Greenland & ICEland
Donald Trump dismantles the Western world order, foreign leaders unite against the US, and chaos continues to erupt in US streets.
💰 On this day in 2010, the robed reactionaries on the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as citizens with regard to political spending, effectively allowing unlimited, unregulated cash flow into American politics. Everything’s been just dandy ever since!
Morning, folks. Sorry, it’s not a good one… Peter here, haunted by the dreadful feeling it’s never been more Joever. This will be a dark ‘First Draft,’ my friends. I’m warning y’all in advance. Ignoring reality doesn’t make it any less real, however.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ US President Donald Trump muses that NATO, not Russia and China, represents America’s greatest geopolitical threat, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron rally the West against a rogue superpower, ICE violence continues apace, and Lindsey “Hooligan” Halligan is humiliated in court once again.
RIP NATO
“To me, a town looks better when you have military people [on the streets].”
That was but one of the many, many 5-alarm fire-worthy statements the former leader of the free world slurred before a packed scrum of reporters at a White House press briefing yesterday afternoon, mere hours after he terminated the Western world order.
I mean that quite literally.
“So at what point are we going to realize the enemy is within 🤬,” read a social media post promoted by Donald Trump, “China and Russia are the boogeymen when the real threat is… NATO…”
Regardless of whatever intention the commander in chief may have had, regardless of how earnestly he believes what he reposted, the planet responded appropriately. Western leaders, oh-so conveniently gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum, all but excommunicated the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance that lasted nearly eight decades.
“I will talk today about the breaking of the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraint,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told the crowd of dignitaries.
“Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
“Let me be direct,” he pronounced, “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
How does it feel, dear reader, to know we are the baddies? How does it feel to swallow the fact that we are now, undeniably, no better than the most brutish, nihilistic bullies on the world stage? How do you reckon with the fact that Russia, still in the midst of an unprovoked, colonialist war against Ukraine, is backing our chief executive’s claim on Greenland?
In the event you’re indecisive, please allow me to share how the rest of the country is reacting…