◼ President Donald Trump spent the past week demanding that Europe turn over Greenland to the United States. The U.S. has accepted Danish sovereignty over Greenland for more than a century, but that couldn’t deter Trump from threatening to dramatically raise tariffs on eight European countries, all NATO allies, until he got his way. Tensions were further inflamed by Trump’s obsession with receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. In a message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump blamed Støre’s government for refusing to grant him the award and claimed he “no longer feels the obligation to think purely of Peace” in his pursuit of Greenland. When the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos summit arrived, both sides seemed girded for battle. But during a rambling speech at the event, Trump proclaimed that he would not use military force. Later, he announced that he had reached a “framework” of a deal with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte that would grant America full access to Greenland’s mineral deposits. In exchange, Trump called off his proposed tariffs on European imports. These developments are promising, but this crisis was unnecessary. We are fortunate that Trump’s recklessness did not cause greater damage to the transatlantic alliance.

◼ Trump’s relentless drive for action, controversy, and attention has been the defining feature of his first year in office. Within hours of being sworn in, he had already signed a blizzard of executive orders that unraveled Joe Biden’s unilateral actions and took sweeping steps to advance his own agenda. Trump has continued the frenzied pace. He is currently running everything from the Kennedy Center to (notionally) Venezuela. Recently, he has been equally focused on pressuring Iran to stop killing protesters and urging the New York Giants to hire John Harbaugh. Even the hyperactive Theodore Roosevelt might have recommended that he slow down a little. Much good has come from this unbridled ambition. Trump has scored impressive victories on immigration, energy policy, and taxes. He has scaled back the growth of DEI initiatives within the federal government, and his foreign policy has strengthened Israel. But he has also issued arbitrary and disgraceful pardons, pursued retributive lawfare against his political enemies, and implemented ill-conceived tariffs. His diplomacy in the Russia–Ukraine war, meanwhile, has been ineffectual and sometimes slanted toward the aggressor, and he has often been needlessly antagonistic toward our allies. Worse, Trump’s disregard for the limits of constitutional authority has opened up new vistas for the exercise of power by a future progressive president. We’d prefer a Trump who is more mindful of the rules. But he has a long record—including now another year as president—of doing it his way.

◼ In 2025, the United States experienced negative net migration for the first time in at least half a century. A study by the Brookings Institution found that an increase in removals, combined with a decrease in new entries, caused net migration to plummet by 10,000 to 295,000. Brookings predicts that the level will remain negative, or extremely low if positive, throughout 2026. On the one hand, this is a victory for Trump, who made mass deportations and tighter immigration restrictions a central promise of his 2024 campaign. On the other hand, public opinion may be turning against the president. Recent polls have shown that Americans are increasingly supportive of legal immigration and opposed to Trump’s aggressive enforcement tactics. Voters should not forget, however, that such tactics would never have been used if immigration law had been properly enforced in decades past.

◼ The 53rd March for Life is taking place in Washington, D.C. Nearly four years after the Dobbs decision, the center of gravity of abortion politics has moved to state capitols. But federal abortion policy still matters—and there is fresh evidence that Trump and congressional Republicans need to hear from pro-lifers and not take them for granted. The policy record of the Trump-Vance administration falls far short of the vigorously pro-life Trump-Pence years. Congress’s defunding Planned Parenthood from Medicaid was a milestone but limited to one year, while the Department of Health and Human Services quietly released tens of millions in family-planning funds to abortion providers to resolve an ACLU lawsuit. The president and some House Republicans went wobbly on Obamacare subsidies for health-insurance policies even if those policies cover abortions. The FDA has dragged its feet on reviewing the safety of the mifepristone-based abortion pill that is now used in the majority of U.S. abortions, and it has failed to roll back dangerous Biden-era rules that permit mail-order access to abortion pills without a single in-person visit to the doctor. If Trump is complacent about his standing with pro-lifers, Vice President JD Vance can and should push this administration to do more.

◼ Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign offered a variety of reasons for its decision to hand the vice-presidential nomination to Tim Walz rather than to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. One unconvincing reason was that the popular Keystone State governor would be unable to deliver Pennsylvania for the Harris campaign. But Shapiro himself has now partially corroborated suspicions that he was shunned because of his being Jewish. In his forthcoming memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro reveals that Harris’s vetting team grilled him over his sympathies for Israel. They asked him whether he had ever had contact with an undercover Israeli intelligence agent (as if Shapiro would know), and even whether the governor was himself a Mossad asset. Harris’s envoys then asked Shapiro to retract and apologize for his condemnation of anti-Israel student demonstrators who had set out to intimidate Jewish students. Shapiro “flatly” declined, as he should have. If the governor’s pointed refusal to play the Harris campaign’s game on its terms cost him the vice-presidential nomination, he dodged a bullet.

Pres. Trump: Invest in Fusion Now

Learn more.

◼ Bill Cassidy has generally been one of the sensible people in the Senate, of the sort that a functioning Senate needs. Neither an ideological warrior nor a posturing maverick, the erstwhile doctor entered the Senate by vanquishing Mary Landrieu twelve years ago, and he has put in serious work on unglamorous health-care issues while being a reliable GOP caucus vote. But it is high-profile votes that have put him in a bind. He earned Trump’s enmity by honorably voting to convict him in the January 6 impeachment and supported a bipartisan investigation that now looks like a fool’s errand. He called on Trump to drop out of the 2024 campaign over his mishandling of classified documents. Despite his strong pro-vaccine stance, Cassidy in 2025 unwisely supported the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary, giving cover to other Republicans to do the same but offending the sorts of voters who supported the impeachment vote. Cassidy thought he had the White House’s backing, however grudging, for reelection without a primary challenge this fall. Instead, Trump recruited and openly cheered Representative Julia Letlow in launching a challenge that will play out amid Louisiana’s jungle primary system. There’s a lesson here for other Republican senators: Cassidy earned nothing by sacrificing his credibility and dignity to vote for RFK.

◼ Trump deserves credit for thus far resisting Democrats’ demands to throw more money at the failed Obamacare program. But his one-page policy response, “The Great American Healthcare Plan,” leaves much to be desired. The outline consists mostly of small-bore ideas that range from the inadvisable (instituting price controls for pharmaceuticals) to the inadequate (allowing more drugs to be purchased over the counter and expanding price transparency). The plan misses the mark because it doesn’t offer a new vision for health care that might replace Obamacare, which made coverage vastly more expensive by adding a raft of regulations to insurance policies. The only way to offer a compelling alternative is to reduce the regulatory burden on health insurance or, at a minimum, provide more lower-cost options to those who don’t require comprehensive health insurance. The first Trump administration made headway by expanding the use of short-term plans. Its latest outline, which unaccountably omits this idea, fails to live up to its title.

◼ Bari Weiss took on a nearly impossible task when she agreed to helm CBS News and steer it toward trustworthy and balanced journalism. She’s an apostate liberal, who resigned from her position as an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times and founded the Free Press, so her appointment was bound to attract controversy. Tony Dokoupil, whom Weiss appointed as the new anchor of CBS Evening News, promised a new approach based on a blunt admission: “No one trusts mainstream media anymore.” Weiss told CBS News producers in a memo, “Let’s make sure every single night has something with viral potential. . . . The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news. We need to be the news for these 10 days.” Should news anchors be the news? In any case: Weiss has ambitious goals, but the culture of CBS News won’t change overnight.

◼ As Covid-era federal assistance dries up, two progressive states are plotting to raid the bank accounts of their wealthiest taxpayers. Democratic lawmakers in Washington State have proposed a “millionaire’s tax” of 9.9 percent on incomes above $1 million. If approved, this surcharge would result in Seattle having the highest combined marginal tax rate in the country, which would suit the city’s new socialist mayor nicely. At least Washington is targeting real income. California, by contrast, is considering a ballot initiative that would impose a retroactive wealth tax of 5 percent on billionaires’ total assets. Such a proposal would force its targets to fork over cash they may not have on hand. This cash grab is being sold as a one-time measure to keep health-care unions’ coffers filled as federal Medicaid cuts take effect, but state governments seldom find a revenue source they don’t wish to renew. Neither tax proposal would seriously address the fiscal woes of Washington and California, as the projected deficits—driven by excessive spending, not insufficient receipts—are simply too large. The primary consequence will be to drive out high-income taxpayers who already finance the lion’s share of public services. Punitive wealth taxes are a bad-enough idea at the national level; they are practically suicidal for states whose residents can simply move away. How much revenue would Washington and California extract from millionaires and billionaires in Texas and Arizona?

◼ A former student at Montana State University, Rex Wu Jr., was found guilty in a federal cyberstalking case and sentenced to 18 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. Court documents show that Wu, who previously served as president of the Chinese Cultural Club on campus, impersonated Daria Danley and Dylan Dean—two conservative recent graduates of Montana State University—when sending threatening, harassing, and pornographic electronic communications to a fellow Asian student, Alexandra Lin. Wu’s messages, which included death threats and Nazi imagery, created the impression of fierce anti-Asian racism and anti-LGBTQ hostility, which Wu and Lin then cited in their political activism on and off campus. Danley and Dean filed a defamation lawsuit against Wu, alleging that his actions led to “reputational damage, educational disruption, and social ostracization.” Wu has defaulted and does not have representation. While the legal system delivers what justice it can, campuses hit by hate-crime hoaxes ought to consider what they have done to incentivize them.

◼ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data that show that overdose deaths in the United States fell by 21 percent over the past year—one of the steepest declines in recent history. All but five states saw reductions, while six states and the District of Columbia reported drops of more than 30 percent, well above the national average. Nonetheless, the toll remains high: The CDC estimates that roughly 73,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in the most recent twelve-month period. The rate has nearly halved since its 2022 peak. The agency does not attribute the decline to any specific policy changes, such as renewed drug-interdiction efforts. (The jury is still out on the effect of blowing up drug boats in the Caribbean.) Good news, worth cheering.