Just Two Weeks In

Are you happy with 2026, now that the first month is almost half over? Me neither.

It should come as no surprise that as soon as the attack stopped in Venezuela, so did mention of Venezuelan drugs. Instead, talk turned to oil and how it is effectively our, which is to say Trump’s, oil now. There’s also silence about the plight of the people of that country, and except for Maduro and his wife, the place is being run by the same people.

Please don’t get me wrong. There can be no doubt that Nicolas Maduro is a very bad man and he should be tried, convicted, and punished for his crimes. There can also be no doubt that right and wrong have never entered into Donald Trump’s thinking on any subject ever. His interests are: himself, money (preferably the ill-gotten kind), and the adulation of Trump from thuggish men and artificially enhanced women. End of list.

We are raised to believe that what sets the United States apart is that it’s a country of laws, not of men. Certainly not a country of a lout and his toadies (many formerly characters on a cable network devoted to praising him) and his personal desire for revenge.

It doesn’t take much to set him off. After campaigning for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, out of envy of Barack Obama who admittedly had done nothing except get elected to support his receiving the award in 2009, the 2025 prize was given to Maria Corina Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy” according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She, knowing Trump’s deserved reputation for endless self-regard, phoned him and told him that he deserved the prize.

But she went to Oslo (though not in time to accept the award; her daughter did that for her). That was too much for Trump, who was of the view that she should have refused the award, saying it belonged to Trump instead.

“Two people close to the White House said the president’s lack of interest in boosting Machado, despite her recent efforts to flatter Trump, stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award the president has openly coveted,” reported The Washington Post. “Although Machado ultimately said she was dedicating the award to Trump, her acceptance of the prize was an ‘ultimate sin,’ said one of the people.

“‘If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,’ this person said.”

This reminds me of an event attributed to Caligula. The insane Roman emperor had fallen ill, but he recovered. One imperial official who thought he knew how to play the emperor gushed that he had prayed to the gods that Caligula recover, saying that he would gladly give his own life to achieve that end. Caligula had the man taken away and executed because the man had made a promise to the gods and a promise is a promise.

Trump didn’t go that far, at least not yet, but he did freeze her out of involvement in Venezuela’s future, choosing instead the existing Marxist vice president of the country.

It didn’t take long for it to become clear that the whole mess was Trump seizing Venezuela’s oil and little or nothing else. Perhaps he was showing his friendly rival Vladimir Putin that he is better at taking over a smaller, weaker neighboring country than Putin is.

Two days later, the toy action figure who by decree of the Orangutan Throne has come to call himself the “secretary of war” — there is no such position or department, but everybody thought it was probably best just to humor him and the president — announced an attack on U.S. Senator Mark Kelly because of a video in which he participated which advised American service members to obey the law. History suggests that both G.I. Joe “Pete” Hegseth and the president himself get the fantods whenever anyone mentions an obligation to obey the law. When the video was released, Hegseth announced that he would seek to court martial Kelly, who having retired as a naval captain remains to some extent under the military’s thumb.

(The highly decorated Kelly served as a naval aviator, flying dozens of combat missions in the Desert Storm hostilities, then went on to fly four space shuttle missions. He is married to former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot and nearly killed by one Jared Lee Loughner in 2011. Hegseth, meanwhile, was in the National Guard off and on for a number of years, finally being promoted to major on his way out and receiving a number of relatively minor participation medals. He was banned from the inauguration of Joe Biden, having been deemed an insider threat, which he says led him to resign. He may also have won drinking contests at the Officers Club. He’s on his third wife, and were anything to threaten her he would probably be the prime suspect. In short, he’s Trump’s kind of guy. He is festooned with tattoos, and in order to get confirmed even by a Republican majority he had to promise to stop drinking. He denied allegations of mistreating women.)

On January 5 Hegseth released a statement accusing Kelly of undermining military discipline and formally censured him, reduced his grade, and reduced his retirement pay.

Perhaps David Frum put it best:

“Translation: ‘Our lawyers advise that we will humiliatingly lose any attempted court martial based upon our ridiculous claims, so I'm instead going to test whether I can reduce a retired naval officer's pension by administrative action to punish him for hurting my feelings.’” Kelly has announced he will sue. Expect both Trump and Hegseth to label Kelly a “domestic terrorist,” a term of Trumpian art usually meaning someone Trump doesn’t like.

Though he first brought it up ages ago, since his seizure of Venezuela such as it was he has been making wild remarks about the U.S. seizing Greenland. He’s made all kinds of ridiculous claims; my favorite is that “we don't want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don't take Greenland, you're going to have Russia or China as your next door neighbor.” It has been widely noted that Greenland is more than 3000 miles from Russia, while Alaska is 55 miles from Russia. Trump has also said that Denmark can either hand over the world’s largest island or he, Trump, will take it by force. Trump seems desperate to lose every ally the U.S. has by the time he leaves office. His desire for war with Denmark is unpopular with American citizens as well, with only 17 percent thinking it a good idea.

His bellicose gibbering was interrupted a week ago by news that an “ICE agent” shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis. Why? Trump offered an answer, after peddling the falsehood that the woman had run over the “ICE agent.”

“It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement,” Trump said. “The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement.” Perhaps Trump hopes to establish the precedent that if someone fails to proffer you the respect you believe you deserve, you may kill that person.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, former South Dakota governor and television advertising model Kristi Noem, appeared almost immediately after the shooting. She announced that the ICE agent was right in killing the woman. She made the announcement from beneath a cowboy hat the diameter of a manhole cover. The image was so embarrassing that it was thought she had better repeat her statement later wearing a baseball cap.

Videos made of the incident showed that the “ICE agent,” identified as Jonathan Ross, was making a cellular telephone video with one hand while drawing his pistol and firing with the other. They also show that the first shot didn’t come until after the front of the car was past him. As Trump suggested, it seems she was shot for angering one of his brownshirts. Oh, and Ross shouted obscenities at the woman he had just killed as the car rolled away, her body behind the wheel.

In the intervening week, dozens of videos have shown that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is entirely out of control, little more than a heavily armed, masked gang of thugs. They beat people on the street. They “disappear” American citizens. They have been told by Trump’s version of Joseph Goebbels, Stephen Miller, and by Vice President “J.D. Vance” (born James Donald Bowman, but James David Hamel and James David Aikens are other names he has used, and he more resembles Herman Goering) that they have total immunity and are free to do whatever they want.

Something that could be revealing — we’ll know depending on how far the administration goes in hiding the information — is how many of the disguised ICE thugs are people pardoned by Trump for the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee made inquiry of Attorney General Pam Bondi and Noem in a letter on Monday that begins, “How many pardoned January 6^th^ insurrectionists have been hired by your respective departments?” (Maybe they should ask if Jared Lee Loughner was pardoned by Trump and hired by ICE as well.)

I do not think we’ve heard the end of this, nor should we have.

As a backdrop to it all, the people of Iran have wearied of fundamentalist Islamic rule. We’ve seen it happen before, and U.S. policy has been to stab the freedom-seeking Iranians in the back. Obama did it in hope of obtaining or preserving a nuclear treaty with the mullahs that in any case would not even have made good toilet paper.

But now it seems as if it might stick, no thanks to the West. When it became clear that the Iranian people were not giving up, and the beards began mowing down the protesters, Trump announced that if the mullahs killed protesters he’d make them sorry they had. That bullet had already been fired, and Trump did nothing. Perhaps the sorrow he anticipated was bitter tears when the ayatollahs learned they had disappointed Trump. It was the standard Trump play: lurking close enough to claim credit for anything good that happens while staying sufficiently distant to avoid, in his mind, any of the blame.

As of this morning, the Islamic dictator had been responsible for the gunning down of between thousands and tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. Trump at first said that he wanted to negotiate with the Iranian mullahs. This was apparently at the behest of Vice President What’s-his-name who was in turn prompted by Tucker Carlson, responsible for the vice president getting his job and apparently his spiritual leader. Trump, the vice president said, could strike a nuclear deal with Iran. No, I’m not making that up. But when it came out that Iran was killing thousands of protesters, the not-entirely-brain-dead Trump said no thanks.

(It’s worth noting that during all of this, Secretary of State March Rubio, the only sane man in the room, has kept Trump from looking too bad. His stock is rising as Vance’s, if that’s his name, has been plummeting.)

Trump has told the demonstrators to keep at it (the ones in Iran, not the ones in the U.S.), that help is on the way, and so on. It should be remembered, though, that the U.S. has no military assets in the region and that they are at least a week away, if Trump intends more than a firecracker response. This week there was word that Trump’s bag man Steve Witkoff has entered the picture. That is never a good sign, except maybe for Trump and Witkoff and whatever scheme they’re working.

Because the news had been so slow in this bright new year, over the weekend it came out that the Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell (no relation), was under criminal investigation for . . . something. As Stalin famously said, show me the man and I’ll find you the crime, and Trump, or at least his bedraggled groupie Jeanine Pirro, likes the sound of that.

I should mention that I have had a slight encounter with Pirro, back when she was the district attorney of Westchester County, New York, in the early 1990s. A friend had mentioned to me that it seemed there was something hinky going on in a murder trial, a case of a baby having been shaken to death. Jeanine, I was told, had shown up at the scene and first thing granted full transactional immunity to the baby’s mother, which was odd. Then her office had set about the task of pinning it on the mother’s boyfriend, who may or may not have done it.

The pressure for a conviction was high. The tall, attractive assistant district attorney would get up — as a friend put it, “exculpatory evidence fluttering down from every fold in her dress” — and frequently be admonished by the judge for some wrongdoing. The defense lawyer, who resembled a cross between Danny DeVito and Joe Peschi, suffered the lawyer’s nightmare of realizing that his client might actually be innocent. At one point, the judge ordered the defense lawyer to take off his belt, and placed it in evidence. It was that kind of trial. I made a habit of being in the courtroom, because it seemed as if there might be a story there. (But at the end, playing the odds, the defendant copped to second-degree manslaughter. So no story.)

During a lunch break, as I sat in the courtroom Jeanine sidled up and sat next to me. “Are you someone I should know?” she asked. I had during the trial learned all I really cared to know about the Westchester District Attorney. “I don’t think so, no,” I replied. She harrumphed and went away. That was the end of my brief contact with her, and I’m confident I’m a better man for it.

Pirro is a good politician, sort of, having overcome her husband, Al Pirro, being sent to the federal can for tax evasion and generally known as a bad man (so of course Trump pardoned him in the closing moments of Trump’s first term), and a scandal involving her efforts to get Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner, to bug Al’s boat in hope of catching that rascally Al cheating on her. But their conversation was taped by the Bronx District Attorney’s office, which was already investigating Kerik. Jeanine was running for New York attorney general when the story blew up. She was not elected attorney general — Andrew Cuomo was instead. Kerik was ultimately convicted of something apparently unrelated, accepting tens of thousands of dollars from a mob-connected outfit in New Jersey. And later, Trump pardoned him, too. He served three years of a four-year sentence. Nice folks, huh?

Well, now Jeanine Pirro is Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and she has decided to go after Jerome Powell, or more likely was told to go after him, in that Powell did his job with some integrity, and integrity triggers all of Trump’s allergies.

The financial, regulatory, and generally honest world reacted with horror to the news. Even the Trump suckup Fox Business Channel criticized it. Powell, meanwhile, hired a law firm famous for baring its teeth in going after the accusers.

On top of it all, Powell’s term as Fed chairman ends in May, and it is customary though not required for the chairman to resign from the Fed itself at the end of his term. But Powell, and the Fed itself, are livid at an apparent attempt to monkey with a semi-autonomous agency. So Powell is likely to stay on — and be elected chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets the interest rates that have been Trump’s complaint with Powell. It’s all very funny.

And poor Jeanine, formerly the brassy loudmouth on the left end on “The Five” on Fox Trump Channel, is the one who will get the blame, because it was her office that subpoenaed the Fed over some ridiculous allegation that no one was making.

During all of this, Trump’s political fortunes continue to fall. A large number of Republican members of Congress have decided that they’d like new jobs beginning next year and are retiring. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a small man in every respect, is beginning to wonder if hitching his wagon to Trump was the good idea he thought it was. He won’t be speaker a year from now.

Indeed, it’s looking more and more likely that John Thune won’t be Senate majority leader next year, either.

But that’s 2027. We’re just beginning 2026, and the events above aren’t even all that happened in its first two weeks.

Meaning that this new year has 50 weeks left. Lord help us. Really.