The actual temperature in Minneapolis has gotten slightly warmer from the weekend’s lows (with Friday having been the first sub-minus-20 Fahrenheit day here in almost 7 years), while the rhetorical temperature has cooled a little. Greg Bovino, the controversial Border Patrol executive who was leading Operation Metro Surge here in the Twin Cities after having led Operation Midway Blitz last fall in Chicago, has been replaced by Trump “border czar”, Tom Homan. Homan suggested today that ICE plans to draw down the number of agents deployed in the Twin Cities.

Yesterday Bruce Springsteen dropped a new single, “Streets of Minneapolis”, that he wrote on Saturday after the killing of Alex Pretti. The lyrics reference both Pretti and Renee Good by name, and also name drop “King Trump and his private army from the DHS” and “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies”.

Also yesterday, 7 Senate Republicans joined all of the Democrats to oppose the omnibus funding bill previously passed by the House, putting a government shutdown this weekend in play. Today a compromise has apparently been reached, under which all of the non-DHS components of the House Bill remain intact and DHS funding is provided for an additional 2 weeks only, thus allowing further opportunity for debate. The Senate is expected to vote on the compromise later tonight and Trump has urged its passage. The House may not return from its break early enough to prevent a technical government shutdown, but it will be back on Monday.

Today Senator Klobuchar officially announced her run for Minnesota Governor to replace Tim Walz, who said today that he is done with elective office, ending speculation that he might seek to appoint himself to the Senate to replace Klobuchar. Speaking of the gubernatorial race, earlier this week one of the announced Republican primary candidates, Chris Kabel, announced he was dropping out on the grounds he could no longer in good conscience support the Republican party in the wake of the ICE occupation of Minnesota.

Finally, today Trump filed a lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, seeking $10 billion as compensation for the fact that in 2020 a Treasury contractor obtained and leaked Trump’s tax returns. It will be interesting, and perhaps depressing, to see how the government responds to this lawsuit.

It continues to be a very long and difficult month, especially in Minnesota.

Last week was the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, a meeting that I suspect in time will be remembered primarily for a speech delivered by Canadian PM Carney about what lies ahead for middle powers in a world where the rules-based international order has been cast aside and “great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests.” Trump responded to the speech by rescinding Canada’s invitation to his newly established Board of Peace, and then later threatening Canada with more tariffs and referring on social media to Carney for the first time as “Governor Carney”, an epithet he used repeatedly with PM Trudeau.

Greenland was a major topic going into Davos. Trump had sent the Norwegian PM an unhinged text message that, after it leaked, was originally assumed by the right to be inauthentic until it was then confirmed that Trump had ordered copies of the text sent to all Western European leaders. After European leaders rallied behind Denmark, Trump then threatened a new 10% tariff on several Western European countries, which prompted EU threats to derail the trade deal agreed upon last year. Then, after things had gotten very tense, suddenly they weren’t: Trump announced he had reached a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland with the Secretary General of NATO. Was this another manifestation of TACO? At this point we don’t seem to know.

Nor do we know much more about the future of Venezuela than when I last wrote. Although we did have the farcical situation a week and a half ago where the reigning Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a female Venezuelan opposition leader, visited the White House and formally presented her medal to Trump. It remains completely unclear what, if anything, she got out of this piece of performance art. The glee with which Trump “accepted” the medal launched a thousand memes of Trump accepting awards that didn’t belong to him, of which perhaps my favorite was Rob & Fab from Milli Vanilli presenting Trump with their Grammy award.

We are now only several days away from another potential government shutdown, as the resolution to the previous shutdown required that certain spending bills be enacted by the end of January. The House reached bipartisan consensus on the necessary bills and then adjourned, leaving things in the hands of the Senate. Hold that thought.

Still no decision from SCOTUS on the IEEPA tariffs case. This week they did hold a very unusual oral argument in a shadow docket case, namely Trump v. Cook, arising out of Trump’s purported firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. The post-argument consensus is that Cook is unlikely to immediately lose her post; it is less clear as to whether the justices will simply allow the litigation to proceed in the lower courts, or instead make a ruling that would end the controversy in Cook’s favor now.

But the main story of the week remains the situation in Minnesota, where a federal surge of ICE personnel has been met by nonviolent resistance from residents and criticized by many as an unwelcome invasion. Friday was the coldest day in the Twin Cities in almost 7 years, with the temperature at sunrise being -22 F and the windchill making it feel like -40 F. Schools were cancelled, and many local groups had called for a general strike. There was a surprisingly well-attended anti-ICE rally in downtown Minneapolis Friday afternoon, given how cold it was. However, a potentially tense situation was holding steady.

And then, yesterday morning, ICE agents killed a 37-year-old man on the streets of Minneapolis. Alex Pretti was a white U.S. citizen, an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He was standing on a sidewalk with a phone in one hand videoing events and his other empty hand raised in the air. ICE agents pepper-sprayed a protestor that he was videoing. He went to assist her, and the ICE agents first pepper-sprayed him, then threw him to the ground and started attacking him. While they were subduing him, they discovered he was carrying a firearm, for which he had the appropriate legal permits; however, he never brandished the firearm before it was confiscated by ICE agents. After his firearm was confiscated, ICE agents fired about 10 shots into him in a manner of seconds.

At least, that is the version of events as they appear to neutral observers from available videos. If you instead listen to DHS Secretary Noem and her minions, Pretti was an “assassin” who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” And it is fascinating to see the Second Amendment crowd contort themselves over how this was somehow Pretti’s fault, for legally carrying a firearm that he never brandished.

Governor Walz and Mayor Frey and Minnesota AG Ellison were already upset over the entire situation here, but Pretti’s killing has pushed everything into high gear. And it may have some immediate national implications, as several Senate Democrats now indicate they are unwilling to pass the DHS appropriations bill that had just narrowly passed the House.

In more picayune political news, Trump has taken the unusual step of endorsing a primary challenger to a Senator from his own party, throwing his support behind Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow in her challenge against Sen. Cassidy. This is the thanks the physician-Senator gets for, against what I assume was likely his better medical judgment, casting the deciding vote in favor of RFK Jr as HHS Secretary. Julia’s husband Luke died of COVID-19 shortly after winning election to the House in 2020 but before taking his seat; she won the special election to replace him.

It’s been a difficult week, especially here in Minnesota.

It seems like ages ago by now, but on Monday Governor Walz made a surprise announcement that he would not be running for re-election this fall. This comes in the wake of continuing concerns about fraud in the administration of COVID-era Minnesota state programs, concerns that were recently inflamed by MAGA wing “journalists”. It seems likely that Senator Klobuchar will run in place of Walz, which would soon create a second Senate opening here (with Tina Smith already having announced her retirement).

Jonathan Cohn had a balanced article about the Minnesota fraud scandal in the Bulwark this week, and made some important points about the broader context of the scandal:

“The assistance programs of Western and Northern Europe tend to be universal, meaning they offer help to everybody, while the programs in the United States tend to be targeted, meaning they serve narrow, carefully defined sectors of the population. That creates incentives to game the eligibility criteria. Another difference is that the European governments are more likely to provide housing or deliver services like childcare directly. The United States, by contrast, outsources more of that work to the private sector, which means there are more opportunities for organizations and businesses to raid the public treasury.

This system didn’t develop by accident. It’s the result, in part, of a decades-long campaign by conservatives to limit or shrink the size of government, and to privatize public services whenever possible. And while there are plenty of intellectually defensible arguments for this approach—like a philosophical preference for lower spending and taxes or belief the private sector will be more efficient and innovative—it does require more aggressive oversight.3

“As long as you don’t have government directly provide those services, then you either have to invest more in auditing and monitoring these service provisions—or you have to be willing to deal with some failures and some scandals that come up every now and again,” Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan and expert on how government actually works, told me.

The American system works best when there are safeguards in place to prevent fraud and abuse. In case you haven’t noticed, the Trump administration has adopted precisely the opposite approach since taking office—cutting personnel who guard against fraud rather than adding them, and weakening internal safeguards rather than strengthening them.

“Many of the cuts the Trump administration has made have been to reduce parts of the government that take on fraud,” Moynihan said.”

But the real news of the week here in Minnesota occurred on Wednesday, in Minneapolis, only a few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed a few years ago. In an incident witnessed by dozens and caught on cellphone videos, both by bystanders and by the assailant himself, an ICE agent (Jonathan Ross) killed a 37-year-old white female US citizen (Renee Good), shooting into her car at close range as she was attempting to drive away.

As with so many stories today, the narrative of this incident varies dramatically depending on which side of the political spectrum you inhabit. To hear DHS Secretary Noem and Vice President Vance tell it, Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was impeding a law enforcement operation and then attempted to flee, placing the ICE agent’s life in danger with her car and prompting him to fire in self-defense. Forensic video analysis performed by the NYTimes and other organizations paints a very different story, suggesting that the agent (who apparently had been run over by a car several months ago in a different operation) was not in any danger. Good’s motivations are also murky, as she appears to have been coming home from dropping her 6-year-old son off at school, rather than “engaging in domestic terrorism”. As such, many in Minnesota want to see Ross charged with murder, while the Trump administration characteristically remains unrepentant. Tensions are high here.

Speaker Johnson’s grip on his caucus appears to be continuing to slip, as this week 17 House Republicans crossed to floor to help pass a bill that would belatedly extend the Biden-era expanded premium subsidies for ACA individual medical insurance plans for an additional three years. The bill is not seen as having a chance to pass the Senate. Also, on Friday SCOTUS returned from its winter break and released one opinion, but it was not the eagerly anticipated opinion in the IEEPA tariffs case.

Speaking of tariffs, a working paper from two academics got some media attention this week. They argue that, due to various exemptions, the effective tariff rates observed in late 2025 are roughly half of the stated tariff rates, which helps explain why the higher tariff regime’s impact on the general economy has been muted so far. They also assert that virtually all of the higher tariffs are being borne by the U.S. rather than by exporters (via price reductions). Dan Drezner, reacting to the researchers’ findings:

“In a lot of ways, Trump’s trade policy is a synecdoche of the Trump administration’s overall policy shifts. There are horrible headlines, followed by policy that is only about 50 percent as horrible as the original pronouncement. Then Trump supporters exult in the fact that predictions of doom turned out to be false. Of course, the effect is like praising a doctor because he only injected half as much arsenic as was previously thought into a patient.”

Trump made three statements this week that I can hardly believe were uttered by a Republican President. First, he said that the U.S. should place limitations on the ability of certain corporations to own certain property (barring large institutional investors from owning single-family homes). Second, he said that the U.S. should place limitations on the ability of certain corporations (namely, defense contractors) to return capital to investors (through buybacks or dividends) and to compensate their senior executives. Finally, he said that the U.S. should place limitations on the interest rates charged to consumes on certain unsecured loans (credit card balances). These policies sound like they came out of Senator Warren’s mouth. Trump also stated this week that he wants to see a 50% increase in federal defense spending. At least that sounds like a Republican President’s position, even if it’s a batshit crazy thing to propose.

Finally, the wonderful world of foreign policy. I don’t think we have much more clarity about the future of Venezuela than we did when I last posted, other than Trump is clearly hot-to-trot to get American hands on Venezuelan oil, which always felt like the most likely root cause of his intervention. Yesterday he convened a White House meeting of the leaders of the U.S. oil industry, attempting to browbeat them into investing $100 billion in Venezuela, a country that on multiple previous occasions has expropriated American oil investments. So far they don’t seem to be biting.

And then there’s Greenland, about which the rhetoric keeps increasing. Yesterday Trump said, in reference to conversations he’s had with Danish officials, that “I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.” Something I just learned is that in 1916, when Denmark ceded the Danish Virgin Islands to the U.S., the U.S. Secretary of State made a formal declaration that “the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.” In light of Venezuela and Greenland, tensions are once again rising in Canada about the possibility of threats, whether economic or military, from the southern neighbor.

In my last post a few days ago, wrapping up the first calendar year of the 2nd Trump Administration, early on in the post I wrote: “We are not yet at war with Venezuela, although events still seem to be trending in that direction.”

Yesterday morning the world woke up to the news that, overnight, the U.S. military had successfully executed a mission to forcibly extract Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas, and extradite them to New York City to await trial on various federal charges, mainly around narco-terrorism. In essence, an attempt at regime change via decapitation, wrapped in the guise of facilitating a criminal prosecution.

Thirty-six hours later, there is still a great deal of uncertainty around what this means for the future of Venezuela. I watched Trump’s news conference from Mar-A-Lago, which was uncharacteristic of me as I have a great deal of difficulty listening to the man speak. On this occasion, it was fascinating. He had no teleprompter, but there was clearly a written text that he was supposed to be reading, and hence much of the time he had his head down as he was reading verbatim from the prepared text. But then every couple of sentences he would get bored, and his head would go up and he would start riffing, before eventually putting his head down again and returning to the text. I would love to see a transcript of his speech that is aligned with his head movements, so that we can deduce which of his words were carefully planned and which weren’t. I strongly suspect that the unplanned words included the following quote, which quickly became the biggest piece of news from the press conference: “We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

It is also unclear what this foreshadows for the future of American foreign policy. In his speech Trump talked about the “Donroe Doctrine”, a term that I hadn’t heard before but was mentioned in a November 2025 NYTimes article as having originated in a January 2025 NYPost headline. Trump reiterated in a phone interview today that “we do need Greenland, absolutely.” He has also made comments over the past day that could foreshadow military action in Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. It does, however, seem fairly clear that a U.S. who is willing to take this type of action against Venezuela is uninterested in taking a hard line against Chinese aggression towards Taiwan or Russian aggression towards Ukraine.