The Streets Remember What Power Tries to Erase

As Trump rewrites history and threatens war, Americans and allies demand accountability instead of amnesia.

Good morning! Like you, I had hoped for a quiet Sunday where the biggest crisis involved stale bagels or the eternal mystery of missing socks. Instead, we wake up to a Trump administration that somehow manages to be both wildly incompetent and terrifyingly efficient at destabilizing the planet. It’s almost impressive, in the way a toddler with a flamethrower might be.

Let’s start at home, where the United States is very much not “great again,” unless your definition of greatness includes militarized federal agents shooting American citizens and then daring the country to do something about it.

The killing of Renée Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis has detonated into one of the largest protest waves we’ve seen in years. Tens of thousands flooded the streets in Minneapolis this weekend, chanting her name, while coordinated protests erupted in all 50 states. Philadelphia alone saw multiple marches converging on federal detention centers, with demonstrators explicitly linking ICE violence at home to Trump’s foreign adventurism abroad. The message from the streets has been blunt: this regime is willing to kill its own citizens to maintain power.

That framing didn’t come from cable news chyron writers or Twitter radicals. It came from teachers, union members, parents, older liberals, young organizers, and people who frankly look exhausted but no longer willing to swallow the “please move on” routine. Protesters aren’t just angry about one shooting. They’re angry about impunity, about the fact that federal authorities immediately seized control of the investigation, blocked state access to evidence, and wrapped themselves in the language of “self-defense” before the blood was even dry. Accountability, apparently, is something we only discuss in theory now.

And yet, in the middle of all this domestic unrest, the administration’s priority appears to be… punishing Minnesota. While Minneapolis mourns and protests, the Trump administration froze food assistance funding to the state, citing vague fraud allegations with an unmistakable racial dog whistle attached. If you don’t accept the official narrative, we will starve your people.

When courts blocked Trump’s broader attempt to freeze billions in social services to Democratic-led states, the administration simply narrowed the target and tried again. Think authoritarianism with a workaround.

While Trump demonstrably cannot manage unrest in his own country, he is once again positioning himself as the world’s self-appointed chaos coordinator. In Venezuela, the situation has gone from illegal to surreal. After a U.S. special forces operation seized Nicolás Maduro, an act Trump openly bragged about, the State Department is now urging Americans to flee the country immediately. Armed paramilitaries are reportedly setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for U.S. citizens. This, of course, comes after Trump declared Venezuela “safe,” “rich,” and effectively under U.S. control. The reality on the ground suggests otherwise, unless your idea of safety includes armed militias and emergency evacuation advisories.

Trump’s promises of order and dominance are not just reckless, they are staggeringly expensive. They depend on taxpayer-funded militarization at home and abroad, flowing to industries that already receive lavish public subsidies, particularly oil. What he’s really promising is this:
you take the profits, the public takes the risk, and the Treasury picks up the tab.

In Iran, the picture is even darker. The country is experiencing its most significant unrest in years, sparked by economic collapse and rapidly expanding into demands for political change. Iranian authorities have responded by arresting protest leaders, imposing a nationwide internet blackout, and reportedly killing hundreds of demonstrators with live ammunition. Protesters are being charged as “enemies of God,” a designation that carries the death penalty.

Trump’s response? Threats. More threats. Vague declarations that the U.S. is “ready to help,” paired with reports that he has been briefed on military strike options against Iran. He cannot stop ICE from killing Americans in Minneapolis, or refuses to, yet he is apparently itching to posture as the global protector of protesters abroad. It’s a neat trick, morally speaking: condemn repression elsewhere while defending and glorifying it at home.

This brings us to Greenland, because apparently the Arctic is having a moment. Trump’s fixation on Greenland has escalated from embarrassing curiosity to full-blown alliance stress test. An opinion piece in the New York Times this week laid out, in chilling detail, how the administration has normalized the idea of seizing Greenland, by force if necessary, despite the fact that Greenland is part of Denmark, a founding NATO member, and already hosts U.S. military installations under long-standing defense agreements.

The reporting is careful, but the implications are stark: if the United States treats allied territory as something it can simply take, NATO ceases to function as a defensive alliance and becomes a punchline. Layered on top of that are more alarming reports circulating in British tabloid media, specifically the Daily Mirror, and amplified by commentators like Shaun King. These claims, which have not been independently confirmed by major outlets, allege that Trump has asked the Joint Special Operations Command to prepare contingency plans for an invasion of Greenland, only to be met with resistance from senior military leaders who view the idea as illegal and catastrophic. One attributed diplomatic quote describes dealing with Trump on the subject as “like dealing with a five-year-old.”

To be absolutely clear: this sourcing is thin, tabloid-based, and should be treated with caution. But the reason it’s circulating, and resonating, is that it aligns disturbingly well with observable behavior. Even if the specifics are unverified, the mindset they describe is painfully plausible: war discussed as impulse management, force as distraction, catastrophe as an option to redirect attention.

Perhaps the most morally bankrupt detail in that reporting is the suggestion that “less controversial” alternatives to invading Greenland might include striking Iran. Less controversial than invading a NATO ally! Sit with that for a moment.

If all of this weren’t bleak enough, we get a reminder that Trump is still fighting the past as ferociously as he’s gambling with the future. This week, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery quietly removed language noting Trump’s two impeachments from its wall text. The sentence had “long bothered” the White House. After Trump threatened the museum’s leadership, compiled grievance lists, and loomed over the institution’s federal funding, the offending historical fact disappeared. Bill Clinton’s impeachment remains on display. Andrew Johnson’s remains on display. Trump’s? Magically erased.

This follows earlier moves to soften and sanitize official government descriptions of the January 6 insurrection, scrubbing references to Trump’s lies and incitement while urging the country to “move forward.” And here’s the tell: Trump’s MAGA movement is relentlessly nostalgic when it flatters him, and aggressively amnesiac when it implicates him.

“Make America Great Again” is a backward-facing slogan. It worships an imagined past. But the moment that past demands accountability, for January 6, for impeachments, for state violence, suddenly we’re told that dwelling on history is divisive, unhealthy, immature. Healing, we’re informed, requires forgetting.

Real national healing requires accountability. It requires naming harm, assigning responsibility, and drawing lines that cannot be crossed again. The protesters in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Boston, Portland, San Francisco, and beyond understand this instinctively. That’s why they aren’t asking us to “move on.” They’re asking us to stop pretending nothing happened while it keeps happening.

Finally, because the universe apparently has a sense of humor so dark it needs a wellness check, we arrive at today’s schadenfreude. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, announced she would like to share her prize with Donald Trump in gratitude for his role in removing Maduro. Trump, who has coveted a Nobel Prize like a raccoon covets shiny objects, said this would be “a great honor.”

The Norwegian Nobel Institute responded with the diplomatic equivalent of a raised eyebrow and a firm “absolutely not.” Nobel Prizes, they reminded everyone, cannot be revoked, transferred, or shared, ever. It’s a small thing, but deeply satisfying: while Trump bullies museums into rewriting wall labels, the Nobel Committee politely declines to rewrite reality.

So here we are. A president who cannot manage unrest in his own cities threatens wars abroad. A regime obsessed with nostalgia erases history while demanding amnesia. An administration allergic to accountability insists it alone can restore order, even as the streets fill with people refusing to forget.

Trump may be incompetent, but he has destabilized the world with stunning efficiency. And it’s worth saying plainly: none of Trump’s grand promises of dominance come free. Every threat, every ICE surge, every foreign “operation,” every vow of “total safety” for oil companies is underwritten by U.S. tax dollars. We’re told there’s no funding for food assistance, childcare, healthcare, or housing, but there is always money for war, repression, and fossil fuel fantasies. Strength, in this administration, is just austerity for the public paired with endless subsidies for power.

By the end of the night, after all of this, the protests, the erasures, the threats, the absurdities, Marz joined me for an extra-long moonbeam vigil by an outdoor fire. The winter chill, the night sky, and the steady warmth of the blaze felt unexpectedly soothing. It was a reminder that even as institutions buckle and leaders flail, there are still small acts of care, presence, and intention that matter. I hope our warmth, literal and otherwise, made its way to the people who need it most right now. Nostalgia won’t heal this country, but honesty just might.