This Week and Next: Trump Is Going To Kill America.
A week that was extraordinary and off the rails. Midterms are too far off to matter. The man needs to be removed. How? Doesn't matter. He has to go.
This week’s chaos in Minnesota—the DOJ investigating Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey, Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, ICE officers shooting a woman in the face—pales in comparison to what looks like the prelude to World War Three.
On Saturday, the President announced via social media that he would impose escalating tariffs on eight NATO allies until they surrender Greenland, a territory whose people—85% of whom oppose joining America—have begged him to leave alone. The tariffs target Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland, starting at 10% in February and rising to 25% by June. The pretext? That these allies participated in Arctic military exercises to which the United States was invited. The actual reason? A 79-year-old man in apparent cognitive decline, exhibiting the textbook narcissistic inability to tolerate rejection, has confused his personal fixations with national security.
And this is merely Saturday’s entry in what has been, even by Trump’s degraded standards, an astonishing week. We are barely seventeen days into January, and the president has already invaded Venezuela, accepted someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize, declared himself acting president of a foreign country, announced he’s seizing its oil, threatened military force against Denmark, launched a trade war against eight NATO allies, and publicly complained that Norway should be embarrassed for not giving him eight separate Nobel prizes—one for each war he claims to have ended.
The Nobel spectacle alone warrants serious questions about his mental state. On Thursday, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado—who won the 2025 prize for her democracy work—arrived at the White House bearing the gift Trump has long coveted: her medal, framed with an inscription praising his “principled and decisive action.” Trump accepted it with evident delight, apparently unable to distinguish between earning an honor and simply taking one.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee responded with barely concealed horror: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.” Norwegian lawmakers called the transfer “unbelievably embarrassing,” “pathetic,” and “disrespectful.” One observed that Trump’s acceptance “says something about him as a type: a classic scapegoat who will adorn himself with other people’s awards.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s social media announcement on Greenland featured his trademark all-caps bombast about “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” and the claim that Denmark protects Greenland with “two dogsleds.” This from a man who mocked a NATO ally whose territory he is treaty-bound to defend, not menace.
We have now reached the point where NATO allies discuss rules of engagement against the United States. Major General Soren Andersen, Denmark’s Joint Arctic Commander, confirmed that Danish soldiers are legally obligated to fight back if American troops attack. That a senior military official of a 75-year ally feels compelled to say this publicly tells you everything about where Trump has led us.
There is something profoundly wrong with this man. The slurred speech, the trailing sentences that collapse into incoherence, the confusion of names and dates, the 3 a.m. social media tirades, the fixation on perceived slights, the inability to stay on topic before veering into grievance—these are not quirks. They are symptoms.
We have seen this tariff movie before. Trump’s trade war with China cost American farmers the $12 billion Chinese soybean market—permanently. Brazil filled the void while American taxpayers spent over $30 billion bailing out the farmers Trump’s policies destroyed. The trade deficit he promised to fix actually increased. Now he wants to repeat this catastrophe with Europe, punishing blue states that depend on European trade while setting up another round of bailouts funded by the coastal taxpayers he despises.
The legal exposure is comprehensive and Trump knows it. His entire tariff regime rests on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, a statute designed for genuine foreign crises—not for punishing allies who decline real estate offers. Lower courts have already ruled that Trump exceeded his authority, and the Supreme Court appears poised to agree. At oral argument in November, the skepticism was bipartisan. Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch warned that “Congress, as a practical matter, can’t get this power back once it’s handed it over.” Chief Justice John Roberts reminded the administration’s lawyer that imposing tariffs “has always been the core power of Congress.” Georgetown law professor Greg Shaffer predicts the Court will rule that “IEEPA does not provide the ability for the Trump administration to adopt the tariffs.” If they do, the Department of Justice has already conceded that refunds will be owed on all duties collected under the statute—potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. Tariffs brought in $195 billion in fiscal 2025 alone. Companies like Costco have already filed lawsuits. A ruling could come any day, and Trump himself has admitted, in a characteristically unhinged social media post, that a loss would mean “WE’RE SCREWED!”
The harm radiates outward: to European allies wondering if America can be trusted, to consumers who will pay higher prices, to farmers facing the loss of another market, to taxpayers who will fund another bailout, to NATO itself. European leaders have warned that any military action against Greenland could end the alliance.
The man is a convicted felon, an adjudicated sexual predator, a fraud who built his fortune on bankruptcy and stiffing contractors. He is failing at everything except enriching himself, his family, and his class. The tax cuts for the wealthy remain. The deregulation proceeds. The Kushner investment fund grows fat on Saudi money. The grift continues while the rest of us absorb the consequences.
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called Trump’s behavior that of a “gangster” and labeled Greenland a “weapon of mass distraction” from Ukraine, where actual territorial aggression requires Western attention. While Putin wages real war, America’s president tries to steal an island from an ally.
Greenland’s prime minister stated it plainly: “If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO.” That sentence will be quoted for decades as the moment American leadership of the Western alliance cracked.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists for moments like this. The cabinet could act. They won’t—not because they fear Trump, but because they are Trump. He has assembled a government of grifters, sycophants, and ideologues who see in his chaos not a crisis to be managed but an opportunity to be exploited. They are not hostages to his instability; they are its beneficiaries. Every norm he shatters, every institution he weakens, every distraction he manufactures creates space for them to pursue their own agendas—the dismantling of the regulatory state, the enrichment of donors, the consolidation of power. They will not invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment because they do not want to. The cruelty, the corruption, the cognitive decline—none of it troubles them, because they are getting what they came for.
And so we watch and wait, hoping institutions hold, hoping courts intervene, hoping something stops this before it becomes irreversible.
The Danes have a word for what Trump is doing: røveri. It means robbery.
2026 All Rights Reserved, Josh Powell and The Powell House Press
josh@thepowellhousepress.com