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Trump can’t cancel the midterms, even though he says ‘we shouldn’t even have an election’

Trump can’t cancel the midterms, even though he says ‘we shouldn’t even have an election’

Andrea Valdez writes: Could the Trump administration really cancel an election? President Trump once again mused about the possibility, telling Reuters recently that he’s accomplished so much that “we shouldn’t even have an election.” This isn’t the first time the president has flirted with the idea of forgoing the midterm elections, and his repeated remarks on the matter have turned what many previously dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory into a real concern. At an Atlantic Across America event in…

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How the ideas of the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, may explain the method behind Trump’s disruptive policies

How the ideas of the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, may explain the method behind Trump’s disruptive policies

John M. Owen IV writes: In trying to make sense of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, analysts have looked near and far for models and sources. Near at hand is William McKinley, the twenty-fifth US president, a Republican fond of tariffs and empire. Farther afield is Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist who died in 1985 and was notorious for his anti-liberal arguments and his membership in the Nazi Party. Trump likely has never heard of Professor Schmitt, but some…

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

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

The Guardian reports: 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…

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Bank of New York Mellon’s $378 million of Epstein transfers draws Sen. Ron Wyden’s focus

Bank of New York Mellon’s $378 million of Epstein transfers draws Sen. Ron Wyden’s focus

Bloomberg reports: A key Senate Democrat asked Bank of New York Mellon Corp. for information about $378 million in transfers processed for Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail in 2019 as he faced sex trafficking charges. Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee’s top Democrat, wrote Wednesday to BNY Chief Executive Officer Robin Vince to seek details about 270 wire transfers in and out of accounts held by Epstein, including a series of “highly suspicious” payments of $1…

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European-U.S. relationship is ‘disintegrating,’ says Germany’s vice chancellor

European-U.S. relationship is ‘disintegrating,’ says Germany’s vice chancellor

Politico reports: German Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil has assailed U.S. President Donald Trump for his rhetoric on Greenland and actions in Venezuela, saying the situation is worse than politicians like to admit. The comments lay bare divisions inside Germany’s governing coalition over how to handle Washington as transatlantic tensions mount. They also mark a divergence between Klingbeil’s approach and that of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has taken a far more cautious approach to Trump to avoid a rupture with…

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We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump imagines

We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump imagines

A year ago, Paul Bierman wrote: Donald Trump has a thing for Greenland. First, he wanted to buy the Arctic island. Then, his son visited for a photo-op. Now, he refuses to rule out using the U.S. military to seize it. Decades ago, the value of Greenland was indeed its strategic location between superpowers and its unique mineral resources. No longer. Today, Greenland’s value is the ice that covers 80 percent of the island. Keeping Greenland’s ice frozen preserves at…

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Iran’s Gulf rivals warn U.S. against strike on Tehran

Iran’s Gulf rivals warn U.S. against strike on Tehran

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iran’s Arab rivals across the Persian Gulf, led by Saudi Arabia, have been lobbying the Trump administration against a strike on Tehran, after the U.S. warned them to be prepared for such an attack. In public, Arab Gulf states have largely kept silent as protests have spread across the neighboring Islamic Republic and human-rights groups said thousands have died in the regime’s crackdown. But behind the scenes, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar are telling the…

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Latino voters powered Trump’s comeback. Now they’re turning on his economy

Latino voters powered Trump’s comeback. Now they’re turning on his economy

Politico reports: In 2024, economic anxiety and immigration concerns drove Latino voters to President Donald Trump. Those same issues are beginning to push them away. Across the country, the cost-of-living woes and immigration enforcement overshadowing Trump’s first year back in office are souring Hispanic businesspeople, a key constituency that helped propel him to the White House. In a recent survey of Hispanic business owners conducted by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared exclusively with POLITICO, 42 percent said their…

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Resistance moms are defending America

Resistance moms are defending America

Amanda Marcotte writes: The videos pouring out of Minnesota onto social media right now are horrific, showing both ICE and Border Patrol agents acting like the Gestapo by assaulting peaceful people with impunity and suggesting that they will kill more people if residents don’t submit. But time and again, those videos also show reason for hope: Ordinary people are refusing to comply. They film Noem’s secret police, blowing whistles and making a fuss, even as those masked cowards attack them….

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Trump warned of a Tren de Aragua ‘invasion,’ but U.S. intel told a different story

Trump warned of a Tren de Aragua ‘invasion,’ but U.S. intel told a different story

Wired reports: As the Trump administration publicly cast Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua (TdA) as a unified terrorist force tied to President Nicolás Maduro and operating inside the United States, hundreds of internal US government records obtained by WIRED tell a far less certain story. Intelligence taskings, law-enforcement bulletins, and drug-task-force assessments show that agencies spent much of 2025 struggling to determine whether TdA even functioned as an organized entity in the US at all—let alone as a coordinated national security…

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The Trump regime rejects America’s foundational belief in human equality

The Trump regime rejects America’s foundational belief in human equality

Osita Nwanevu writes: It’s garnered less attention than the other events of our already wretched new year. But to understand why Renee Nicole Good was killed on Wednesday, why the White House has designs on Greenland, and why the people of Venezuela may soon be governed, in effect, by a junta of oil companies backed by the US military, we should also consider an email Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M, received about his course Contemporary Moral Problems…

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The resistance libs were right. Donald Trump is indeed a fascist

The resistance libs were right. Donald Trump is indeed a fascist

Michelle Goldberg writes: For the last decade there’s been a debate, among people who don’t like Donald Trump, about whether he’s a fascist. The argument that he isn’t often hinges on two things. First, when Trump first came to power, he lacked a street-fighting force like Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, even if he was able to muster a violent rabble on Jan. 6. “Trump didn’t proceed to unleash an army of paramilitary supporters in an American Kristallnacht or take dramatic action…

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Immigration agents terrified of backlash against ICE after Minneapolis shooting

Immigration agents terrified of backlash against ICE after Minneapolis shooting

Ken Klippenstein reports: In the wake of an ICE officer’s killing of Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security is rolling out “Operation Metro Surge,” flooding Minneapolis with hundreds of additional federal agents — only to realize it doesn’t actually have the confidence to match the bravado. While homeland secretary Kristi Noem and others in the administration preen about justifying last week’s shooting and trumpet their war on “domestic terrorism,” DHS is privately divided and hesitant about the latest deployments….

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Thousands of Border Patrol and ICE agents unmasked by DHS whistleblower

Thousands of Border Patrol and ICE agents unmasked by DHS whistleblower

The Daily Beast reports: Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good. The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees. The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to…

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