Trump Versus the World

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

 

We’ve been strangely spinning our wheels for the past week: When last we met, the Twin Cities were in chaos, Donald Trump was threatening to dynamite the Western alliance structure over Greenland, and nobody knew quite what the heck was going on in Venezuela.

 

This week? Well, it’s not like Minnesomalia has calmed down even the slightest bit; over the weekend anti-ICE protesters (plus the human stain otherwise known as Don Lemon) invaded a Saint Paul church during services because the preacher was rumored to be “working with the authorities,” leading to an appalling, quasi-desecratory scene. (Apparently, the feds plan to charge Lemon under the Klan Act, which feels a bit like an intentional troll of Spike Lee.)

 

But today, Minnesota is the odd man out in terms of topics, because it’s hard to beat the narrative tidiness of the remaining two stories, which have somehow managed to dovetail into one another in ever more unpredictable and disgraceful ways. You’re not going to enjoy this. But strap in regardless; it’s time for some tough medicine.

 

What’s Wrong with Donald Trump Is Wrong All the Way Through Him

 

Last Thursday, after months of public bellyaching, plus a military strike that left him holding the president of Venezuela in American custody along with all the high cards, President Trump finally won that Nobel Peace Prize he has long desired by the most expeditious means available: extorting it from its rightful owner, Venezuelan opposition politician María Machado. (“Nice election your party overwhelmingly won there back in 2024; now give me that shiny bauble and I may remember that it happened.”)

 

The piece I wrote in reaction to the sordidness of it all has proven exactly as unpopular with readers as I expected it to be. (I failed to take my colleague Dan McLaughlin’s sage advice.) But I knew I didn’t have to respond to the naysayers; all I had to do was wait, and Trump himself would say or do something that would prove my argument beyond all rational doubt. (You work a gig long enough, you learn a few tricks.) And since Thursday, Trump has done this several times, as he pounds the table with ever more bilious rhetoric, demanding that the entire Western alliance allow him to extort Greenland from Denmark.

 

For those too embarrassed to keep up with current events, I recommend the work of my colleague Andrew Stuttaford, who has been covering the breakneck pace of weekend developments like a hawk. I will summarize: Donald Trump’s thuggish demands for Greenland, an island that we already have unlimited military basing rights with, are now at a fever pitch. In the wake of his big show of force in Venezuela, he cannot rest until he has added it to his trophy case: Its acquisition is “psychologically needed for success.” So now not only will Denmark be tariffed — at an opening rate of 10 percent, escalating to 25 percent until such time as they give Trump what he demands — so too will ten other countries who have responded to Denmark’s symbolic request for NATO allies to come to Greenland.

 

Who knows if Trump will actually go through with it; half of what he writes on Truth Social is bloviation, but the other half is deadly serious, and given this, the only safe thing to do is to take him at his word. But I have no time for those who blithely wave off this sort of wildly destructive behavior as “dealmaking.” It is no such thing; it is outright megalomania. There is no other way, no more “neutral” a term, to describe a president who now mutters about his personal right to “a sacred piece of Land” like Captain Queeg hunting for missing strawberries, or who now hints at war with NATO if he is not given what he will never be able to have. This language will have repercussions.

 

Because yes, that’s where Trump is at now rhetorically, and if you didn’t see the tie-in coming from a mile away, you need to update your Unified Theory of Trump. Just yesterday, the president wrote a missive to Norway’s leader that he had cc’d to every American embassy in Europe: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

 

Please read that again. Let the implication sink in: Trump is now on the warpath against Denmark, and is threatening the forced dissolution of the American alliance, and as an excuse, he is citing to Norway their awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Machado. Maybe, you might say, he’s just lashing out blindly in his frustration, reaching for any weapon to hand. But what a commentary that is on the mindset of the president of the United States: We are asked to understand him either as a schoolyard bully or a child throwing a tantrum. Wresting the physical medal from Machado — by dangling the prospect of freedom for her people before her eyes — was clearly not enough: All of Europe must pay for its sin in not awarding it to him in the first place. (For those wondering what relationship the actions of a Norwegian Nobel committee have to the government of Denmark, just assume that Trump thinks all Scandinavians are the same.)

 

This is our president. Is he “on tilt?” No, I think he is operating as programmed. He is living a power fantasy. He has mastered the Republican Party through both showmanship and fear. Only external forces — the bond markets, perhaps the Supreme Court, and finally the ironclad laws of political gravity — will act as a check on him now. So all of his actions are of a piece: demands for the fulfillment of his ego, relentless escalation, and desperately cheap attempts to create a permanent “legacy” that will forever be denied to him. Trump may be the main character in his own story, but he will never be able to write history’s verdict of him; that work belongs to future generations, and his helplessness in the face of it lies at the hidden core of his narcissistic rage.

 

The clearer this becomes, the more I expect Trump to lash out against a world that has rejected him — and I fear with disastrous, irrevocable consequences. Defend Trump’s actions with respect to Greenland if you must — my job is to judge them. And I have a clear enough picture of the man at this point to predict the dire future to come: To paraphrase the verdict of Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, what’s wrong with Donald Trump is wrong all the way through him. And this will not end here.

 

Bill Cassidy Is Repaid for His Loyalty

 

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician by trade, is presumably a smart man. Possessed of a conscience, he cast a vote to impeach Donald Trump in 2021, in the wake of the January 6 riots. Donald Trump has not been known to forgive such offenses — his hit list for those GOP lawmakers who voted to impeach him is methodical and implacable — and in 2020, 2022, and 2024 alike, he devoted special attention to encouraging “MAGA” challengers to take out disloyal legislators. (Many simply retired in the face of the inevitable.)

 

Not Cassidy, who apparently thought he could wriggle his way out of an inevitable Trump-backed primary challenge by supporting his most controversial cabinet nominees once he retook power. Cassidy, as a doctor, expressed intense and public skepticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. RFK’s lengthy history of (truly noxious) anti-vaccine activism led many to fear that he would meddle with the FDA’s vaccine policies either directly or by hiring cynical activist-allies. Cassidy, under significant public pressure given his professional credentials, provided a key vote in what turned out to be a 52–48 roll call to confirm.

 

It is now January of 2026. RFK Jr. has done exactly as many had feared — and as he promised Cassidy he would not — by replacing the CDC vaccine panel with his own handpicked cadre of crank doctors and vaccine skeptics. And Donald Trump has done what he was always going to do: endorse a challenger to Cassidy at the last moment. Trump publicly commanded Representative Julia Letlow to get into the race — she had not even gotten in yet — by offering his public Truth Social blessing. (Letlow filed for the race a day later; presumably this was worked out well in advance.)

 

Trump, back when he was still campaigning, used to love to regale audiences with the story of the woman and “the snake.” I don’t know why people fail to realize it’s him talking about himself. What did you expect from Donald Trump? It’s his nature.