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Take Trump Seriously About Greenland

The United States grabbing land from an ally sounds like the stuff of a Netflix political thriller. But every American should contemplate three realities about Donald Trump’s aggressive desire to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory. First, unlike his usual shtick, in which he floats wild ideas and then he and his aides alternate between saying he was serious and saying he might have been joking, he means it. The Danes seem to believe him, and so should Americans. When institutions begin planning based on the president’s directions, as the White House is now doing, it’s no longer idle talk.

Second, Trump is calling for actions that likely contravene American and international law. He is undermining the peace and stability of an allied nation, while threatening a campaign of territorial conquest. He refuses to rule out an unprovoked war of aggression, a violation of the United Nations Charter and an international crime that would be little different in kind from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to seize Ukraine. Finally, the almost-certain illegality of any attempt to seize Greenland against the will of its people and the Danish government means that if Trump directs the U.S. military to engage in such an operation, he could well precipitate the greatest civil-military crisis in American history since the Civil War.

How do we know Trump is serious? “One way or another,” the president crowed in his speech to a Joint Session of Congress last month, “we’re gonna get it.” A few weeks later, in case anyone missed the point, Trump told NBC: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 percent.” Trump says a lot of strange things, certainly. He has mused about striking hurricanes with nuclear weapons, running for a constitutionally prohibited third term, staying in office even if he loses, and annexing Canada as the 51st state. But when a president publicly makes a vow to Congress to do something and then repeats that vow over and over, such statements are not trial balloons; they are policy.

And sure enough, Trump has followed up by sending Vice President J. D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, as unwelcome emissaries to Greenland. Vance—a neo-isolationist who apparently expresses opposition to the president’s plans only in Signal chats—has now embraced Trump’s old-school imperialism. Worse, Vance tried to press Trump’s case by boorishly criticizing Denmark’s relationship with the island, smarmily telling the Danes: “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.” (Imagine the reaction in Washington if a European leader came, say, to Puerto Rico, castigated America’s management of the commonwealth, and urged the island to sever ties with the United States.) But at least he promised that military force, which to gain Greenland would have to be directed against Denmark, a NATO ally, was not going to be part of America’s efforts.

Trump, true to form, short-sheeted his hapless VP the next day by saying that military force was not, in fact, “off the table.”

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the White House has begun work on estimating the costs of controlling Greenland in “the most concrete effort yet to turn President Donald Trump’s desire to acquire the Danish territory into actionable policy.” Once these kinds of meetings start taking place in the White House, the next step is usually to send out orders to the rest of the American national-security establishment, including the CIA and the Pentagon, to begin planning for various contingencies.

Even if the American people supported direct aggression against our own allies—by a large margin, they do not—public opinion is not a legitimate excuse for treaty-breaking. Treaties are the law of the land in the United States, and the president’s Article II powers as commander in chief do not allow him to wave a monarchical hand and violate those treaties at will. Just as Trump cannot legally issue orders to violate the Geneva Conventions or other agreements to which the United States is a signatory, he does not have the right to break America’s pact with NATO at will and effectively declare war against Denmark. When George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces into combat against Iraq in 2003, some of his critics claimed that his actions were illegal, but Bush at least had the fig leaf of a congressional resolution, as well as a lengthy list of UN Security Council resolutions. Trump will have literally nothing except his insistent greed and glory-seeking vanity.

If the U.S. military is given direct orders to seize Greenland—that is, if it is told to enter the territory of another nation, pull down that nation’s flag, and then claim the ground in the name of the United States—it will have been ordered to attack an ally and engage in a war of conquest, even if no shot is ever fired. These would be illegal orders, because they would violate not only our treaty obligations but also international prohibitions against unprovoked wars of aggression. At home, the president would be contravening the Constitution: Article II does not allow the commander in chief to run around the planet seizing territories he happens to want.

At that point, every senior commander, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on down, has a moral obligation to refuse to accept or support such a command. Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a military-ethics professor at the Naval War College (where I also taught for many years) told me, speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the Defense Department, that civilian leaders have “the right to be wrong,” but that if the United States moves against Greenland, especially if both America and Denmark are part of NATO, “senior military leaders have an obligation to advise against this course of action and resign if necessary.” Shanks Kaurin added that this obligation might even extend to a requirement to refuse to draw up any plans.

But what if the orders are less obvious? Trump long ago mastered the Mafia-like talent of making his desires evident without actually telling others to engage in unsavory acts. In that case, he could issue instructions to the military aimed at intimidating Greenland that on their face are legal but that are obviously aggressive.

Retired Major General Charles Dunlap, who served as the deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force and now teaches law at Duke, suggested that Trump could take advantage, for example, of the wide latitude given to the United States in its basing agreement with Greenland. The president, Dunlap told me in an email, could choose to engage in “a gross misreading of the agreement” and move a large number of troops to Greenland as “a show of force aimed at establishing a fait accompli of some kind.” Military officers are required to presume that commands from higher authority are legal orders, and so a series of directives aimed at swarming forces into Greenland would likely be obeyed, Dunlap said, “because of the potential ambiguity” of such directives “as well as the inference of lawfulness.”

In any case, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have taken important steps to ensure that no one is left in the Pentagon to tell them that their orders might be unlawful. All of the top military lawyers whose job is to provide independent legal advice on such matters have been fired. And, as Dunlap notes, courts are notoriously reluctant to get involved in such questions, which is why Congress must step in. “The military,” he said, “ought not be put in the middle of something like this.”

Americans used to take their presidents far more seriously. Before Trump, when a president spoke, his words instantly became the policy of the United States government—for better or worse. When President Ronald Reagan caught his own aides flat-footed by bungling a policy message during a press conference in 1983, for example, a Reagan-administration official later said: “You can’t say ‘No, he didn’t mean it’ or ‘That’s not really government policy.’ That’s out of the question.”

But those days are long gone. As a direct result of Trump’s many off-the-cuff ruminations and long stretches of political glossolalia, Trump has convinced many Americans not to take their president at his word until it’s too late. (Consider how many people, for example, refused to believe that he would impose massive global tariffs, a policy they can now examine more closely by the light of a burning stock market.)

I realize that this entire discussion seems like utter lunacy. War against … Denmark? But when the president says something, it’s policy. Trump insists that he must be taken seriously. Americans and their elected representatives across the political spectrum should oblige him.

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Jesse Watters Roasts Himself For Not Calling Out Trump While Markets Tank: ‘If Biden Was Golfing During a Stock Market Like This…’

Fox News host Jesse Watters dropped some self-deprecating humor on Monday while reacting to Democrats’ outrage over former President Donald Trump hitting the links over the weekend, despite a dramatic downturn in the stock market.

The conservative network mainstay noted he had not joined Democrats in criticizing Trump over the weekend for golfing amid the economic uncertainty of the past several trading days.

Trump announced his sweeping reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday of last week. Thursday and Friday the Dow lost 1,600 and 2,200 points, respectively.

The president spent the weekend golfing at his resorts in South Florida. He also skipped the transfer of the bodies of four soldiers killed overseas in order to attend an event at his course. Democrats in Congress hit Trump for taking time to hit the links, as did protestors at nationwide rallies and MSNBC’s Jen Psaki.

On The Five, cohost Dana Perino aired clips of the blowback. Watters reacted by roasting himself and acknowledging his partisanship – saying he would have never been critical of former President Joe Biden if the roles were reversed.

Perino led with the criticism of Trump and said, “Jesse, one of the things I cannot stand is complaints about golf.” Watters replied with a grin:

Me too. And that’s not a middle finger to middle America. That’s a middle finger to all these foreign countries who are trying to get on the phone and negotiate these tariffs down. But if Biden was golfing during a stock market like this, I’m sure I wouldn’t say a word.

Cohost Greg Gutfeld joked, “You wouldn’t.”

Watters responded, “I would not. I know I’m not panicking, Dana, because I’m not looking. I haven’t looked at my bank account. I’m afraid.”

The host of Jesse Watters Primetime has never been shy about his conservative leanings – and how his politics differ from his mother, who he has told Fox viewers time and again is extremely liberal.

Watch above via Fox News.

The post Jesse Watters Roasts Himself For Not Calling Out Trump While Markets Tank: ‘If Biden Was Golfing During a Stock Market Like This…’ first appeared on Mediaite.

MSNBC Guest Accuses Trump’s 77 Million Voters of Wanting to ‘Destroy the Republic’ Rather Than ‘Elect A Black Woman’

Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude laid into the 77 million Americans who voted for President Donald Trump on MSNBC, accusing them of opting to “destroy the republic” rather than to “elect a black woman.”

“I don’t know what it’s going to take for the American people, for 78 million Americans to deal with what motivated them to make the choice to elect this man again,” he told MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace on Monday’s Deadline: White House. “To make the choice that will allow these people to undermine every fundamental assumption we have. That you can just be disappeared.”

Glaude continued, “I don’t know what it’s going to take for 78 million Americans to deal with what motivated them to make this choice, and the choice that they’ve made, we have to just be honest, is to literally throw the republic into the trash bin.”

The Princeton professor argued:

We chose a felon who is more interested in loyalty, who is more interested in retribution, who is more interested in grift than in democracy, and we chose a felon because we didn’t want to elect a black woman. So to read that, to actually explicate that is to say we would rather destroy the republic than for that to have happened, and until we grapple with it, there’s no amount of protesting I could do, there’s no amount of resistance that could come into play to actually force 78 million people to grapple with what motivated them to put themselves in this position.

Wallace replied, “You’re right in that 78 million people voted for someone who wants to shred the Constitution.”

Watch above via MSNBC.

The post MSNBC Guest Accuses Trump’s 77 Million Voters of Wanting to ‘Destroy the Republic’ Rather Than ‘Elect A Black Woman’ first appeared on Mediaite.

University of Florida Student Sent to ICE Detention Facility Over Expired Driver’s License

A student at the University of Florida is being held at a detention facility in Miami after he was pulled over and found to be driving with an expired license and registration tag.

Twenty-seven-year-old international student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, who is in the country on a student visa, was arrested by the Gainesville Police Department on March 28 over the infractions.

Zapata Velásquez, a Colombian national, was reportedly sent to the Krome Detention Center in Miami and has not been heard from since he was taken there on April 1. As noted by the Miami New Times, he does not appear in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee database. The New Times reported:

After graduating from Santa Fe College in 2023, the UF International Center assisted him with the transition to UF, according to the Independent Florida Alligator.

Under current regulations, the U.S. Department of State can revoke non-immigrant visas, including F-1 visas, for people arrested for driving under the influence or similar offenses.

According to NTN24, ICE gave Zapata Velásquez two options post-arrest: go to jail while his case is resolved in immigration court or sign his own deportation order.

Zapata Velásquez’s detention and pending deportation is just one of several instances in which university students in the country lawfully have been targeted for detention and deportation by President Donald Trump’s administration. Over the last several weeks, federal agents have arrested students who, despite not being charged with a crime, remain in federal detention facilities after they publicly criticized Israel. Last month, recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was apprehended in front of his pregnant wife. Two weeks later, masked federal agents arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student, on a sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts.

The Trump administration has also sent more than 250 Venezuelan nationals it says are gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador without any discernible due process. On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported that it could find no criminal record for at least 75% of the people sent there by the U.S. In one instance, the administration admitted it mistakenly deported a Maryland father of three named Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, but insisted it is under no obligation to bring him back. A lawyer for Abrego Garcia successfully argued in U.S. District Court that the administration should return the deportee. The District Court ruling was upheld by a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but on Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts stayed the lower court’s order.

The post University of Florida Student Sent to ICE Detention Facility Over Expired Driver’s License first appeared on Mediaite.