Another day in Trump’s America.

This is no longer the America we know.

With 3000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents already on the ground, a deranged Trump threatened the people of Minnesota with more violence, this time by our military.

Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota after protests.

A woman confronts a federal immigration officer at the scene of a reported shooting, Jan. 14, 2026, in Minneapolis. | John Locher/AP.

President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to send the military into Minneapolis over widespread demonstrations after federal agents shot and wounded a man, and in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a protester by an ICE agent last week.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responded to Trump’s threat with a direct appeal for the president on social media, asking him to “turn the temperature down.”“Stop this campaign of retribution,” he wrote. “This is not who we are.”

Minneapolis has become the center of the national fight over Trump’s immigration agenda after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year old Renee Good in her car last week. State and city officials have since sparred with the federal government over everything from continued law enforcement presence in Minnesota to the status of the investigation into Good’s killing.

“This is not sustainable,” Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey said in a press conference Wednesday night. “This is an impossible situation that our city is presently being put in, and at the same time, we are trying to find a way forward, to keep people safe, to protect our neighbors, to maintain order.”

Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act — which authorizes the deployment of the military for certain domestic purposes during civil unrest — when his mass deportation efforts have been met with protests or violence. He sharpened that threat recently after the Supreme Court ruled that his previous efforts to deploy the National Guard into Democratic-led cities exceeded his authority.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said in a statement Thursday that if Trump follows through, he is prepared to challenge that in court.
“For decades, my Republican colleagues have warned against tyrannical federal overreach,” he said. “Well, it is now at their doorstep. I urge Minnesota Republicans to join me in speaking out against this dire threat of escalation from the federal government. Before any of us are Democrats or Republicans, we are Minnesotans. If ever there was a time to set partisan politics aside and do what is right for our state, our country, and our democracy, it is now.”

Trump’s rhetoric about Minnesota has echoes of his focus on Portland, Oregon, last fall, when protests at a federal ICE field office in South Portland caught the White House’s attention. Trump at the time told reporters he would enact the 1807 law if “people are being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.” He repeatedly referred to the rioters in Portland as “insurrectionists.”

Top Trump officials in recent days have returned to this language. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said last week that the Democratic Party is “committed to inciting a violent insurrection to keep millions of foreign criminal trespassers on our soil.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also called Good a “leftist insurrectionist who was purposefully and illegally obstructing law enforcement operations.”

Its invocation would fulfill a long-term desire of Trump’s. He views the Insurrection Act as the epitome of executive power and considered invoking it during his first term to quell unrest after George Floyd’s killing. Aides suggested it again after the 2020 election, Trump talked about it extensively during the 2024 campaign, and allies discussed it in the context of the 2024 election — worried the president’s victory could spark violent protests.

Trump’s post comes as a federal judge is on the cusp of a ruling that could sharply curtail ICE’s ability to push back on protests and make arrests of demonstrators. U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez intends to rule no later than Friday morning on whether to restrict ICE’s use of nonlethal force, stops of motorists who tail ICE vehicles and arrests of people obeying police perimeters.

In a separate post Thursday morning, Trump referred to Menendez, a Biden appointee, as a “highly respected” judge for her decision to wait a few days before deciding on a broader lawsuit by Minnesota against “Operation Metro Surge,” the infusion of federal authorities into Minneapolis and St. Paul to carry out immigration operations.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters at the White House that she discussed the Insurrection Act with the president Thursday morning, calling it his “constitutional right.” She did not call what’s happening in Minnesota an insurrection, instead describing it as violent and a “violation of law in many places” as she urged Walz to work alongside DHS to “get criminals off the streets.”

She also said she did not recommend its invocation to Trump, but discussed the president’s options and what her agency is seeing on the ground in Minnesota.
“The president uses all the information and intelligence he can get. That’s why he calls me, he calls [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], he calls local law enforcement,” Noem said, speaking to Trump’s weighing the Insurrection Act. “He talks to those individuals and agents as well that are involved, that he knows well. This president makes fully informed decisions and utilizes his authorities when it’s appropriate.”

Minnesota officials urged people living in the city to exercise restraint as violence has escalated.

“I know you’re angry,” Walz wrote Wednesday night on X. “I’m angry. What Donald Trump wants is violence in the streets. But Minnesota will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, and of peace. Don’t give him what he wants.”

Federal immigration officers shoot pepper balls as tear gas is deployed at the scene of a reported shooting, Jan. 14, 2026, in Minneapolis.

Trump’s statement came just hours after a man was shot in the leg by federal law enforcement, in what the DHS said was self-defense.

The agency alleged in a statement on X that the officer was “violently assaulted” by the suspect, as well as two others, and fired his weapon in self-defense.
DHS blamed Walz and Frey for the incident.

“Their hateful rhetoric and resistance against men and women who are simply trying to do their jobs must end,” the agency wrote. “Federal law enforcement officers are facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest criminals and lawbreakers.”

A protester holds an umbrella as they react to tear gas after a shooting on Jan. 14, 2026, in Minneapolis. | John Locher/AP

Vice President JD Vance, in a White House press briefing last Thursday, claimed that the ICE agent who fatally shot Good enjoyed absolute immunity because he was “engaging in federal law enforcement action.”

Walz, Frey and more Democrats throughout Minnesota have urged ICE to leave the state, arguing that the federal government’s presence has only inflamed tensions around Trump’s immigration and deportation agenda.
Protests continued on Wednesday night, as federal officers clashed with protesters who threw snowballs in a haze of tear gas, culminating in the violent confrontation. (Politico)

Then came more proof of Trump’s derangement.

Look at the sick man’s face, lost in his fantasies, because the opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, of Venezuela catered to his delusions that he deserved the Nobel Prize she received.👇

Yes, he is keeping her medal.

The Nobel Committee made clear that this ceremony she constructed to placate his vanity is unreal.

One more thing.

Can you see connection between this post below and the two above?

They Were Ordinary Germans. We Are Ordinary Americans.

One summer day, years ago, I chanced upon the diary of a German soldier from the early 1940s in a flea market in New York City. It was buried among a bunch of other random items — hat blocks, Matchbox cars, an Underwood typewriter. There was so much I might have missed it, but I am Jewish; books adorned with eagles perched on swastikas tend to catch my eye.

It was a small notebook, filled with German writing. Though I don’t speak German, I was able to make out the months — Februar, März, April — and the year. The black-and-white photographs of the soldier’s life, tucked into the yellowing pages, were what interested me most: a photo of the beaming young diarist in his sharp new uniform, a rifle slung over his shoulder; one with his fellow soldiers in a countryside somewhere on what appeared to be a pleasurable weekend furlough of some kind, their field caps tipped back upon their heads; others featured him with what I assumed to be his family — an older couple, perhaps his parents, and a group who might have been siblings, gathered at a festive dinner. There were a number of him posed beside a pretty young woman I assumed to be his wife or girlfriend.

Young love.

To me, what was most notable was what I didn’t find: There were no photos of death camps, or mass graves, or starving prisoners. Instead, there was one of him with his parents in front of their house. Proud.

I shook my head at what I saw as this man’s almost pathological ability to compartmentalize the madness he likely played a role in and the quaint, pastoral life he led at the same time. It reminded me of something I was told as a child.

“How could people do such things?” I often asked, around age 9 or 10.

That’s Germans, I was told by my parents and teachers. They were evil. It was in their blood. The only good German is a dead German, they would say.

Most of my grandparents’ families were murdered in the Holocaust. And so in my upbringing, there were no “ordinary” Germans, to borrow a phrase from the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning. They were all hateful, fascist murderers — fools who could be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good. How the Germans came to be this way, no one could say. One thing was certain, though: We, thank goodness, were not like them.

We were Americans.

We weren’t so easily fooled.

We were different.

I recalled that certainty in recent days, reading about the killing of Renee Good. I read about how the Trump administration quickly labeled her a terrorist. About how federal officials blocked the investigation by Minnesota. About how our leaders accused her of trying to ram an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent when the videos of the incident seemed to clearly show otherwise. “Who are you going to believe,” asked Chico Marx, “me or your own eyes?” I suppose, in the eyes of this administration, that makes me a Marxist now.

None of this surprised me. After all, the shooting was just one day after the administration published a propaganda website saying the Jan. 6 insurrection was the fault of the Democrats and the Capitol Police.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, proudly so, and don’t trust any state, religious or corporate entity. So I knew that a lie told enough becomes the truth, that terror is a government’s method of control, that fear is its greatest motivator.

But that’s the Trump administration, I reassured myself, not the American people.

Americans aren’t so easily fooled.

Americans are different.

Alas, my comfort was short-lived, as I made the mistake, then, of sinking into social media. There I encountered ordinary Americans who believed the Trump administration without question. Ordinary Americans who blamed Ms. Good, who repeated the things they learned from the government, like that she was a paid agitator, a far-left radical who got what she deserved. Ordinary Americans who said the armed agent who killed an apparently unarmed woman was a hero, defending his nation from undesirables. Ordinary Americans who, soon enough, lay the blame for the whole thing on Democrats, antifa, Gov. Tim Walz, Jews, women and gays.

Past or present, it’s not the leaders who disappoint me. It’s the led.

Which brings me back to that flea market find, to that old diary I didn’t buy. I was a young, broke writer at the time. I opted to spend what money I had on the old typewriter.

But I miss those days.

I miss the comfort of believing Germans were different.

I miss believing that we Americans could never be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good.

I miss believing we are not like them.

I am forced to wonder, now, if that long-ago German diarist wasn’t evil after all. If he had been led to believe by a terrorizing state that what he was doing was good. That he was defending his nation from undesirables. That he was a hero.

And I wonder if someday, at some distant flea market, a young man will chance upon an old iPhone from 2026, and scrolling through it — through pics of the owner’s friends, vacations, festive dinners — will wonder how this unbothered American went about his normal life as the country was descending into fear-induced psychosis at the hands of an autocrat.

“Thank goodness,” he will comfort himself, “we’re not like them.” (Shalom Auslander, Guest Columnist, New York Times).

Forecasting the future.

What can make Trump’s impeachment possible in 2026?

Democrats win the House.

What can make Trump’s removal from office possible in 2026 possible?

Democrats win the Senate.

Now you know how to devote your money and time from now through November 3rd, 2026.

Election Day 2026 includes all 435 U.S. House seats and 35 U.S. Senate seats, along with many state and local elections and more.

We can do this! We must do this!

One more thing.

From Trump’s interview with Reuters.

The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency.
“It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”

Texas Senate update. Emerson poll.

Jasmine Crockett, Congresswoman from TX 30 is also seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Georgia Senate update.

Greenland

Summary of Posts from X.

Speaking on January 14, Trump warned that Denmark cannot defend the strategic Arctic territory, prompting a 'fundamental disagreement' with Danish and Greenlandic officials despite plans for a joint working group.

Denmark quickly deployed troops via C-130 planes to Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq, launching Operation Arctic Endurance with small NATO ally contributions from France, Germany, Norway, the UK, and Sweden.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the move as 'strategic self-harm,' citing Denmark's willingness to cooperate and a poll showing only 17% American support.

One more thing.

How a billionaire with interests in Greenland encouraged Trump to acquire the territory

The US president’s friend Ronald Lauder – who first proposed Arctic expansion – is now making deals in the island.

One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. “Trump called me down to the Oval Office,” John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. “He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland.”
It was an extraordinary proposal. And it originated from a longtime friend of the president who would go on to acquire business interests in the Danish territory.

The businessman, Bolton learned, was Ronald Lauder. Heir to a makeup fortune – the global cosmetics brand Estée Lauder – he had known Trump, a fellow wealthy New Yorker, for more than 60 years.

Bolton said he discussed the Greenland proposition with Lauder. After the billionaire’s intervention, a White House team began to explore ways to increase US sway in the vast Arctic territory controlled by Denmark.

Trump’s renewed pursuit of Lauder’s idea during his second term is typical of how the president operates, Bolton said. “Bits of information that he hears from friends, he takes them as truth and you can’t shake his opinion.”

The proposal seems to have stirred Trump’s imperialist ambitions: eight years on, he is mulling not just buying Greenland but perhaps taking it by force.

Like many of those around the president, Lauder’s policy suggestions appear to intersect with his business interests. As Trump has ratcheted up his threats to seize Greenland, Lauder has acquired commercial holdings there. Lauder is also part of the consortium whose desire to access Ukrainian minerals appears to have spurred Trump to demand a share of the war-torn country’s resources.

Lauder has said he met Trump in the 1960s when they went to the same prestigious business school. After working for the family cosmetics business, Lauder served under Ronald Reagan at the Pentagon, then as ambassador to Austria, before running unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1989.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Lauder donated $100,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee. When Trump’s sanity was questioned in 2018, Lauder called him “a man of incredible insight and intelligence”.

That same year, Lauder said he was assisting Trump with “some of the most complex diplomatic challenges imaginable”. This seems to have included sowing the idea of Arctic expansion. The following year, the Wall Street Journal revealed Trump’s interest in Greenland. Denmark’s rulers expressed outrage. Trump responded by tweeting an image of a golden Trump Tower looming over a village, beside the caption: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”

‘A treasure trove of rare-earth elements’

‘Trump’s Greenland concept was never absurd – it was strategic,’ Lauder wrote.

Trump’s fixation with Greenland endured, as did Lauder’s. Last February, shortly after Trump returned to the White House, Lauder leapt to his defence when the president publicly contemplated a military takeover of the world’s largest island.

“Trump’s Greenland concept was never absurd – it was strategic,” Lauder wrote in the New York Post. He went on: “Beneath its ice and rock lies a treasure trove of rare-earth elements essential for AI, advanced weaponry and modern technology. As ice recedes, new maritime routes are emerging, reshaping global trade and security.”

With Greenland at “the epicentre of great-power competition”, Lauder argued, the US should seek a “strategic partnership”. He added: “I have worked closely with Greenland’s business and government leaders for years to develop strategic investments there.”

Since Lauder steered Trump’s attention to Greenland in 2018, as first reported by the US journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book The Divider, the cosmetics billionaire seems to have ploughed lots of his own money into the Arctic territory.

Danish corporate records show that a company with a New York address and unnamed owners has in recent months bought into Greenland.

One of its ventures is exporting “luxury” springwater from an island in Baffin Bay. When a Danish newspaper reported in December that Lauder was among the investors, it quoted a Greenlandic businessman involved in the endeavour. “Lauder and his colleagues in the investor group have a very good understanding of and access to the luxury market,” he said.

This group of investors is also reportedly seeking to generate hydroelectric power from Greenland’s biggest lake for an aluminium smelter.

It is unclear what effect a US takeover of Greenland – by invasion, purchase or persuasion – might have on Lauder’s commercial interests there.

Following Trump’s comments – in the aftermath of sending troops to capture the ruler of Venezuela – that the US needed Greenland “very badly”, Denmark’s prime minister warned that military action by one Nato member against another would break the alliance.

Trump appears unmoved. “We’re going to be doing something with Greenland,” he said last week, “either the nice way or the more difficult way.” After a White House meeting on Wednesday, the Danish foreign minster, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said: “We didn’t manage to change the American position. It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering Greenland.”

A deal to exploit Ukraine’s minerals

Lauder’s apparent involvement in shaping US policy adds to mounting questions about conflicts of interest during Trump’s second term and the apparent self-enrichment of those close to the president. Trump’s two elder sons, Don Jr and Eric, have been on a global moneymaking campaign from Vietnam to Gibraltar.

They insist there is a “huge wall” between their business activities and their father’s position as the most powerful man alive. Trump’s spokesperson has said: “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” But foreign rulers have facilitated the enrichment of the first family, while sometimes seemingly securing the president’s favour.

Lauder, though, appeared for a time to have broken with his old friend.

In 2022, while he was out of office, Trump hosted the far-right agitator Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago club. Lauder, who heads the World Jewish Congress, joined the condemnation. “Nick Fuentes is a virulent antisemite and Holocaust denier plain and simple,” he said. “It is inconceivable that anyone would associate with him.”

But once Trump regained the White House, Lauder resumed financial support. In March 2025 he gave $5m to Maga Inc, a fundraising operation for Trump’s movement. The following month, Lauder was reportedly among the guests at an exclusive candlelit dinner with the president. Tickets were $1m each, payable to Maga Inc.

By then, Lauder’s business interests once again appeared to be overlapping with Trump administration policy.

A leaked November 2023 letter sent by the head of TechMet, a mining company, to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, named Lauder as part of a consortium hoping to exploit a lithium deposit in the war-torn country.

Lauder said at the time that he had not discussed Ukrainian minerals with Trump himself but had “raised the issue with stakeholders in the US and Ukraine for many years up to the present day”. Leading Republicans joined a campaign for the US to gain a hold on Ukraine’s prodigious resources. Trump became its loudest proponent.

Weeks after Lauder’s Maga Inc donations, Washington and Kyiv signed a deal to jointly exploit Ukraine’s minerals. It went some way to preserving Trump’s support for Ukraine following his televised Oval Office tirade against Zelenskyy for what he deemed insufficient gratitude for US backing.

The lithium deposit was the first to be tendered under the minerals deal. This month, the Lauder consortium reportedly won it. TechMet, the company leading the consortium, declined to comment, as did Lauder. His Greenland business partners and the White House did not respond when contacted by the Guardian.(The Guardian).

New York City moves forward.

The MLK Day celebration is on Monday.

There have been changes made.

MLK Day concert held annually at the Kennedy Center for 23 years is relocating.

Natalie Cole and music producer Nolan Williams Jr. with the Let Freedom Ring choir at the Kennedy Center in January 2015.

Let Freedom Ring, an annual concert in Washington, D.C., celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr., has been a signature event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more than 20 years. Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Chaka Khan have performed, backed by a choir made up of singers from D.C.-area churches and from Georgetown University, which produces the event.

But this year's event, headlined by actor and rapper Common, will not be held at the Kennedy Center.

Georgetown University says it is moving Let Freedom Ring to D.C.'s historical Howard Theatre to save money.

For Marc Bamuthi Joseph, it wouldn't make sense to hold it at the Kennedy Center this year.

Until March 2025, Bamuthi was the Kennedy Center's artistic director for social impact, a division that created programs for underserved communities in the D.C. region. He regularly spoke at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day event.

"I would much rather that we all be spared the hypocrisy of celebrating a man who not only fought for justice, but who articulated the case for equity maybe better than anyone in American history … when the official position of this administration is an anti-equity position," he said.

President Trump has criticized past programming at the Kennedy Center as "woke" and issued executive orders calling for an end to diversity in cultural programming.

In February 2025, Trump took over the Kennedy Center and appointed new leadership. Shortly thereafter, the social media division was dissolved. Bamuthi and his team were laid off.

Composer Nolan Williams Jr., Let Freedom Ring's music producer since 2003, also says he has no regrets that the event is moving.

A view of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which was recently renamed the "Trump Kennedy Center," in Washington, DC, on Dec. 26, 2025.

"You celebrate the time that was and the impact that has been and can never be erased. And then you move forward to the next thing," said Williams.

This year, Williams wrote a piece for the event called "Just Like Selma," inspired by one of King's most famous quotes: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Williams says sometimes the quote is "interpreted in a passive way."

"The arc doesn't just happen to move. We have to be agents of change. We have to be active arc movers, arc benders," said Williams. "And so throughout the song, you hear these action words like 'protest,' 'resist,' 'endure,' 'agitate,' 'fight hate.' And those are all the action words that remind us of the responsibility that we have to be arc benders."

The Kennedy Center announced Tuesday that its celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. next week will feature the Missionary Kings of Harmony of the United House of Prayer for All People's Anacostia congregation. (NPR)

One more thing.

Reminding everyone. Tuesday, February 20 is the day of a national strike.

Eve and I will join. Will you? Share the word.

Free America Walkout.

On January 20 at 2 PM local time, we will walk out of work, school, and commerce because a Free America begins the moment we stop cooperating with fascism

★ We walk away from fascism.★

★ We walk towards a Free America.★

★ We fight for a future that belongs to us all. ★

★ Everybody in, nobody out. ★

★ Welcome to the Free America Walkout. ★