“We Will Remember” Is Not a Foreign Policy

Markets blink, Europe walks away, courts push back, and Trump’s protection-racket presidency hits resistance.

Good morning! Gosh, if you’re looking for when the systems all started flashing red at once, Tuesday was a strong candidate. Wall Street, which has spent years politely ignoring geopolitical absurdity, finally blinked. The S&P 500 dropped more than 2 percent, its sharpest fall in months, not on bad earnings or a surprise jobs report, but on the dawning realization that the President of the United States is openly threatening allies with tariffs unless they help him acquire Greenland. Investors didn’t just dump stocks; they dumped America. The dollar slid, treasuries sold off, and that dreaded volatility spiked. Instead of fleeing to the usual U.S. safe havens, money headed for Swiss francs and gold, the market equivalent of quietly packing an overnight bag and slipping out the back door.

By the time Donald Trump arrived in Davos, late, after Air Force One had to turn back due to “minor electrical issues,” forcing a plane swap and some gallows humor from staffers, the damage was already done. The president took the stage at the World Economic Forum insisting the United States has “the hottest country in the world,” bragging about stock markets that had very recently disagreed with him, and informing a stunned audience that he wanted “immediate negotiations” to take control of Greenland. He reassured them he wouldn’t use force. Instead, he offered something much more familiar: “You can say no,” he said, “and we will remember.”

What he did not say onstage, but what reporting has since confirmed, is that this memory already had a price tag. Behind the scenes, Trump privately threatened President Emmanuel Macron with a 200 percent tariff on French wine if France declined to join his proposed “Board of Peace,” a name that manages to be both Orwellian and faintly wine-club adjacent. Champagne, it turns out, was not a joke. No diplomacy; just a shakedown delivered with a corkscrew.

Some people audibly gasped when Trump attacked NATO and suggested the alliance might not defend the United States in the future. This was not a misunderstanding. It was extortion delivered with a smile. Give me Greenland, join my board, or I will tariff you into oblivion. No invasion, just memory, and maybe the destruction of a major European export industry for emphasis.

This is the worldview Trump has always preferred: protection-racket diplomacy dressed up as dealmaking. It’s why he still venerates figures like Al Capone, not for their success, but for their method. Fear without legitimacy, and consequences without consent. At Davos, that logic finally collided with an audience that prices risk for a living, and they did not applaud.

And then the threat stopped being theoretical. On Wednesday morning, the European Union halted approval of its trade deal with the United States, explicitly citing Trump’s escalating tariff threats over Greenland. The deal, reached just last summer and billed at the time as restoring “stability and predictability,” capped U.S. tariffs on most European imports at a relatively modest 15 percent and would have lowered barriers for American agricultural and industrial exports into the bloc. That work is now frozen. “Given the continued and escalating threats, including tariff threats, against Greenland and Denmark, and their European allies, we have been left with no alternative,” said Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee. “Business as usual is impossible.” Ursula von der Leyen, speaking in Davos, put it more bluntly: a deal is a deal, and when friends shake hands, it’s supposed to mean something. Apparently, “we will remember” does not count as good faith.

Back home, a dangerous Arctic blast is bearing down on the eastern half of the country, with wind chills plunging as low as minus 40 or 50 degrees in parts of the Midwest and Great Lakes. By the weekend, that same air mass is expected to collide with a southern frontal system, spawning a massive winter storm stretching nearly 2,000 miles from Texas to the Northeast. Tens of millions are under winter storm watches. Power outages are likely. In some regions, people who lose heat may face days of subfreezing temperatures. Frostbite and hypothermia won’t need blizzards; they’ll happen quietly. As Trump lectures Europe about how it’s “not recognizable anymore,” Americans are being warned to prepare for life-threatening cold.

In one of the most chilling decisions of this administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has quietly stopped assigning any dollar value to lives saved when evaluating new pollution rules. For decades, under Republicans and Democrats alike, regulators used a standard metric known as the “value of a statistical life” to weigh the costs of regulation against the benefit of preventing premature death. Under Trump’s EPA, that value is now effectively zero. The agency will still tally what pollution controls cost industry, but it will not count what Americans lose when those controls are weakened. If your child breathes polluted air from a power plant, the government now cares only about how expensive it would be for the polluter to stop.

Fine particulate matter and ozone are among the deadliest pollutants in the country, linked to asthma, heart disease, dementia, and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. Cutting them added more than a year to the average American lifespan since 1970. Removing human life from the ledger while keeping corporate costs intact isn’t simply technocratic fiduciary duty; it’s a moral declaration.

The beneficiaries are increasingly clear. A new analysis shows that just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2024. Half! Saudi Aramco alone emitted more CO₂ than all but four countries on Earth. ExxonMobil’s production would place it among the world’s top ten polluters if it were a nation. These companies are consolidating, expanding, and lobbying against phaseouts even as the climate crisis accelerates and extreme weather becomes more lethal. As Shanley has reported in a recent essay, the same warming that is driving deadly heat, storms, and displacement is also opening up new extraction opportunities in places like Greenland, melting ice, newly accessible shipping lanes, untapped oil, gas, and mineral reserves suddenly back on the table. At the very moment the damage is being traced, scientifically and legally, to specific actors, and courts are beginning to connect emissions to real-world harm, the U.S. government is choosing not to count the bodies, while powerful interests eye the spoils of a warming planet.

In Virginia, judges finally forced an end to the surreal standoff over Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney whose tenure was defined by unlawful appointment and political prosecutions. After weeks of defiance, a judge called her continued presence a “charade,” warned that her filings amounted to false statements, and publicly solicited applicants to replace her. Within hours, she was gone. Notably, the rebuke came from a Trump-appointed judge, who also scolded Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for submitting briefs more appropriate for cable news than a federal courtroom.

At the Supreme Court, another guardrail is under review. The justices heard arguments on whether Trump can fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, a test case for how much political control the president can exert over the central bank. Trump claims “cause,” citing disputed, years-old allegations that never resulted in charges. Outside the courtroom, he’s been less careful, boasting openly about stacking the Fed with loyalists who will slash interest rates on command. Every living former Fed chair and multiple former Treasury secretaries warned the court that allowing the purge would threaten economic stability. Even this Court, which has expanded presidential power repeatedly, appears hesitant to go that far.

And hovering over everything is the ruling we still haven’t heard: whether Trump actually has the authority to impose sweeping tariffs at will. That uncertainty is the quiet driver of the market panic. Investors aren’t reacting to a Champagne joke. They’re reacting to the possibility that trade policy has become a personal enforcement tool, one that may or may not survive judicial review, but will wreak havoc either way.

Trump will finish his Davos performance today, and we’ll circle back with a fuller accounting once the transcript lands. For now, the picture is already clear enough. Markets have reacted, and allies have recoiled. Courts have begun enforcing lines that should never have been tested, while regulators are quietly erasing human life from their balance sheets while corporations eye new profits in a warming world. Even the weather is reminding us that systems fail hardest at the margins.

A worldview built on coercion, extraction, and loyalty tests is colliding with institutions that still, at least in places, operate on rules, evidence, and restraint. The tension is showing up in bond yields, court orders, emergency alerts, and hushed rooms full of people who understand risk when they see it.

This bears repeating: this does not require some sweeping political miracle to stop. It would take only a handful of Republicans, in the House or the Senate, to say enough, and defend the law instead of the strongman. That pressure comes from constituents who keep calling, keep writing, keep showing up, and refuse to normalize what is very clearly not normal.

For now, it’s time for some fresh air, a long walk, and a reminder that reality still exists outside the spectacle. Marz and I are off to find some coastal air and movement before the next update drops.