Knees, Nations, and Other Failing Institutions

On EU asset traps, U.S. Naval piracy, AI power grabs, healthcare collapse, and squirrel diplomacy

Good morning! Pour yourself something warm, because the planet may be cooling but the news cycle has decided to ignite itself like a malfunctioning vape pen left on a space heater. Let’s begin in Europe, where the grown-ups still vaguely pretend institutions matter. The EU is moving to permanently lock up Russia’s €210 billion in frozen assets, not merely sanction them, but structurally weld the vault shut until Putin ends his war and pays for the cratered cities he’s spent nearly four years pulverizing. It’s a legal sleight of hand born of necessity: the bloc discovered that when your “unanimous consent” system includes Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico, two men who treat Putinism like an Etsy hobby, you need to rig the trapdoor before they set the house on fire. Hungary and Slovakia screamed about the “rape of European law,” because nothing says principled constitutional defense like two autocrat-curious leaders wailing that Europe won’t let them sabotage Ukraine anymore. Their tantrum is as predictable as it is revealing. And if Brussels were honest, they’d admit the list of countries they are now designing geopolitical policy to circumvent includes not only Hungary and Slovakia, but also, with a sigh and a stiff drink, the United States. Washington has become the world’s most powerful swing state for authoritarian alignment, a place where the winds of policy now blow from whatever direction Vladimir Putin finds most convenient that morning.

And Europe is no longer pretending not to notice. Denmark, loyal NATO stalwart, Scandinavian model citizen, and historically one of America’s most dependable allies, has now formally classified the United States as a national security risk. Not because of espionage or trade disputes or some Beltway misunderstanding, but because the Trump administration’s behavior has become so erratic, so openly aligned with Moscow’s preferences, and so hostile to democratic norms that Copenhagen’s intelligence services now treat Washington as a destabilizing actor. The kind you monitor, the kind you plan around, the kind whose policy swings can undermine your own national defense.

This is the kind of diplomatic recalibration that used to be reserved for rogue states, not for the country that once anchored the entire postwar security order. But the message from Europe is unmistakable: the problem is no longer just Orbán and Fico. The problem is the United States, specifically this United States, the one governed by a man whose foreign policy compass spins like a rigged carnival wheel and always seems to land on whatever benefits the Kremlin. Europe is no longer asking whether America can be trusted. It is drawing up contingency plans for when it cannot.

While Europe is drafting contingency plans for the United States, our own judiciary was busy reminding the Trump administration that somebody in this country is still obligated to follow actual law. In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case has become a Rosetta Stone for understanding Trump’s mass-deportation machine: lawless, improvisational, vengeful, and allergic to the concept of due process.

Abrego Garcia, wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, dumped into the CECOT megaprison despite a court order forbidding his removal, then hauled back to the U.S. only after the Supreme Court intervened, has spent the better part of the year trapped in a bureaucratic pinball machine. ICE detained him again the moment he returned, then spent months claiming they could deport him to… wherever. Uganda. Eswatini. Ghana. Costa Rica. Pick your destination, spin the wheel, no diplomatic clearance required. Judge Xinis was not impressed. She noted the administration had “affirmatively misled” the court about which countries were “viable removal options,” which is a polite legal way of saying the government was lying as casually as most people breathe.

Her ruling was scathing: there is no legal authority to detain Abrego Garcia, no final order of removal, and certainly no justification for ICE holding him indefinitely while they play fantasy geopolitics with imaginary deportation destinations. “His removal cannot be considered reasonably foreseeable, imminent, or consistent with due process,” she wrote, a sentence that doubles nicely as a review of the Trump administration’s entire immigration policy.

DHS responded with its usual dignity, declaring this “naked judicial activism” by an Obama judge, because in Trumpworld, “judicial activism” means “a judge said no.” But Abrego Garcia’s lawyers called the ruling what it is: a rare and overdue reaffirmation that the government cannot simply disappear people into indefinite detention because they feel like it.

His story is a microcosm of everything broken in the system. He fled gang violence. An immigration judge granted him withholding of removal. The Trump administration deported him anyway in what officials later called an “administrative error,” a phrase that does a tremendous amount of work for a decision that landed an innocent man in one of the most notorious prisons in the Western Hemisphere. Then, when forced to bring him back, they served him with new criminal charges from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, charges that materialized only after his Supreme Court victory. Coincidence, surely.

For now, Abrego Garcia is out, ordered to live with his brother in Maryland while preparing for trial in Tennessee. He must not travel, not contact witnesses, not possess a passport, not associate with gang members, not drink excessively, and must search for employment, conditions that, compared to being dumped in CECOT or held without legal authority in a Pennsylvania detention center, likely feel like the functional equivalent of parole into paradise. But the message from the court was unmistakable: Trump’s deportation dragnet is not exempt from the Constitution, even if it behaves like it is.

The White House spent the day proving the point. Donald Trump, flanked by a small constellation of tech oligarchs and aspiring Bond villains, signed an executive order turning the federal government into the world’s largest tech lobby with an army and a flag. The order authorizes the DOJ to sue states for daring to regulate artificial intelligence, threatens to cut off federal funds from any state insufficiently obedient to Silicon Valley’s quarterly earnings, and instructs federal agencies to draft national legislation that would permanently vaporize state AI laws. Colorado’s attempt to prevent algorithmic discrimination was singled out like a misbehaving child in a Victorian orphanage. And the best part? Trump framed it as a triumph of national coherence over chaos, a necessary defense against China, and a jobs program, because apparently AI will soon constitute “50 to 60 percent of the U.S. economy,” a number that exists nowhere outside the fevered imagination of an 80-year-old man who thinks the internet is made of tiny steam engines.

It’s also quite the ideological pirouette from the man who delights in bragging that he “returned abortion to the states.” States are free to decide on reproductive rights, he insists, so long as those decisions immiserate women and enshrine minority rule. But the moment a state tries to protect its residents from predatory algorithms or energy-gobbling data centers, suddenly federal supremacy must be invoked like divine right. Trump loves states’ rights the way he loves the truth: strictly when convenient, and only until lunch.

Congress is performing its usual December pantomime, a yuletide ritual in which lawmakers gather to sing carols around a roaring bonfire of expired subsidies and unmet deadlines. The Senate rejected both the Democratic push to extend ACA subsidies and the Republican plan to toss people a one-time $1,500 coupon that doesn’t even cover a typical deductible, a sort of “healthcare by Bed Bath & Beyond gift card” approach. As a result, 24 million Americans are about to greet the new year with insurance premiums that could double overnight, because nothing says festive like choosing between paying rent and treating pneumonia. Leaders of both parties traded insults while the clock ran out, and Trump swanned through a Congressional Ball saying Republicans and Democrats would “work together on healthcare,” by which he meant endorsing the Cassidy–Crapo proposal that caps out at paying maybe 20 percent of your ambulance ride if you’re lucky. The American public overwhelmingly supports extending the subsidies, but this is Congress, where popularity polls are used mostly as decorative coasters.

As domestic governance collapses under the weight of its own indifference, the U.S. is suddenly rediscovering the charms of 18th-century maritime plunder. In the Caribbean, the administration has decided to escalate its posture toward Venezuela from sanctions to full-fledged naval piracy. U.S. special forces rappelled onto a Venezuelan oil tanker like it was a Tom Clancy audition reel, seized the crew, and declared the vessel destined for an American port. Caracas reacted with appropriate shock, calling it “international piracy,” and to be fair, when a foreign navy drops from the sky and takes your ship, most dictionaries back them up on the terminology. The White House insists this is all about “drug interdiction” and “illicit shipping,” though curiously the operation unfolded just after the U.S. parked the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, off Venezuela’s coast. Maduro says the U.S. aims to “steal Venezuelan oil,” which the administration denies, though they do admit they plan to seize the oil. Nuance lives.

Treasury piled on by sanctioning six more ships and several of Maduro’s relatives, because nothing signals diplomatic seriousness like tattling on your geopolitical enemies’ nephews. Russia, of course, called to offer support to Maduro, and the White House waved off concerns with the breezy confidence of a country that has never once miscalculated its way into a decades-long regional disaster.

So here we are: Europe is insulating itself from American sabotage, America is suing its own states on behalf of trillion-dollar companies, Congress is rolling into recess while 24 million people stare down unaffordable healthcare, and the U.S. Navy is now reenacting Pirates of the Caribbean with live ammunition. It’s almost enough to make you nostalgic for the days when the only thing breaking was the news, not the entire concept of governance.

With all that, we arrive at the end of another delightful stroll through the crumbling architecture of global order. Which brings me, naturally, to my dog. In a burst of enthusiastic confidence and athleticism, Marz launched himself at a cheeky squirrel yesterday and, in the process, sideswiped my knee, the same knee that he helpfully remodeled into an ACL confetti streamer last year. So your faithful correspondent is once again benched, wrapped in ice packs, and contemplating her life choices while the perpetrator naps smugly nearby, having successfully defended the homeland from a another rodent with ambiguous intentions.

But if there’s an upside to being temporarily rendered bipedally useless, it’s that I finally have the enforced downtime to finish that pesky essay about vassals and vassal states I promised last week, a topic that, given the day’s news, feels less like political theory and more like a weather report. Europe insulating itself from Washington, states suing the federal government, the U.S. Navy seizing tankers like a 17th-century privateer, Denmark quietly wondering whether America is still safe to stand next to, the whole world is one big map of who bends to whom, and why.

So while Marz recovers from the mortal terror of having seen a squirrel, and I recover from being body-checked by a 140-pound opportunist, I’ll be finishing some work without feeling remotely guilty about not going for a romp.