Things are off to an aggressive start this year. Watching what's unfolding in the streets of the United States is like witnessing a series of grizzly car wrecks, one after the other. A political climate in which one (or two) nations can act with impunity on the world stage and flout the rule of law has been the hallmark of this year. At the same time, this is nothing new. The United States has long disregarded the UN Charter and acted as world police for almost as long as the United Nations has existed; arguably even before it existed. But there's something different about its behavior now. With a national ethos of liberty and freedom that have grown fallow, now bolder, more heedless means of maintaining power need to be enacted. Under the Trump administration, these efforts are employed lazily — like recycling the playbook, practically verbatim, from the unjust and unlawful invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11. History has adjudicated that the war on terror was a disastrous and failed endeavor, yet, this hasn't prevented Trump and his ragtag cronies from dredging up a dusty record from twenty years ago and putting the needle to imperialism's greatest hits. Invading a sovereign nation like Venezuela no longer needs to be justified in 2026. Power no longer needs to pretend that the motive is anything but a selfish one — now they just come out and say it. It's for the oil.
It also sends a very clear message to the rest of the world: try to stop me.
That invasion into Venezuelan airspace took place as the Epstein files loom ominously over president Donald Trump's term. He campaigned on promises to declassify the documents in the files, an echo of previously undelivered promises of draining the swamp. The swamp, it seems, has a deep bottom. Now that it's clear he's implicated in the files, he is fighting tooth and nail to keep the nation focused on other matters. To keep the pressure on, federal agents have been deployed to city streets. In major metropolitan areas throughout the country the national guard is in place to patrol the streets and make them safer. Masked ICE agents have been parading around like the president's personal gestapo, stifling dissent, deporting people to torture camps in El Salvador, or detaining them in a homegrown camp garishly named Alligator Alcatraz. But these ICE agents—having been deputized by the president to step outside their normal jurisdiction—aren't just targeting black and brown people bold enough to criticize foreign policy like in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, they're murdering white women with the same callousness and cold indifference that police have been butchering African Americans with for centuries. In broad daylight and in plain sight, Johnathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good in the face three times at point blank range, proudly marched back to his car, unscathed, and drove off. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, the highest death-rate since 2004.
To keep the fire burning, and the distractions flowing, Trump has been sending out high-profile members of his ghoulish entourage like "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth and deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security Stephen Miller to talk about war, and power and dominance. A small French military contingent has arrived with boots on the ground in Greenland, as countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland and Germany and even the UK marshal their own troops in preparation to respond to Trump's threats of taking Greenland by force. Donnie's second term seems characterized by a deeper darkness than the first. Something sinister is simmering. Except this time things seem more calculated, more brazen, more mendacious. The briefings—led by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, which are truly something to behold, and make Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders seem tame—are an affront to truth and decorum. A seething hostility has replaced whatever thin shreds of integrity might have remained in the office. Journalistic rigor is meet with odious groans and loutish eye-rolls as ad hominem attacks are levied at reporters audacious enough to ask serious questions.
At the moment protests are erupting not just in Minneapolis but in cities all across the United States. The atmosphere is eerily reminiscent to that of George Floyd's killing five years ago on another Minneapolis street. Members of the Black Panther Party have been showing up in cities like Philadelphia, armed with automatic weapons and black berets, using their second amendment rights to stand in defiance against state sanctioned tyranny and human rights abuses. As the administration seeks to assert itself in Latin America to the south, in Greenland to the east, Ukraine further east, in Yemen and Syria and Somalia and Gaza, and at home as it goes to war with its own citizens, one has to wonder whether the country can fight wars on all of those fronts and win.
Somehow I don't think that's where the real war is being fought. It seems the monster is inside the house.
That's where it's been all along.
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”
― The Fire Next Time
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