Chapter 1: What recent actions has Trump taken regarding Greenland?
President Trump told a gathering of world leaders that, for now at least, he won't take Greenland using military force.
Because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force.
That was in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. Trump later said, in fact, he had met with NATO's secretary general and has, quote, a framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland. So a transatlantic crisis that threatened the very existence of NATO is perhaps on pause. But the mere fact that the world was talking about the U.S.
coming to own Greenland in any capacity says a lot about the Trump administration one year in.
And here I am in a place called the White House. It's a beautiful place. Who would have thought?
In his second stint in the presidency, Trump has repeatedly said and done things that were previously assumed to be unacceptable to voters. In a surprise 80-minute appearance at the White House on Tuesday, Trump celebrated several of them.
We cut millions of people off the federal payroll. I don't like doing that, but the good news, I don't feel badly because they're getting private sector jobs and they're getting activists. Can you believe it? Began the process of abolishing the Federal Department of Education and returning education back to the states. And Linda McMahon is doing a fantastic job. Terrible.
halted all refugee admissions to the United States, including from Somalia, which is a terrible, terrible place and other dangerous places.
There have been lawsuits, protests, a record-breaking government shutdown, resignations at top levels of government and the military. But in general, the Trump administration continues undeterred on almost all of its agenda. Consider this.
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Chapter 2: How has the Trump administration changed political norms?
Can you tell me more about what you're thinking about with that?
Yeah, what I was really trying to explore with this piece one year into his second term was sort of the boiling frog theory of American politics. And I should say up front that this theory is apocryphal. It's not actually true, but I think it works for our purposes, which is the way it goes is that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will hop out.
But if you put a frog in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will not know to jump out because the changes will be so incremental and gradual and it will boil to death.
I think you also gave a really good example when you talked about the boiling frog. You walk through the series of events leading up to the seizure of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Can you recap kind of how we got from point A to point B without any of the steps feeling overly dramatic?
Sure. So it really starts back in 2015 when Trump comes to national prominence as a politician in a campaign launch speech. that demonizes immigrants broadly as criminals, rapists, not the best among us, people who are bringing drugs across the border. So he has been getting the country comfortable for a long time with the idea that undocumented immigrants are dangerous and they're a problem.
But going to this term with Venezuela, he uses a fairly obscure wartime powers act, the Alien Enemies Act, to essentially declare that we are at war with Venezuela, specifically a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. And because we are at war with them, we're able to take certain wartime liberties to deport Venezuelans.
And a lot of opinion polls along the way showed that by and large, a lot of these steps did have broad, if not a majority, you know, from time to time, a good chunk of Americans were on board with each of these steps.
Exactly. Now, there might be images they see of what this actually looks like that they kind of cringe at. But yeah, broadly, they support this. Then he begins a series of strikes on boats in the Caribbean and East Pacific Oceans off the coast of Venezuela. And yes, a lot of these boats that are targeted, there are drugs on them.
But it is not, as the president has claimed, you know, a huge mob or cartel boss headed to the United States. In some cases, these are small fishing boats, people who are petty criminals bringing small amounts of cocaine, not to the United States, but to neighboring islands like Trinidad.
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