greenlanders showed us so bravely, against his menace—being propped up by habit, momentum, denial, instinct: a society whose legs stand only sturdily enough to deny the legibility and respite of true collapse.Trump is the worst of the boomer presidents. The best (Obama) has confused Hollywood schmoozing for humanitarian work—though it’s better to be a starfucker than a grifting sex offender or a callow war criminal. It’s no surprise that the fentanyl fold is our new national posture in the global imagination: We’ve been trapped in the Me Generation’s psychotic prolapse for 33 anguished years. Thank God, for their witness and testimony, energy and wit—for Greenlandic comics.A broken health care system and predatory pharmaceutical companies have gotten rich on this. I write from Europe, where I moved after a kidney stone found me in a professionally administered fentanyl fold during a brutal ordeal where, waiting for a surgeon, I almost lost a kidney. The final bill was $8,000 with insurance. My kidney stone, somehow, cost more than a diamond. All this in a hospital with its own Dunkin Donuts franchise, a statue of a benefactor’s fortunate son, who died sailing, aged 12. A plaque reads: “He liked sailing and Winston Churchill.” This was 2022, lockdowns still in effect.A nurse attended me on a walk after I came to. Her skin was rich espresso, mine fentanyl grey. A six-foot robot whirred at us with mechanical blasé, all white plastic, a flat-screen face, and on it a prosperous, tanned doctor in his golfer’s den, “working from home,” while this woman suffered … me. “The future’s gonna be strange,” I said. She said, “Strange is already here.”The strange future is here in ICE’s murder of the nurse Alex Pretti. In the brave mass movement of Minnesota, backs braced against jackboots and cold. And in the heavy hands pushing down on the tiny shoulders of the 5-year-old innocent—the child as bait, now with his father in a Texas gulag, not the first in that place and not the last. We need grace where we can find it: The dead cannot be silenced or defunded. They can still speak, sing, dance for us, move through us.Here’s something Europe honors and that the martyred poet Renee Nicole Good knew as Trump could never: It is a nation’s poets, not its condo developers, who speak for its soul. This is good news for my homeland, because Walt Whitman, maybe our greatest poet, was a nurse in the last Civil War. And as poet-nurse (who better to speak for our new martyrs?), he wrote: The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard,(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!In mercy come quickly.)As one nurse was slain in Minnesota, others are on strike. I hope the kind woman who treated me like a human despite my wretchedness gets all she wants. I hope it comes from the bonuses of a hundred fleece-vested health care CEOs until said CEOs are no longer marked for crowd-pleasing slaying.I hope it’s true, what people say: that Trump was almost collapsing at Davos, literally folding over. His bruised hands clutching the podium like a geriatric’s walker as he confused Iceland and Greenland, then invented the nation of Abr-Bajan. I hope these are the signs of his incipient collapse, the twinkling advent of a quick, compassionate exit from our captive fentanyl fold days. Like Whitman said: In mercy come quickly!How might it arrive? A crash. A revelation. I hope as gently, even benevolently, as a casino failure.After? We may rest, at last. Then to reclaim our feet, put our hearts to something higher. Open our hands so that others may take them, in trust, in contract, in faith. Life renewed, as in Balanchine’s fingers—that choreographer, alone, uttering a grateful reply to God from Job, after all plagues: “You gave us four fingers and a thumb, I want to see them all.”

America Is at Its Wits’ End. What We Do Now Matters.
New Republic • Jan 28, 2026

America Is at Its Wits’ End. What We Do Now Matters.

MAGA men oil their guns with liberal tears, I know, but I have to admit I’ve been shedding them. Or not tears exactly, but a touch of liberal blood. Maybe that works on their guns too. A few days ago, back when I was forcibly trying to tune out the drumbeat of war in Europe, I suddenly blacked out. When I came to, I was bruised and bleeding from the bridge of my nose. A sketchy medispa offered intravenous hydration, and, settling into a big chair with a needle in my vein, I went right back to scrolling. At Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, declared American hegemony dead: “This is a rupture.” He’s looking for allies to organize a free world without us. Fascism is revving up here, but to the rest of the world, we’re at an ending. It’s curtains for the Pax Americana, and maybe even the dollar.The night before I passed out, my timeline was seized with videos showing young men heading north to confront ICE. The street clashes and wails of imprisoned children are driving Americans, once again, to clash and put themselves in harm’s way, while others bear anxious witness. “Doomscrolling” should no longer be framed as a bad habit, unless you’re sold on denial. In A Chill in the Air, Iris Origo’s Italian war diary (1939–40), she describes her utter dependence, as Mussolini’s Blackshirts thronged her village, on “the confused, discordant voices coming out of a little box” that foretold “inevitable, imminent catastrophe.” The same dread is here. Will there be more bloodshed in occupied cities, economic collapse, war with NATO? Reels and TikTok now bleat like the AM tube radio that kept Origo informed and misinformed in equal measure. “‘It’s Now Happening’—Urgent $38 Trillion U.S. Dollar ‘Collapse’ Warning Issued as Markets Brace for Gold and Bitcoin Price Shocks,” read a recent headline, which I first took for propaganda and spam, until I saw it was Fortune; but is Fortune now propaganda and spam like CBS News? Origo later remembered the truth-lies mix from the radio as the worst noise of the war, more disturbing even than the roar of bomber planes. On the night before I fainted, Minneapolis adrenaline seemed like the only response to the fact that, incontrovertibly, it has happened here. Evidently, the old “the Resistance is cringe” wankers who scoffed at the f-word now concede that the “hysterical pussy hats” were right. Shoulda listened, gentlemen. And who’s hysterical now, ye Chapo graduates with your bear spray and Rambo dreams? Where was that ferocity a decade ago when you couldn’t be bothered to so much as join up with the bow-tied Never Trumpers, let alone knit a damn hat and march with us pussy prophets, back when this might actually have been prevented?But I’m not mad at you, as Renee Good once said. No, no, no. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now consider Trump’s first year a failure—you don’t say—so the majority of the United States is at least thinking clearly again. And there’s more than one way to skin a cat, so it should be OK that our fellow Americans choose variously to fight, flee, freeze, fawn, or even flop. Surely some of those sucking up to brain-broken Trump at Davos (like aviator-wearing French President Emmanuel Macron with that vomitous “my friend” text) are fawning to protect themselves, just as Renee Good was fleeing to protect herself and her wife. No emergency behavior may be a noble choice, and fawning for Trump is of course immoral, but here we are. On the little boxes of 2026, the murder of Alex Pretti, hard on the heels of the murder of Good, has been met with moral stupefaction. Minnesota sure looks like a battlefield. Erin Maye Quade, a state rep in a Minneapolis suburb, describes the scene. “I’ll just see abandoned cars on highways, and neighborhood streets. Sometimes the doors are still open and the car is still running.… You could be in line at Burger King and an ICE officer snatches a random worker on the way into work. You could be at a restaurant, and all of a sudden 14 ICE officers come in and kidnap every single worker.”But in New York, on the sidewalks and in the subway, people seem to be Brits-during-the-Blitz-ing it, keeping passably calm and carrying passably on. When I first heard tales of that famous pose in London in 1940, I pictured it with admiration. Now, a dumb bandage on my nose, I can only guess at the blood pressures of repressed people stoically punching the clock in pinstripes. At night, they were allegedly having lots of sex, but were they fainting too?In the videos from Minneapolis, no one seems to be keeping calm or suppressing anything. Good for them. Various Minnesotans keep telling us they have Viking blood up there and not stiff Brit upper lips. It takes all kinds. Some people genuinely think of themselves as Vikings, some as British stoics, some as Black Panthers. In Philadelphia, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense cases the city while carrying big guns. (“Those who serve in the public, they should be fearful of the public,” their leader said recently.) Until now, maybe, presidents have counted on cultural norms, federalism, inertia, the regal dollar, and general human benevolence to get us to believe we’re all American and throw in with this implausible experiment. As we know, the laws, norms, benevolence, and even inertia and federalism are in flames now. So some of us are going to land on the fainting couch, and supply MAGA with gun oil, while others like Pretti and Good are going to head toward danger. On the other side, a Border Patrolman is going to slip and fall, wham, on the Minnesota ice—and give our side video for days. As a liberal-tears-shedder from the icy north, I felt no pity. Then I trudged back to Union Square to protest ICE.

Trump Advisers Quietly Turn on Stephen Miller as Brutal ICE Poll Hits
New Republic • Jan 28, 2026

Trump Advisers Quietly Turn on Stephen Miller as Brutal ICE Poll Hits

After we recorded this episode, we noticed that Axios is reporting that anger is rising at Stephen Miller inside Donald Trump’s inner circle. Some White House officials blame Miller for smearing ICE murder victim Alex Pretti. This comes as reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times suggest that other top advisers want ICE to change course in a way that is running afoul of Miller’s designs. That all this is leaking out shows internal dissatisfaction with Miller is growing. Meanwhile, a new YouGov poll finds 55 percent of Americans and 67 percent of independents have very little confidence in ICE. Both reflect large recent spikes. We think all this reflects a deeper Miller-MAGA miscalculation. So we’re talking about all this with The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, who spent time in Minneapolis and wrote a good piece on the outpouring of popular energy there. We discuss what he saw on the ground among ordinary people, why it badly undermines Miller-MAGA ideology, how we know advisers are turning on Miller, and how MAGA poses a far bigger threat to social cohesion than immigrants do. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

LIVE: Minneapolis Erupts, Protests Spread Nationwide After ICE Killing of Alex Pretti
1:24:43
BreakThrough News Video • Jan 28, 2026

LIVE: Minneapolis Erupts, Protests Spread Nationwide After ICE Killing of Alex Pretti

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