This is right up there with the time Trump had billions of gallons of water released from California reservoirs in the mistaken belief the water would magically flow hundreds of miles south and put out the fires in Los Angeles. Which it didn’t.

This is a real Truth Social post, graphic and all.

The Fox News story on this embarrassment:

“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” Trump wrote Saturday night on Truth Social. “It’s on the way!!!”

Gov. Landry was designated the special envoy to Greenland in December and held formal discussions of the road map of Trump’s designs to solidify Arctic security from threats from Russia or China.

Let us reflect on the fact that Greenland is on Denmark’s socialized health care system, which is a lot better than ours. In comparisons of health care systems among countries around the world, Denmark consistently ranks much higher than the U.S. And Louisiana is close to last among the states in providing health care to its citizens. The worst of the worst. In recent years about 10 percent of adults in Louisiana have had no health insurance — that’s probably higher now — whereas all citizens of Greenland get free health care.

The news comes as Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command evacuated a crew member who required urgent medical treatment from a U.S. submarine in Greenlandic waters, seven nautical miles outside of Greenland’s capital of Nuuk.

The crew member has been transferred to the Greenlandic health authorities via a Danish Defense Seahawk helicopter to a hospital in Nuuk, according to the Joint Arctic Command.

Some news stories are trying to spin Trump’s announcement by saying he had to send the hospital “boat” to take care of the sailor, but the sailor already is getting good care from a hospital in Greenland. Does Trump know there are hospitals in Greenland? Or does he imagine Greenland as some third world country with people living in igloos?

And how much does it cost to send a military hospital ship from Louisiana to Greenland, anyway?

The prime ministers of Greenland and Denmark have informed Trump that Greenland does not need his “boat.”  And of course this is being reported internationally, giving the world another example of what a clueless imbecile Trump is.

But I do hope he brags about sending the hospital “boat” to Greenland in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Maybe the low-info Trump supporters will ask why he’s willing to provide health care to Greenlanders but not to Americans.

In other news — some guy tried to enter the “secure perimeter” at Mar-a-Lago with “what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can,” the Secret Service announced. The man was shot and killed by Secret Service and a local sheriff’s deputy, it says. Trump was elsewhere at the time.

See also DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court at The Guardian.

Here’s a gift link to the live update commentary at the New York Times. It was a six-three decision; the dissenters were Thomas, Alito. and Kavanaugh. Roberts wrote the majority opinion.

As I understand it, Roberts wrote that a president cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s tariff powers in the Constitution. This leaves open the possibility that Trump will use some other contorted legal mechanism to set tariffs, but we don’t yet know what that is or why the SCOTUS wouldn’t strike that down also. The Constitution is crystal clear that the authority to set tariffs belongs only to Congress. And, of course, Trump could just ask Congress to rubber stamp his tariff policies. No guarantees that would work, of course.

Update: This was written and published before the decision. The Wall Street Journal will let you read it if you open a “free” account, so it’s not behind a paywall. In brief, Trump has been throwing a fit over a Federal Reserve report that says 90 percent of the income from the tariffs is being paid by U.S. consumers.

The Fed analysis aligns with other research into the distribution of tariff costs from Harvard economists and Germany’s Kiel Institute—and with common sense. There isn’t widespread evidence that foreign producers are cutting their prices to offset the tariffs, the main mechanism by which foreigners would “pay” for the border taxes.

Nor is the dollar strengthening, which is the other possible mechanism for making foreigners pay (we’ll spare you the equations). Instead the tariffs are causing an increase in post-tariff prices of those goods that are still imported, alongside a modest decrease in the volume of imports. Americans pay higher prices, or “pay” in the form of less choice. …

… So far the manufacturing boom Mr. Trump promised hasn’t appeared, as manufacturing jobs are down over the last year. The New York Fed and other research on cost distribution shows one reason why: To the extent American companies eat some of the costs of tariffs, that’s less cash available for investment and hiring.

If we’re assuming the Wall Street Journal editorial board speaks for the monied class, I’d say that the monied class decided to pull the plug on the tariffs before things got any worse.

See also Layla Jones at TPM.

Update: Trump is currently throwing a temper tantrum on national television. He isn’t making sense, as usual.

From the New York Times:

As Trump says he will impose tariffs under Section 122, the question is how long they will last. The law allows the president to impose those tariffs for 150 days, after which they would need Congressional approval. That will be an uphill battle with midterm elections approaching and more concerns among voters about tariffs adding to the costs of goods.

If he can’t get Congressional approval, the president could turn to other authorities after 150 days. But that would mean yet more uncertainty and unpredictability for businesses that have been whipsawed by this tariff policy.

Update: Paul Krugman on today’s ruling.

Josh Marshall, Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

Rogé Karma, Get Ready for Zombie Tariffs at The Atlantic

Update: Kate Santaliz reports for Axios that some House members are pushing for a reconciliation bill that codifies the tariffs that were struck down today. However, it doesn’t sound as if there are enough votes to pass it. A handful of Republicans welcomed the Court’s decision.

This morning I saw that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested “on suspicion of misconduct in public office,” with the consent of his brother, King Charles. And a former prime minister and acting president of South Korea was sentenced to 23 years in prison for attempting an insurrection. If other countries can do that, why can’t we? Our bad boys with money and connections get one pass after another.

I’m also reading that considerable U.S. military assets have been assembled in the Middle East and are poised to attack Iran. This attack could happen as soon as Saturday, but Trump hasn’t yet made his final decision about it. No, Congress has not been briefed, never mind consulted. I suspect most Americans haven’t noticed the news stories about it. Trump may very well decide to not go through with it. But if he thinks being a War President will pull up his sagging poll numbers, IMO he’s in for a disappointment.

Trump’s stupid Board of Peace is holding its first meeting today, or perhaps it’s done meeting already. I’m not sure. As of the most recent report I could find the countries that have expressed interest in joining are Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.  Whether any of them have coughed up the $1 billion to be permanent members has not been revealed. I understand a number of other countries sent representatives as “observers,” not as members. So Trump probably did have a big group to meet with.

Anyway, among other things Trump announced the U.S. might attack Iran in the next ten days or so if it won’t make a deal to get rid of its nuclear weapons program. And he announced the U.S. has pledged $10 billion to the Board of Peace for reconstructing Gaza. Where this money is coming from is, um, not clear. Among Trump’s plans for Gaza is a 5,000-person military base, The Guardian reports. Other nations also pledged money for Gaza, but who is collecting this money and what precisely it will be used for is not clear. If Trump follows his usual pattern a lot of it will find its way into Trump family pockets.

And my larger point is that this is all so outside the norm that one would think news media would be expressing some alarm about it. But no.

Elsewhere — I’ve never been a big follower of Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, but he has an excellent column out now headlined Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools — Again. In brief, he’s admitting that Netanyahu’s policies are destroying Israel, not saving it, and that knee-jerk support for Israel does the U.S. no good, either. And what he writes has been blazingly obvious for a long time. But I haven’t seen it expressed any more clearly.

The Trump regime is taking steps to label all demonstrations against its policies as terrorism. And there’s currently a test case in Texas. The DoJ is putting an alleged “Antifa” cell — I’m serious — on trial on charges of terrorism. The plan appears to be to claim that everyone protesting Trump’s policies are “members” of Antifa, which the DoJ has identified as an actual terrorist organization.

The incident for which protesters are being tried happened on July 4 in Prairieland, Texas. Some young people were protesting an ICE  facility. They shot off fireworks and graffitied cars. At some point a police officer allegedly was shot in the neck. He survived. The police arrested everyone they could catch, and those people are now the “cell” on trial. Read background at TPM.

Brandy Zadrozny writes at MS NOW:

Prosecutors characterize the events that night as an “antifa attack” on the federal government. The defense calls it a protest gone wrong. But the implications of this trial extend beyond the fate of one group of activists: For the first time, federal prosecutors are seeking to convict protesters — most of them American citizens — on charges related to domestic terrorism. The outcome will test whether President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign to brand leftist activists as terrorists can succeed in the courts.

“This is the first indictment in the country against a group of violent Antifa cell members,” acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson said in a November press release.

Since charges were filed, senior members of the Trump administration have held up the Prairieland case as a proof point in their wider campaign against anti-government organizing, arguing that local activism and demonstrations are coordinated attacks by domestic terrorists. Trump’s Department of Justice portrays antifa — a contraction of “anti-facist” long understood as a loose left-wing ideology, not an organization — as a structured “militant enterprise” comparable to foreign terrorist organizations, one that calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and poses a national security threat.

Some of the protesters did engage in property damage, and one of them, identified as Ben Song, is accused of shooting the police officer. But this case appears to be a first step in criminalizing all anti-Trump activism. If the DoJ can pretend Antifa is a real terrorist organization, and that everyone who demonstrates in opposition to Trump belongs to it, they will give themselves permission to arrest peaceful protesters.

The next No Kings day will be March 28, btw. If you possibly can, show up.

Some of the defendants in Texas have pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists, which I wonder was part of a plea deal or even coerced.

Elsewhere — Today Paul Waldman’s new Cross Section column is headlined MAGA White Supremacists Are a Bunch of Pathetic Losers. Well, yeah, So much of MAGA bubbled up from the depths of racism and misogyny.  And I want to add a bit to what Waldman wrote.

The little town I grew up in in the 1950s and 1960s was a “sundown town,”  There was a big notice at the bus depot declaring that any Black person caught within town limits after sundown was subject to arrest (worded somewhat differently). So, yeah, it was all White stretching everywhere. I doubt there were any nonwhite people residing in the county. During the 1960s I heard the grownups worry that some day Martin Luther King was going to show up with a bunch of Those People, and they were terrified. But of course that didn’t happen because why would it? It was a little mining town in the Ozarks with not much going for it. Hardly anyone ever moved there. You had to be from there to belong.

Paul Waldman writes that White supremacists are “whiny and stupid and weak, their ideas whither under even a moment’s scrutiny or questioning, and their fantasies of oppression are pathetic.” Well, yeah. It’s a really good column and worth reading. I just want to throw in a couple of my own observations.

Something I realized while I was still a Young Person: The hard-core White supremacists, the one who are really into it, are the most ordinary people you can imagine. As a rule they are not notably successful, intelligent, or accomplished at anything. There’s nothing about them to make them special, except that they are White. And they cling to that with all they’ve got. It’s the core of their identifies, the one thing they can point to to claim validation for their existence. They’re White, by gawd, so they are owed respect and status. And if they don’t get that, it’s oppression.  This is not to say that people with education and accomplishment can’t believe in White superiority, too, but as a rule it’s not as important to them.

The other observation, which I picked up from social psychology journals, is that White bigots sincerely believe all White people feel as they do about race. White people who say otherwise and who denounce racism are phonies, or “just being PC.” If the bigots ever got it in their heads that a lot of us Other White People think White supremacists are contemptible, stupid goobers, their heads would probably explode.

Also — Noting the passing of Jesse Jackson and Robert Duvall. RIP.

A lot has happened over the past couple of days, and I’m feeling overwhelmed again. But I do want to say something about Pam Bondi’s, um, performance yesterday in front of the House Judiciary Committee. I’ve never before in my life wanted to see someone tarred and feathered as much as I did yesterday.

I understand Trump expressed approval of the debacle, but I’m not sure she did him any favors. Even some voices on the Right were disturbed at what went on yesterday. You may remember Erick Erickson from his RedState days. I take it he’s moved on to cushier venues, but he’s still solidly Right.

When the Attorney General of the United States is asked why she has prosecuted no one related to Jeffrey Epstein and this is her answer, she should be fired or resign. But neither will happen, which is another reason the Democrats are going to have a good election year. pic.twitter.com/IahqskOAHW

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 11, 2026

And Erickson is not alone.

I’ve been idly wondering what sort of career Bondi will have when her current gig ends. They may hire her on Fox News, but I can’t imagine a real law firm or law school hiring her to do anything other than sort mail or make coffee. She is older than I thought she was, though — she was born in 1965 — so maybe she’ll just retire.

But the Department of Justice has effectively been gutted. I understand Bondi has fired more than 230 career attorneys and other employees. At least 6000 more have resigned. And of course these were the best, most experienced people. At the same time, lawyers are not exactly lining up to apply for jobs. The DOJ is getting desperate to hire people. See also Once-Elite DOJ Is Now Desperate For Lawyers, Resorts To ‘Forward This To A Friend’ Recruiting at Above the Law.

And then this happened.

Federal judges selected Donald Kinsella, a veteran litigator, as the top federal prosecutor in Upstate New York to replace a Trump appointee who was disqualified from the role. 

But just hours later, after judges swore Kinsella in during a private ceremony, a White House official fired him.

“Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, [the president of the United States] does,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a social media post. “See Article II of our Constitution,” 

“You are fired, Donald Kinsella,” Blanche added.

Trump keeps trying to appoint unqualified but loyal attorneys to federal prosecutor jobs — think Lindsey Halligan and  Alina Habba. So along with being unqualified they were not properly appointed and confirmed to their jobs, and their prosecutions were being challenged for that reason, along with the many other reasons.

Trump keeps preferring these incompetent wonders over actual lawyers. He wants U.S. attorneys who will do what he wants and bring bogus criminal charges against people he doesn’t like. This is not going well. Yesterday a Grand Jury failed to indict the six senators who made the “don’t obey illegal orders” video. That failure goes to Jeanine Pirro, who is turning into the “failure to indict” queen. I bet she’s sorry she left Fox News. But Trump can’t see that loyalty is not competence, and all of this legal thrashing around makes him look weak.

Further, the firing of Donald Kinsella may not hold up.

The law governing U.S. attorney vacancies at times allows district judges to appoint an official to serve until a vacancy is filled through the normal Senate confirmation process. But it remains an open question whether the president can dismiss those appointed by the federal judiciary.

Peter Shane, a leading constitutional and administrative law scholar at the New York University School of Law, said in a social media post Wednesday evening that he believed Trump’s dismissal of Kinsella was likely unlawful.

So we’ll see what happens. But this brings us to the larger issue of how Trump is his own worst enemy. His second administration is a massive failure already, and most of the nation knows it even if he doesn’t. See also The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore at Strength in Numbers.

In other law-related news, a judge has temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s action against Mark Kelly over the illegal orders video.

In TACO news, ICE Goon Czar Tom Homan has announced the “conclusion” of the immigration operation in Minnesota. He says there will be a “significant drawdown” of federal agents. I’ll be impressed when they’re gone entirely.

Senate Democrats have blocked a DHS funding bill, meaning DHS is likely to run out of funding this weekend.

Trump is losing it. What “It”? The plot, the narrative, the culture war, a big chunk of his base, his political capital, you name it.

See Greg Sargent, Trump Rages at Bad Bunny—and Accidentally Exposes a Big MAGA Weakness. Greg Sargent argues that Trump is losing ground even in places he thought he owned, like the world of pro football. “The president has long regarded pro and college football—the players and fans, at least—as ‘his’ part of the culture,” Sargent writes. But he’s staying away from the Super Bowl. Because of Bad Bunny? or because he was advised he’d be booed?   Greg Sargent continues,

But something deeper is going on here than Trump’s usual lashing out at a critic. This clash hints at a genuine fear on Trump’s part that he’s on the defensive big time in the war over ICE—not just in the political war, not just in the war that’s shedding American blood in the streets, but also in the culture war. Because the battle over ICE has become a culture war all unto itself. And Trump is losing it.

Last October The Gnome declared that ICE would be “all over” the Super Bowl, and only “law-abiding Americans who love this country” would be welcome. Also, too,

When asked if she had “any message to the NFL” regarding the organization naming Bad Bunny as its Super Bowl halftime performer, Noem said, “Well, they suck and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”

Jeebus, she was threatening the NFL? Anyway, the NFL has said there would be no ICE at the Super Bowl, and I’m not sure what happened to get The Gnome to back down. I turned on the pregame show and I’m seeing people finding their seats in the stadium, and I take it nothing alarming has happened yet. And I haven’t seen a big uprising among football fans about Bad Bunny. There’s been a backlash from MAGA, of course, but probably not the uprising against Bad Bunny that Trump expected.

Sargent goes on to cite recent polls that show approval of ICE is losing ground among voting blocks that Trump thought he owned — rural voters, non-college-educated voters, men aged 18 to 29. They don’t like ICE; they don’t like how the deportations are being handled. See also Trump Is Losing Normies on Immigration.

Now see Josh Marshall, Trump’s Big Loser Energy, and Other Tales From the Annals of Political Messaging. This is about Trump’s threat to nationalize the midterm elections, which he won’t be able to do.

Trump doesn’t want to “nationalize” elections. Before the semi-walkback by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the closest he and his toadies came to explaining what he meant is that he wants Republicans to take over running elections in some 15 places where he constantly loses and where he is upset about losing. This is really the biggest loser energy imaginable. He lost and he’s so stung by it that next time he wants to brings his own refs. Again, that’s just the biggest loser energy imaginable. And what’s motivating all of this is that he’s getting less popular every damn day and it’s straight up killing him. He’s homing in on a massive ego injury in November and he’s lashing out right and left. …And it’s driving Donald Trump completely up the wall.

Great! Let him suffer. Glory in it. And most of all lean into it.

Trump’s supporters are abandoning him. He’s getting less popular. He’s losing. So he wants his Republican friends to start counting the votes. So he can win and feel less sad.

Big loser energy! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Trump is accustomed to being as outrageous as he wants to be and then basking in the approval of his culties and the Republican Party in general, while the libs howl in outrage. But he got spanked by Republicans over the recent Obamas-as-apes video. For them truem believers MAGA has been about cultural warfare more than anything else, but a lot of independents and low-info voters got caught up in it because, you know, illegal alien criminals should be deported and Joe Biden (they think) caused inflation. They weren’t expecting the excesses of ICE and a president utterly out of touch with their concerns while he focuses on building a giant ballroom and getting things named after himself.

The Republican Party expects to lose a lot of seats in Congress in the midterms and don’t see Trump doing anything to turn that around. At some point before November a lot of them are going to have to create some space between themselves and Trump if they expect to have any chance at all of keeping their seats. Meanwhile the Epstein files have got to be eating Trump alive. What will Trump do next? I expect him to get more extreme, more outrageous, because that’s his pattern. I expect him to try to crank up hysteria about some enemy who is causing all our (his) problems.

Meanwhile it seems to me most folks just want a nice normal Super Bowl game to watch with beer and lots of cholesterol-stuffed food and a catchy halftime show and no politics. Which seems to be what’s going on.

Let’s look at some news about Trump reported over the past few hours. The first example is courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson’s February 5 post:

This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

“I needed it for my own ego” is honest, at least, but who actually says that?  Then yesterday CNN reported:

President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.

But there was a condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

Again, not exactly normal. I haven’t heard if Chuck responded. Chuck doesn’t have the authority to rename either Penn Station in NYC or Dulles Airport — which is in bleeping Virginia — anyway.

Then Trump shared an appalling video that depicted the Obamas as monkeys. It was eventually deleted after some Republicans complained about it. Update: The White House is now blaming a staffer for the video. Sure.

Trump continues to make ridiculous claims about how he’s brought down prescription drug prices by more than 100 percent.

Trump is having, or at least allowing, a 22-foot-tall gold statue of himself to be erected in Miami on the site where the US will host a G20 summit later this year. The statue is being paid for by a bunch of crypto bros. However, the sculptor is not letting the statue out of his studio until the bros cough up the balance of what they owe him. And since crypto recently took a dive, that may be a problem. So we may be spared the embarrassment of having world leaders being greeted by “Don Colossus.”

Again, these are stories published over just the past few hours. And I say we’re looking at an increasingly deteriorated mental state. Trump is not what we might call well socialized, but there was a time in his life when he could probably fake being psychologically and socially normal. But that time is over. And I know there have been news stories about his declining mental state going back at least a couple of years, if not longer, but I say he’s getting worse. He has absolutely no filters now.

I got this from TPM:

The Trump administration is retaliating against recently freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family for becoming a poster boy for the brutality of Operation Metro Surge by seeking to end their asylum claims and expedite the deportation proceedings against them, MPR reports.

In short, somebody doesn’t have enough sense to leave well enough alone. Although this might be Miller as much as Trump.

Getting back to the New York tunnel story, the project is expected to have a major effect on rail service, and not just in New York:

The project, known as Gateway, sits at the heart of the Northeast Corridor rail route that runs from Boston to Washington and is the most-used passenger line in the United States. It includes the construction of a new two-track tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey, which are linked by 116-year-old tunnels in such poor condition that trains are often delayed, creating a bottleneck.

Supporters of the project say the new tunnel would be crucial to avoiding a disruption in rail service around New York City that they believe would have drastic effects on the national economy.

So this project isn’t just about doing a favor to New Jersey-New York commuters.  Funding originally was held up because the Administration wanted to be sure there was no DEI hanky-panky going on. But holding up this project so Trump can get Penn Station re-named after him is just nuts.

Meanwhile Trump is still planning to put up some oversized European-style triumphal arch in DC and is looking to gut the Kennedy Center in ways that could ruin it as a performance venue. So what’s keeping him from ordering a nuke dropped on the next foreign leader — or U.S. governor — who pisses him off?

As I understand it, when older people have lost all filters this usually indicates a shrinking prefrontal cortex This is not something you want to see in a POTUS.

Having Trump as president really is like being tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded gun (excuse me if I’ve said that before). And in spite of his crashing poll numbers a whole lot of people are still propping him up and protecting him. In the current Congress he’s not about to be impeached and removed from office for cause. At least there could be a huge grassroots scream for removing him under the 25th Amendment.

So much depends on this year’s midterm elections, so Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections are worrisome. I don’t think he can get away with it. The Constitution gives the president no role whatsoever in how elections are run. But Congress could throw wrenches in the works. The Constitution, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

(Note that when this was written, senators were chosen by state legislators.)

It seems to me that this clause gives Congress power to do a lot of mischief. A pile of case law on the “elections” clause has accumulated over the years, though, so some boundaries probably have been drawn already that I don’t know about. And in such a closely divided Congress I question whether there would be a majority to enact anything. See also the elections clause article at the Constitution Center.

Assuming any attempt to actually nationalize the elections fails, there is another likely result of Trump’s incessant whining and wild claims about how awful some states are at running elections. And that would be to cast doubt on the midterm results and possibly challenge them in court or overturn them by some more authoritarian means. Trump would no doubt love a re-do of January 6 on an even bigger scale. It could get nasty.

What may save us is Trump’s own massive incompetence. His administration is a failure by any measure, and he shows no inclination to change course. The percentage of the electorate that approves of everything he does is now down to about 27 percent, according to a recent Pew poll, and that 27 percent probably represents his true believer base. There’s about another 10 percent of voters who are not sure if they still like Trump or not, and the rest of the country thinks he’s a disaster. He’d have to rely mostly on ICE and other DHS enforcers. But see Federal and State Election Laws Ban Federal Forces from Polling Places at the Brennan Center.

Update: Wrestling fans in Las Vegas don’t like ICE.

In other news — I don’t even pretend to understand crypto. But those of you who are interested might like Paul Krugman’s Is This Crypto’s Fimbulwinter? In Norse mythology, Fimbulwinter is the winter that precedes Ragnarok, the end of all things.

Negotiations over DHS funding appear to be going nowhere. The Democrats came up with a list of demands that seem reasonable to me. And of course a lot of people are furious the Dems just aren’t demanding ICE be dismantled. Next year, maybe. But the Republicans dismissed these demands out of hand, and no further negotiating has taken place, as far as I can tell.

There were two special elections in Texas yesterday. In one, a Democrat won a runoff election to the U.S. House from a deep-blue Houston area district. In the other, a Democrat won a special election for a seat in the Texas state Senate in a district that voted for Trump by 17 points. And it wasn’t close. See G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers:

Texas Monthly describes the district as a hub of far-right activism. In recent years it has swung from “a bastion of Bush-era conservatism into an uncompromising vehicle for their war on ‘woke.'” It was even redistricted awhile back to ensure a four-to-one Republican majority. Note that the quote below was written before yesterday’s election:

Legislatively, the outcome of the race is essentially meaningless: The winner will serve out the remaining term of Kelly Hancock, who resigned his Senate seat in June after being appointed by Governor Greg Abbott to Texas comptroller. A rematch is expected between Rehmet and Wambsganss during the November general election. (The Texas Legislature does not reconvene until January 2027.) But symbolically, one expert said, a Rehmet victory would represent a political earthquake—a stunning rebuke of a movement that has for years used the region as an incubator for far-right policies that are exported across the state and nation. 

“If he were to lose by six points, that’d be worth talking about,” Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at nearby Southern Methodist University, told me. “And if Rehmet were to win? You’d say, ‘Holy shit.’”  

What do you say when the district swung by 22 points? I take it this wasn’t necessarily a rebuke of Trump as much as a rebuke of the far-right Christian nationalist wackjobs that have dominated local government. But I’d say Democrats need to be looking to how Rehmet pulled this off.

As I understand it we are now in a shutdown, but it isn’t expected to last long. Remarkably, Trump called Chuck Schumer last week to initiate negotiations. As a result, most of the spending bill is expected to go to the House tomorrow. It’s expected that the House will vote on it on Tuesday. DHS funding has been held back in the Senate for two weeks for further negotiation. Conditions Dems are expected to push include “unmasking immigration agents, ending their indiscriminate sweeps and requiring them to obtain warrants as well as abide by strict use-of-force guidelines, among others,” according to the New York Times.

The NY Times also reported that before Trump called Chuck,

White House legislative affairs aides had reached out to some of the Democrats who had broken from Mr. Schumer last fall and crossed party lines in a vote to end a record-breaking shutdown. Would they like to attend a listening session at the White House to discuss a potential deal? They all declined.

News stories are calling this deal “fragile,” warning that it would yet break apart. The Dems have to stick together this time. See also the live reporting link at the NY Times.

Update: The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

Update Update: Trump has announced that the [Bleep] Kennedy Center will be closed for two years, beginning in July, for renovations. “I have determined that the fastest way to bring The Trump Kennedy Center to the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur, is to cease Entertainment Operations for an approximately two year period of time, with a scheduled Grand Reopening that will rival and surpass anything,” The Thing said. Most of the scheduled performers have canceled, although the National Symphony Orchestra and a few other random programs, including a screening of Sleepless in Seattle, were still listed as upcoming. I hate to see what kind of ghastly gilded atrocities he inflicts on the building.

See also ‘Their first instinct was to loot’: how Trump’s acolytes are plundering the Kennedy Center.

Stuff to Read: (In no particular order)

The Atlantic, ‘It’s a Five-Alarm Fire’: The FBI’s search and seizure of material from Fulton County election offices marks a major escalation.

Alexandra Petri, Hey you, hold onto your humanity. You’ll thank me later.

Heather Cox Richardson, January 31, 2026. I have to comment on this one. Stephen Miller posted,

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

HCR compares Miller’s comment to similar comments by antebellum advocates for slavery. But the “labor class” was more than enslaved people from Africa. Beginning in the colonial period and well into the 19th century, a lot of people from the UK and Germany came here as indentured servants and stayed after their contracts ended. Beginning in the mid-19th century Irish escaping the potato famine dominated industrial and construction labor for some time. When California became a state in 1850 there was already a substantial Chinese population there, which continued to grow. Chinese supplied most of the labor to build the intercontinental railroad. And when the bosses ran short of Chinese, they hired Irish.

In the early 20th century Southern and Eastern European immigrants supplied the cheap labor for factories and sweatshops. Nearly all of the 146 garment workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911 were recent Italian or Jewish immigrants.  One of Stephen Miller’s great-grandfathers was a Jew who escaped poverty and oppression in Belarus, landing at Ellis Island in 1903 with $8 to his name. He made a living as a peddler and brought more of his family over.

I should note that European immigrants also imported the labor union movement, which IMO has benefited all of us. And their children who were born here went to public schools and assimilated and were citizens like everybody else. Was this ever a problem? Not that I’ve heard.

U.S. agriculture has a long history of depending on migrant labor from Mexico, going back at least to 1910. During World War II there was such a shortage of farm labor the U.S. ran a formal guest worker program. This program ended in 1964 and was replaced by the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers program, and I don’t know how that works. I’m seeing the ag industry wants significant reforms. But this is one reason we’ve enjoyed an abundance of food at reasonable prices (until recently) here in this country.

Does Stephen Miller seriously know nothing about U.S. history? Maybe he thinks White immigrants are different, somehow, but the Irish and Italian and other immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century faced a whole lot of discrimination for a long time. And by now a lot of ethnic Chinese Americans are more generations removed from China than Miller is removed from Belarus. And Black Americans have been part of U.S. history all along, even though their contributions were long ignored in the history books. But if you treat people fairly and give them opportunities to work and assimilate, most of them will. It doesn’t have to be a problem.

Everyone in media is having a ton of fun trashing the Melania documentary. It’s reported that the film cost Jeff Bezos $75 million to make and $35 million to promote. It has also been widely reported that nobody is buying tickets. A TPM writer watched the film “so you don’t have to,” and wrote,

At the concession stand, I noticed they were selling large commemorative popcorn buckets emblazoned with Melania’s face. It’s part of a massive marketing campaign that brought a distinctly fascistic flavor to city streets, with billboards featuring the first lady’s portrait looming over street corners. Yet, at my screening, this effort to cultivate a cult of personality wasn’t quite taking. When I asked the two women selling snacks if anyone had bought the buckets, I received an emphatic response.

“No — and I hope not,” one of them said, 

Meanwhile Bezos is laying people off at Amazon. I understand Amazon Prime deliveries are getting a bit slower. Lots of Prime items no longer offer free two-day delivery. Four to five days is the norm. Note also that the film has a single digit rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the accompanying reviews are hilarious.

Regarding yesterday’s Epstein document dump — what was redacted, and what wasn’t? The names of alleged co-conspirators were redacted, which is kind of infuriating considering that exposing these people was the whole point. I’m reading the FBI has identified ten co-conspirators, but we still don’t know who they are. Likewise, the names of some federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers were redacted. According to this very helpful Time magazine article, some of these records date to the late 2000s, “when then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta approved a controversial deal that shielded Epstein from federal charges related to allegations of sexual abuse and sex trafficking of minors in Florida in exchange for a guilty plea to state charges.” But Acosta’s name was not redacted.

On the other hand, names of several of the survivors were not redacted. “One survivor, who had identified herself anonymously as “Jane Doe”, told CNN that she has received numerous unsolicited phone calls since her identity was revealed Friday,” per the Time article linked above.

A whole lot of people closely associated with the Trump Administration are named in the files, including Elon Musk. Another is Kevin Warsh, who just got named to be the new fed chair, and Brett Ratner, who directed the Melania movie. I don’t believe the files implicate anything about these people.

Election interference. Nothing worries me more than what Trump might do to interfere with the midterm elections. The New York Times has a good overview of the threat and how to address it.