2026-01-18 03:47:25
As President Donald Trump wraps up the first year of his second term—one marked by US aggression abroad and rising political violence at home—a wave of new polls released this week shows him and his policies at remarkably high, and in some cases record, levels of unpopularity. Across nearly every major measure, Trump is generating more backlash than loyalty, deepening distrust as his personal standing continues to slide.
A new CNN poll released Friday found that nearly 60 percent of Americans describe Trump’s first year back in office as a failure. Trump is faltering even on issues that have historically been his strongest, like the economy. A majority of Americans (55 percent) say he has made the economy worse, while just 36 percent believe he has focused on the right priorities—a nine-point drop since the start of his term. CNN also found Trump’s overall job approval rating languishing at 39 percent, down from 48 percent last February. A clear majority say he has gone too far in using presidential power. You can read the full results here.
CNN’s numbers are not outliers. A new Associated Press–NORC poll, released on Thursday, shows erosion even within Trump’s own party. Only 16 percent of Republicans say the president has helped “a lot” with the cost of living, down sharply from 49 percent in April 2024. Trump’s approval on immigration—still one of his strongest issues among Republicans—has slipped as well, falling from 88 percent in March to 76 percent in the latest survey. Overall, just 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, a marked decline, while 61 percent disapprove. Across the poll, voters say Trump is focused on the wrong priorities, abusing power, hurting the economy, and leaving the country worse off. The survey marked his lowest approval ratings on the economy reported by AP pollsters during both stints in the White House.
Other surveys this week echoed the same themes. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Trump deeply underwater overall, with 58 percent disapproving of his job performance and just 36 percent approving of his handling of the economy. The poll also found overwhelming opposition to Trump’s foreign adventurism, with 71 percent saying the use of military force against Greenland would be a bad idea. Meanwhile, a Marist poll released Friday found that 56 percent of Americans oppose the United States taking military action in Venezuela.
2026-01-18 03:09:36
Donald Trump promised on Saturday to issue a series of increasing tariffs on European NATO allies until he is permitted to buy Greenland, the latest escalation in his already feverish threats to take over the Arctic country, which is part of Denmark.
Trump announced on Truth Social that starting next month, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland would all be charged a 10 percent tariff on all goods sent to the US. The tariff would rise to 25 percent on June 1.
“These Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable,” Trump wrote.
The president continued to assert that acquiring the island was “imperative” for America’s national security and the “survival of our planet” in the face of alleged threats from Russia and China, adding that the US’ “Golden Dome” air and missile defense system made the takeover necessary.
But Trump’s claims are unfounded and don’t require obliterating the US’ relationship with NATO. As I noted earlier this week, the US already has a massive collection of at least 128 military bases in at least 51 countries—all without taking over land—and the US has had a strategic military presence in Greenland since World War II. There is also no evidence of a Russian or Chinese military presence on Greenland’s coast.
Trump’s threats have led European nations to send military personnel to the island at the request of Denmark. Protesters in Denmark and Greenland demonstrated on Saturday, demanding sovereignty.
According to CNN, an estimated 5,000 protesters showed up in Greenland’s capital city of Nuuk—remarkable for an island with a population of approximately 56,000.
Even many Republican lawmakers have voiced strong opposition to buying Greenland.
Trump’s rhetoric risks “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), chair of the Senate defense appropriation subcommittee, labeled Trump’s rhetoric as risking “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”
“If there was any sort of action that looked like the goal was actually landing in Greenland and doing an illegal taking… there’d be sufficient numbers here to pass a war powers resolution and withstand a veto,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said on Thursday.
A bipartisan delegation of congressional lawmakers visited Copenhagen on Friday to reassure Denmark and Greenland officials that they would not support Trump’s plan to annex or buy Greenland—and especially not any military action against a fellow NATO member.
“Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset, and I think that’s what you’re hearing with this delegation,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said on Friday after meeting with Danish and Greenlandic leaders there.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said on Wednesday that the president’s threats were “utter buffoonery.” “If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency,” he continued. “He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”
But on Friday, Trump refused to commit to not engaging in attacking a NATO partner.
“I don’t talk about that,” the president replied when questioned by reporters.
2026-01-18 01:04:07
On Friday afternoon, a judge blocked federal agents in Minneapolis from arresting peaceful protesters or using crowd control tools against them, just as news broke that Trump’s justice department desperately launched an investigation into whether Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey impeded immigration enforcement through their public opposition.
US District Judge Kate Menendez ruled that DHS and ICE agents working in Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota must refrain from “using pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity.” Menendez also barred federal agents from stopping vehicles from following them if they maintain a safe distance.
Menendez’s order granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed by protesters last month that argued that their constitutional rights to exercise free speech and peaceably assemble were violated by federal agents who retaliated with intimidation, force, and detention.
Menendez wrote that protesters and observers “did not forcibly obstruct or impede the agents’ work.”
“The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly—not rioting,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “We remind the public that rioting is dangerous—obstructing law enforcement is a federal crime and assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”
Menendez’s order comes as the Trump administration began sending about 1,000 more federal agents to Minnesota last week—in addition to the 2,000 others already deployed in the state.
The Justice Department is also intensifying its assault on Minnesota by targeting Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey. Prosecutors reportedly issued grand jury subpoenas to the pair on Friday.
But the investigation into Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey raises similar First Amendment concerns as the lawsuit filed by the protesters—the right to condemn the government without fear of punishment.
“Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system against your opponents is an authoritarian tactic, Gov. Walz wrote Friday in a post on X. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”
On Friday night, Mayor Frey said on X that the subpoena was an “obvious attempt to intimidate.”
In a Friday night post to X, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote, “A reminder to all those in Minnesota: No one is above the law.”
But the Trump administration’s claim that its escalation of violence is justified against protesters comes as story after story emerges of violent encounters with federal officers, including using tear gas on a six-month-old baby.
While yesterday’s ruling protecting protesters will likely go to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, where 10 of the 11 active judges have been nominated by Republican presidents, the broader picture is becoming clearer: the administration must know protesters are thwarting federal agents; they know their enforcement is being challenged in court; and they know support for their immigration policies is plummeting.
2026-01-17 22:18:39
Journalist Mariana Zúñiga woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of explosions and military planes in Caracas, Venezuela. Her WhatsApp chats flashed the news: The ruling dictator, Nicolás Maduro, had just been captured by the US military. She was surprised and felt uneasy about what was to come.
In the days that followed, Zúñiga would go into the field, despite the dangers journalists face, to report on what the country feels like at this tumultuous moment.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.This week on Reveal, we speak with Venezuelans about witnessing this moment of history from up close and afar. For Freddy Guevara, an exiled Venezuelan opposition leader living in the US, there is little confidence in the country’s new leadership.
“They are not moderate at all,” Guevara says. “They are super radical, and they believe they are smarter than everyone.”
And historian Alejandro Velasco explains the role Venezuela’s most valuable resource—oil—has played in the country’s history and relations with the US.
2026-01-17 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In an era of rapid globalization, economic growth has come with trade-offs. To make room for urban development or fossil fuel extraction, countries often clear forests, pollute water and decimate wildlife populations.
However, while nations and businesses build lucrative markets around these activities, destroying nature often comes at a cost—literally. Natural resources underpin the global economy, from pollinators supporting agricultural supply chains to forests ensuring water quality and availability. One estimate suggests that more than half of the world’s gross domestic product is moderately or highly dependent on the environment.
Research shows the services that nature provides are diminishing as we degrade it. Now, a growing number of economists and ecologists around the world are helping decisionmakers understand the full extent of the contributions to local and national economies made by plants, animals, or entire ecosystems—and what’s at risk financially if they are lost.
Since time immemorial, humans have relied on natural resources like clean water, forests, and soil to prop up economies. As Stanford University ecologist Lisa Mandle put it to me bluntly, “if there were no nature, there would be no economy.”
But it wasn’t until fairly recently that experts formally started to catalogue the environment’s financial contributions to society through an approach dubbed “natural capital accounting.” In 2005, a report compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world, which was called for by the United Nations, estimated that human activities had driven the decline of two-thirds of ecosystem services on Earth, including freshwater supply, climate-change mitigation, and disease control.
Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, including $34 billion in the United States.
Dubbed the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” the report also revealed how much was not known about the environment’s financial contributions, finding that the costs of degrading nature were rarely tracked in local and national economic accounts. Since then, experts have scrambled to fill these gaps.
Mandle is the co-executive director of Natural Capital Alliance, a Stanford-based collaboration of research institutions and nonprofits such as the Nature Conservancy working to help countries better understand their natural resource availability and how to balance those benefits with development.
For example, the group recently worked with the Colombian National Planning Department to calculate the economic value of the country’s Upper Sinú Basin. Using input from locals and complex financial models, they found that ecosystems in the region deliver around $100 million in benefits to hydropower production and the delivery of clean water to households and economic sectors—nearly 2 percent of the region’s GDP.
“In many decisions, nature has been treated as essentially worthless or of negligible value when compared to other kinds of human activities,” said Mandle. “Natural capital accounting is an effort to correct that and to shine a light on the many different ways that nature and biodiversity supports human well-being and the economy.”
It’s not just governments using this type of data; businesses around the world are increasingly required to disclose the biodiversity risks of their operations, the Financial Times reports. At the same time, investors have shown more interest in companies that can show they are environmentally friendly, Viorel Popescu, an ecologist at Columbia University, told me.
Large corporations are major contributors to biodiversity loss, but Popescu said they are also at “the forefront of being able to do something about it,” and can often move at a faster pace than governments. With this in mind, Columbia University announced in September the creation of a master’s program focusing on biodiversity data analytics. The idea is to help businesspeople understand the implications of corporate operations on nature.
“We’ve been training ecologists to do ecology forever, and they don’t always get into places where they can actually make decisions, unfortunately,” said Popescu, who is the director of the program. He has been an ecologist for more than two decades and stressed that the new program is “trying to get people that don’t have necessarily an ecology or a conservation background…but are in the position of making a difference.”
Ecosystem accounting has revealed some staggering stats on nature’s financial contributions. Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, including $34 billion in the United States. A recent federal report found that US birders spent an estimated $108 billion related to their pursuits in 2022 alone, which is almost six times the total revenue generated by the National Football League that year. Mangrove forests prevent more than $65 billion in property damage around the world each year, according to a 2020 study.
Even a single species can bring in the big bucks: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that the endangered North Atlantic right whale generated $2.3 billion in sales for the whale-watching industry and across the broader economy in 2008 alone. Conservation groups often use these analyses to make the case for protection of plants and wildlife.
“To participate in the commodification and financialization of our Relatives is an affront to the Natural Laws.”
Experts recognize that natural capital accounting has limitations, largely due to the diversity of ecosystems and what values different groups of people put on various services. Additionally, interactions across a single ecosystem can be incredibly complex, and “it can be hard to tease out what the value is of an individual component, because its value is not just [that component], but it’s how it interacts within this system to sustain life,” Mandle said. The UN has a framework to help countries track ecosystem services, though much of these processes are case by case.
In recent years, new markets have emerged to commodify nature-based solutions through the sale of carbon offsets or “biodiversity credits,” which represent a measured unit of biodiversity protection that companies can purchase to support conservation. However, critics say the “financialization of nature” fails to recognize its intrinsic value, and could actually work against its protection.
“Only humans would have the audacity to assign ‘financial value’, in their colonial thought process ways, to the Sources of Life and the living beings that are our relatives,” Casey Camp- Horinek, an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma and chairwoman of the Indigenous Council of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature, said in a statement on the group’s website. “We do not own anything that is called Nature, we are Nature, and to participate in the commodification and financialization of our Relatives is an affront to the Natural Laws and quite simply wrong.”
Popescu said he’s “conflicted” about assigning financial values to ecosystem services. “But at the same time, I’m well aware that if we don’t try to do that, you’re not going to advance the conversation,” he said.
Echoing this sentiment, Mandle said that while it’s crucial to also consider the intangible values of nature, “there are some decisions that get made, you know, comparing numbers, lines on a spreadsheet, or weighing costs and benefits.”
It’s a “head approach and a heart approach,” she said. “I think they work together.”
In any case, it’s clear that environmental degradation and climate change are already taking a heavy toll on the global economy, costing trillions of dollars annually, according to a UN report released in December. “I think [natural capital accounting] has become especially relevant recently as the size of the human enterprise relative to Earth systems has grown,” Mandle said. “Many of these values have only been apparent once they’ve been lost.”
2026-01-17 20:30:00
More resignations of federal prosecutors are expected at the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota amid ongoing frustration over the Trump administration’s response to the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis.
“I have heard there may be more people leaving, people I would consider senior and respected career prosecutors,” said Anders Folk, a former acting US attorney in Minnesota, who left the office in 2021 to work for the Justice Department in Washington, DC, under former President Biden.
Minnesota Federal Defender Katherian Roe, in a staffwide email obtained by the Sahan Journal, also wrote that “more resignations are anticipated” at the US Attorney’s Office. “It’s a sign that something is not right” there, added Folk, who is still in touch with colleagues in the office and is now running for Hennepin County Attorney.
Already this week, at least five federal prosecutors in Minnesota announced their resignations. Among them was the office’s second-in-command, Joseph Thompson, who was overseeing the welfare fraud investigation involving Somali immigrants that President Trump used as a pretext to send his immigration force to Minneapolis.
The prosecutors did not give a reason for their departures, but their announcements came shortly after the Justice Department ordered the office to investigate Good’s wife rather than focus on the shooter and the shooting. “It’s a big deal, and this is fairly unprecedented,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor now based in Los Angeles, said of the resignations. “You have so many leaving, and frankly on principle: We are living in unique times where prosecutors are being asked to do things they’ve never had to do before. That’s not what they signed up for.”
Five senior prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in DC—a unit that investigates police killings—also resigned this week.
Since Trump’s reelection, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office has seen a steady stream of departures. Nearly 50 out of about 135 staffers have left their positions, according to a person with knowledge of the departures who did not want to be named, and who confirmed that more resignations are likely. Some of the office’s attorneys left earlier this year as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was working to downsize the federal workforce. Others quit in December, after ICE launched its Minneapolis surge.
“They’ve had a major brain drain, and I don’t know who’s going to be left to do the cases.”
The administration’s response to the Good’s death on January 7 appears to have been the last straw for some of the prosecutors. The 37-year-old mom, who had partly blocked a neighborhood street with her vehicle, was fatally shot in the head and chest by ICE officer Jonathan Ross. The killing, which has sparked nationwide protests, was captured on video by multiple bystanders, and also by Ross, who recorded the encounter on his phone. In his footage, a male voice, which the New York Times has verified was Ross, could be heard calling Good a “fucking bitch” after he shot her.
The Justice Department has defended Ross, accusing Good of trying to run him over, and ordered the US Attorney’s Office to focus on Good’s wife, who was on hand protesting the ICE operation. But a frame-by-frame video analysis from the Times clearly shows that Ross shot Good as she was steering her vehicle away from him, and that he was not run over, as Trump and other federal officials claimed, or struck by the vehicle in a substantial way.
The administration quickly excluded the Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from its investigation, making it harder for state authorities to gather evidence. As staffers at the US Attorney’s Office watched the video footage, some were crying or otherwise visibly emotional about the death and the Justice Department’s response, according to the person with knowledge of the departures.
Since Operation Metro Surge began in the Twin Cities, federal immigration officers have reportedly arrested more than 2,400 people. To deal with the influx of cases, given its reduced staff, the US Attorney’s Office is receiving help from military attorneys known as Judge Advocates General. Several JAGs are already stationed at the office, and the Pentagon, according to CNN, plans to send about 25 more.
As videos spread showing brutal ICE encounters in the Twin Cities—officers dragging a disabled woman out of her car as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment; carrying away an unconscious man in handcuffs; throwing a flashbang at a car with six children, and more—protesters are calling for accountability and yelling at the masked federal officers to get out of their neighborhoods.
But to file civil rights cases against ICE agents or any other law enforcement, prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office would need approval from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys in DC. And that “feels impossible,” said the person with knowledge of the resignations, “when you can’t even get an investigation for a woman who was shot point-blank in the head.”
Folk, the former acting US attorney, told me that he’s never seen anything like the recent spate of resignations in Minnesota. It’s unusual, he said, for so many career prosecutors, as opposed to political appointees, to leave at the same time. “It’s deeply concerning to many members of the legal community here,” Folk told me, and he worries about the consequences for other investigations, including the ones looking into fraud in state welfare programs and the assassinations of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, last year.
At least some of the attorneys who resigned this week had planned to use their accumulated leave to stay on longer and help with the transition, but the Justice Department fired them after they announced their intentions, abruptly blocked their credentials, and had them escorted out of the building.
The Minnesota US Attorney’s Office had fewer than 30 prosecutors prior to the latest departures—that’s less than half of what the full head count should be, Folk said. Former federal prosecutor Levenson added that it might be difficult for the office to hire new attorneys, given the explosive political environment. “People of the caliber you used to get at US attorney’s offices aren’t interested in the job; they’ve had a major brain drain, and I don’t know who’s going to be left to do the cases,” she said.
“This will have an impact for years to come.”
