The Justice Department remains wildly out of compliance with the Jeffrey Epstein transparency law Congress passed last year—but don’t expect the House Republicans who voted for the bill to make too much of a stink about it. “I don’t give a rip about Epstein,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) told Politico last week. “I’ve done what I had to do for Epstein. Talk to somebody else about that. It’s no longer in my hands.”
Way too much weekend news for us to go dark for the holiday—but we hope you enjoy a pleasant Martin Luther King Jr. Day today. Happy Monday.
Honoring MLK Today
by William Kristol
On November 2, 1983, President Reagan signed legislation officially proclaiming the third Monday in January a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy.
So far as I can tell, our current president has issued no statement this year in recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Indeed, this administration’s only notice of the day seems to have come in late November of last year, when it announced that it had eliminated this holiday from the list of days with free entry to America’s national parks.
So if you go to a national park today, you’ll have to pay. But not if you go on June 14th, 2026. For Donald Trump’s Interior Department has announced that the schedule of “resident-only patriotic fee-free” days will include for the first time that date billed as “Flag Day/President Trump’s birthday.”
So petty. So pathetic.
Still, Martin Luther King Jr. Day remains a federal holiday. There is no federal holiday honoring the current occupant of the Oval Office. I trust there never will be. And it is heartening that the United States is still a country that, by law and consensus, honors King and not Trump.
If you want to reflect on real American patriotism and greatness, you might take a few moments today to read about the life and achievements of King and the civil rights movement he led. You might particularly find it worthwhile to read some of King’s own writings, and to listen to or watch some of his own words.
You might focus on the year 1963. In April of that year, he wrote his great “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” defending nonviolent civic action and expressing grave disappointment with the self-proclaimed “moderates” who in recent years had been reluctant to join wholeheartedly in the fight against injustice.
Of course, you ought to watch the magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, one of the great speeches in American history. The “I have a dream” peroration is justly famous, but the whole speech—it lasts less than 20 minutes—is very much worth watching.
Just three weeks after that, King delivered a beautiful eulogy for the four young girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—“unoffending, innocent, and beautiful . . . victims” of violence, the “martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”
For what he had accomplished in his still short life, King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, he emphasized that “I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.”
He added that,
Today I come to Oslo as a trustee, inspired and with renewed dedication to humanity. I accept this prize on behalf of all men who love peace and brotherhood. I say I come as a trustee, for in the depths of my heart I am aware that this prize is much more than an honor to me personally.
. . .
I accept this award in the spirit of a curator of some precious heirloom which he holds in trust for its true owners—all those to whom beauty is truth and truth beauty—and in whose eyes the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.
The contrast in human spirit between the 1964 Nobel Prize recipient and the current wannabe winner in the Oval Office speaks for itself.
This year will mark our 250th birthday as a nation. The current administration will do everything it can to vulgarize and personalize the celebration. There will be much talk of American greatness and little evidence of it. But all the shouting and strutting won’t be able to conceal the fact that the malevolent charlatans who now dominate our national stage will sooner or later—and I trust sooner—be left behind, unlamented discards on the ash heap of history. Whereas the memory of the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. will live on.
NATO Tried to Placate Trump. This Is What They Get.
by Andrew Egger
Sometimes this White House inflicts on us a story that is so brainstoppingly stupid, so completely outrageous, that it’s a danger even to speak, read, or write about it—you can feel your neurons giving up the ghost just from exposure to the event. If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back.
So it is now with Donald Trump’s latest machination to acquire Greenland. On Friday, the president made his most aggressive policy move yet in his ongoing campaign/tantrum to take over the Arctic island, placing a large and growing tariff on Denmark—and on every European country that joined Denmark in condemning Trump’s bullying on the subject—which he said would be removed only when Greenland was in American hands. And over the weekend, he ordered his staff to send to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and other European leaders the following letter, which must be read to be believed:
Dear Ambassador:
President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state]
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now 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 its 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”
Run quick and grab some paper towels; I see your grey matter is leaking out your ears. Take your time. Morning Shots will still be here.
Okay, welcome back. Now, where does one even start?
How about with China? On Saturday, in her Receipts newsletter, our Catherine Rampell offered a grim assessment of all the ways Trump’s economic and foreign policies are driving our erstwhile allies into China’s eager arms. Countries that had previously been sympathetic to U.S. arguments about excessive economic entanglement with the authoritarian government in Beijing have suddenly found themselves suffering repeated economic punishments from a U.S. government that now looks plenty authoritarian, too. Increasingly, they’re opting to go with the authoritarians who are at least willing to play nice instead: Canada, for instance, just announced a remarkable new strategic partnership with China that will substantially reduce trade and travel barriers between the two countries.
It is terrible for America that this happened, and there is a zero percent chance that it would have happened if not for Trump’s insane campaign to alienate our allies. That he is gift-wrapping the world economy for China at the exact same moment that he is stepping up to the brink of war with our allies with the supposed aim of restraining China—thereby further alienating them, thereby further empowering China—is almost too much to take.
The other main takeaway concerns the psychology of European leaders toward Trump. Over the last year, everyone who comes into professional contact with the U.S. president has been faced with a strategic choice. There have basically been two models for Trump engagement: Punch back, or go belly up.
“Punch back,” as a strategy, has often paid good dividends. But there have been moments when “go belly up” seemed to be working too. And the poster child for this seemed, last year, to be our NATO allies in Europe. As we wrote repeatedly at the time, NATO leaders seemed to make a specific strategic decision: All Trump cares about is being buttered up, so if we want to keep him on our team, we have to butter him up as shamelessly as the dictators do. Their months spent heaping praise on his every move seemed to pay off in some ways; at least Trump stopped actively working with Vladimir Putin to screw over Ukraine, at any rate.
But now Europe gets to learn what is becoming increasingly clear to everybody: Trying to satiate this guy just makes him hungrier. In this way he’s just like any other authoritarian, really. Give Putin the Donbas to shut him up, and who knows what he’ll try to take next? Give Trump Greenland to shut him up, and who knows what he’ll try to take next?
The outrages will continue. Just this morning, news broke that Trump has invited Putin himself to be a member of the “Board of Peace” to reconstruct the Gaza strip. It’s time for Europe to see what time it is.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Martin Luther King Jr. Day and ‘the Minds and Hearts of Children’... Indiana schoolteacher PATRICIA BROWN anticipated in 1979 how creating the holiday would prove meaningful.
America: Playing Stupid Games, Winning Stupid Prizes… On The Focus Group Podcast, BILL KRISTOL joins SARAH LONGWELL for a reflective conversation on the tough times we live in and how voters are processing them.
Trump Threatens Europe Over Greenland; Europe Responds… WILL SALETAN joins JVL to discuss Donald Trump’s escalating threats against Europe as he pushes to “conquer” Greenland, claiming “World Peace is at stake!”
Trump’s Polls Are Slipping—So Why Does He Feel More Dangerous Than Ever? On The Bulwark on Sunday, ANDREW EGGER joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss his unpopularity and why he’s vulnerable.
Don’t Count on Trump Coming to the Rescue… On Shield of the Republic, MICHAEL WEISS joins ERIC EDELMAN to discuss prospects for U.S. strikes in Iran, Trump’s Venezuelan adventure, and the latest from the Russia-Ukraine war.
Trump Is Making China Great Again… America’s friends and trading partners are running into the arms of our adversaries. In Receipts, CATHERINE RAMPELL explains what a mess this is all is.
Quick Hits
CBS NEWS’S CECOT REPORT AIRS: The long-delayed 60 Minutes report on the Trump administration’s deportation of innocent Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison finally aired on CBS last night. For folks who have been following the saga of the report, which new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled last month just before it was scheduled to air, there weren’t many surprises: The bulk of the report was unchanged from the original version that a Canadian broadcaster accidentally leaked weeks ago.
But it was clear, watching it on U.S. airwaves last night, why Weiss had agonized so much over the story: Her specialty is creating false equivalences that suggest the Trump administration isn’t so bad when you look at it in context, and the CECOT story remains one of the most flatly evil and indefensible things this administration did last year. The administration did actually send hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, many of whom had no criminal records and had been accused of no crimes, into a living hell in a Salvadorean torture prison.
And the administration remains unrepentant. In statements to 60 Minutes, administration officials made a number of truly insane statements: That they had every right to send migrants whom no court had convicted to brutal imprisonment because “intelligence reports” suggested they were guilty, that they further had no responsibility for those migrants’ wellbeing because “they are not U.S. citizens and were not under U.S. jurisdiction,” and that at any rate “we hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
IF A SCANDAL FALLS IN THE FOREST: It’s become a truism that Donald Trump benefits from a constant churn of multiple scandals that crowd each other out. In the past two weeks, two stories that should have been scandals under remotely normal circumstances have gone practically unnoticed. The headlines speak for themselves.
January 8: “Trump plans to make his ballroom addition as tall as the White House itself.” That’s what architect Shalom Baranes reported to the National Capital Planning Commission, which is near certain to approve the project in March; it’s stacked with Trump appointees and led by Trump’s former personal lawyer and White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf. The Commission of Fine Arts, whose approval is also needed, has been purged of Joe Biden holdovers and is about to be packed with Trump loyalists. Oh, and the review process will be unusually expedited.
January 10: “Smithsonian removes Trump impeachment text as it swaps his portrait.” The administration had previously griped about the Trump portrait label in the National Portrait Gallery’s “America’s Presidents” exhibition, mentioning his two impeachments and the January 6th Capitol Hill attack. The impeachment references were scrubbed, then restored. Now there’s a new photo of a glowering Trump with bare-bones text: birth year and presidential term dates. The other presidents still have short bios—and the one for Bill Clinton mentions his impeachment.
It’s small stuff compared to the blatantly political federal investigations, or the Greenland insanity, or the jackbooted thuggery in Minneapolis. But the fact that “small stuff” like this is part of our new normal should alarm.
—Cathy Young
Cheap Shots
If only the founding fathers had thought to include a coequal branch of government who could reign in a raging, narcissistic, demented toddler of a president.
Opportunity missed there guys. 😐
Re: "It’s time for Europe to see what time it is."
When I was in, what?, junior high school? We learned about the run-up to WWII, that Neville Chamberlain claimed he'd purchased "Peace in our time" by turning over the Sudetenland to Hitler and that it didn't work and appeasing Hitler just strengthened him and encouraged him to continue. The big message: appeasement doesn't work.
Everyone knew this. Everyone understood this. It wasn't really a point of historical debate.
And now here we are. And the Europeans are looking wobbly. To quote Margaret Thatcher, "This is no time to go wobbly."
It's terrible. Terrible things will happen. But they have to happen because the United States is governed by a madman that no one around him is willing to confront.