A Country Adrift

Chaos caused by the Trump administration, inside and outside the U.S.

Jan 11, 2026

Last week, I hosted my first Substack Live, speaking with David R. Shedd, a former CIA and Foreign Service officer and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as the author of “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets.” We talked about Venezuela, Greenland and more. See the full interview below. Our paid subscribers will be getting timely, useful, important bonus content like this, so I hope you will consider upgrading. While our core newsletter will remain free and available as is, we need support to build out bonus content (thank you!).

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Each week, I keep a running list of topics for this newsletter. Here’s the most recent one:

Chaos on the streets with bullets and protests. In Iran, of course (with Donald Trump fanning the flames and threatening to attack) and in Minneapolis.
We now own Venezuela and will spend billions trying to run it. So much for America First.
Donald Trump declares the only constraint on his global power is “my own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me.”
The idea of trying to own Greenland is no longer a joke. It’s now official policy, with purchasing it — or using force to get it — discussed by top officials on TV.
On Wednesday, the U.S. withdrew from 66 international organizations and 65 climate, labor, and human rights agreements, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Thanks to RFK Jr — the sickest-sounding and -looking man you’d want to give you any health advice — childhood vaccine recommendations have been dangerously downgraded.

I am angry, as so many of you are, about what happened in Minneapolis and the ICE-involved shooting of Renee Good. The fact that the officer was hit and dragged in an earlier incident doesn’t excuse his itchy trigger finger, the way officials think it does. It only makes clear he shouldn’t have been back on duty; shouldn’t have tried to block the car with his body; and shouldn’t have fired into a moving vehicle (the last two points are from the government’s own rules of engagement for ICE agents).

Mayors, governors, and other state-level officials across the country are frantically trying to protect people from heavily-armed masked agents of the federal government.

ICE and other amorphous federal agencies have been set free to roam en masse in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, Portland, Charlotte, New Orleans, and now Minneapolis. These agents wear masks, snatch people from the street, homes, schools, and wherever else befits them.

They do this under the guise of “qualified immunity” bestowed by the Department of Justice. So Good’s killer will likely face no consequences for his actions.

Here’s a snapshot from Trump’s unleashing of ICE in Chicago for “Operation Midway Blitz” via the Marshall Project:

When federal agents launched “Operation Midway Blitz” in September, they arrested thousands of people, at times near schools or child care centers, and used chemical agents like tear gas on protesters. In response to the often chaotic and high-profile raids, city residents blew whistles to alert neighbors of approaching agents and organized “magic school buses” to accompany children to school.
The Marshall Project analyzed ICE data that includes arrests and detentions through the middle of October, the most current detailed records publicly available. People who ICE arrested during that time were later detained in 13 states, at county jails, privately run detention centers and a rapidly constructed facility on a military base, the data shows.

This is wrong. Forget “illegal” or “unconstitutional” or some other erudite qualifier—it is both of those things and more—it’s just wrong. It’s breaking up families, people are living in abject fear, and it is an utter disgrace.

The Guardian is doing a fantastic job of tracking these things. Here is the tally so far (since January 2025):

“People currently in detention” is a descriptor from The Hunger Games. Of course, the share of people detained who have no criminal record continues to grow apace, because that was always going to be the case. On The Guardian site, this and other charts are interactive:

This is a fascist agenda. It is.

This is what we call “security forces” when we talk about authoritarian governments. Anonymous militias with badges acting with impunity, turning the power of the state against its people, citizens, residents, and otherwise.

I suspect you’ve seen one or more of the many videos of the horror in Minneapolis. To me, this is the definitive one:

This analysis is thorough, comprehensive, indisputable, and totally unnecessary. Any thinking person who saw the video of Good’s murder—and it was murder—could see exactly what happened. It’s impossible to watch that and then say, “She deserved to be shot at point-blank range by an officer of the federal government.”

Or, so one would hope. If you still, somehow, harbor any questions as to the beliefs and intentions of Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller, all you need to do is listen to what they say out loud, usually on TV.

These two clips of JD Vance’s press conference are the perfect encapsulation of this moment and the moral rot driving it.

Not only does the sitting Vice President tell a completely different story than the one that is clearly visible to anyone who can watch it. He doubles down on the more traditional “left-wing idealogue” smear of a woman federal agents killed mere hours before.

This is just some sort of truth-creation, direct from the White House. Flooding cities with masked agents conducting warrantless…everything; arresting 30,000-plus people per month; holding 70,000 of them without charges, and deporting a half million people to wherever the dart lands on a map, is a fascist agenda being implemented.

Vance typically peddles his brand of Christianity—performative at best—but this editorial from the National Catholic Reporter is unflinching in its view of the way Vance and many of his MAGA cohort practice their faith:

As a Catholic, Vance knows better than to peddle this brand of gaslighting and agitation. Vance knows that, by virtue of her humanity, Good was endowed with inherent dignity, made in the image and likeness of God. Vance knows that only God can take life. Vance knows that protesting, fleeing or even interfering in an ICE investigation (which there is no evidence that Good did) does not carry a death sentence. Vance knows that lying and killing are sins.
Vance knows. He doesn’t care. Vance’s twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity has been repudiated by two popes. His Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.
The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel. Our only recourse is to pray for his conversion of heart.

“Obey or die” is not the hallmark of a thriving faith, nor a thriving democracy. It’s the utterance of a power structure bent on absolute power. Here’s Stephen Colbert summing it up better than I can:

It’s not shocking to hear the Vice President and other Trump cronies talk like this, but he’s clearly turning up the dial (or being hung out to dry, depending on who you ask) to try to seize the post-Trump MAGA/GOP mantle from the current frontrunner, U.S. Secretary of State, Acting National Security Advisor, Acting USAID Administrator, and Acting Archivist of the United States, Marco Rubio (when I saw someone had written that last title, I thought they were joking. But it’s true 🤦‍♂️).

Rubio had quite a week, orchestrating a sea blockade of Venezuela and then kidnapping the country’s leader and his wife, and handing it over to Trump to tell us how American oil companies are going to make it so Venezuelan oil is somehow American oil.

Brazen doesn’t begin to describe what the President just did in Venezuela. Obviously illegal and incredibly destabilizing come to mind as a more apt characterization. Add to that Miller’s tirade on Jake Tapper’s show about the finer points of imperial power and why Greenland is next on the list. Watch this with the knowledge that he is Trump’s most-trusted advisor.

Trump is not satisfied with ripping apart America from the inside, he is hell-bent on plunging the world into utter chaos from the outside as well. What they did in Venezuela was remarkably dangerous on its own, but thinking of it terms of NATO, Russia and Europe, or China and Taiwan, or any other regional power politics dynamic should have us all worried.

As part of our bonus content, I hosted a discussion on Venezuela and the wider implications with David Shedd, former CIA officer and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Watch the whole thing (±30 minutes) here (and be sure to check out his book, “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets”):

The things this administration is doing are not frivolous, easily-fixable missteps—they are an attempt to fundamentally reshape the U.S. both at home and abroad. It has a well-funded messaging machine that spits out whatever the regime says it must, and it fully relies on apathy to succeed.

We can defeat this. We must. Our neighbors and our country demand it of us.

Dive Deeper: At Home

Courts stepped in to stop Trump’s efforts to withhold federal funds for childcare in 5 Democratic-led states [Axios]
Lawfare is tracking domestic deployments of U.S. troops. There is a shocking lack of transparency around federal and military activity in the U.S. [Lawfare]
Federal immigration agents have been involved in at least 13 fatal shootings with civilians in cars since last July [The Wall St. Journal]
ICE has a tool to monitor mobile phones in entire neighborhoods [404 Media]
Google the phrase: “ICE detention center conditions” and go to the News tab
USAID’s closure has killed hundreds of thousands of people already [The New Yorker]

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