What the Media Didn't Tell Us About Trump's Greenland and Panama Threats
TV and print coverage treated Trump's military threat as an unusual policy option
Jan. 8: Trump’s threat may have been illegal … Internal emails show Trump’s DOJ went after Dem governors … Landlords allegedly conspired to hike rents … Zuckerberg finally uses Facebook for original purpose of fucking people …
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Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede flew into Copenhagen last night for talks with the king of Denmark, Frederik Christian, after RePresident-elect Donald Trump yesterday said he’s not ruling out the prospect of using military force to seize Greenland.
Trump also indicated that he considers military force an option for taking the Panama Canal. “I’m not going to commit to that,” Trump said, asked whether he’d rule out military coercion for either country. “It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
Both places represent important geopolitical points for the U.S., key to economic concerns such as the global shipping through the canal and the access to natural resources in both Greenland and the open waters and shipping lanes of the Arctic.
Trump is also not happy about Chinese interests making inroads in running the canal.
There are, obviously, military implications, as well.
But Trump’s reasons for wanting these territories are not the issue here. I, for instance, want Bora Bora for TFN’s economic fucking prosperity and national fucking security.
What responsible coverage owes us is not an explanation for Trump’s desires (:::shudder:::) but the context in which Trump can pursue said desires. Nations are supposed to pursue national interests by winning consent for strategic and economic alliances, not by forcing oneself upon other nations in their metaphorical fitting room in a metaphorical New York retail outlet.
For one thing, there’s the monstrous fact that Trump didn’t include multiple wars of choice in his platform, deluding even his own voters into thinking he was the isolationist anti-war guy he ran as. But we can set even that aside because betraying MAGA was always part of the deal.
So how else were Trump’s remarks reported and discussed yesterday? Let’s look at how some of today’s still-standing journalistic giants are reporting on Trump’s remarks.
The best I saw was Aaron Blake’s Washington Post analysis — meaning, not the main coverage of the remarks, just a sidelined, siloed one-person-view of the remarks — that pointed out that Trump is threatening to attack a NATO nation (Denmark, by way of its Greenland territory).
And Blake reminded folks that a U.S. attack would, by treaty, require all the other nations in NATO to take up arms against the U.S., which is one of those NATO nations and so would also be required by treaty to take up arms against the U.S.
That was the closest I saw to a full embrace of the scope of what Trump was envisioning. The rest fell far short of Blake’s mark.
Here’s the Associated Press:
The AP informs us Trump is rejecting longstanding U.S. policy. Instead of choosing self-determination from the menu, he’s going to go with territorial expansion.
“Policy.”
“Territorial expansion.”
The AP is framing Trump’s remarks as policy preference. Y’know, as if they’re on a pre-existing list of policy options that he has. Like which socks you’ll wear today.
The headline of a CNN analysis informs us that Trump’s remarks give us insight, which actually sounds like a good thing! They “explain everything about America First.” You may now nod your head wisely with understanding. You now understand everything about America First. Thank you, RePresident Trump!
And paragraph two informs us that “there’s method in his expansionist mindset.” Ah, grasshopper, only now, thanks to his remarks, do we comprehend the Trumpian sublimity.
In fact, according to CNN, this marks Trump’s “unique” approach to “grappling with national security questions the US must face.” He’s just answering a question, yo!
It’s only in paragraph six that we learn that Trump’s approach “appears certain to run headlong into international law.” Appears!
On CNN’s air last night, Trump’s remarks prompted this exchange during the endless arguing that constitutes TV’s attempt at journalisming:
Josh Rogin, Washington Post columnist: “America is not an expansionist military power … Not in the 21st century.”
Scott Jennings, CNN contributor due to his wisdom and accuracy: “Why not?”
Rogin: “Because that’s not the world that we live in.”
TFN doesn’t know about the 21st-century world others live in, but TFN is pretty sure that Newsfuckers live in a world in which America expansionisted its military power into Iraq and Afghanistan and expanionistizes its fucking-around power into all kinds of other countries and elections. Do not get me started on Guatemala.
To say “That’s not the world that we live in” is magical thinking. Not meaning to dump on the guy — extemporaneous opinion-having on TV is hard! But what makes it harder is that literally no one is talking about the actual reason America is not an expansionist military power (except when it is).
It’s illegal.
It’s a war crime.
An international crime.
And even a U.S. crime.
Not a norm violation. Not an expansionist mindset. Not a unique fucking approach. It’s a goddamn fucking crime even to threaten this shit and literally — as far as TFN could tell — no one said so, and contextualized Trump’s remarks as a slight unusual off-the-menu order that the chef conceivably could whip up without getting shipped off to a cell in The Hague.
Here’s 18 U.S. Code § 878:
Whoever knowingly and willfully threatens to violate section 112, 1116, or 1201 shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both, except that imprisonment for a threatened assault shall not exceed three years.
Got that? If you even threaten to violate section 112 (violence against a foreign national), that’s a crime.
Section 878 is literally headlined: “Threats and extortion against foreign officials, official guests, or internationally protected persons.”
Trump wants Greenland and Panama and he’s saying he won’t rule out military action to get them. That’s threats and extortion to coerce the officials of those countries to sell or trade the territory in question.
This is literally why Trump was impeached the first time — illegally threatening to withhold Ukrainian funding that he was required by law to provide to Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine just saying they would investigate Hunter Biden, history’s greatest monster.
Trump just upped the criminal ante exponentially from his first impeachment in a geopolitical poker game that’s not allowed to be.
Now, to be clear, I’m not a lawyer or a prosecutor. (In fact, I’m unemployed. Which means I’m available to do nothing for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s non-prosecutions.)
But even as a layperson who hasn’t yet switched from Google to a functioning search engine, I still managed to find multiple laws Trump seems to have broken.
18 U.S. Code § 960 - Expedition against friendly nation
Whoever, within the United States, knowingly begins or sets on foot or provides or prepares a means for or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition or enterprise to be carried on from thence against the territory or dominion of any foreign prince or state, or of any colony, district, or people with whom the United States is at peace, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
18 U.S. Code § 2441 - War crimes
(a)Offense.—
Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
Got that? If a single Greenlander, Dane, Inughuit, Tunumiit, or Kalaallit dies in Trump’s invasion of Greenland, he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — the former Fox co-host who thought he’d be waging war against Muslim countries — are eligible for the death penalty.
And, obviously, Trump broke international law, including the UN Charter:
But, you law-abiding Newsfuckers protest, if an illegal threat happened on live television, which it did, then surely Garland would have ordered the perpetrator’s arrest immediately, right?
[Pause for laughter. Pause some more for bitter tears.]
None of our corporate media analysts or pundits are discussing this in legal terms so it’s very likely and even understandable that prosecutors aren’t, either.
This is how norms really die. Not in their violation, but in the failure to recognize their violation.
The Iraq War wasn’t a war crime just because America illegally kidnapped and imprisoned and tortured people. The war itself was a crime. And not just any old crime like discriminating against Black renters or hiring undocumented workers to build one’s tacky-ass hotels.
The war was a war crime. And violated the United Nations charter — to which the U.S. is a signatory — outlawing the use of military force against another nation except in self-defense or with permission of the UN Security Council.
The fact that Democrats — and the media — failed to enforce this law, or even mention it in covering Bush, helped get us here. And Democratic silence today helps explain why media today are covering Trump’s remarks as unusual instead of unlawful.
Even More Other Crimes Unprosecuted
It took Attorney General Merrick Garland a while to figure out that then-Pres. Donald Trump had crimed back in 2020/2021. It wasn’t enough to see Trump do it on live TV. It took the House investigation to show Garland just how crimey the crimes were.1
So it shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that Garland never acted on other election crimes.
Namely, the Trump Justice [sic] Department used the agency to try to kill the re-elections of two Democratic governors.
Seems, as the kids say, important!
A redacted internal Justice Department report released yesterday shows that from June through October 2020, top officials went after Govs. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Phil Murphy (D-NJ) for their handling of COVID. Because elections were coming up.
Specifically, they pressed for — and got — leaks to the media of damaging information. And made sure there was damaging information.
For instance, Trump officials leaked to the New York Post that they had demanded nursing-home information from New Jersey. And then half an hour later they demanded nursing-home information from New Jersey.
One unnamed official who’s unnamed because why the fuck are they unnamed said in an email, “I’m trying to get [the Civil Rights Division] and [Civil Division] to do letters to [New York/New Jersey] respectively on nursing homes. Would like to package them together and let [New York Post] break it. Will be our last play on them before election but it’s a big one.”
The only officials named as complicit in all this were Attorney General Bill Barr and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Eric Drieband, both of whom will now be shunned in polite society and/or routinely booked as thoughtful guests on TV news.
The inspector general who wrote the report referred the allegations to the division that investigates violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits public officials from using their public office to influence elections. Ha yes that’s still on the books.
Anyway, it took the Garland Justice Department four years to uncover Justice Department emails.
Look, an Actual Prosecution!
Rents are high for a reason. Okay, reasons. So let’s meet seven of them!
Six landlords and one scuzzy landlord-abetting company are being sued by the Justice Department for fucking over tenants illegally on top of ways they fuck over tenants legally.
It’s a scam of the sort that your scam-talking TFN has talked about before: Landlords got around laws prohibiting price collusion by sharing their data with a company that grinds up that data (like the ground meat that’s overpriced in a similar scam) and then “advises” those landlords what rents to charge.
It’s like telephone. Asking your classmate whether they like like you would violate federal trade law. So you ask a mutual friend if your classmate like likes you. Only in this case it’s landlords asking their mutual friends how much they can fuck fuck you.
Anyway, they all say they’re as innocent as landlords. But one of them has flipped, and not houses: They’re cooperating with prosecutors.
The feds are working with attorneys general in ten states on this. And the landlords in question control more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia. (Here’s a gift link to a Washington Post tool for looking up where it’s been happening.)
So, yay, Attorney General Merrick Garland for once! On the other hand, he’s still gotta Garland this somehow, so, the proposed punishment is that the criminal landlords … have to stop what they’re doing. That’ll learn ‘em!
It’s like when a shoplifter gets arrested and then a judge sentences them to not shoplift. Y’know: Tough love!
What, you thought Garland would send these criminal landlords to federal prison? That’s free housing!
Furk Fuckerberg Fucks Fuckbook
The Fucking News would like to urge all Newsfuckers never to lose sight of just how fucking stupid billionaires can be.
By late 2023, smart people working for billionaire Mark Zuckerberg had succeeded in removing 95% of hate speech from Facebook.
So now Zuckerberg, who’s so stupid he couldn’t even make it through Harvard (where almost 80% of grades are As or A-adjacent), is letting 100% of that 95% of hate speech back in. On Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
And he’s doing this after the rest of the world saw how that worked for Twitter, when Elon Musk did the same thing. (See the devastating Musk takedown in yesterday’s TFN).
Zuckerberg announced yesterday that he’s making his platforms the wild west again. So, what’s cool on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads now includes “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.”
More specifics of what you can do on Zuckerberg’s platforms now, via Wired:
Accuse Chinese people of spreading COVID.
Call people disqualified for jobs due to their gender or Jesus’s disapproval of their sexual orientation.
Promote offline violence (unless it’s imminent!) even though Facebook knows Facebook was responsible for a deadly riot based on false Facebook posts in Myanmar.
As Wired notes, it’s arguably fair to say that some of Facebook’s human content-moderators went too far slapping “hate speech” labels on posts, for instance, opposing the deployment of women in combat. But the remedy, Wired also notes, ought to have been more/better human content-moderation, not abandonment of the (successful) effort.
And there’s more than just content-moderation in Zuckerberg’s drive to emulate Musk and push even more people to Bluesky.
Zuckerberg appointed Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as his global policy head and Ultimate Fighting Championship boss Dana White, a Donald Trump ally, to the board of Meta, the parent company of all Zuckerberg’s platforms.
How smart is Kaplan? He argued that “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.” The only people who can speak on the floor of Congress are members of Congress, and the Constitution says they can say a shit-ton of stuff that would be a crime said anywhere else.
Zuckerberg also said he’s moving what remains of his content-moderation team from California to Texas, to avoid bias. As if employees in Texas won’t get biased faster than a tortured animal bolting from its pen in some godforsaken “rodeo” when they and their families can’t find obstetricians for the vaginas and uteri that you can now say on Facebook disqualify them for some jobs.
And, while we’re hating on the social-media oligarchs, there’s the $40 million that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon paid for the temporary rights to a documentary and limited series about America’s favorite recidivist First Lady Melania Trump. To be directed by a director accused of assaulting several women who worked with him and audiences who saw “Tower Heist.”
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) posted yesterday, “Together, Bezos, Musk & Zuckerberg own more wealth than the bottom half of America. Billionaires are buying elections. And there's a greater concentration of ownership than at any time since the Gilded Age. Is that the society we want for our country?”
Democrats Help Republicans Expand Anti-Immigrant Regime
A bill allowing deportation of undocumented immigrants charged with non-violent crimes passed the House yesterday with help from 48 Democrats.
It’s a bit Draconian in the sense that we’re talking about charges of crimes, not convictions, but Americans generally support deporting people who aren’t supposed to be here, even if that’s their only (alleged) crime. But this bill goes way beyond that. Like, over the border!
The Cato Institute’s Director of Immigration Studies David J. Bier writes that the bill would create broad powers for state attorneys general to challenge even legal immigration if their state suffers “harm” from their presence, like, any cost over $100 — even if the state sees a net economic benefit from that immigrant (as the U.S. does). Even stupid attorneys general would be allowed to do this.
And individual judges, some of whom are also extraordinarily dumb, could seek court orders banning all immigrants from specific countries. One judge could do that!
It’s hard to imagine how a bill like this slipped past the Democrats. It’s almost like some of these closed-border zealots have an open-border policy on stupid bills.
Four Quickies
The U.S. yesterday finally caved to mounting pressure and acknowledged the genocide that’s been going on since 2023, announcing stiff economic sanctions. Secretary of State Tony Blinken made clear, however, that “Both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering.” But tens of thousands have been killed and more than a quarter of the population have been forced to flee their homes. We are, of course, talking about the officially genocidal Sudanese paramilitary group fighting against the government there. But wail til Blinken finds out about Gaza!
Los Angeles seems to be in danger of burning up. Whatever you may think of L.A., that’s bad! An estimated 30,000 people have been ordered to evacuate and 13,000 structures were deemed to be in danger as of last night.
Eco-lawyer Steven Donzinger would like his pardon now, please and thank you. Amnesty International agrees.
Turns out that Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, who shot himself and blew up a Cybertruck outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, actually did have an accomplice. Livelsberger, who appears to have worn his green beret a bit too tight, asked ChatGPT for help with firearms, explosives, and getting a cellphone anonymously. ChatGPT remains at large and is believed to be an active accomplice in helping oligarchs steal our shit.
TCB
I know, TFN is late again. I’m sorry! I’m spending most of my days working on reporting I really want to get out before the inauguration, so TFN is likely gonna suffer in the interim. Sorry about that — all intentions are to get TFN out earlier post-inauguration! (Until the next batch of time-sensitive reporting, obvi.)
MERCH Thank you to the Newsfucker who brought it to our attention that the only TFN mug in The TFN Shop is labeled NOT safe for dishwashers or microwaves. Please keep that in mind as we investigate whether the site will let us offer a mug that you can put in a dishwasher or microwave which, duh.
CONNECTING Come say hi on your social media of choice: Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon or Spoutible.
Go get ‘em, kids!
I couldn’t find the article backing this up, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the DOJ only really got off the stick once House investigators began sharing all the shit they had come up with — without DOJ resources — after we all watched Trump crime on live TV.
“This is how norms really die. Not in their violation, but in the failure to recognize their violation.”
You did not go far enough. Recognize, publicly acknowledge, and act on. It’s clear that Trump cares nothing about the rule of law. Republicans, as bought and paid for enablers of their Fuhrer, care nothing about the rule of law when the Orange Menace breaks it. They are too terrified of retribution. The right wing media, and the eager MAGA consumers of their propaganda, neither cares nor understands. They revel in the entertainment factor. It enriches the media and brings joy to the hapless masses.
Even if Trump is not in the least bit serious about any of this, running foreign policy is not like bullying the weak. The strong will watch and pay attention. And they will act when they detect weakness. Just ask Putin and Xi.
The so called rule of law barely exists today. We will forget it ever existed. And what’s worse, half the country will not care.
How will it be when we complete our trashing NATO, are despised by our former Allies, and cheered on by our current adversaries, soon to be our future business associates. Values, character, and our own history will be replaced with a kind of Capitalistic diplomacy, determined to grab what it can (or at least bluster about it), turn its back on others when it sees the same, and say “this is how the world works, and it’s none of our business.”
It is disgustingly beyond description.
For whatever it's worth, I don't mind when articles are published a little later than normal. Sometimes the anticipation makes the newsfucking that much better.