Trump Betrays Everybody

From Gaza to Greenland, from Ukraine to Wall Street, and the few people who can still stop him

Good morning! Pour the coffee, hug the dog, and brace yourself, because today’s roundup reads less like a news digest and more like a case study in what happens when grievance, ego, and absolute power collide, and when ordinary people, from school corners to Arctic streets, decide they’re not going quietly.

We begin, as so many disasters do, with Donald Trump threatening the world. Minnesota is now living inside Trump’s favorite genre: domestic escalation cosplay. After ICE agents flooded the state, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, and sparked protests across Minneapolis, Gov. Tim Walz put the National Guard on standby, not deployed, not occupying streets, but positioned in case Trump follows through on his openly stated desire to invoke the Insurrection Act. Trump, meanwhile, is investigating Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for the crime of objecting to a killing. In Trump’s America, dissent is suspicious and accountability is treason.

Yet, amid the armored vehicles and federal bravado, something genuinely human happened. Parents, teachers, alumni, and neighbors stood outside elementary and high schools with walkie-talkies, whistles, and Signal chats, patrolling streets so immigrant families could get their kids to school without disappearing. No uniforms, or weapons, just people bearing witness. In a city shaped by the memory of George Floyd, they understand exactly what happens when state violence unfolds without witnesses, so they refused to look away. DHS insists ICE is “protecting children,” even as parents are detained at bus stops and schools shift tens of thousands of students online. The whistles aren’t for noise, they’re for memory.

That theme, truth being treated as contraband, shows up again in Texas. Two ICE detainees who contradicted DHS’s official story about the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos are now suddenly facing deportation. Their accounts describe guards choking a restrained man pleading for medication. DHS claims he tried to kill himself while handcuffed and shackled. Conveniently, the men who dispute that version are being fast-tracked out of the country. Legal experts note DHS has the authority to pause deportations while claims are investigated, and has chosen not to.

Zoom out, and the retaliation widens. In Colorado, gray wolves, literal wolves, have been drafted into Trump’s revenge campaign. A voter-approved reintroduction program is now effectively frozen after the federal government abruptly ordered Colorado to “cease and desist,” threatening to seize control of wildlife management. State officials say the legal justification is nonsense, but the timing is not. Colorado jailed MAGA election denier Tina Peters, and Trump has been on a vendetta tour ever since: killing clean water projects, freezing disaster aid, gutting research institutions, canceling grants, and now going after a keystone species because, apparently, ecosystems also need to learn obedience. Wolves don’t understand pardons or Truth Social, they just die when politics decides nature is expendable.

Across the Atlantic, the same bullying goes global. Thousands of Greenlanders marched through snow and ice chanting “Greenland is not for sale,” rejecting Trump’s increasingly explicit threats to seize their homeland. As the protest ended, news broke that Trump was slapping tariffs on European countries that oppose his Greenland fantasy, tariffs that may not even survive the courts. The Supreme Court is already poised to review Trump’s sweeping claims of tariff authority, and there is a very real chance it will rule them unconstitutional, forcing not just their removal but a chaotic unwind that could require repayments to companies and allies alike. All of this disruption, all of this economic whiplash, for a plan that exists mostly in one man’s head.

Parents brought children. Elders sang traditional songs. A nine-year-old girl held a handmade sign and explained that her teachers taught her how to stand up when another country tries to bully you. Imagine being out-governed by a fourth grader.

European leaders are done pretending this is normal. Italy’s far-right prime minister called the tariffs a mistake. Germany said it will not be blackmailed. The IMF warns that uncertainty itself has become an economic weapon. And one has to ask the obvious question: why is Trump fighting Europe, destabilizing NATO, rattling markets, and daring courts to clean up the mess, instead of helping Ukraine stop Russia?

The contrast could not be sharper. As Russian strikes hammer Ukraine’s energy grid and temperatures plunge well below freezing, the UK committed £20 million to keep hospitals, schools, and homes warm. Italy is shipping industrial boilers. Emergency energy coordination is underway. This is what governance looks like when civilians freezing to death is treated as an emergency rather than a distraction.

Gaza sees infants dying of hypothermia, and the Trump White House does nothing. No aid surge, just silence. Children freezing apparently don’t poll well unless they can be blamed on someone Trump already hates.

So where are the resources going? Under Kash Patel, the FBI has been transformed into a federally funded opposition research shop. Agents are scouring internal files not to stop crime, or to avert terrorist attacks, but to discredit anyone who investigated Trump. Sensitive materials, possibly including grand jury information, are being funneled to Trump-aligned lawmakers and media, timed for maximum outrage. Careers are being destroyed, and agents fired without cause. Smears laundered as “transparency.” Hoover would recognize the tactic immediately. Call it score settling with a seal.

And if you think this betrayal stops at U.S. borders, listen to Iran. Protesters there took to the streets after Trump promised “help is on its way” and that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” to protect peaceful demonstrators. Millions believed him. Then he reversed course, claiming, without evidence, that Iran’s regime had agreed to stop killing people. They hadn’t. According to Iran’s own leader, thousands died. Protesters describe snipers firing after lights went out, communications cut, streets sealed. “He used us as cannon fodder,” one said. Others put it more bluntly: Trump is responsible for these deaths. He urged people to rise knowing full well he might abandon them, and when he did, the regime grew bolder.

Which brings us to Wall Street, because no tragedy is complete without capital folding first. Six years after promising to reshape finance and fight climate change, the ESG era has collapsed. ESG, shorthand for “Environmental, Social, and Governance” standards that were supposed to measure how much damage companies do to the planet, workers, and basic accountability, was sold as a way to make capitalism responsible without requiring much sacrifice. And when even that minimal responsibility became inconvenient, it vanished.

Banks fled net-zero alliances the moment Trump returned. Climate language disappeared from earnings calls. Fossil fuel financing surged back. Larry Fink stopped talking about climate altogether, replacing it with the soothing phrase “energy pragmatism,” which translates roughly to: never mind. The planet was always conditional. When grievance politics threatened profits, Wall Street marched right back down the hill while the world burned.

This is the through-line. Trump doesn’t govern, he retaliates, and bullies. He doesn’t protect life, he punishes disobedience. From wolves to witnesses, from schoolchildren to sovereign nations, the pattern is relentless: loud promises, reckless escalation, and abandonment when the consequences turn deadly.

Here’s the part that matters, this can still be stopped. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger laid it out plainly: Congress has the power right now. Because the House majority is razor thin, a handful of GOP members, literally a few, could halt everything Trump wants. Refuse to advance bills, block funding, and pass explicit prohibitions on annexing or attacking Greenland. Embed it into must-pass funding bills being negotiated right now. Force a veto, and override it. The Senate can do the same.

Courage is in short supply on Capitol Hill, where too many members are more worried about post-Congress lobbying gigs than stopping a president who is destabilizing NATO, baiting world war, and torching democratic norms for sport. Silence is a choice, and inaction is a vote.

So this is the call to action. Pressure Congress, relentlessly, and publicly. Name names, and demand that they use the power they already have. The choice is no longer subtle: a few brave members of Congress can stop this spiral, stop the bullying, the annexation fantasies, the trade wars, the abandoned allies, the burning planet, or they can sit on their hands while one addle-brained old man drags America and the world toward catastrophe.

History will remember who stood up, and who looked away.