Trump's Corruption: $1.4 Billion

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

NYT editorial:

A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.

A hotel in Oman. An office tower in western India. A golf course on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. These are a few of the more than 20 overseas projects the Trump Organization is pursuing, often requiring cooperation with foreign governments. These deals have made millions for the Trumps, according to Reuters. And the administration has sometimes treated those same governments favorably. One example: The administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam about a month after a Trump Organization project broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi. Vietnamese officials ignored their own laws to fast-track the project.

Amazon paid far more for the rights to “Melania” than the next highest bidder — and far more than the company has previously paid for similar projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chairman and one of the world’s richest people, has many reasons to curry favor with the administration, including antitrust regulation, Amazon’s defense contracts and his space company’s federal contracts.

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Mr. Trump’s sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. One that has become public: A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm — two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips.

Spot the Looney

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.  Serious people are now raising serious questions about his sanity.

Amelia Nierenberg at NYT:

President Trump ratcheted up his feud with European leaders on Tuesday, firing off a series of mocking social media posts that reinforced his designs on Greenland, as he risked damaging the longstanding trans-Atlantic diplomatic alignment beyond repair.

A day before he was scheduled to join allies at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Trump insisted that the United States must have Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory, repeating a persistent demand that has shaken the foundations of the NATO alliance. “There can be no going back,” he wrote in one of a series of posts on his Truth Social platform.

In another post, he shared messages from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said, “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.” A senior French official confirmed that the messages were authentic.

The tensions over Greenland threatened to dominate the meeting in Davos. Speaking there later Tuesday morning, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, suggested that the European Union would take steps to bolster its security in light of the crisis and would be looking at “how to strengthen our security partnerships with partners such as the U.K., Canada, Norway, Iceland and others.” She did not offer details.

Ms. von der Leyen also argued that Europe needed to change to adapt to a more hostile era, saying, “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order.”

Faced with Mr. Trump’s threats, including a warning that he will impose new tariffs on nations that oppose his territorial demands, European leaders have scrambled to formulate a response and were expected to gather in Brussels this week to come up with a way to answer Mr. Trump’s provocations.

Mr. Macron, who was scheduled to speak at Davos on Tuesday afternoon, appeared to be trying to appeal to Mr. Trump in person, inviting him to dinner in Paris on Thursday, according to the messages Mr. Trump shared online. Mr. Macron offered to set up a meeting there of leaders of the Group of 7 countries — with additional invitations to the Russians, Ukrainians, Danes and Syrians. It was not immediately known whether Mr. Trump responded to Mr. Macron’s messages.

Mr. Trump also shared a message from Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, in which Mr. Rutte said he was “committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.” An official at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the exchange was authentic.

Mr. Trump said that he had spoken with Mr. Rutte and reiterated his claims that American control of Greenland was essential for the security of the United States and of the world.

The Madness of King Donald

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.  Serious people are now raising serious questions about his sanity.

NEW: @potus letter to @jonasgahrstore links @NobelPrize to Greenland, reiterates threats, and is forwarded by the NSC staff to multiple European ambassadors in Washington. I obtained the text from multiple officials:

Dear Ambassador:

President Trump has asked that the…

— Nick Schifrin (@nickschifrin) January 19, 2026

Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic:

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they fe

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova at CNN:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been invited to join US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” the committee that will oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, his spokesman said on Monday.

Speaking to reporters during a regular media briefing, Dmitry Peskov said: “President Putin also received through diplomatic channels an invitation to join this Board of Peace.”

He said the Kremlin is now reviewing the invitation and “hoping to get more details from the US side.”

CNN has asked the White House for a comment.

Later on Monday, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said President Alexander Lukashenko also received an invitation to join the board.

The ministry’s press service said Minsk “highly appreciates that the American side sees Belarus – and this is clearly stated in the text of the address – as a country ready to take on the noble responsibility of building a lasting peace and leading by example, investing in a secure and prosperous future for future generations.”

Lukashenko is Putin’s closest ally and has been described as Europe’s last dictator.

Thermostatic Party Identification

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.   Events could change things abruptly, but the early signs are favorable for Democrats in the 2026 midterms.

 Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

The political landscape in the U.S. changed greatly in the first year of Trump’s second term as president. A record-high percentage of U.S. adults said they identify with neither major party, and a shift in independents’ political leanings caused the Republican Party advantage that aided Trump’s reelection to dissipate almost as soon as he took office. Over the course of the year, the Democratic Party regained and expanded its advantage in party leanings, a trend that was borne out in the party’s strong performance in 2025 special elections compared to similar races in the more Republican-favorable 2024 election cycle.

Importantly, these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically.

Rather, as in 2022 through 2024, these recent political shifts appear to be a consequence of one party’s association with an unpopular incumbent president (the Democrats with Biden and now Republicans with Trump). Negative evaluations of the president’s performance appear to persuade a subset of Americans, primarily political independents who have weaker attachments to either party, to side with the opposition party.

This dynamic has led to frequent changes in the party power structure in Washington in recent federal election cycles, with the incumbent president’s party losing control of the presidency or one house of Congress in each of the past six presidential or midterm elections.

And the long-term future does not look bright for the GOP: 

GOP Woes

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.   The early signs in the 2026 midterms do not favor Republicans.

 Ariel Edwards-Levy, Jennifer Agiesta, and Edward Wu at CNN:

Public opinion on nearly every aspect of President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House is negative, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, with a majority of Americans saying Trump is focused on the wrong priorities and doing too little to address cost of living.

A majority, 58%, calls the first year of Trump’s term a failure.

There’s hardly any good news in the poll for Trump or the Republican Party entering a critical midterm year, with the president’s handling of the economy looming as the defining issue in key House and Senate races.

Asked to choose the country’s top issue, Americans pick the economy by a nearly two-to-one margin over any other topic. The poll suggests Trump is struggling to prove that he’s addressing it. And it finds broad concerns over Trump’s use of presidential power and his efforts to put his stamp on American culture.

Cook changes 18 House ratings, all in favor of Democrats, including four districts in New York. https://t.co/yb4pRTK73L pic.twitter.com/dUFwI4pi0Z

— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) January 15, 2026

Trump: "We Shouldn't Even Have an Election"

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

James Oliphant reports on a Reuters interview with Trump:

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.”

 Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim at NYT:

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina found President Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 “unnerving.” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia described Mr. Trump’s efforts to get his state’s lawmakers to intervene a “fruitless exercise.” David Ralston, a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, called the plan to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states he had lost “the craziest thing I’ve heard.”

Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by The New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president’s efforts to overturn an American presidential election. The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election.

He has also said he wanted to “lead a movement” to ban voting machines and mail-in ballots in time for the midterm elections this year.

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Senator Graham, the veteran South Carolina lawmaker, recently called Mr. Trump “the greatest president of all time.” But his 2022 testimony came at a time when Mr. Trump’s political future was uncertain. At that time, Mr. Graham expressed exasperation over the president’s baseless 2020 election fraud claims, telling the grand jurors, “I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short,” and that “if you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”

Taking Greenland Would Be Unpopular

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Avery Lotz at Axios:

Americans are divided on the merits of President Trump's recent foreign incursions and threats and remain especially skeptical of acquiring Greenland, new polling has found.

The big picture: While the U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has gained support in its aftermath, Trump's Greenland gambit remains deeply unpopular, underscoring the political riskiness of a key piece of his so-called "Donroe Doctrine."

By the numbers: A plurality of Americans say Trump's use of military force against Venezuela was not justified, but a growing share back it, including a majority of Republicans, per polling from The Economist and YouGov.Meanwhile, 17% of U.S. adults said they approve of the president's push to acquire Greenland, according to a Reuters-Ipsos survey conducted between Jan. 12-13. Two out of five Republicans say they support doing so.

However, only 4% of those surveyed — and 8% of Republicans — said using military force to take Greenland is a good idea, per the Reuters-Ipsos poll.

A separate poll released by the Economist-YouGov found broad opposition to seizing ownership of Greenland, either by force or monetary incentives.Just 8% of U.S. adults — and 18% of Republicans — backed taking control of the self-governing territory of longtime U.S. ally Denmark by force.

Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy at CNN:

Three-quarters of Americans say they oppose the United States attempting to take control of Greenland, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, indicating that President Donald Trump’s push to expand America’s territory faces stiff headwinds with the public.

The survey finds just 25% of Americans favor the US attempting to take control of the Danish territory. Even the president’s partisans are about evenly divided, with 50% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying they support it and 50% opposed. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are deeply against the move, with 94% opposed overall, including 80% who say they strongly oppose it. About 8 in 10 independents who don’t lean toward either party are also opposed.

Trump said Wednesday on his social media website Truth Social that “anything less” than US control of Greenland is “unacceptable.” The message came ahead of a meeting at the White House between Danish officials, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that appeared to do little to bring the two sides any closer to an agreement.