Donald Trump unveiled a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” in government as he accused his predecessor Joe Biden of “persecuting” Christians during his presidency.
Speaking at two events in Washington for the annual National Prayer Breakfast, Trump announced a string of initiatives, including a presidential commission on religious liberty and a White House “faith office”.
The Roman salute, the Sieg Heil, the YMCA dance. The comparison is so absurd it practically debunks itself.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that Trump’s America – whatever else you might think of the man or his policies – can be mentioned in the same breath as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany needs to get a grip.
Because let’s be clear about what we are talking about here. Fascism, and especially its Nazi incarnation, was an evil the like of which the world had never seen before. Or, thankfully, since.
Nato countries discuss sending troops to Greenland after Trump threats
Nato countries have discussed deploying troops to Greenland in response to Donald Trump threatening to use the US military to seize the Danish island.
Germany was among dozens of European allies understood to have held informal talks over “what Nato troops would do” if the US president followed through on his threats, diplomatic sources told The Telegraph.
Questions were even raised over whether Article 5, the Western military alliance’s mutual defence clause, could be invoked in the event of an American invasion of a fellow Nato member state.
H/T XC
“Environmental justice” appears to be the latest Biden-era initiative on the chopping block as 168 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice and civil rights office were put on administrative leave on Thursday.
The move comes as President Trump works to purge the government of “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Hysteria has erupted here and abroad over President Donald Trump’s threats to level trade tariffs against particular countries.
Both American and foreign critics blasted them variously as either counterproductive and suicidal or unfair, imperialistic, and xenophobic.
Philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote, “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
As President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency get on with their business of trimming waste, fraud, abuse and graft from the federal budget — a business that is vitally important, given the government’s parlous financial outlook — they need to keep this in mind.
Less than two weeks in, DOGE teams poring over federal spending records are discovering all sorts of problems.
Hi @DOGE, I think we found another one.
Open borders NGO “Make The Road NY” has received over $16,000,000 in government grants while actively training illegal aliens how to avoid deportation and lie to ICE agents.
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) February 4, 2025
h/t XC
President Trump has declared that the illegal transit into the U.S. of migrants and drugs, chiefly fentanyl, is a national emergency, and he has targeted Mexico, Canada and China with tariffs to force them to halt the flow.
How fentanyl became part of the tariff equation comes down to the production and smuggling of an opioid that has caused the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The U.S. has long pressured Mexico, by far the main source of fentanyl, to do more to halt the drug’s production and export, and the money-laundering activities that are vital to the drug trade. Canada entered the picture because of the growing presence of Mexican cartels there.
Donald Trump knows exactly what he’s doing with tariffs.
Everyone else is baffled: Why did the president announce heavy taxes on imports from Canada as well as Mexico and China?
Europe is still in denial
If you want to know how to respond to Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, just think back to what happened between the EU and the UK after the Brexit referendum. The EU thought it could pressurise the UK either into reversing Brexit or accepting a bad deal. The EU, as the larger power, believed it had a stronger position — and the media concurred.
But the EU had a big trade surplus against the UK, and so had more to lose from a trade war. And this is how it played out. The single biggest victim of Brexit was not the UK economy, but German industry. Germany’s spectacular decline started in 2018, kicked off by Brexit and followed by a string of supply shocks including the pandemic and then Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump’s tariffs will be next. The overarching lesson here is that if you are the surplus country, no matter how large you are, you should not engage in trade warfare.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte agreed with US President Donald Trump regarding Greenland, particularly on the issue of defense, Bild reports.
“When it comes to defense in the Arctic, Trump is right. What I think is very good is that the Prime Minister of Denmark immediately began negotiations with President Trump. Essentially, it was about the high relevance of defense in the far north,” he said.
H/T Mauser
After Trump slapped tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, economists of Left and Right called him a lunatic: protectionism surely means higher prices, disrupted supply chains, trade war. Super triple bad!
Yet philosophically it makes sense, and the inability of journalists to see the President’s point of view betrays how far free trade has become a religion – a faith, like any other, that’s prone to myth and hypocrisy.
Love him or hate him, Trump’s political comeback and his early executive actions make him an historic figure.
Ever since Election Day 2024, various supporters and conservative journalists have been voicing the prediction that President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office will be “the greatest ever.” Former aide Steve Bannon has prophesied for months that Trump’s start will be “the most aggressive” rollout since FDR’s first presidential term in March 1933. The New York Post went even further on Inauguration Eve. With visions of a new Camelot, the newspaper headlined that Trump’s second term promises to inaugurate “a golden age in the U.S.” As if on cue, President Trump used the same phrase in his inaugural address on January 20.
Come April 30, Donald Trump — and countless allies — will compare his opening salvo favorably with the achievements of FDR and LBJ.
A new strategy: more land for more peace.
President Donald Trump hasn’t just shifted the Overton Window, the zone of what’s understood to be possible in politics; he’s blown it wide open. It’s now the Overton Vista. As the close Trump ally Marc Andreessen declared on January 25, “The last week has totally reset my conception of what’s possible.” Coming from a tech bro steeped in Schumpeterian disruption, that’s saying something.
Bank on it: If the conventional wisdom thinks one thing, Trump thinks something else. Case in point: Gaza. In the wake of 15 months of carnage, the familiar assumption is that there will be some sort of “peace process,” as diplomats shuttle back and forth, securing a minimally worded agreement, to which the combatants are minimally adhered. Then comes the insertion of United Nations peacekeepers, and an international consortium of foreign-aiders, contractors, and perhaps even nation-builders.
Trump dropped a bombshell.
Was anyone in Israel paying attention?
I noticed some coverage, but then the story dissolved out of sight (excepting Arutz Sheva). For good reason, such as…ain’t never gonna happen.
Not while Israel is moving in the opposite direction…and not while some Israelis stick to fantasies.
So it was only about a week ago when Trump offered Gazans a plan, which is to forget Gaza, vacate the place, for greener pastures. Ditto Palestinian Arabs in general.
Never in living memory — and probably not since the most tempestuous times of the Second World War when the world was dominated by such extraordinary personalities as Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, and in their way, Stalin and Hitler — has anyone had such an impact on the ambience of international relations and the prevailing trends in public policy as U.S. President Donald Trump has had, at time of writing, only 10 days into his second term. His appearance by video conference last week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the dismal little Swiss town of Davos was an astonishing change from his appearance there five years ago. At that time, the only ripple of applause that he received was when he said that the United States would participate in the United Nations tree-planting program. The Euro-federalist elites looked upon him then, in emulation of the shellshocked bipartisan Washington political establishment, as a dangerous mountebank, an interloper, a dreadful meteor briefly altering the pink socialistic skies of an ”ever-closer Europe,” especially when viewed from one of the Spartan hotels of Davos.
