Bob Sheak, Jan. 24, 2026
Arlene Sheak edited
The president is an embarrassment to the US, but more importantly, he is an unprecedented danger to democracy and a threat to peace in the world. He often claims he is for peace, but he is quick to utilize the military abroad and authorizes the largest military budget in American history – and in the world. He also aggressively authorizes the deployment of federal law-less enforcers into cities across the U.S, particularly “Democratic” cities.
All the while, he acts and speaks erratically. He makes up his own “truths.” He sees himself as an all-powerful leader, an autocrat or dictator. He enriches himself and his family. The New York Times Editorial Board reported that Trump had pocketed $1,405,500,000 in 2025
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/20/opinion/editorials/trump-wealth-crypto-graft.html).
His power is unfortunately rooted in his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, including the military, an array of federal agencies, ICE, along with the Republican Party, support from the rich and corporations, a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and his base of tens of millions of right-wing Americans. His policies are having detrimental effects on many Americans.
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His mental instability
Harold Meyerson contends that the president has “become psychotically megalomaniacal (https://prospect.org/2026/01/20/25th-amendment-time–mad-king-donald).
“Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States.
“Today, which marks the first anniversary of Trump’s reassuming the duties of the presidency, it’s clear that the conventional wisdom was profoundly and disastrously wrong. Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States.
When the consequences are confined to his ordering up monuments to his assumed greatness—stamping his face on coins, engraving his name on government buildings, sizing his ballroom to dwarf anything else in D.C.—they can be dismissed as relatively harmless outbursts of ridiculously overindulged self-love.
“But when, as he told The New York Times earlier this month, he views the only constraints on his actions to be his own sense of propriety and morality, rather than the Constitution that presidents are sworn to preserve, protect, and defend, then we’ve been shuttled into a different form of government than the one we’ve assumed we’ve lived in for the past 250 years: a monarchy, at least as Trump himself sees it.”
Meyerson gives this example, regarding Trump’s bizarre reason to annex Greenland. “The president Bottom of Form
Tcited his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize as a reason he wants to seize Greenland. Just believing that he was in any sense qualified for the prize itself should have been evidence enough of his derangement. He surely feels wounded when anyone dares to tell him the truth about himself, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee unknowingly did when they gave the award to somebody else.
“But his determination to seize Greenland—already disgraceful, deplorable, and altogether addled even before his Nobel deprivation message—has become proof positive of his narcissistic megalomania, now that he’s linked his determination to his wounded ego.”
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Trump’s meandering speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
Erin Mendell and Shashank Bengali report on this for The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/us/politics/trump/davos-speech-takeaways.html). Here are some highlights of what they report.
“In remarks that stretched for over an hour, Mr. Trump lashed out at NATO in front of fellow members of the military alliance and lobbed criticism at the leaders of several nations, Somali immigrants in the United States, wind power and more.”
Denmark and Greenland
“Mr. Trump referred to Greenland, which he has insisted the United States must control for reasons of national and international security, as ‘cold and poorly located.’ He has argued that China and Russia could seek to exploit it, and said on Wednesday that granting U.S. control of it was ‘a very small ask.’” He ruled out using military force, but threatened European leaders who oppose such a U.S. annexation, telling them ‘We will remember.’”
Trump’s veiled threats pushed the long-established trans-Atlantic alliance “to the brink.”
Here are examples of other points Trump mentioned.
- He spent several minutes arguing that European nations have hurt themselves by trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while reveling in his efforts to block and dismantle renewable electricity plants in the United States.
- After referring to Greenland, a territory with a population of nearly 60,000 people, as a “piece of ice,” he appeared to confuse it with Iceland, a Nordic island nation, when talking about a dip in the stock market this week.
- He said he had received a call from Karin Keller-Sutter, Switzerland’s president at the time, pushing back on an initial 30 percent tariff. “And she was very repetitive,” he said, adding, “She just rubbed me the wrong way.” After that call, Mr. Trump said, “I made it 39 percent.”
- Mr. Trump drew some gasps when he directly criticized Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada. Canada is historically one of the United States’ staunchest allies.
- Mr. Carney said in a speech at Davos on Tuesday that the era of U.S. hegemony could be over, calling the current moment “a rupture.” Though he didn’t mention Mr. Trump’s name, there was no mistaking his meaning.
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His Falsehoods
Falsehoods Fueled Trump’s First Year Back in Office
Linda Qiu does a fact-check of Trump’s falsehoods in 2025
(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/us/politics/trump-falsehoods-fact-check-first-year-year.html). There is no surprise here. Trump has a long-history of stretching the truth and outright lying.
In the first year of his second term, President Trump has cited an arsenal of falsehoods, baseless claims and distortions to justify significant policy changes on the economy, immigration, trade, executive power, and foreign policy.
For example, Trump claimed that he would transform the economy from the “worst” to the “best” and that his tariffs would bring back manufacturing companies to the U.S. Contrary to this claim, Qui writes,
“The manufacturing sector shed 63,000 jobs from January 2025 to December 2025. Construction spending in manufacturing has also declined. Economic activity in the sector in general contracted for 10 consecutive months in 2025, according to a longstanding survey by the Institute for Supply Management.”
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Billionaires and Corporations gained a lot in Trump’s first year back in the White House
Derek Seidman considers who gained the most during Trump’s first year, Jan 20 2026 (https://truthout.org/articles/who-gained-the-most-during-trumps-first-year-billionaires-and-corporations). Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York. His research finds that billionaires and corporations did well 2025. Others find that the average American struggled just to pay the bills.
Seidman writes,“Big banks saw their stocks skyrocket by 29 percent during Trump’s first year.”
“…major industries and their billionaire leaders who rule over us all — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, Big Oil to Big Crypto — have profoundly benefited from the administration’s first year. Many of these corporate actors have cozied up with Trump through piles of campaign and inauguration contributions, as well as donations to his White House ballroom project.
“They’ve been the big winners over the past year, raking in billions from a policy agenda overseen by Trump and his administration stacked with billionaires and industry-friendly regulators.”
Here’s one of Seidman’s examples.
‘Wall Street and its coterie of financial oligarchs have been prime beneficiaries of Trump’s first year. This is especially true of big banks, which saw their stocks skyrocket by 29 percent in 2025.
“The bullishness around banks springs largely from Trump’s lax regulatory regime.
This includes the weakening of antitrust oversight, to the glee of big banks profiting from ramped-up mergers and acquisitions, and the appointment of corporate-friendly regulators to key financial cabinet and oversight roles.”
“One major beneficiary of these policies is Jamie Dimon, the longtime billionaire CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the U.S.’s biggest bank.
Dimon — who appears to be chumming up with Trump after years of tension — raked in around $770 million in 2025 through a “combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank’s shares,” whose value rose 34 percent last year, according to The New York Times.
‘Other bank executives — at Citi, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, and more — have also massively cashed in.’
Seidman writes,
“Tech corporations and billionaires have been major beneficiaries of Trump’s first year, with their stocks and revenues soaring, as the president has adamantly backed their core interests, including turbocharging the construction of data centers that power artificial intelligence (AI), gutting state-level AI regulations, cutting limits of AI chip exports, and approving chip exports by chipmaking behemoth Nvidia to China.”
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Trump is hardly a president who advances peace in the world
Katrina Vanden Heuvel and John Nichols consider Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine,” Jan 13 2026 (https://www.thenation.com/article/society/donroe-doctrine-venezuela-maduro). Here’s some of what they write.
“Trump, acting very much as a European king of old, attacked Venezuela as this edition of The Nation went to press. His move represents a brazen violation of international law that destabilizes global security and seizes Congress’s exclusive authority to declare war. Military force is justified only in response to a clear, credible, and imminent threat to the security of the US or its treaty allies. Venezuela, whatever its internal dysfunctions or its connections to drug trafficking, poses no such threat.”
They continue.
“While Trump and his allies tried to justify naked aggression as part of a convoluted strategy to target ‘narco-terrorism,’ Representative Pat Ryan (D-NY), a former Army intelligence officer who served two combat tours during the Iraq War, declared, ‘No matter what they say, it’s always oil.’ Ryan was not alone in recognizing echoes of the WMD claims of former president George W. Bush, and how that blood-for-oil war went so horribly awry. In his first bid for the presidency, Trump positioned himself as something of an anti-war Republican. That was always a cynical gambit, and Trump is now exposed as an economic imperialist who learned nothing from Iraq and who is willing, as Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) noted, to embark on a career of empire that risks the lives of US troops to make ‘oil companies (not Americans) more profitable.’”
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The growth of reckless domestic law-less enforcement: ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Bill Chappell considers “How ICE grew to be the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency (https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump). Here’s some of what he reports.
“Just 10 years ago, the annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was less than $6 billion — notably smaller than other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security. But ICE’s budget has skyrocketed during President Trump’s second term, becoming the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with $85 billion now at its disposal.
“The windfall is thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted last July. After hovering around the $10 billion mark for years, ICE’s budget suddenly benefited from a meteoric spike.
Chappell quotes Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute.
“With this new bill and other appropriations, it’s larger than the annual budget of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined….”
Chappel continues. “ICE is now the lead agency in President’s Trump immigration crackdown, sending thousands of agents into U.S. communities. As its funding and profile has grown as part of those efforts, ICE has come under increasing criticism for its officers’ actions, from masked agents randomly stopping, questioning, and detaining people and thrusting them into unmarked vehicles to the recent
“Under the 2025 law, ICE has a $75 billion supplement that it can take as long as four years to spend, along with its base budget of around $10 billion. If the agency spends that money at a steady pace and current funding levels continue, it would have nearly $29 billion on hand each year. That essentially triples ICE’s total budget from recent years.
“To give that large number a sense of scale, consider that the Trump administration’s 2026 appropriations request for the entire Justice Department, including the FBI, stands at a little over $35 billion.
“The Trump administration has set lofty goals for ICE, aiming to deport 1 million people each year. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act also allocates $45 billion for ICE to expand its immigration detention system — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last June that the agency will be able to hold up to 100,000 people in custody daily. By comparison, the federal Bureau of Prisons currently holds over 153,000 inmates.
“As of Nov. 30, 65,735 people were held in immigration detention, according to the data tracking project Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
With those metrics in mind, ICE went on a hiring spree in 2025, fueled by its bigger budget. In just one year, the agency says, it ‘more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000.’ (The Office of Personnel Management, which tracks federal workforce statistics, is only updated through Nov. 30 and does not reflect any hiring made by the DHS in the last quarter of the year.)
“According to the DHS, ICE received 220,000 applications in 2025, thanks in part to a generous incentive package with perks like a signing bonus of up to $50,000, disbursed over the course of a five-year commitment, and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment.
“ICE is still on that hiring spree, looking to hire deportation officers in at least 25 cities around the U.S., according to a job listing on the USA Jobs website that will remain active through the end of September. The starting salary for an ICE deportation officer in the Enforcement and Removal Operations division, or ERO, ranges from $51,632 up to $84,277.”
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More Americans have come to oppose Trump’s ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement force
Joe Lancaster reports on this and how support for abolishing ICE is surging (https://reason.com/2026/01/20/as-ice-cracks-down-support-for-abolishing-it-surges).
Lancaster writes, “Earlier this month, the death of Renee Good at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross brought overly aggressive federal law enforcement into public view. As a result, more Americans than ever now think we should get rid of it.”
He continues, “More Americans now support the abolishment of ICE, in a major change since July and in Donald Trump’s first presidency,” Forbes‘ Mike Stunson wrote last week, “as the fatal shooting of Renee Good by a federal officer has led to a wave of backlash against the agency.”
Stunson who “cited a January 2026 poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov, which found that 46 percent of respondents support abolishing ICE, with 43 percent opposed. The same poll found 50 percent felt Good’s shooting was “not justified,” while only 30 percent said it was justified.
“A separate poll by Civiqs found 43 percent of respondents support ending ICE, with 49 percent opposed. Notably, though, this represents a dramatic shift since only a few months ago. In September 2024, only 19 percent supported, and 66 percent opposed, abolishing the agency.
“It was also the highest number in favor of abolition, and the lowest number against, since Civiqs began asking the question in July 2018, when the #AbolishICE movement began in earnest. (At that time, respondents favored keeping the agency intact by a 2–to–1 margin.)
‘And an Associated Press/NORC poll shows 61 percent of Americans now oppose Trump’s handling of immigration; as recently as March 2025, respondents were evenly split.
“The reason for the shift is clear: Americans are suddenly confronted with the reality of what ICE is doing, and they don’t like what they see.”
What do they see?
“Trump has deployed 3,000 federal officers and agents to Minneapolis this month, the largest operation in DHS history,” Nick Miroff wrote last week in The Atlantic. “Many of the ICE officers and Border Patrol agents are outfitted in tactical gear and wear body armor and masks, and they’re using the technological tools that the department acquired to protect the country’s borders: surveillance drones, facial-recognition apps, phone-cracking software. Powered by billions of dollars in new funding, they are making immigration arrests and grabbing protesters who try to stop them.”
Stunson continues.
“The results are plain to see: ICE officers assaulting U.S. citizens, smashing windows and dragging them from their cars, going door-to-door without a warrant or even reasonable suspicion. In October, ProPublica reported ICE had arrested at least 170 Americans—in many cases using considerable force—including some who were detained for multiple days without being allowed to contact their families or an attorney.”
Stunson adds, “Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that ICE has scanned the driver’s license photos of one in three American adults and could access the driver’s license data of three in four American adults.”
An alternative
“Leaving immigration restrictions more to the states would bring us closer to the Constitution’s original meaning,” agrees George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. “We may not be able to fully restore the original meaning of the Constitution on this score. But abolishing ICE and shifting more law enforcement resources to state and local governments would bring us closer to it. It would also simultaneously curtail ICE abuses and reduce crime.”
“The U.S. went nearly its entire existence without ICE; it could do so again. And the more that Americans become familiar with the agency and see what it does, the more they seem to agree.”
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Jack Smith’s Testimony on Trump’s Indictments
Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer report on Jack Smith’s defense of his Trump indictments during House Hearing (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/us/politics/jack-smith-trump-testimoney-congress.html).
“Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who twice indicted Donald J. Trump, defended his investigation in a tense and long-awaited appearance before a House committee on Thursday — flatly accusing Mr. Trump of causing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”
Smith said, “No one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account,” Mr. Smith said in his opening remarks. “So that is what I did.”
“The hearing posed significant risks to Mr. Smith, who has said he believes Mr. Trump and his appointees will seize on the smallest misstep to investigate, prosecute and humiliate him. House Republicans had made it clear that they would make a criminal referral to the Justice Department if his testimony revealed serious inconsistencies or misstatements.”
“‘Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, that it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence,’ Mr. Smith said, sitting alone at the witness table with a water bottle, legal pad and white ballpoint pen.”
Jack Smith told the committee that he believed his investigations had gathered proof beyond a reasonable doubt that would have led to President Donald Trump’s convictions on charges of mishandling classified documents and seeking to unlawfully overturn his 2020 election loss, if he had not won last year’s presidential election.
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Concluding thoughts
I have written enough, though it is hardly all that could be written. The central point is that we are stuck with a president who looks at America and the World as something he can manipulate and, in the process, does great harm. And there are signs he is mentally unstable.
There is hope.
Democrats are doing well in recent state elections. People are demonstrating against his anti-immigrant, anti-democratic deployment of ICE forces. Trump’s poll ratings are down. Many countries are resisting his threats on tariffs and military interventions. Then, not the focus here, there are the yet to be released Epstein files.
Vital issues - challenging pol and econ power 