Lots of discussion today about this.
CNN, 19 Jan 2026: Trump ties efforts to acquire Greenland to failure to win Nobel Peace Prize
This link updates latest news on the topic.
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The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 19 Jan 2026: Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw, subtitled “Will Republicans in Congress ever step in?”
This piece includes the text of the letter.
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JMG and many others note Norwegian PM Hits Back At Trump: Greenland Belongs To Denmark, We Have Nothing To Do With Nobel Prize
My take on this is that Trump doesn’t care; the country should *order* the Nobel committee to give him the award. That’s what Trump would do. Has done.
Cartoons on Fb today show people current and imaginary, donating their prizes to Trump in front of the White House, to his juvenile glee.
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Another piece I saw today described the latter as being written by a “petulant 12-year-old.” Similarly:
AlterNet, 19 Jan 2026: European officials are mocking ‘child’ Trump with meme of Norway letter written in crayon
(The photo is actually Trump at an Easter Egg Roll.)
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Tom Nichols looks at the big picture.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 19 Jan 2026: The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal, subtitled “Attacking an ally would be a perversion of everything the armed forces have been trained to do.”
The United States is a global superpower, and its military trains for war in every domain. During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises. One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies. We did not ask what to do if the president becomes a threatening megalomaniac who tells one of our oldest friends, Norway, that because the Nobel Committee in Oslo refuses to give him a trophy, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace” and can instead turn his mind toward planning to wage war against NATO.
As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, Donald Trump’s threatening message to the Norwegian prime minister should, in any responsible democracy, force the rest of the U.S. political system to act to control him. The president is talking about an invasion that would require “citizens of a treaty ally,” as she put it, “to become American against their will,” all because he “now genuinely lives in a different reality.” And yet neither Congress nor the sycophants in the White House seem willing to stop him.
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No one will stop him. His fans *love* him. And all of Trump’s political sycophants know that. They will never overthrow him.
NY Times, long graphic piece, 15 Jan 2026: 11 Pro-Trump Republican Voters on What They Like So Far and What They Don’t
Here are the participants.
This is one in a long series of NYT group interviews. The first question to this group is: “If you had to describe how Donald Trump’s second term is going in just one word, what would that one word be?”
Some of the answers: Great! Excellent! Awesome!
Of course many of their explanations reveal their susceptibility to misinformation. Mostly they’re impressed by his forcefulness, and his attempts to accomplish what he promised in his campaign. Never mind that, according to most sources, he’s failed at accomplishing most of those goals. My take is that these people are just happy that someone with their own prejudices and hatreds (of illegals especially) is in charge of things, no matter how incompetently.
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On a related matter. Look how the fundamentalist Christians are salivating about the end of the world. Dangers of religion example 5,271,009.
JMG, 19 Jan 2026: Christian Site: Trump’s “Board Of Peace” Will Hasten The End Times And The Antichrist Will Rise To Power
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The theme of the day should be about Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil rights, and how conservatives want to erase his legacy (and the holiday) and civil rights.
Today, obviously inspired by the success of the TV series Heated Rivalry, NY Times notes this.
NY Times, Tessa E.S. Charlesworth and Eli J. Finkel (research psychologists who study bias and political partisanship), 19 Jan 2026: Americans Are Turning Against Gay People [gift link]
The remarkable success of “Heated Rivalry,” the steamy new television series about closeted gay hockey players, has been widely taken as yet another sign of social progress — evidence that acceptance of queer love continues to grow.
We wish we could share that optimism. Unfortunately, new research that one of us, Professor Charlesworth, helped conduct reveals a darker truth: The decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then. The popularity of “Heated Rivalry,” it seems, is a welcome burst of enthusiasm for gay life in a new era of anti-gay prejudice.
This reversal stunned us. In the two decades before 2020, visibility, recognition and legal inclusion of gays and lesbians progressed in lock step — larger and more prominent Pride parades, rainbow-lit landmarks, federal legalization of same-sex marriage. That progress translated into something remarkable: Americans’ bias against gay people declined faster than any other bias ever tracked in social surveys.
And summarized at AlterNet today by David Badash: Anti-gay bias surging ‘sharply’ among least expected groups: report
I suppose that this is part of the general retreat from Enlightenment values, from the civil rights values of the 1960s, and a regression to conservative, tribal values, as I’ve discussed many times here. Such cultural attitudes wax and wane… but generally arc forward, as MLK claimed.
Today’s Forum on KQED discussed this matter:
KQED, Alexis Madrigal, 19 Jan 2026: Reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy in the Age of Trump
For once there’s a transcript at this link, or a partial one. I’ll just mention one comment that I recall: that for every supposed mark of what we now recognize as progress — eliminating slavery, granting women the right to vote, granting everyone civil rights, granting gays the right to get married — there were always people pushing back against it. And these are the conservatives.
In passing again I wonder: why the conservative push to install the Ten Commandments everywhere? It’s described as Christian messaging, but it’s not — it’s Old Testament messaging. Tribal values. Jesus said much more. Jesus was liberal, even woke.
