Three hundred and sixty-four days ago, we published an edition of Morning Shots that focused on the president-elect’s increasing fixation on territorial acquisition. The headline: “Take Trump’s Greenland Obsession Seriously.”
A lot has happened since then—DOGE, “Liberation Day,” CECOT, troops in the streets, and on and on—but Greenland, it seems, is the Trump dream that will never die. Happy Wednesday.
The Spirit of Fascism
by William Kristol
MAGA is a vulgar, cartoonish, cultish, and incoherent movement.
So, a century ago, was fascism.
And as today’s MAGA more openly and explicitly embraces the spirit of yesteryear’s fascism, it’s perhaps worth noting that it is the era of the rise of fascism to which MAGA looks back with nostalgia and yearning.
In her most recent newsletter, the historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of this 2009 statement by Peter Thiel, who as much as anyone could be considered the theorist of Trumpism as an intellectual movement.
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women . . . have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
The first sentence is a bit startling. But there is, to be fair, a long tradition of worrying about various tensions between freedom and democracy. Thiel, one could say, has simply adopted the radically pessimistic view that those tensions can no longer be managed or resolved.
Far more striking is the rest of Thiel’s statement, his yearning for the pre-welfare-state and pre-women’s-franchise 1920s, “the last decade during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.”
Thiel’s history is not striking just because it is wrong—the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in the summer of 1920, making the general election that fall the first to feature the mass participation of women, though some states had granted women full suffrage even earlier.
It’s striking because we do now know, after all, what followed the decade of the 1920s: A 1930s that featured a worldwide Great Depression, and the rise of fascism—which, while unsuccessful in America, came closer here than we often remember, and was dominant overseas. All of that culminated in the horrors of World War II. The terrible events from 1929 to 1945 followed on—followed from—the economic and foreign policies of the decade for which Thiel is so nostalgic.
Thiel is an intelligent man. Yet his hatred of the modern world—a world characterized by the welfare state and the emancipation of women—is so great that it overwhelms all sensible political judgment.
If Peter Thiel is a MAGA theoretician, Stephen Miller is MAGA’s chief propagandist. On Sunday, in the wake of Trump’s Venezuelan intervention, Miller posted:
Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories (despite have [sic] already made them far wealthier and more successful). The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to these newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.
So Britain and France should not have dissolved empires and colonies, but rather have fought to hold countries like, say, India and Vietnam? And the United States’ openness to immigrants from, say, India and Vietnam, has been an exercise in self-punishment?
Apparently so. On Monday, Miller extended his critique of the modern world, going on television to decry “This whole period that happened after World War II where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging.”
Was that what characterized the last eighty years of world history—eighty years of Western success and dominance?
As the political scientist Nicholas Grossman remarked, “Imagine looking at the period after WWII and especially after the Cold War as an era of American weakness.” But Grossman sees what lies behind Miller’s complaint: “Unless, I suppose, if becoming the strongest, wealthiest country in history sounds bad to you because some brown people were a part of it, and you’d rather be weaker if it means being whiter.”
The more liberal nation and the liberal world order that we were able to construct after World War II made us stronger. Miller and Thiel—and MAGA—reject that.
So MAGA does not want to make America great again. MAGA does not simply want to correct some of the excesses of modern America or the modern world. MAGA embraces what was most illiberal about the old order. The theorists of MAGA look back longingly to, they yearn for, the ideas and policies that produced the worst of the 1930s.
Or to put it simply: It is fascism that they yearn for.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Real Story Behind the Minnesota Welfare Fraud Scandal… You don’t have to buy the MAGA narrative to worry about how the government failed here, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
The Rorschach Regime Change Test… Republican senators deliver mixed messaging on Trump’s Venezuela attack, reports JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass.
Venezuela Exposes the Lie of America First… SARAH, TIM, and JVL discuss the legality and consequences of the Venezuela operation and the emerging split between “America First” and “Trump First” on The Next Level.
We’re the Bad Guys Now… America has become the kind of country it used to oppose, laments MONA CHAREN.
She Watched January 6th From Trump’s White House… SARAH MATTHEWS was inside Trump’s White House on January 6th. As former deputy press secretary, she explains to SARAH LONGWELL what it was like watching the Capitol attack from the West Wing, why Trump refused to meet the moment, and how that day finally pushed her to resign.
Quick Hits
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, BUT IF IT DID, IT WAS GOOD: We were prepared for another infuriating anniversary of January 6th yesterday, with the now-familiar spectacle of “normie” Republicans sneering at those who “can’t let it go” while the man who sparked the riot is still in power. What we weren’t necessarily expecting was the lengths to which MAGA would go to perversely commemorate the insurrection.
Yesterday, the White House unveiled a new website featuring a ludicrous alternate history of the events of the day, a work of sheer, smug propaganda that portrays Trump as a peacemaker and lays the full blame for the attack on House Democrats and the Capitol Police. “It was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters,” the website reads, before rolling out a timeline filled with one Ministry of Truth–style lie after another: 2:24 p.m., “President Trump Urges Calm”; 2:44 p.m., “Ashli Babbitt Murdered in Cold Blood”; 8:00 p.m., “Mike Pence Refuses to Act, Stolen Election Certified.”
Meanwhile, some of those Trump pardoned last year for their crimes on January 6th staged a breathtaking commemoration of their own, back at the scene of the crime. A small group of Proud Boys marched from the Ellipse to the Capitol again yesterday, in what was billed as a “memorial march” for Babbitt, the only rioter killed by police on the day of the insurrection.
HEY, I THOUGHT WE WERE COOL: U.S.–Russia relations are at a bizarre moment: Even as Donald Trump keeps parroting Kremlin talking points on Ukraine, the two countries are finding themselves in unexpectedly direct friction over America’s sudden intervention in Venezuela. Case in point: The U.S. Coast Guard has been pursuing an empty oil tanker that had intended to dock in Venezuela, but the Wall Street Journal reports that Russia has now moved military assets to escort the ship to safety:
The tanker, formerly known as the Bella 1, has been trying to evade the U.S. blockade of sanctioned oil tankers near Venezuela for more than two weeks. The vessel failed to dock in Venezuela and load with oil. Although the ship is empty, the U.S. Coast Guard has pursued it into the Atlantic in a bid to crack down on a fleet of tankers that ferry illicit oil around the world, including black-market oil sold by Russia.
The vessel’s crew repelled an effort by the U.S. to board the vessel in December and steamed into the Atlantic. As the Coast Guard followed it, the crew sloppily painted a Russian flag on its side, changed its name to the Marinera and switched its registration to Russia.
Russia has been concerned by U.S. seizures of tankers that ferry its illicit oil around the world and power its economy, and it has made the unusual move of allowing the tanker to register in Russia without an inspection or other formalities, experts say.
Russia has asked the U.S. to stop pursuing the vessel, according to three other U.S. officials. On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was monitoring “with concern” the situation surrounding the tanker, according to state news agency RIA.
YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HYDE: It’s been one of the strangest non-stories of the second Trump administration: Trump has pretty much cut the pro-life movement out of the Republican party, and people have somehow barely even noticed. Here he was talking to House Republicans yesterday, wheedling them to abandon their longstanding commitment to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funding for abortions:
You have to be a little flexible on Hyde, you know that. You’ve gotta be a little flexible. You’ve gotta work something. You’ve gotta use ingenuity. You’ve gotta work. We’re all big fans of everything, but you’ve gotta be flexi—you have to have flexibility.
For pro-lifers, the Hyde Amendment is bare-minimum stuff. But the fact that Trump would talk like this doesn’t come as a real shock. Ever since the 2024 presidential primary, when Ron DeSantis tried to outflank Trump to the right on the issue of abortion, Trump’s position has been clear: I delivered you people the end of Roe v. Wade, and I’m not planning on going further than that. He’s been true to his word: anti-abortion advocates have been pretty much the sole GOP interest group to which Trump hasn’t tried to deliver at least a symbolic win in his second term. In fact, Trump’s advisers have gone after Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley for trying to make abortion policy an issue ahead of next year’s midterms.
Cheap Shots
As a woman, I would like to throttle Thiel. As a human being I would like to state that Miller is a racist and an ahole.
The most horrifying aspect of the Greenland demand is not the madness of the orange pirate, but the anesthesia of the public.
We are witnessing a terminal fracture in the postwar order, yet it is being discussed like an eccentric footnote, a curiosity to be smirked at and safely ignored. Greenland is not a bauble. It is a NATO member’s sovereign territory. To threaten it is to strike the alliance at its spine. There is no rational response from NATO that does not involve classifying the United States as a hostile vector. Alliances are not poetry. They are machinery, and that machinery either responds to aggression or admits it is dead.
Once that line is crossed, the cascade is not political; it is actuarial. The United States Treasury bond and Article 5 of NATO are backed by the exact same asset:
The absolute sanctity of the American guarantee.
You cannot default on one without incinerating the value of the other. The moment Washington treats a sovereign border as a suggestion, the "Full Faith and Credit" of the United States becomes a junk rating. Global capital does not store value in the coffers of a rogue state. Central banks will not anchor their survival to a partner who behaves like a neighborhood racketeer. The dollar will not be debated out of dominance; it will be dumped in a fire sale.
What is obscene is the pretense that this is abstract. If China announced the seizure of a treaty ally's territory, headlines would be screaming about war, contagion, and collapse. Yet when Washington does it, we get historical trivia and amused detachment. We are treating a breach of contract as a quirk of personality.
This is a full-scale failure of American self-preservation. We are watching the foundation of our own wealth liquefy, and we are discussing it with the casual detachment of tourists watching a distant fire.
This is the sound of a superpower forgetting how to survive.