Welcome to America: Please Hand Over Your Phone

From diverted Canadian flights to looming World Cup chaos, the border becomes the latest tool of intimidation.

Good morning! The world is doing that thing again where cruelty, incompetence, and farce all arrive in the same news cycle and insist on being taken seriously.

Let’s start with Ukraine, because reality should always get first position. As Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepared for another round of high-wire diplomacy, including yet another face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump, Russia answered the prospect of peace talks by plunging Kyiv into darkness. Overnight, nearly 500 drones and 40 missiles, including ballistic weapons, slammed into the capital and other regions, knocking out power and heat to roughly a third of the city as temperatures hovered around freezing. The strikes lasted nearly ten hours. Civilians were killed, children were wounded, and hundreds of thousands of people woke up without electricity, heat, or any illusion that Moscow is negotiating in good faith.

Zelenskyy did not mince words. This, he said, is how Russia responds to peace efforts. And the timing was unmistakable. As he boarded a plane bound for North America, stopping first in Canada to coordinate with European leaders before heading to Florida, missiles were still falling. Poland scrambled fighter jets. Airports closed. Energy infrastructure burned. Diplomacy under bombardment isn’t diplomacy. It’s coercion.

Yet Zelenskyy is still trying. He’s pushing a U.S.-backed 20-point peace framework that’s reportedly close to completion, insisting on security guarantees strong enough to prevent Russia from simply pausing and attacking again. He’s even floated a 60-day ceasefire followed by a referendum on territory, a move that effectively calls Russia’s bluff. If Moscow truly wants peace, it can stop shooting long enough for Ukrainians to vote. Russia’s response so far has been missiles, which tells you everything you need to know.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has made clear how he sees the situation. “He doesn’t have anything until I approve it,” Trump said of Zelenskyy, casting himself as the final arbiter of a country currently being bombed into winter darkness. The comment landed about as well as you’d expect in Europe, where leaders are scrambling to reinforce Ukraine’s position and limit the damage a transactional, Putin-friendly White House could inflict.

And if you needed a reminder that the Trump administration has turned the United States into a jurisdictional booby trap, consider this: a routine domestic Canadian flight nearly became a border nightmare.

Last week, more than 100 passengers boarded a Porter Airlines flight in Toronto bound for Winnipeg. No passports, no international paperwork, because why would you need one to fly within Canada? Midair, a sensor malfunction forced an emergency landing. The nearest safe runway wasn’t in Manitoba or Ontario. It was in Minneapolis.

In a single decision made for safety, a domestic commute became an involuntary encounter with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency operating under a regime that has openly flirted with annexation rhetoric, “51st state” taunts, and the weaponization of the border. Passengers who had never intended to enter the United States suddenly found themselves subject to U.S. law and U.S. discretion, without passports, without counsel, and without the protections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

They were lucky. They were processed and sent home. But luck is not a strategy, and nder current U.S. practice, border agents can demand access to phones and laptops, question political views, detain travelers indefinitely, and deny entry with no meaningful recourse. “I didn’t mean to land here” is not a defense. The border is effectively a rights-free zone, and geography does not negotiate.

The lesson is grim but clear: the idea of a “safe” domestic flight near the U.S. border is over. If your flight path clips American airspace, and many do, you are gambling with a system that now treats even allied citizens as potential suspects. The border has become a trap door.

Americans are beginning to feel the consequences of this posture and responding with impressive levels of denial. Canadian travel to the U.S. has dropped sharply. Montana alone reportedly lost more than 130,000 Canadian visitors this summer. Border towns are bleeding tourism revenue. Yet, instead of confronting the obvious, that people don’t want to vacation in a country that threatens them, officials are blaming exchange rates, inflation, or Canadians being “price sensitive.”

Canadians aren’t broke, they are repelled. The irony is that while U.S. border economies hollow out, Canadian destinations are booming. Victoria, B.C. is posting record tourism numbers. Canadians are rediscovering that staying home isn’t a sacrifice, it’s an act of self-respect. When a bully starts rattling sabers, you don’t book a weekend in his backyard.

This all connects. A United States that treats Ukrainian sovereignty as a bargaining chip, that shrugs at missile strikes while demanding concessions, is the same United States that now treats borders as tools of leverage rather than law. The same administration that tells Zelenskyy he “has nothing until I approve it” is quite comfortable telling Canadian travelers the same thing. Trump has ended the era of “the longest undefended border in the world”.

Here’s the new reality: if you fly anywhere near the border, carry your passport like armor. Assume your devices are searchable. Assume diversion is possible. And spend your money where the rule of law still behaves like one.

This brings us to the looming stress test no one in Washington seems prepared to acknowledge: the World Cup.

In less than a year, the United States is supposed to welcome hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors, fans, athletes, journalists, families, many of whom will transit through U.S. airports and internal checkpoints now dominated by an emboldened ICE and Customs and Border Protection. These are not travelers accustomed to a system where phones can be searched without warrants, political views can be questioned, visas can be revoked on the spot, and “secondary inspection” can stretch indefinitely without explanation.

We’ve already seen lawful travelers detained by mistake, domestic flights diverted into U.S. custody, and political speech treated as grounds for suspicion. Scale that system up to a global sporting event, add language barriers and security theater, and the outcome is predictable: confusion, abuse, diplomatic incidents, and preventable human-rights scandals playing out at arrival gates. If the United States intends to host the world, it may want to stop treating the world like a suspect.

Now here’s where the farce begins bleeding into policy. Amidst all this chaos, Trump is busy posting photos of marble. Yes, marble. Kennedy Center décor ideas, which he has treated less like a national cultural institution and more like a personal branding opportunity. While civilians huddle in freezing apartments and diplomats race the clock, Trump is scrolling through stone samples like a man redecorating during an evacuation.

At the same time, he’s lashing out online about the Epstein files, again, calling renewed scrutiny a “Democrat-inspired hoax,” demanding the release of names, and insisting Republicans had nothing to do with Epstein, despite years of documented social overlap that he has never explained. This is the same Trump family that once demanded the Epstein client list be released immediately. Now the tune has changed.

Back home, the justice system keeps quietly pushing back in ways that send MAGA world into a rage spiral. In Los Angeles, a jury acquitted Bobby Nuñez, a tow truck driver who briefly moved an ICE vehicle during an aggressive arrest. The agents were without their truck for thirteen minutes. Thirteen. For that, Trump’s acting U.S. attorney charged Nuñez with theft of government property and threatened him with up to ten years in prison, bragging online that he’d “laugh behind bars.”

A jury of his peers said no. Four days of trial over a car being moved one block ended in acquittal. Shortly afterward, the judge removed the Trump-appointed prosecutor from his acting role. Cue Stephen Miller, who promptly melted down on X, denouncing the verdict as “blatant jury nullification in a blue city” and complaining that juries with “shared interests and values” undermine the justice system. Translation: juries are fine until they refuse to rubber-stamp intimidation.

More than half of similar ICE-related prosecutions have collapsed or been dismissed, including cases where bodycam footage showed ICE agents injuring each other and blaming civilians. The government can file political charges all day long. Convictions require evidence and persuasion. Juries keep noticing the difference.

That theme carries straight into Tennessee, where a federal judge has now halted the prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and scheduled a hearing on whether the case itself is vindictive. Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison despite a standing court order protecting him, was only brought back to the U.S. after the Supreme Court forced the administration’s hand. Upon his return, he was immediately arrested on human smuggling charges based on a years-old traffic stop that resulted in… a warning.

Judge Waverly Crenshaw has now made clear that prosecutors will have to explain themselves. If they can’t justify why this case suddenly mattered only after public and judicial pressure, the charges could be dismissed outright. Once again, the courts are asking the question the administration refuses to answer: is this about law enforcement, or retaliation?

Trump is floating the idea of scrapping the Senate filibuster so Republicans can finally govern and, he promises, deliver “great health care.” This would be more amusing if it weren’t so revealing. The filibuster isn’t why Republicans have no healthcare plan. They didn’t have one when they controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate. They didn’t have one when they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They don’t have one now. Removing a procedural rule doesn’t conjure policy out of thin air. It just removes guardrails while incompetence accelerates.

Trump also insists the midterms will be about “pricing,” not “affordability,” apparently believing voters will be impressed by a thesaurus swap while still unable to pay medical bills.

For some end of the year schadenfreude, Elon Musk’s Cybertruck is the gift that keeps on failing. In Las Vegas, police are now patrolling in a fleet of Tesla Cybertrucks donated by billionaire tech investor Ben Horowitz and his wife, because clearly the best use of a $2.7 million donation is turning cops into rolling product placements. The trucks have been recalled repeatedly for parts flying off, pedals malfunctioning, lights detaching, and other small issues you generally want sorted before deployment. European regulators won’t even allow them on the road.

Sales are collapsing. Giving them away is easier than selling them. The sheriff insists it’s about “innovation.” The ACLU notes it looks more like branding. Either way, nothing says “public safety” like a stainless-steel vehicle that keeps shedding components and has documented failures involving doors and electrical systems, exactly the sort of problems you don’t want in an emergency vehicle.

So that’s where we are. Ukraine under bombardment while its president tries again to negotiate peace with a man more interested in dominance than diplomacy. Juries quietly refusing to be instruments of fear. Courts asking inconvenient questions. Republicans fantasizing about procedural shortcuts to policies they still don’t have. Billionaires donating malfunctioning trucks for the vibes. And a president rage-posting about marble while the world burns.

Somewhere in all of this, under moonlight and cold air, people and their dogs are still holding moonbeam vigils. Still choosing solidarity over spectacle, and still insisting that cruelty, corruption, and chaos are not inevitable, even when they’re loud, well-funded, and wearing very expensive stone finishes.