Finally Friday Reads: Descent into Cruelty and Madness

“The United States of Trump has been eliminated from the Quidditch World Cup. FAFO.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

While I have tried to prepare myself for the daily shock of what comes out of Trump’s mouth and his administration’s actions, I never seem to reach a point where I don’t spend massive amounts of time feeling overwhelmed. Today is no different. I also keep thinking all the physical work and concentration it’s been taking to work on the house would get the other stuff out of my head. That doesn’t work either, because it appears endless.

JJ sent me this link this morning, and I just can’t get over this headline in The Guardian. “‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says power constrained only by ‘my own morality.’ President says morality ‘the only thing that can stop me’ in New York Times interview on limits to his authority.”Maya Yang reports the story.

“Donald Trump has said, “I don’t need international law” and that his power is limited only by his “own morality”.

In a new interview with the New York Times, Trump said the only constraint to his power as president of the US is “my own morality, my own mind”.

“It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He went on to concede “I do” in regards to whether his administration needed to adhere to international law, but said: “It depends on what your definition of international law is.”

Trump, who spoke to the newspaper as his administration looks into “a range of options” in attempts to gain control of Greenland, also emphasized the importance of ownership.

“Ownership is very important,” Trump said, adding: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

Trump also dismissed concerns that his decision to oust Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s president would set the precedent of a potential Chinese takeover of Taiwan or Russia’s attempt to control Ukraine.

Justifying the US’s attacks on Venezuela, Trump repeated his controversial claims Maduro had allegedly sent gang members into the US.

“This was a real threat … You didn’t have people pouring into China. You didn’t have drugs pouring into China. You didn’t have all of the bad things that we’ve had. You didn’t have the jails of Taiwan opened up and the people pouring into China,” Trump said, adding that no criminals were “pouring into Russia”.

He said that he does not believe Chinese president Xi Jinping would seize control of Taiwan, telling the New York Times: “That’s up to him, what he’s going to be doing. But you know, I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t.”

 

The Guardian’s Jonathan Yerushalmy followed up to day with this headline. “Morality, military might, and a sense of mischief: key takeaways from Trump’s New York Times interview. Trump sounds off on Venezuela’s future, Taiwan’s security and his aims for Greenland, days after operation to seize Nicolás Maduro.” That’s quite the list of ways to become an international piriah.

Just days after launching an unprecedented operation in Venezuela to seize its president and effectively take control of its oil industry, Donald Trump sat down with New York Times journalists for a wide-ranging interview that took in international law, Taiwan, Greenland and weight-loss drugs.

The president, riding high on the success of an operation that has upended the rules of global power, spoke candidly and casually about the new world order he appears eager to usher in; an order governed not by international norms or long-lasting alliances, but national strength and military power.

Here are some key points from his interview with the Times.

1. US is in Venezuela for the long haul

When asked how long he would be “running Venezuela”, Trump said it would be “much longer” than a year.

After Trump initially claimed that the US was running the South American country, in the hours after the operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro, members of Trump’s cabinet sought to downplay America’s role in its governance. Since then however, Trump has continued to assert that he is in fact “in charge”.

2. Seize Greenland or preserve the Nato alliance?

Trump has spent the days since the attack on Venezuela renewing his push for the US to acquire Greenland and has not ruled out using military force to take it. He has framed the issue as one of national security, but when pushed by White House correspondent David E Sanger on why he hasn’t chosen to simply reopen bases and send troops to Greenland under the terms of a decades-old treaty, Trump insisted the territory must be part of the US.

“I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with … a lease or a treaty,” the president said, adding “that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

When asked by the Times whether obtaining Greenland or preserving the Nato alliance was more important, Trump declined to answer. He did however acknowledge that it “may be a choice” between the two options.

Greenland was formerly ruled by Denmark – which still controls its foreign and security policies – and both countries are members of Nato. However in his interview on Wednesday, Trump said that alliance was essentially useless without the US.

“I think we’ll always get along with Europe, but I want them to shape up … If you look at Nato, Russia I can tell you is not at all concerned with any other country but us,” he said.

You may read the rest at the link. Dr. Paul Krugman also had a good headline for his latest SubStack post. “The Mad King’s Madness Deepens. Trump wants war, war, and more war – even against Americans.” He may want the Nobel Peace Prize, but he is definitely undermining his own arguments.

Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.

And as January 6^th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.

So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.

What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Times reports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”

The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed.

And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where, on Wednesday, an ICE agent killedRenee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.

Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.

A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.

But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6^thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.

So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful — so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.

And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending.

Michelle Goldberg used her column at the New York Times to further elucidate the murder of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE Agent. “By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”

The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”

In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”

It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.

Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.

Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”

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I’ll conclude today’s offerings with an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack: Letters from an American.

On MS NOW today, columnist Philip Bump broke down when talking about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis. “I have a six year old,” he said. “And…seeing the image of the stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car—really emotional for me and…what I take away from this is, for me that’s the thing that stands out: that this was a family that could have been like mine.”

Bump went on to emphasize that “there are a lot of situations, a lot of incidents that have involved ICE, have involved the government over the course of the past thirteen months in which there is resonance for other families in similar ways,” but what he hit on in his first reaction to Good’s killing was the one the administration must fear most of all. Good was a white, suburban mother, whose ex-husband told reporters she was a Christian stay-at-home mom, and Bump is a white man.

President Donald J. Trump’s people see that demographic as their base. If it turns on Trump, they are politically finished, as finished as elite southern enslavers were when Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded American mothers of the fragility of their own childrens’ lives to condemn the sale of Black children; as finished as the second Ku Klux Klan was when its leader kidnapped, raped, and murdered 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer; as finished as the white segregationists were when white supremacists murdered four little girls in church in 1963.

Evidence that President Donald J. Trump has sexually abused children would likely be enough to crater his political support from this group, making it no accident that the administration is openly flouting the law that required the full release of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of those files, and many of them were so heavily redacted as to be useless. In a court filing on Monday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “substantial work remains to be done” before it can release them all.

But there is no hiding the murder of Renee Good, captured on video by several witnesses as it was. And so the Trump administration is working desperately to smear Good and to convince the public that, contrary to widespread video evidence, the federal agent put in place by the Trump regime shot her in self-defense.

Just remember what Warren Zevon once said: “Enjoy every Sandwich,” we never know what comes next …

What’s on your Action, Blogging, and Reading list today?