But nothing illustrates the depth of Trump’s unraveling more than his demented obsession with Greenland—claiming
it needs to become American territory to “protect” it despite already
hosting several U.S. military bases as part of the NATO alliance.
“The first 365 days” by Pedro Molina
In an unhinged Truth Social post,
Trump declared that “world peace is at stake” in his Greenland gambit.
“China and Russia want Greenland, and there is not a thing that Denmark
can do about it,” he wrote. “Only the United States of America, under
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, can play in this game, and very successfully,
at that! Nobody will touch this sacred piece of Land, especially since
the National Security of the United States, and the World at large, is
at stake.”
Nobody has touched that “sacred piece of land,” whatever the hell he means by that, since Denmark claimed it in 1721.
The notion that either Russia or China could invade Greenland is
bonkers. China has its hands full trying to figure out how to invade
Taiwan, just 100 miles off its coast, but somehow it can also support an
invasion of Greenland from more than 5,000 miles away, surrounded by
NATO nations?
And the idea that Russia could challenge Greenland is just as
absurd, given its ongoing inability to seize meaningful territory in
Ukraine—without 1,000 miles of ocean between them. Trump keeps claiming that Greenland has been “covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” which is just stupid.
But even if it were true … so what? Oh noes, a boat sailed by? That’s what keeps Trump up at night?
Not content to stop there, Trump followed up with this bit of
geopolitical genius: “I love the people of China. I love the people of
Russia,” Trump said. “But I don’t want them as a neighbor in Greenland,
not going to happen.”
Who is going to tell Trump that Russia is already a neighbor of the United States?
Meanwhile, my theory from a year ago still stands. Trump wants Greenland because it looks outsized on a Mercator projection map:
Trump’s brain is mush.
It’s gone. He’s gone. And Republicans are sitting there watching him
wreck America’s alliances with barely a peep. Even those few speaking up
are afraid to put any real muscle behind their words.
For generations, American power rested on credibility—on allies
knowing the United States meant what it said, honored its commitments,
and played a stabilizing role in the world. That credibility made
America safer, richer, and more influential than any nation in history.
And this is the man Republicans are entrusting with that legacy. On Tuesday, Trump declared on Truth Social:
“No single person, or President, has done more for NATO than
President Donald J. Trump. If I didn’t come along, there would be no
NATO right now!!! It would have been in the ash heap of History. Sad,
but TRUE!!!”
He is insane.
Trump is now burning our nation’s credibility to the ground. He
is alienating allies, threatening territorial grabs, and normalizing
authoritarian expansionism, all while signaling that American
commitments last only as long as his attention span.
This is how the world stops trusting the United States. This is
how instability spreads. This is how wars start—not because America is
weak, but because it has become dangerously erratic.
And Republicans are letting him do it, even as Trump posts that NATO is the “real threat” to America.
How much of the world order does Trump have to burn down before Republicans decide it’s worth the political risk to act?
It takes a special kind of insanity to send armies into U.S. cities and Venezuela, then start musing about invading Greenland because you didn’t get a peace prize for it all. But it takes a special kind of cowardice to watch it happen and say nothing.
And yet that’s exactly what Republicans are doing—standing
by, muttering concerns, issuing carefully worded statements, and
otherwise keeping quiet like lemmings headed for a cliff, terrified that
if they step out of line, Trump might—egads!—write a nasty tweet about
them.
At this point, silence isn’t loyalty. It’s complicity. But it’s
not too late to do something about it, whether it’s impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Otherwise, your legacy is at stake, and history is not going to be kind about it.
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donny said when he was just five years old,
You know there's nothin' happenin' at all.
Every time he put on the radio,
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all.
One fine morning, he puts on an alt-right station,
And he couldn't believe what he heard at all.
he started dancing to that right wing music, whew!
his life was saved by alt-right polls.
Hey baby, alt-right polls.
Despite all the amputations,
We could dance to an alt-right station.
Here it's altright. Here it's altright. Hey babe.
donny said when he was just five years old,
You know there's nothin' happenin' at all.
Two TV sets, two Cadillac cars ah,
It ain't helpin' us at all, not at all
One fine morning, he heard an alt-right station,
And he couldn't believe what he heard at all, not at all.
Despite the amputation,
You could dance to an alt-right station.
Here it's alright. Here it's alright.
Aw, now here it's alright.
donny said when he was just five years old,
You know there's nothin' happenin' at all.
Yea, every time he put on the radio,
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all.
One fine morning, he put on an alt-right station,
And he couldn't believe what he heard at all.
he started dancin' to that alt-right music.
Aw, his life was saved by alt-right polls,
alt-right polls.
Despite all the amputation, you could dance to an alt-right station.
It's alright, alright, alright, alright, alright,
Alright, alright, alright, baby, baby, baby, baby, alright.
thanks to Songwriters: Lou Reed / Stephanie Dancer
Trump posts racist video depicting Obamas as monkeys
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage.
Donald Trump went on a massive social media spree overnight that included posting on Truth Social an election conspiracy video that ended with a clip depicting former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The
racist depiction of the Obamas – the first Black president and first
lady in American history – appears at the end of a one-minute video
perpetuating the false and disproven claims that ballot-counting company
Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 presidential election
from Trump. The company in 2023 settled for $787.5m with Fox News in a landmark defamation lawsuit.
For two seconds, the video shows the smiling faces of the Obamas superimposed on monkeys bobbing to The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
As
of Friday morning, the video has been liked more than 2,500 times and
reposted more than 1,100 times, as prominent Democrats decried the post.
“Disgusting
behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this.
Now,” said the press office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a longtime Trump critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.
“This
is overt racism. Full stop. There’s no ‘misinterpretation’ and no
excuse. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and why he should never
be anywhere near power again,” political strategist Adam Parkhomenko
posted on X.
The video was just one of more
than 60 posts the president made on Truth Social over the course of
three hours. In addition to repeating lies about the 2020 presidential
election, Trump posted the Trump Accounts Super Bowl ad and calls to add his face to Mount Rushmore.
'Please stop the fake outrage': White House attempts to brush off racist video reposted by Trump
My colleague Richard Luscombe notes
that the White House has tried to brush off the outrage caused by
Donald Trump reposting a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle
Obama as apes.
In a statement sent to the Guardian, Karoline Leavitt, linked to a post on X last October by a separate rightwing account, which features a 55-second video
from which the Obama clip appears to have been taken. It begins with
the Obamas depicted as apes, later shows Biden’s head superimposed on a
monkey body and other prominent Democrats depicted as other animals,
while Trump is shown as a male lion.
“This
is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of
the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop
the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to
the American public,” Leavitt said.
Hundreds of people are protesting in Milan against the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Winter Olympics.
Carrying
banners reading “ICE out” and “Fuck ICE” those criticising the presence
of US federal immigration agents are mostly students, gathered in
Piazzale Leonardo da Vinci, in front of a building of the Politecnico
University in the eastern part of the city.
More
protests are planned on Friday afternoon and again on Saturday
involving a variety of activists groups, including pro-Palestinian,
environmental campaigners and students fighting for affordable housing.
A
reminder that vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state, Marco
Rubio, are in Milan for the for the games. Vance is due to meet the
Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, later today.
The
US state department said last week that several federal agencies,
including ICE, will be at the Olympics to help protect visiting
Americans.
Donald
Trump will begin his day in Washington. At 3pm ET he’ll sign executive
orders in the Oval Office. That’s currently not open to the press, but
we’ll let you know if that changes.
Later, the
president will travel to Palm Beach, Florida, where he’ll meet with the
president of Honduras on Saturday. Trump will then attend a Super Bowl
watch party on Sunday before travelling back to the White House.
My colleague Taz Ali is covering the latest out of Oman, where talks are ongoing between Iranian and US officials in Muscat, Oman, which are thought to be focused on Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who is mediating the talks, held separate meetings with Iran’s top diplomat, Abbas Aragchi, and US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
In a statement, the Omani foreign ministry said the meetings so far have focused on preparing the conditions for “resuming diplomatic and technical negotiations”.
Taz notes that Tehran is deeply worried that Trump may still carry out his threat of striking Iran, not least because of the not-so-subtle comments made by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Thursday.
“While
these negotiations are taking place, I would remind the Iranian regime
that the president has many options at his disposal, aside from
diplomacy, as the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in
the history of the world,” she told reporters.
A
military escalation is not completely beyond the realms of possibility
and could serve Donald Trump’s interests, according to experts, who also
note the US mobilisation of a large military force in the region, or an
“armada”, as the president called it.
Shannon Watts, gun violence prevention activist and founder of Moms Demand Action, did not mince words in her response to Donald Trump and his racist video depicting Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
“Every Democrat
who votes for the agenda and nominees of this racist, bigoted,
misogynistic piece of shit who’s destroying our country is voting for
this, too,” Watts posted on X.
Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health,” said:
“This doesn’t need a lot of explaining – Donald Trump is a racist
pushing a white supremacist agenda. That’s obvious to everyone paying
attention.”
Social media influencer and political commentator Harry Sisson said that the “racist and disgusting” video was “beneath the office of the presidency, like everything that he does”.
“Every American must condemn this,” he posted on X.
Heidy
Sánchez, 43, wasn’t given a choice. She was forcibly removed from
Florida last April but, worrying about Cuba’s failing healthcare system,
she left her two-year-old daughter, Kaylin, behind with her American
husband, Carlos.
“My little girl was still
breastfeeding,” she said. “Waiting to get on the plane, my breasts were
swollen, and I kept saying, ‘Kaylin must be hungry.’” Sánchez had
struggled for years to conceive and Kaylin is her only child.
Neither
woman has a criminal record, but both have been caught up in the US
government’s push to deport Cuban immigrants. Now they each live in
small towns south of the Cuban capital of Havana, passing their days
talking to lawyers and family in the US.
As the US government heaps pressure on Cuba,
cutting off access to its oil shipments, Donald Trump has framed the
campaign as an effort to make the island safe for Cuban Americans.
“A
lot of people that live in our country are treated very badly by Cuba,”
Trump said recently. “They all voted for me, and we want them to be
treated well. We’d like to be able to have them go back to a home in
their country, where they haven’t seen their family, their country for
many, many decades.”
The condemnation on Donald Trump and the racist video he posted on Truth Social depicting Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as monkeys continues to trickle in Friday morning.
Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama, called Trump “a stain on our history”.
“Let
it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will
embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on
our history,” Rhodes said on X.
George Conway, the ex-husband of Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, reminded his followers that he had been calling Trump out over racism since 2019 and linked to an op ed he wrote for the Washington Post titled: Trump Is a Racist President.
The post was still up almost eight hours later, alongside another post of a video that accused the Democratic party
of being anti-Black. Continuing on his social media spree in which he
posted more than 60 times over the course of three hours, the president
has once again begun posting to Truth Social about an hour ago.
Trump posts racist video depicting Obamas as monkeys
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage.
Donald Trump went on a massive social media spree overnight that included posting on Truth Social an election conspiracy video that ended with a clip depicting former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The
racist depiction of the Obamas – the first Black president and first
lady in American history – appears at the end of a one-minute video
perpetuating the false and disproven claims that ballot-counting company
Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 presidential election
from Trump. The company in 2023 settled for $787.5m with Fox News in a landmark defamation lawsuit.
For two seconds, the video shows the smiling faces of the Obamas superimposed on monkeys bobbing to The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
As
of Friday morning, the video has been liked more than 2,500 times and
reposted more than 1,100 times, as prominent Democrats decried the post.
“Disgusting
behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this.
Now,” said the press office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a longtime Trump critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.
“This
is overt racism. Full stop. There’s no ‘misinterpretation’ and no
excuse. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and why he should never
be anywhere near power again,” political strategist Adam Parkhomenko
posted on X.
The video was just one of more
than 60 posts the president made on Truth Social over the course of
three hours. In addition to repeating lies about the 2020 presidential
election, Trump posted the Trump Accounts Super Bowl ad and calls to add his face to Mount Rushmore.
