2026 Will Test Our Resolve

And it’s only the first week…

This is not AI. It’s a screen capture from Trump’s speech.

It’s only been a week, and already 2026 is off to quite the start.

An assault on Venezuela, spiraling U.S. imperialism, cutting off child support to blue states, naked revisionism on January 6, and another unhinged, incoherent mess of a speech by Trump—this year is going to try us in every way.

Today I’ll cover the gist of these stories, but at the end I’ll return to a central theme. It is my hope that it will help us process—and survive—whatever the regime throws at us in the months and year ahead until we can boot the GOP from power in November. In the end, our objectives, including an electoral rout, are clear; theirs are, well, a hot defensive mess.

And in that, we can take some comfort.

Blood for oil

The illegal attack on Venezuela and abduction of Maduro kicked things off. The big takeaway is that we’re no longer even pretending it’s about “drug trafficking” or “narco-terrorism.” Those are just throwaway words now.

Nor is this about respecting international law or promoting democracy. Those are also out the window. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy advisor, couldn’t have made this clearer. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller asserted,

“We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

That’s the whole framework: power and oil. The White House isn’t hiding it anymore—likely because Trump can’t stick to the approved talking points. So they’ve adopted his version, which he laid out to Joe Scarborough of MSNBC in a phone interview: “Joe, the difference between Iraq and this is that Bush didn’t keep the oil. We’re going to keep the oil.”

The stakes are rising with Trump’s military aggression. Today, the U.S. military pursued and moved to seize a Venezuelan oil tanker bearing a Russian registration and Russian flag painted on its side. Russian military vessels were nearby

U.S. threats and imperialism on the rise

Venezuela may be just the beginning of this regime’s aggressive moves. Lately, the Oval Office is sounding more like the Kremlin than ever.

The White House has now threatened other countries, including Cuba, Colombia, Iran, Mexico and our own NATO ally Denmark. Our European friends have even had to warn that a U.S attack on Greenland would mean the end of NATO.

Today I want to focus on the Greenland threat.

“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Monday. “That is, including our NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.”

That may be the entire point. The bizarre bellicosity is once again being driven by Miller. During his interview with CNN, Miller insisted that “obviously Greenland should be part of the U.S.” due to its geostrategic importance. “The real question is, what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” Miller asked. “Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over Greenland.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sought to downplay the threats on Greenland, saying that ultimately Trump wants to buy the territory from Denmark and that the threats are merely a negotiation ploy to get the other side to the table.

First, who negotiates that way with a friend? If someone ever says, “Sell me your lake house, or I’m just going to go take it from you,” then heads up: He’s not your friend.

Second, we shouldn’t take anything Rubio or this regime says at face value. This same White House told congressional lawmakers that there was no plan for a war or for regime change in Venezuela and then promptly did the opposite. They will say whatever lie suits them in the moment to throw off anyone trying to prevent a disastrous escalation or open conflict.

Punishing the poorest families in the blue states

At home, the regime is leveraging baseless claims of “fraud” in Minnesota, pushed out to its MAGA base by propaganda mouthpieces like Nick Shirley, to press for sweeping cuts to programs for needy children. Specifically, it has moved to cut off child care support and SNAP benefits to five blue states: California, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado and New York.

The Department of Health and Human Services will require those states to provide “extra documentation” to access federal funds, which could delay funding for months or be used to cut it off completely.

This is rank political retribution, falling on the backs of the poorest, most vulnerable families. And it’s being served up with truly Orwellian rhetoric. Deputy DHS Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement,

“Families who rely on child care and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose.”

Right. It’s the needy, poor families who are most worried that other families might not be as needy or poor as claimed.

The blue states are taking the matter to court immediately. “We’ll fight this with every fiber of our being, because our kids should not be political pawns in a fight that Donald Trump seems to have with blue state governors,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York.

Zooming out, the baseless allegations of “fraud” are being laid to justify the unprecedented slashing of Medicaid and SNAP benefits, which will hurt red states and MAGA voters even more than the blue states. The regime is priming its base to accept these cuts in the name of stopping “illegal aliens” from receiving them, giving them someone other than the GOP to blame when the cuts hit hard.

Rewriting the history of January 6th

On the five-year anniversary of January 6th, the White House put out an appalling, counterfactual narrative in an attempt to rewrite history. A new web page on the official White House site went up with this specific goal in mind. Per the New York Times,

The site blames Capitol Police officers, who defended lawmakers that day, for starting the assault; Democrats, who were the rioters’ main targets, for failing to prevent it; and former Vice President Mike Pence, who rejected falsehoods about the 2020 election, for allowing the results to be certified.

We’ve grown accustomed to the lies and propaganda coming from the White House. Far worse was the treatment of the day by newly captured CBS News, which decided to air “both-sides” coverage of January 6 rather than tell the American public the truth. Here is a snippet from that broadcast, where CBS sets out the false claims of the White House as if there were any debate over who drove the insurrection at the Capitol that day:

If there was any question about where CBS was headed after the Ellisons installed Bari Weiss as president, that has been answered. Time to stop watching.

Old man shouts at clouds, threatens no elections

Donald Trump delivered a rambling, 90 minute speech to Republican lawmakers yesterday. He chose to address them at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which will keep that name forever as far as I’m concerned.

During the speech, Trump urged the GOP to win the midterms to prevent him from being impeached, which may be the best clip ever for Democratic ads.

Trump also teased canceling the midterms, saying of Democrats,

“They have the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”

[Narrator: If it limps like a dictator, simps like a dictator and pimps like a dictator, it’s a dictator.]

Let me be clear about the midterms before everyone freaks out.

Federal elections are run by the states. The most critical House races will occur largely in suburban parts of blue states. That means Democratic secretaries of state will oversee the tabulations and results.

There is no law or authority that permits the president to “cancel” elections, even in a declared emergency or during wartime. Even if he were to invoke the Insurrection Act, there is no way, logistically or practically, to militarize the swing districts enough to drive voters away from the polls.

Trump can’t “cancel” the elections, and he knows it. That’s why he tried (and failed) so hard to rig them using mid-decade gerrymandering. It’s why we are seeing so many early retirements from the GOP: They know they are in deep trouble, and there’s no way to pull Trump’s 747 out of its nosedive.

I should add that, per an analysis by Daniel Dale of CNN, Trump also lied 18 times during his speech about the economy, crime, January 6 and the 2020 election. If other politicians did that, voters and even their own party would abandon them as unsuitable for office. With Trump, they just shrug or, worse yet, eat up his lies like junk food. Rinse and repeat.

End stage Trumpism?

The above is enough to make anyone want to shut out the news and turn off all devices. Harder still is the realization that this is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Political sicknesses, like other infections, generally work themselves through in this way.

It’s important to recognize that while Trump’s actions are growing more unhinged, the area of control where he rages is growing noticeably smaller. As I discussed in my year-end recap, Trump has suffered significant setbacks on several fronts, including on his illegal troop deployments, his failed political prosecutions, his floundering economic policies, his redistricting bust, the results of recent elections and his underwater approval ratings on nearly every single issue.

So what’s a frustrated would-be dictator to do? Act out in the places where he still thinks he has leverage: international affairs, the use of military force, the withholding of federal dollars, and the bully pulpit of the Oval Office.

The first question we should ask when we see Trump go on the attack is therefore this: Disturbing as it is, does it actually expose his relative weakness? Is he trying to expand his presidential authority as he did in early 2025, or is he now howling from a much more contained place?

Trump knows he is cornered on the Epstein files, of which we have only seen an astonishingly small one percent of the documents, according to recent court filings by the Justice Department. Trump’s approval numbers remain in the tank as consumer prices soar. And he still has no healthcare plan, meaning tens of millions will likely see premium hikes, followed by punishing cutbacks to Medicaid. It’s a one-two punch that his own base will have to absorb.

Given this, expect more bad behavior and scary threats from the White House. But also watch to see whether Trump is already acting corralled, with most of his bluster falling within the narrower confines of his role as Commander-in-Chief or top bully.

My own eyes are on how Trump will react when the Supreme Court rules on his tariffs and possibly strikes them down. Will he invade another country over it, or limit his anger to more ketchup throwing? Stay tuned.