This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 20 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
It has been one year since Donald Trump took office, and it has been brutal in many ways.
Masked, armed federal immigration officers are subjecting the residents of Minneapolis to a violent and lawless occupation. Trump is musing about sending American soldiers into the state and investigating local elected leaders.
While that’s happening, the economy is deteriorating, from unemployment to inflation to the tariffs the president has levied. On Tuesday alone, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped almost 900 points.
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney
Just in the past month, Trump has seized and captured the president of Venezuela, brought him to the U.S. to stand trial and announced that we are taking the country’s oil and selling it to put the proceeds in a private offshore bank account that he controls.
Our closest allies in Europe are preparing for a possible war with us because Trump wants somebody to give him Greenland — and a Nobel Peace Prize.
That obsession and its consequences were on full display in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday. The annual meeting of world leaders became an emergency summit to deal with an American president who is acting like an evil madman.
They have tried coddling Trump like a toddler. But now they are facing the ominous fact that Americans have been staring in the face for a year: The United States is a nuclear-armed superpower run by a would-be tyrant.
Some of America’s closest allies are now talking about the president like an enemy. Things are so dire that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave one of the best, most clear-eyed, sober, urgent speeches I have heard a politician deliver in a very, very long time — and certainly not the usual kind of speech that we hear at places like Davos.
“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons: tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” Carney said. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.”
“This is not sovereignty; it’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination,” he continued. “The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together.”
It wasn’t just world leaders. Visitors in Davos could see a glow in the snow-capped mountains after the sun set, when a group of 10 local residents hiked up the mountain with 450 torches to spell out one message: “No Kings.”
On Tuesday, while the rest of the world was describing Trump as the biggest threat to peace and stability in the world, the president was exactly where you would expect him to be: at a White House podium, for an hour and 44 minutes, boasting about his year of accomplishments.
The White House conveniently typed up and printed out a big stack of paper sheets for Trump to read from, listing his supposed accomplishments. The bullet points included No. 243, “Stripped notorious crackhead and grifter Hunter Biden of his taxpayer-funded Secret Service detail,” and No. 245, “Signed an executive order to end the use of paper straws.”
All of this comes days after Trump announced he was forming a “Board of Peace” to supplant the United Nations. The board would be run by him, and member states would be charged $1 billion to have a permanent seat on the council. Trump has already invited heads of state like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Benjamin Netanyahu, and strong-arm leaders from nations like Hungary and Belarus, to join. Over the weekend, the president also received a text from the prime minister of Norway seeking to ease tensions with the U.S. over its positions on Greenland, Gaza and Ukraine. Trump responded by text, saying, in part: Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. This is an obvious point that has been made a ton, but the U.S. electing Trump is not just our problem. We have made it the world’s problem, because we made ourselves the center of the global order. The postwar global order was predicated on U.S. hegemony. That power has been abused in all sorts of awful, bloody and unforgivable ways, from Vietnam to Iraq. But it was the ordering principle we took from the big lesson of World War II, which is that autocratic regimes, expansionist empires and fascists will create global conflicts, and you need the world’s oldest, most stable democracy at the center of it to prevent that. The best way to understand the postwar liberal order is that it’s really a World War Avoidance Machine. What we are dealing with is what happens when the winners of World War II realize that the order they built is crumbling and that the global hegemon is sounding — and maybe acting — like an Axis power. The U.S.’ allies are gaining a daunting awareness that Americans in the anti-Trump camp have had from Day 1, when the president unilaterally pardoned all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol on his behalf in 2021. They are becoming aware that the most powerful person in the world is a danger and a threat and is destabilizing the world order. And that means we’re all in a lot of trouble. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press). Recommended
