American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

It was poe called Andy.

[Tero]

Trump and GOP have taken CA and Minnestota as examples since 2016

“Oh, Minnesota,” Trump told the crowd, dropping into the just-you-and-me-talking mode that has always been one of his greatest assets as a politician. “You know what’s going on. You know what I’m talking about. Do you know what I’m talking about? Be politically correct. Just nod — quietly nod. The whole world knows what’s happening in Minnesota.”

"What was happening in Minnesota then was a slow-burning tension surrounding the state’s Somali community, its second-largest immigrant population."

"Minnesota had been a haven for refugees since after World War II, when it was an early destination for Holocaust survivors in the United States, and especially since the late 1970s, when it began taking in thousands of South Vietnamese and Hmong people on the wrong side of America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia."
"At an October 2015 listening session in the small city of St. Cloud, where tensions had run particularly high, the state’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, addressed the Somali community. “This is Minnesota, and you have every right to be here,” he said. The state, he said, was “not like it was 30, 50 years ago,” when its population was nearly entirely white — and bigots who had a problem with that should “find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again.”

"Trump’s message, a year later, was that, in fact, it could be that again. If elected, he promised, his administration would “not admit any refugees without the support of the local community where they are being placed — the least they could do for you. You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.”

"The speech crystallized one of the core themes of Trump’s politics, which has become the overwhelming argument of his second term: that the country’s foundational idea of a civic nation — one whose people are bound by a shared commitment to principles rather than ancestry or cultural identity — is a sort of liberal swindle. In Trump’s America, shared prosperity requires exclusion: a policing, by force if necessary, of the boundaries of who gets to call themselves American based in large part on where they come from."

"Nevertheless, Minnesota is still a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, and for over half a century, it has more clearly than perhaps any other state embodied the civic ideal that Trump seems intent on overturning. On the ground in Minneapolis, this is very overtly what the city’s residents who are tracking and confronting federal agents see themselves fighting for."

"This owed something to history — the state’s civil society was shaped in the 19th century by Yankee antislavery Republicans and later immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany, all deeply moralistic political cultures — and something to politics: The most powerful force in Minnesota politics for decades has been the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a midcentury left-liberal fusion organization shaped in its early years by a cohort of cerebral amateurs, several of them young political science professors."
"But as race has become a ubiquitous lens for social science analysis, Minnesota has come in for a harder look. For a quarter-century now, researchers, drawing on data from around the world, have noted a clear correlation between the generosity of a country’s welfare state and the homogeneity of its population — a finding that invites a new reading of the idea of moralistic government as just another form of self-interest.

"A particular criticism of Minnesota, which rocketed to the foreground following George Floyd’s killing, is that Minnesota’s proud progressivism on race was itself a counterintuitive product of the state’s lack of diversity and pervasive segregation. Beneath its rhetorical commitments, the state possesses some of the country’s most severe racial disparities across a wide range of metrics, from unemployment to homeownership to incarceration to educational attainment."

"The fraud scandal in Minnesota, in which dozens of members of the state’s Somali community are implicated in stealing over $1 billion from the state’s much-vaunted social services system, has struck bone because it fits so neatly within this line of argument: that liberals’ civic commitments are not just empty and unproductive but also a cover for looting the state by the very people liberals are most preoccupied with protecting."

"But whatever its misgivings, Minnesota is still Walz’s state more than Trump’s. Much of the political particularity that nurtured Minnesota’s civic culture is gone now. But the state brushed off Trump’s appeal in 2016 and, for good measure, elected Ilhan Omar, the country’s first Somali congresswoman. Predictions that Trump would win the state in 2020 and 2024, after Floyd’s murder and its consequences, proved wrong, too."

"This has been true nationally, too. The response to Trump’s first year back in office has made clear that ambivalence and opposition are not the same thing. It is hard to think of a federal action that has become more unpopular more quickly than Trump’s immigration raids."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/maga ... p-ice.html

[Tero]

There is no honorable way out to offer to trump. And Ukraine now sidelined thanks to trump

President Stubb has written an article for the January issue of Foreign Affairs magazine entitled "The West's Last Chance."

The thirteen-page article explores the world order and its future – and ends with an ominous conclusion.

– This is our last chance.

Stubb refined his thesis on world order while working as a professor at the EU University in Florence. According to his assessment, the world is threatened with disorder unless the direction is changed.

– For the global West, the question mark, the wild card, in all of this is whether the United States wants to preserve the multilateral world order that the country has been instrumental in building and from which it has benefited greatly, Stubb estimates.

The Finnish President predicts a difficult path ahead, as the United States has already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, and numerous UN organizations.

So far, the Trump administration has remained within regional cooperation structures, such as the defense alliance NATO.
Foreign and security policy sources estimate that the project has a moderate chance of success. Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans do not support their president's obsession with buying Greenland.

If extremes were to be taken, Congress would hardly approve the annexation of Greenland as the 51st state of the United States or any other administrative territory.

Sources emphasize that they intend to speak constructively to the Americans. They are trying to find an honorable way out for Trump, even though there may not be one.

Trump has already lost his respect in European NATO countries.

Europe will be represented at Davos by, among others, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz , French President Emmanuel Macron , British Prime Minister Keir Starmer , and President Stubb.

Originally, Davos was supposed to focus on Ukraine's peace efforts, and the fate of the Ukrainians should not be left on the sidelines.

https://www.iltalehti.fi/politiikka/a/3 ... 1a2d33a85c