Letters from an American - January 15, 2026

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

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January 15th, 2026. You know what Americans aren't talking about very much today after Trump's threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota? They aren't talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein Files. Despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the the release of those files in full no later than December 19th. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme. Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, has threatened to hold former President Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein.

But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony. They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law,

including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, there is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics. The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for immigration and customs enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago, and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Knoem,

all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife, domestic terrorists. As G. Eliot Morris noted today in strength and numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them. by a margin of about 20 points. There's a gap of about eight points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don't. Morris writes,

Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him, negative six on immigration and negative 10 on deportations, per my tracking, into a complete show in the Court of Public Opinion. Although immigration had been one of Trump's strongest positions, Now only 20 to 30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump's immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Trenda Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Del Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Trenda Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren to Aragua is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration, U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of goods murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from goods murder and appear to justify ICE's violence. Today, Minnesota Governor Tim Walls asked Minnesotans to bear witness. You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flashbang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear. Nicholas Bogle Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamid Aliazis of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn't know what happened, saying, it's not like the agents are talking to us. This morning, Trump's social media account posted, if the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law

and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the patriots of ICE who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the Insurrection Act, which many presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great state. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President DJT.

Legal analyst Asha Rangappa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posse Cometatus Act to permit troops to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then, she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws. Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly. Governor Tim Walz has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are, he wrote on social media.

Walls also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops. I know this is scary, he wrote. We can. We must speak out. loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That's what he wants. The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers

beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and airbags detonated by a flashbang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent.

This shouldn't have happened, the mother told Kilot Fitzger. Gerald of Fox 9 in Minneapolis. We were just trying to go home. The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt told reporters today that Trump's threat to invoke the Insurrection Act spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country. elected officials who are using their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers, who are encouraging left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations. Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam told reporters today that federal agents will ask Americans to validate their identity

by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone federal agents, alleged has committed a crime. As CNN's Kennedy Iyer reported, today CNN legal analyst Ellie Honig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show proof of citizenship without some other basis to make a stop.

Yesterday, in an interview with Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the U.S. that the party of a president who wins an election then loses seats in the midterms and suggested he didn't want to be in that position. It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms, Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election. In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions in the United States during his presidency. He said, polls showing public,

popular opposition to his threat to take Greenland were fake. He said he doesn't care that even Senate Republicans object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation's financial system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said, again, and falsely, that the economy was the strongest in history. A lot of times you can't convince a voter, he said, you have to just do what's right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well. One of the other things Trump's statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S.

has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields. There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, told Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller of Semaphore, that is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to. The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing strain of Trump's poor poll numbers,

popular anger over ice, fury over threats against Greenland, Republican pushback over the investigation, of Powell and the December 23rd, 2025 decision of the Supreme Court, suggesting Trump could not use federalized National Guard troops to enforce his power on Democrat-dominated state governments. That strain is showing in the administration's raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natinson. The FBI executed a search warrant at Natanson's home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor, they say, has illegally retained classified documents. But Nathanson is a leading journalist covering the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees who might give her information about the

workings of the administration. The agent seized her phone, two laptops, one personal and one issued by the Washington Post, and a Garman watch. The first amendment, to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, make searches of reporters' homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bruce D. Brown, called the search of Natinson's home a tremendous escalation in the administration's intrusions into the independence of the press. The strain also showed in Trump's fury on Tuesday.

When a worker at a Ford plant, Trump was torn. as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base, shouted, pedophile protector at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, fuck you, you.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.