Letters from an American - January 20, 2026

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

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January 20th, 26. World leaders are gathered at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which is taking place from January 19th to January 23rd. Trump is scheduled to go to the meeting in person for the first time since 2020, although now, with him still in the U.S., his social media account has been posting wildly. Just after midnight, the account posted that Trump had a very good telephone call with Mark Ruta, the Secretary General of NATO concerning Greenland. I agreed to a meeting of the various parties in Davos, Switzerland. As I expressed to everybody very plainly, Greenland is imperative for national and world security.

There can be no going back. On that, everyone agrees. Shortly after, the account posted an AI image of world leaders sitting in front of Trump's desk in the Oval Office with a large picture of North America entirely covered with stars and stripes to indicate American ownership, including Canada as well as Greenland.

The flag also covers Venezuela. Then the account posted an image of Trump with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio next to him as he stands on what looks to be an Arctic landscape, holding a U.S. flag waving a bow a sign that reads, Greenland, U.S. Territory, established 2026. Later on, it would post private text messages to Trump from Ruta and French President Emmanuel

Macron, mocking their attempts at diplomacy, and repost a message reading, at what point are we going to realize the enemy is within, angry emoji. China and Russia are the boogeymen when the real threat is the UN, NATO, and Islam. Then the account posted, no single person or president has done more for NATO than President Donald J. Trump. If I didn't come along, there would be no NATO right now. It would have been in the ash heap of history. Sad but true, President DJT. But Seizing Greenland was not the only thing on the mind of administration officials. The accounts posts suggest they are worried about Trump's declining popularity. It launched an attack on Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, whom the administration is targeting for alleged mortgage fraud, just

before it claimed that Trump was lowering mortgage rates. Later, the account would post a short video of Trump under which the Chiron read, I am standing up for American auto workers, although the video was of him promising to stop all federal payments to sanctuary cities on February 1st. Then it bopped over to claiming that the people resisting ice violence in Minnesota are agitators and insurrectionists. These people are professionals. No person acts the way they act. They are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave like lunatics in a certain manner, just like they are doing. They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail or thrown out of the country. The first to go, he said, should be Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Democratic Representative Elon Omar, both of whom he called corrupt.

Later, the account insisted that Democratic Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is also corrupt. Later, the account posted that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing and taking out of the system. They are saving many innocent lives. There are thousands of vicious animals in Minnesota alone, which is why the crime stats are nationwide the best ever recorded. Show the numbers, names, and faces of the violent criminals, and show them now. The people will start supporting the patriots of ICE instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators.

Make America great again. the account turned to reposting long-debunked lies about the 2020 presidential election. It reposted claims that there was voter fraud in Nevada. There wasn't. The Dominion voting machines flipped 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden. They didn't. That China had rigged the voting for Biden. It didn't. It appears someone is thinking about the fact that special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will be testifying in public on Thursday, January 22nd. In Washington today, in a long, rambling speech before reporters, Trump appeared to try to bring his social media post directly to the media.

The speech was supposedly to outline the accomplishments of his administration, and he brandished a large sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip labeled accomplishments, both of which he later threw on the floor. But Trump turned from it almost immediately to insist that agents from immigration and customs enforcement are not arresting and detaining American citizens, although they very publicly did so on Sunday, breaking into the home of U.S. citizen Chong Lee, Scott, Thao, without a warrant, holding him at gunpoint, marching him outside in sub-freezing weather in just sandals and underwear, driving him around for an hour or two before dropping him back at his home, and then lying that

members of his family are on the registered sex offender list. Trump denied such abuses, claiming that in Minnesota, ICE is apprehending bad people. To illustrate his claims, he held up one photo at a lot of, after another of individuals above the label, Worst of Worst, as he mumbled about how bad they were. Many murderers, many, many murderers, people that murdered. Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who has watched and clipped Trump speeches for years, commented, folks, this is some really weird shit.

The president is not well. From there, Trump was off with the usual litany of complaints about former president, Joe Biden and familiar stories like this one. I should have gotten the Nobel Prize for each war, but I don't say that. I saved millions and millions of people. And don't let anyone tell you that Norway doesn't control the shots, okay? It's in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They'll say, we have nothing to do with it. It's a joke. They've lost such prestige. Got all, that's why I have such respect for Maria doing what she did. She said, I don't deserve the Nobel Prize he does. When she got it, they named, they said, wow, that's amazing. I thought President Trump would get it.

Trump also had words about Jack Smith. Deranged Jack Sick Smith. He's a sick son of a they gave me the worst of the worst. Trump's threats against Greenland and is promised to hit Europe with high tariffs if governments there don't support his seizure of Greenland drove the U.S. stock market sharply downward today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 870.74 points or 1.76%. The S&P 500 was down 2.06% and the NASDAQ composite fell 2.39%, the worst day for all three of these major indexes since October. Yesterday, Tom Fairless of the Wall Street Journal reported that, contrary to Trump's repeated assertions, U.S. consumers and importers, not foreign countries, are the ones who have paid for Trump's tariff war. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank,

echoed the findings of Yale and Harvard Business School economists, confirming that American consumers and importers have absorbed 96 percent of the cost of Trump's tariffs. Trump's threats against Europe are an entirely different kettle of fish. For as Conrad Putsier, Chow Dang, and Sam Goldfarb of the Wall Street Journal explain, the European Union is the biggest trading partner of the U.S., its largest investor, and its closest financial ally. European leaders are discussing whether to retaliate against the U.S. using the EU's anti-coercion instrument, nicknamed the bazooka, which can restrict imports and exports to any country trying to coerce an EU member and can limit U.S. investment there. In the Atlantic, on January 18th, Robert Kagan wrote that

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, and warned they are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For, eight decades they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America's predominant strength and have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way European and Asian allies have cooperated with the US on both defense and trade while the power of those alliances has prevented serious challenges to that order global trade has generally been free and oceans have been safe for travel

both by humans and container ships. Nuclear weapons have been limited by international agreement. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely, Kagan wrote. They can't imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

In Davos today, Canada's Prime Minister, Mark Carney, told the world, we are in the midst of a rupture. The rules-based international order is no longer an automatic route to prosperity and security, he said, as the world's most powerful nations now use that system's economic integration to coerce other countries. In its place, Carney offered a different vision than the world of of fortresses made up of major powers with spheres of influence that Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin are trying to build.

If middle powers pursue a system he called variable geometry, he said, they can rebalance the world and help solve global problems while still building strength at home. His vision is a version of the diplomatic variable geometry of former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But Carney's vision de-centers the U.S., noting that middle powers must work together to be at the table to avoid being on the menu. Under a system of variable geometry, countries can develop infrastructure and trade at home, strengthening their own nations, while negotiating new international agreements,

as Canada has done recently with China, Qatar, India, the Association of Southeast Asia, nations, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc made up of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. But for international affairs, variable geometry means creating international coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. Coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future

challenges and opportunities. We know the old order is not coming back, Carney said. We shouldn't warn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses, and the most to gain from genuine cooperation. 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.