Letters from an American - January 19,2026

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

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Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is unable to read the letter today, so I will be reading it in her place. January 19, 2025. Late last night, Nick Schiffrin of PBS News Hour posted on social media that the staff of the U.S. National Security Council had sent to European ambassadors in Washington a message that President Donald J. Trump had already sent to Prime Minister Eunice Garshtur of Norway. The message read, Dear Eunice, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will

always be predominant, but now can think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a right of ownership anyway? There are no written documents. It's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since it's founding, and now NATO should do something for the United States. The world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland. Thank you. President DJT. Faisal Islam of the BBC

voiced the incredulity rippling across social media in the wake of Schifrin's post, writing, even by the standards of the past week, like others, I struggled to comprehend how the below letter

on Greenland, Nobel, might be real, although it appears to come from the account of a respected PBS journalist. This is what what I meant by beyond precedent, parody, and reality. Later, Islam confirmed on live TV that the letter was real, and posted on X, Incredible. The story is actually not a parody.

International Affairs journalist Ann Applebaum noted in the Atlantic the childish grammar in the message and pointed out, again, that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many written documents established Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia's increasing threat. This note, she writes, should be the last straw. It proves that 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.

Applebaum implored Republicans in Congress to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. They owe it to the American people, she writes, and to the world. Former President Dick Cheney's doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed, this letter and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness. Today, three top American Catholic Cardinals, Blaise Supich of Chicago, Robert McGillroy of Washington, D.C.,

and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast, suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna del Orto of the Associated Press reported that the Cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow Cardinals expressed alarm about the administration's actions. Supich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed is saying

might makes right. That's a troublesome development. There's the rule of law that should be followed. We are watching one of the wildest things a nation state has ever done, journalist Garrett Graf wrote, A superpower is dying by suicide because the Republican Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the mad king. This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever. In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of structural. and painstaking negotiations from the world's best diplomats to build.

Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars. They worked out rules to defend peoples and nations from the aggressions of neighboring countries and tried to guarantee that global trade, fostered by freedom of the seas, would create a rising standard of living that would weaken the ability of demagogues to create loyal followings. In August 1941, four months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars.

In a document called the Atlantic Charter, they agreed that, countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade, thanks to freedom of the seas, would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights. The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, in 1945, representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Bielo-Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, formed the United Nations as a key part of an

international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might make right, which had twice in just over 20 years brought wars that involved the globe. Four years later, many of those same nations came together to resist Soviet aggression, prevent the revival of European militarism, and guarantee international cooperation across the Atlantic Ocean. France, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a defensive military alliance with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the 12 original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries that made up the North Atlantic Treaty organization, or NATO,

reaffirmed their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments, and their determination to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilization of their peoples founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years, years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment

and said Russia's invasion of Ukraine had gravely undermined global security. And therein lies the rub. The post-World War II rules-based international order prevents authoritarians from grabbing land and resources that belong to other countries. But Russia's President Vladimir Putin, for example, is eager to dismantle NATO and complete his grab of Ukraine's eastern industrial regions. Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina's right-wing president, Javier Millet, and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nazre Asfura,

helping his election by pardoning former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, a leading member of Asphura's political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela's oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls. This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own Board of Peace, apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor,

veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is the most impressive and consequential board ever assembled, and that there has never been anything like it. those on it would, he said, lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come. The Kremlin says Putin, whose war on Ukraine has now lasted almost four years and who has been shunned from international organizations since his indictment by the International Criminal Court for War Crimes, has received an invitation to that Board of Peace. So has Putin's closest ally,

President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who Ivana Kotasova and Anna Chernova of CNN Note has been called Europe's last dictator. Also invited are Hungary's Prime Minister and Putin ally Victor Orban, as well as Javier Millay. And now Trump is announcing to our allies that he has the right to seize another country. Trump's increasing frenzy is likely coming, at least in part, from increasing pressure over the fact the Department of Justice is now a full month past the date it was required by law to release all of

the Epstein files. Another investigation will be in the news as well, as former special counsel Jack Smith testifies publicly later this week about Trump's role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith told the House Judiciary Committee in December that he believed a jury would have found Trump guilty on four felony counts related to his actions. Smith knows what happened, and Trump knows that Smith knows what happened. Trump's fury over the Nobel Peace Prize last night was likely fueled as well by the national celebration today of an American who did receive that prize, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded King the Prize in 1964 for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the black population in the United States.

He accepted it with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind, affirming what now seems like a prescient rebuke to a president 60 years later, saying that, what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. Trump did not acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year. While the walls are clearly closing in on Trump's ability to see beyond himself, he and his loyalists are being egged on in their demand for the seizure of Greenland

by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who is publicly calling for a return to a might-been. makes right world. On Sean Hannity's show on Fox News Channel today, Miller ignored the strength of NATO in maintaining global security as he insisted only the U.S. could protect Greenland. He also ignored the crucial fact that the rules-based international order has been instrumental in increasing U.S. as well as global prosperity since 1945. With his claim that American dollars, American treasure, American blood, American ingenuity is what keeps Europe safe and the free world safe. Miller is erasing the genius of the generations before us.

It is not the U.S. that has kept the world safe and kept standards of living rising. It is our alliances and the cooperation of the strongest nations in the world, working together to prevent wannabe dictators from dividing the world among themselves. Miller is not an elected official. Appointed by Trump and with a reasonable expectation that Trump will pardon him for any crimes he commits, Miller is insulated both from the rule of law and, crucially, from the will of voters. The Republican Congress members Applebaum called on to stop Trump are not similarly insulated. tonight Danish troops the same troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. troops in Afghanistan

from 2001 to 2021 arrived in Greenland to defend the island from the United States of America. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts, recorded, with music composed by Michael Moss.