Notes on Unbearable Stupidity, January 6, 2026 Edition
"A year ago, I went to Copenhagen to write about the political crisis Trump had created over Greenland," Anne Appelbaum said the other day on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter. "Danes told me that because the US can already do whatever it wants on the island, they had come to a conclusion: Trump just wants the U.S. to look bigger on a map." Trump is obsessed with bigness, and Greenland looks even bigger on the Mercator projection maps that swell up the northern places. European countries have made it clear that to grab Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, aka NATO, would be to go to war with NATO, which would be among other things unfathomably stupid. The Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said, "I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland. But I will also make it clear that if the US chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO..."
Part of the unbearable stupidity of the current administration is its feckless enthusiasm for doing things that seem like manly feats of strength to manosphere idiots and also make this country weaker. So much of the stupid here is also about stupid versions of masculinity, all the way down to the dim bulb that is Pete Hegseth and his belief that pushups are a top military strategy. The Trump Administration is an autoimmune disorder sabotaging the things that actually made America if not great at least powerful: its economy, its higher education system, its international relations, its crucial immigrant workforce, its functioning federal government, its public health systems, the rule of law, and lots of other things like food safety and clean water.
Part of this disorder is a devout belief that violence is power, when it is what you resort to when the power of persuasion or alliance or other forms of building lasting power have failed, and often how you further sabotage those powers that come through relationship and respect. It's the logic of abusers who don't understand that you can fear them without respecting them. Heather Cox Richardson quotes the leftover lasagna noodle known as Stephen Miller telling Jake Tapper “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” He doesn't understand, however, what strength and power look like when they're not force, which they're mostly not.
Trump has recently proposed to build gigantic "Trump-class/golden fleet" US Navy battleships when battleships long ago became obsolete, which is to say that this too is unfathomably stupid and also right up there with Trump steaks and Trump sneakers as a branded product line. A military expert's assessment is that "It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water." Trump's proposed ballroom to replace the East Wing of the White House that was illegally smashed to smithereens last fall keeps getting bigger and if we're lucky, will never be built either.
I suspect that all this bigness and all this putting his name on stuff – ships, the memorial to John F. Kennedy, the former US Institute of Peace, National Park passes – is because Trump is in rapid cognitive and corporeal decline and napping his way toward the big sleep. He's building memorials to himself. Also, he has a longtime habit of making an inane association and then getting stuck there, and apparently he has equated bigness with greatness, and will just keep bringing obscene bloatedness to everything he can. (Other inane associations include his conflation of insane asylums and refugees seeking asylum and his utter inability to understand how tariffs work.)
Speaking of unfathomably stupid, it's the fifth anniversary of the violent attack on Congress and the Constitution and on the peaceful transfer of power (which Jack Smith has been testifying about in Congress recently, to the effect that Trump was indeed guilty as hell of instigating it). All those middle-aged white men who believed that somehow their vengeful violence would stop the last step of the 2020 election and then what? That the people of the United States and the nations of the world would say "oh you smashed shit up and wanted to hang Mike Pence, so DJT is now the rightful king of the US of A?"
It's macho-variety stupid to believe that violence of this sort is strength rather than weakness (and I always thought of that January 6 attack as resembling those abusive ex-boyfriends/husbands who think they can terrorize and coerce the woman into wanting to be with them again, partly because they mistake women for possessions rather than people). Of course there was a lot of more covert and sophisticated work to steal the election too. With the right-wing former presidents of Brazil and South Korea both in prison for attempting coups, our country feels like a stupid country for being unable to do the same.
One thing we don't talk about enough (I should've written a whole essay about that): on the eve of January 6, 2021, Georgia sent two Democrats to the senate, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, through real power, the power of grassroots organizing (thank you Stacy Abrams) to persuade voters to turn out for the candidates in question, the power that produces legitimate and lasting results (but doesn't strut around like a rooster on meth). It was historic for Georgia and it tipped the balance in the senate just enough to get 2020 winner Joe Biden's key legislation through.
Speaking of stupid, there's January 3, 2026, in which an apparently long-planned raid in violation of international law led to the killing of maybe eighty Venezuelans and the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife, and their being hauled in to court in the USA. The fact that Trump just pardoned a Latin American former head of state, Honduras's Juan Orlando Hernández, for much more substantiated drug-trafficking charges, is about the fact that Trump is an incoherent nihilistic narcissist whose attention flickers like a guttering candle. He will probably get back to obsessing about marble armrests for the seats in his failing Trump-branded Kennedy Center because he is also, in his decline, increasingly retreating to his happy place, which is being a hotelier of sorts, redecorating while Rome burns.
Meanwhile the USA committed violence in a foreign country because of lots of different weak reasons being shuffled around on the talk-show and social-media circuits, because Madero was a bad guy or because of drugs, which were sometimes fentanyl that comes from China via Mexico or cocaine that mostly comes from other Latin American countries, or because of the oil. Or for reasons not mentioned by the administration, including that Trump is incredibly unpopular and has sabotaged the economy in ways that will become far more painful this year. But as oil policy analyst/climate journalist Antonia Juhasz noted, "Friendly reminder: Americans don't like war and Trump's base is particularly isolationist and already highly piqued at him for not paying enough attention to domestic matters. A recent CBS News poll shows 70% of those polled oppose the U.S. taking military action against Venezuela." Distracting people from the things you're doing that they hate by doing more things they hate is not strategic genius.
US oil companies probably don't want to take over the Venezuelan oil industry. Speaking of stupid versions of masculinity, Trump and his team are fixated on fossil fuels in a way that has partly to do with massive campaign donations and partly to do with some idea that coal in particular is manly and fossil fuel overall is what guys do, so they have stalled a lot of the US development and deployment of renewables, which is both an economic blow to the American people and an attack on the climate and our international climate obligations.
The I'm-with-stupid Administration said it was running Venezuela, and then Maduro's vice president went and got herself sworn in and seems to be running the place, so they invaded a country and just got one unpopular guy and his little-known wife while pissing off nearly everyone everywhere and making the whole world less safe (not least because the justification for this undermines the legal and ethical case against Russia invading Ukraine or China invading Taiwan). At least we haven't heard about invading Canada lately. But Trump did just threaten Colombia. And Cuba. And Greenland. And Mexico.
It has also been said that the Venezuelan lady who got the Nobel Peace Prize and dedicated it to Trump in an obscene display of obsequiousness was not going to be given the boost she hoped for in taking over the country because Trump is still sulky she got the prize and not him, and that whole constellation of self-interest makes the Nobel Peace Prize seem stupid too, as in what were they thinking in giving it to the lady who still grovels before the guy who keeps blowing up her countrymen in their fishing boats, and also invading Venezuela or whatever that violent attack is going to be called probably did not ratchet up Trump's own Nobel qualifications. (Among the most embarrassing things an American president has ever done: cold-called the Norwegian prime minister in August to lobby for the shiny golden status symbol, but he will probably go to his grave sulking that he can't have it and Obama got it.)
The Guardian's David Smith wrote on Saturday, "And while Trump talked at length about the capture of Maduro and vague plans to 'run' Venezuela in a case of the American empire strikes back, he could not resist upending his moment of glory by airing familiar grievances, from his legal treatment to frustrations with specific officials and a perceived lack of credit for his past actions." They do not seem to know exactly why they invaded Venezuela, and they also do not seem to be in control in Venezuela despite saying lots of stuff about running the country and and being in charge. They chase after bigness and greatness and masculine prowess and they are small, petty, weak, and stupid in the grand scheme of things, and none of this can make the Epstein Files go away.
p.s. Juhasz writes in Rolling Stone, "President Donald Trump’s bizarre war on offshore wind is getting worse — and it’s screwing workers and anyone who uses electricity. In the past year, Trump’s policies have resulted in the loss of more than half of the planned power set to come from offshore wind, according to a new report by the Energy Industries Council released last week. People all across the country are facing relentlessly skyrocketing energy prices, with average electricity bills in July up 9.5 percent from just one year ago. Rising energy costs were a key issue influencing voters in elections this month and are expected to again play an outsized role in the crucial 2026 midterms."
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