HCR excoriates Trump

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for January 19.

Trump wrote the following letter to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway:

“Dear Jonas: 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. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT” 

It's incredible to think that this bozo is actually the president of a formerly respected country. It's preposterous, and it's been universally ridiculed and scorned -- like its author. Someone named Garrett Graff wrote:

A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.” 

Richardson says: "In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build." She goes on to describe the creation and history of NATO, which has "stabilized the world for 75 years." She says:

Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls. 

Now Trump has launched a project that is apparently sort of a counter-United Nations with his proposed "Board of Peace." 

A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”

The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin’s closest ally, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova of CNN note has been called “Europe’s last dictator.” Also invited are Hungary’s prime minister and Putin ally Viktor Orbán as well as Javier Milei.

Aside from the Epstein files, Trump is apparently bothered by a couple of other things that are going on. Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it probably drives Trump even more insane that King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964; he did not acknowledge King's Day, the first time that a U.S. President has done that since Reagan proclaimed the holiday in 1983.  The second is the fact that Jack Smith is to testify later this week "about Trump’s role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions."

Richaradson says "Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened."

Tonight Danish troops—the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021—arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America. 

 Stranger than fiction. How much damage will Trump do before he is finally deposed?