2026-01-09 06:15:00
The events that led to a federal officer in Minneapolis killing Renee Nicole Good have not been universally interpreted. On a visit to Texas on Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the incident as an “act of domestic terrorism.” She said Good was attacking ICE officers and that she “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle.”
“Our officer followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation,” Noem said later in the day at a press conference in Minneapolis.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called that “bullshit” and “garbage.” He demanded that ICE “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
“We do not want you here,” he said. “Your stated reason for being here in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite.”
And when Frey was questioned about his remarks by CNN host Kaitlan Collins, saying some had called his remarks “divisive,” he said this: “I’m so sorry if I offended their Disney Princess ears. But here’s the thing. If we’re talking about what’s inflammatory, on the one hand, you got someone dropping the f-bomb. On the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else.”
So how did all of this get started? And how is it all going now? Today, Explained co-host Noel King wanted an on-the-ground perspective, and Max Nesterak, a reporter and editor for Minnesota Reformer, told her that Minnesotans are tired and full of pain.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Over the past couple of weeks, a fraud scandal in Minnesota has consumed the American right. That scandal led to the government deploying a bunch of ICE agents to Minneapolis. Yesterday, one of those officers shot and killed a woman. What do we know about that shooting?
So yesterday morning, around 10 am, ICE officers fatally shot a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident named Renee Nicole Good. I spoke with witnesses and received a video of the incident.
What we see and what the witness I talked to said [is that] she was out for a walk and saw an ICE vehicle stuck in the snow. And then more ICE vehicles arrived, and bystanders were blowing their whistles and protesting to get people’s attention as part of these patrols, “ICE watch,” that people throughout the Twin Cities are doing to document the arrests.
Then we see Good in her Honda Pilot parked perpendicular in the middle of the street. And an ICE agent — she waves one by, then another ICE agent pulls up, gets out of his car, and yells at her to get out of the car. We see her back up and then pull forward. And that’s when an officer, who’s near the front of the vehicle, fires three shots, fatally killing her.
Even though the video of this encounter is out there from multiple angles, people do not agree on what they’re seeing. President Donald Trump yesterday spoke first. What did he say happened?
He echoed what we heard at a news conference yesterday [in which] Kristi Noem accused Goode of stalking and impeding ICE operations. That is completely different than what many people see in the video. And what we’re hearing from Democratic leaders [is completely different]. US Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, accused ICE of terrorizing their neighborhoods. She called [ICE’s] actions reckless and callous, and [said] that ICE needs to be held accountable.
And your mayor, Jacob Frey, what has he had to say?
Well, he gave a very impassioned news conference, saying very bluntly for ICE to get out of Minneapolis. And that’s something that has been repeated by the governor and members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation: that they don’t want ICE conducting this enhanced enforcement operation in Minnesota.
A few weeks ago, DHS began ramping up immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. And on Sunday, we received reports that about 2,000 more officers and agents were coming to the state in what DHS is calling its largest operation ever.
So this has really created a standoff between Democratic leaders who say they are not getting any coordination or communication from the Trump administration and federal agencies who are carrying out these operations.
As all of this is happening in the streets, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, announced this week that he’s not going to run for reelection. That announcement was tied to the scandal that I mentioned. Can you explain what happened here?
This goes back a number of years with the prosecution of people for stealing funds intended to feed hungry children during the pandemic. The story has reached the national news and the Oval Office just in recent weeks, but it really began in 2022, when US Attorney Andy Luger, a Biden appointee, charged nearly 50 people with stealing $250 million from this pandemic-era program.
This has been known as the Feeding Our Future scandal after one of the nonprofits at the center of it; it now includes more than 90 indictments across multiple social service programs. So the fraud is no longer contained just to this meals program, but to other programs aimed at serving the most vulnerable Minnesotans.
And there is a very important detail here, which is that a majority of the people charged and convicted are of Somali descent.
That’s right. Now we’re seeing the Trump administration use that to justify vicious attacks on the entire Somali American population in Minnesota of roughly 91,000, most of whom are American citizens.
If local media have been on this story since 2022, why did it boil over in late 2025?
So Christopher Rufo, a conservative journalist, writes a piece in City Journal with this bombshell quote from a confidential source that the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer. Al-Shabaab is a US-designated terrorist organization that runs parts of Somalia. Days later, President Trump calls Somali immigrants “garbage” and unleashes a torrent of other attacks on Somalis, and draws national attention to Minnesota.
I should note that prosecutors have said that greed has been the motivating factor for these fraudsters, not ideology. Prosecutors say they don’t have evidence of people intentionally funding terrorist groups. That said, Al-Shabaab controls parts of Somalia. So if people send money home, that money — likely, some of it ends up in the hands of Al-Shabaab, because they charge taxes, or rather, extort people.
So Chris Rufo, who is an activist journalist, went out on a limb with the funding terrorism claim. However, in his article, he points out that there was massive fraud and that local officials — most of whom, as I understand it, were Democrats — did not root it out. This happened on their watch.
Yeah, that’s right. You know, Democrats have always condemned the fraud, and Gov. Tim Walz has said they take strong action against people accused, and [that] those people go to jail. But I have to say, the sheer scope of [the fraud] is really an indictment of the Walz administration’s ability to steward public resources. And I think it’s underscored that all of these social service programs have really been run on the belief that everyone is honest. I think that goes back to a tradition here in Minnesota of a Scandinavian-style, high tax, high services government that is trusting and doesn’t have the checks in place to prevent abuse.
How do we get from Chris Rufo’s exposé — which included some truths as well as some unproven stuff — to Tim Walz resigning?
Pressure has been mounting for months. The House Republicans created a committee, a fraud oversight committee. It became clear that Republicans were going to run on this issue. This was going to be their signature issue in trying to win back the governorship in 2026. The New York Times publishes a big piece in November that makes it even harder to ignore. And then it gets the attention of a young independent YouTuber named Nick Shirley, who posts a 40-minute video on December 26, showing himself going around to Somali-run daycares and demanding to see children, and not seeing any. He claims to uncover more than $100 million in fraud.
I should note: It’s maybe not so unusual that a random person with a video camera who demands to see children in a daycare doesn’t see any. I know at my child’s daycare, they have a passcode to get in. I would expect that my daycare center would not let in any random YouTuber off the street.
In the wake of this, reporters have been crawling all over Minnesota trying to fact-check Nick Shirley. Was any of what he reported accurate?
I think we’re still trying to figure that out. There’s definitely problems with his reporting, not just the tactics, but the fact is that one [daycare] that he visited has been closed since 2022, according to state officials. State officials also visited and found nine operating normally with children. Still, four of them are the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, according to the Star Tribune. Reporters at the Star Tribune also visited those 10 facilities [that Shirley visited] and were able to go inside four where they found children.
I should also note that local reporters have also made the connection that some of those daycare centers were also meal sites for Feeding Our Future, which was tied to that giant fraud. But, it’s important to note, the owners have not been charged in that case.
So here we sit on Thursday morning, and you may have seen some dark jokes circulating online about how everything happens in Minnesota: You guys had George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020. Tim Walz’s ups and downs. You had a Democratic lawmaker murdered in her home last summer. And now, again, you have the Twin Cities really on edge. How are people there doing?
I think all of us here are tired of feeling like everything happens in Minnesota.
I was at the vigil for Renee Good yesterday, and the atmosphere was just anguish at her killing, and certainly resolve: People saying, “We have to continue turning out to stand up for our neighbors.” So there’s a sense of defiance, but also just sadness. We’re all tired of Minnesota being the center of attention, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to let up. The DHS says it’s running the largest operation ever in the state right now. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said yesterday that ICE operations did not stop after the killing, that they will continue as planned. So there’s a sense on both sides that there’s a fight to be had here. I think people are digging in for a continued standoff between the state and federal government.
2026-01-09 03:45:00
Recently, something incredibly rare happened: American policymakers at the highest levels of government committed to tackling animal cruelty.
Specifically, late last month, the Trump administration announced a multi-agency “strike force” to crack down on animal abuse.
In a Fox News interview with Lara Trump about the initiative, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Trump’s Department of Justice will aggressively pursue dog fighting cases, and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promised to hold puppy mills — operations that confine dogs in cages for breeding, and where most of America’s puppies for sale originate — accountable for mistreating animals.
Alongside Bondi and Rollins, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about how his agency has been working to end animal experimentation for drug development and scientific research.
The announcement of this new “strike force” took animal advocates by surprise. Historically, both Republican and Democratic administrations have largely ignored animal welfare as a policy matter, failed to enforce what few legal protections animals do have, and benefited animal-exploiting industries through favorable executive orders, subsidy programs, and deregulatory measures.
That was certainly the case during Trump’s first term and, for the most part, it’s true for his second, which makes it hard to square the agency heads’ strong language in support of animal welfare during the Fox News interview with many of its past actions. Those include reduced enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, gutting the USDA’s animal welfare research department, removing protections for endangered species, and suing California to dismantle its cage-free egg law. (The one major exception is the Trump administration’s long-running campaign to phase out animal experimentation.)
It remains to be seen just how much the “strike force” initiatives will help animals, but the administration’s effort to stake out territory on these issues is striking. Animal welfare is often coded as a liberal cause, but it has widespread support among voters across the ideological spectrum, though neither party has meaningfully taken it up as a priority — until recently. Over the last few years, some prominent figures on the right have seized on this opening, and the administration’s strike force is the latest and most high-profile move.
While HHS has laid out some details about its efforts to phase out animal experimentation, Secretary Rollins and Attorney General Bondi didn’t include many during their Fox News segment on the new initiative, and no official documents have been released about their plans, so it’s hard to properly assess just how much it’ll help animals. But actions over the past year provide some clues, according to Delcianna Winders, the director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Animal Law and Policy Institute. (Disclosure: In 2023, I attended a media fellowship program at Vermont Law and Graduate School.)
To start, Winders lauds Bondi’s plan to combat dog fighting. But she notes that dogs used in fighting comprise “a very small number of animals relative to the number of animals who are supposed to be protected under the Animal Welfare Act,” which provides minimum standards for more than a million animals in zoos, puppy mills, and laboratories, in addition to meting out penalties for animal fighting.
The Justice Department hasn’t released any details on its plan, and it’s unclear where the money will come from to designate prosecutors in all 50 states to work specifically on dog fighting cases, as Bondi has promised. The agency didn’t respond to our request for comment about its initiative.
To help far more dogs, the administration would need to strictly regulate puppy mills, which USDA Secretary Rollins suggests the agency will do.
“On the surface, it’s exciting,” Winders said. “It’s exciting to hear a secretary of agriculture say, ‘We want to tackle puppy mills.’ That has never happened before.” But Winders is skeptical the USDA will follow through: “All of the evidence, including the evidence from the past year, indicates that there is not a commitment to do that.”
Over the past year, the USDA hasn’t issued a single fine against a puppy mill and has increasingly relied on issuing relatively toothless warnings (instead of fines and other penalties) to businesses that violate the Animal Welfare Act. The Trump administration’s slash-and-burn budget cuts have also led to a further decline in the number of USDA inspectors, even as the number of facilities it’s tasked with inspecting has significantly increased. This has meant there just aren’t enough employees to inspect the country’s more than 2,000 USDA-licensed puppy mills.
Another crack in the plan is that providing immediate relief for dogs in puppy mills — by taking them out of especially harmful conditions — would require involvement from the Justice Department, but its division that handles such cases has also been hollowed out. The USDA did not respond to questions about its initiative.
However, Winders is optimistic about HHS’s efforts to phase out animal experiments, an area where “we’ve already seen significant progress.”
Last April, the US Food and Drug Administration announced it would no longer require animal testing for the development of certain drug classes. And weeks later, the National Institutes of Health — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — launched an initiative to reduce animal experimentation and fund the development of alternative non-animal research methods, like organoids, tissue chips, and computational modeling.
Pro-animal research groups, and some academics, have criticized the administration’s anti-animal experimentation plans as vague at best, and a significant hindrance on scientific research at worst. The criticism is understandable, given Secretary Kennedy’s reckless policy decisions on many areas, including vaccines. But there’s certainly merit to the idea that we ought to reduce our dependence on using well over 100 million animals annually in biomedical research, drug development, and toxic chemical testing. There’s the argument that it’s inhumane, but it’s also expensive and often ineffective, as results rarely translate from mice, rats, dogs, or monkeys to humans.
In November 2024, Vivek Ramaswamy — a conservative who ran for president that year and is currently running to be governor of Ohio — posted on X that “animal cruelty will eventually become a genuine concern for conservatives” and that it “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
The strike force initiative, despite its flaws, shows Ramaswamy’s prediction was somewhat prescient.
Animal welfare may be perceived as a progressive issue, and indeed, Democrats tend to support animal welfare at higher rates than Republicans — but not by much. And over the last decade, there’s been an increasing appetite among conservatives to challenge industries that exploit animals and claim the Republican Party as the party for animal welfare.
The most notable demonstration of that is the White Coat Waste Project, which was launched over a decade ago by a former right-wing consultant and has worked to cut government spending for animal experimentation on the grounds that it’s cruel but also amounts to taxpayer waste. The group has found some support among Democrats, but more so among high-profile Republican elected officials and right-wing activists and pundits.
More recently, Liam Gray — a former editor at the right-wing news outlet the Daily Caller — founded the Wilberforce Institute, a home for conservatives and libertarians who champion animal welfare. His organization has a presence at a lot of conservative events — including Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest last month — and he said that while there’s often some suspicion at first, once he talks with conservatives about the actual issues, “people agree with what we’re saying” and that the response has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
When it comes to the Trump administration’s strike force initiative, Gray said that while there may be valid criticisms to be had, “in the animal movement, there’s a tendency to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I think that I don’t want to see that happen here.”
He does, however, want to see the Trump administration address factory farming, which is the proverbial elephant in the room. Animals raised for meat account for around 99 percent of all animals exploited for profit in the US, and the Trump administration has done a lot to benefit the industry, and almost nothing to regulate it. That might be because the meat and dairy industries overwhelmingly contribute to Republican candidates (though Democrats go similarly easy on these industries).
Most recently, the new US dietary guidelines — published yesterday — emphasize meat and dairy consumption, news that the meat industry is celebrating.
“What I would like to see from the Republican party is a recognition that we are wasting billions of dollars supporting and sustaining and bolstering factory farming,” Gray said, by way of subsidy support and various marketing and research programs. “And if you’re a proponent of the free market, then you should believe that this industry should be able to survive on its own.”
But beyond the government’s financial support of the meat industry, there’s a tension at the heart of the conservative cause for animal welfare. Conservatives tend to oppose regulation, which is what animals most need. Virtually all animal suffering is not the result of one-off cases of people hurting or neglecting individual animals, but the lack of regulations and laws that allow large-scale industries to hurt animals with impunity. Republicans have shown they can challenge the animal research field, but the real test will be whether it can do the same for the livestock sector.
Over the past decade, it’s been fascinating to see the animal rights movement — which is mostly comprised of left-leaning activists — reckon with the fact that an administration they largely oppose has taken some actions to help animals. Especially on the animal experimentation issue, it’s led to a “diverse, sometimes-uneasy coalition of animal welfare advocates, science reformers, and far-right political figures,” as journalist Rachel Fobar put it for Vox last year. But that coalition, with all its contradictions and disagreements, represents what little hope there is to prevent animal cruelty at the federal level. I hope it can turn splashy television announcements into substantive policy — and I hope more people of all political stripes join them.
2026-01-08 19:45:00
The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, along with recent comments from the White House have made clear that US President Donald Trump’s ambition to take over Greenland needs to be taken very seriously. European governments are reportedly discussing contingency plans if he makes good on his threats.
A US military attack on the territory of a friendly European country — effectively the end of the NATO alliance — still seems unlikely, though can’t be ruled out entirely. While there have been proposals to station more troops in Greenland as a deterrent, for now, European governments seem to view that step as unnecessarily escalatory.
A political and economic campaign to pressure Europe into giving up Greenland seems more likely. The best hope of preventing the US from going farther down this road may be just how unpopular the idea is in Greenland itself and in the United States.
No one is laughing about Greenland anymore.
President Donald Trump’s frequently expressed desire for the US to take possession of the world’s largest island may once have been treated as a lark, troll, or distraction, but following last week’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, it’s become clear that Trump is increasingly acquiring a taste for military action and that he is even less constrained by international norms than previously thought.
“We do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump said, shortly after the Maduro raid, describing it as “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships.” The White House said on Tuesday that Trump and his senior advisers are discussing options for how to take over the Danish territory and that military force is “always an option.”
Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, dismissed the idea that there was anything stopping the US from pursuing its imperialist visions in the far north, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland. … We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” (Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a softer line, saying no invasion was imminent and that the goal is to purchase Greenland. Neither Denmark nor Greenland have indicated any interest in selling.)
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded to the threats by saying that Trump’s ambitions for the territory should be taken seriously and that “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end. The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO, the world’s strongest defensive alliance — all of that would collapse if one NATO country chose to attack another.”
On Tuesday, the leaders of six European countries along with Greenland issued a joint statement affirming the importance of territorial integrity and stating that “it is for Denmark and Greenland and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.” The French government says it is in communication with partners over plans to respond if Trump makes good on his threats.
Strong words, but can Europe back them up? If we take Trump at his word that he plans to take some action on Greenland “in about two months,” what can Denmark and its European allies do before then to dissuade him? And if he follows through on his threats, what costs are they willing to pay to fight back?
The idea of an actual US vs. Europe military conflict over Greenland still seems outlandish, even after what happened in Venezuela, though European countries aren’t discounting it entirely. A global outlook published by Denmark’s intelligence service in in December classified the United States, for the first time, as a security risk, writing that Washington “uses economic power, including in the form of threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will and no longer excludes the use of military force, even against allies.” The country’s foreign ministry has set up a “night watch” to monitor Trump’s activities and social media activity posts while the rest of the country is sleeping.
“I absolutely think there’s the political will to protect Greenland.”
Rachel Rizzo, senior fellow focused on transatlantic security at the Observer Research Foundation
Early in 2025, when it first became clear Trump wasn’t going to let the issue drop, the French government discussed sending troops to Greenland as a deterrent, though the proposal hasn’t gone anywhere since then. The consensus for now among European governments is that a military build-up to counter the United States would risk further inflaming tensions with Trump while still probably not being enough to hold off a (still hard to imagine) US operation to seize the territory by force.
“For all of the military assets that Europe has and that NATO has, the United States still remains the backbone of NATO, and I think that that’s why this is also such an unprecedented conversation that we’re having,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow focused on transatlantic security at the India-based Observer Research Foundation.
Trump has mocked Denmark’s recent moves to bolster security in Denmark by saying they had added “one more dogsled.” In fact, Copenhagen announced a new $4.26 billion arctic security package in November, including two additional naval vessels and 16 F-35 fighter jets. Ironically, this is the sort of spending Trump, who has long accused NATO countries of skimping on their own defense and free-riding on US security guarantees, has called for, though until recently the idea that increased spending would provide security from the United States would have seemed very strange.
Even with a bulked-up military, Denmark and allies may not be a match for the US in a conventional war. Danish commentators calling for more troops to be sent to Greenland acknowledge this would be mostly a symbolic step. Still, it’s worth noting that Denmark not only fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan — a major source of frustration now that they’re being bullied by its government — but lost around the same number of troops per capita.. Trump and Miller’s dismissive comments aside, this is not a country that lacks the will to defend itself.
“I absolutely think there’s the political will to protect Greenland,” Rizzo said.
If it’s still hard to imagine even Trump militarily invading a friendly European NATO ally, it’s much easier to imagine him applying political and economic pressure to get what he wants. European officials interviewed in a recent Atlantic article sketched out a scenario in which Trump simply declares Greenland to be a US protectorate. He could then use various forms of leverage to pressure Denmark and other European governments to accept US control of Greenland as a fait accompli. This could include his preferred economic weapon, tariffs. He could also threaten to pull the United States out of NATO —a scenario that appeared very possible during his first term but that he has spoken less about lately. Finally, he could return to another familiar source of leverage: threatening to withhold ongoing US weapons aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.
What can Europe do to prevent this? The first choice is likely to cut a deal with the notoriously transactional president. It’s become clear that Trump’s interest in Greenland is not just about leverage or pressure — he sincerely wants the island, either because he’s genuinely worried about Chinese and Russian activities in the Arctic or because he’s simply interested in territorial expansion as an end unto itself. But could savvy diplomacy turn his obsession into a form of leverage? The question now facing European leaders, says Liana Fix, senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, is “is there something that can give Donald Trump a win that does not violate the sovereignty of Denmark?”
One reason Europeans are skeptical of Trump’s stated concern about the island’s security needs is that the US military already has broad latitude through prior defense agreements to operate in the territory. The Danish government has also made clear it’s open to an expanded US troop presence in Greenland and increased US mining activity, so long as it remains sovereign Danish territory, but this was apparently not enough for the Trump administration.
It’s possible there may be an unrelated issue Europe could cut a deal on in exchange for Trump backing off, such as the Digital Services Act, which is strongly opposed by US tech companies and has been harshly criticized by Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and others in Trump’s orbit.
Fix notes that “it’s a fine line to walk, not to appear to be appeasing” Trump. This is one case, she notes, where “appeasing is likely to backfire.”
European governments could threaten to sanction US companies or sell off US bonds, but at the end of the day, notes Rizzo, “Europe doesn’t have that much leverage economically over the United States,” which has already helped Trump in trade talks this term, and is likely the reason he feels emboldened to treat Denmark this way.
The best weapon the Europeans may have for resisting US pressure may be just how unpopular an idea this is in all corners of the Atlantic. Danish rule is a fraught issue in Greenland and all the island’s political parties support eventual independence, albeit on different timelines. But Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, noted that Trump’s brute-force approach has offended Greenlanders as well, leading to increased coordination between Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital, and Copenhagen. The Greenland government has refused to engage in bilateral talks with the Americans without Danish involvement, an opportunity they might have jumped at under other circumstances.
Polls show US control of Greenland is deeply unpopular there. “It has been very difficult for the US administration, for the MAGA universe, to tell stories about anyone in Greenland actually wanting to be American,” Gad said. A visit by second lady Usha Vance to Nuuk was scrapped in March amid reports of planned protests, though the administration blamed scheduling issues. The fact that one particularly vocal Greenlandic Trump superfan, stonemason Jørgen Boassen, has become a quasi-celebrity who seems to be interviewed in nearly every article about the topic, indicates that there is probably not a wide base of support for US annexation.
The lack of any popular base of local support would make it difficult for the US to pull off a version of the “little green men” operation Russia carried out in Crimea in 2014, which involved Russian forces taking over the region while presenting it as a local uprising against Ukrainian rule. Whether or not they were actually a majority, there at least was a significant amount of local support for Russian rule in Crimea. That’s not the case in Greenland.
Trump prefers quick and overwhelming victories in his foreign policy actions — arresting Maduro, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. Even if he could take over Greenland, and even if he doesn’t care about effectively destroying NATO, how much sense does it make for the US to rule long-term over a hostile population in a territory that polls show Americans overwhelmingly don’t even want? A YouGov survey released this week shows only 8 percent of Americans support using force to take Greenland and just 28 percent support purchasing it.
All of this is taking place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire. Just this week, even amid the rising Greenland tensions, France and the UK announced a plan for future security guarantees for Ukraine that envisions the US playing a prominent role in monitoring the ceasefire.
Would European governments really be willing to blow up the transatlantic security alliance over Greenland?
For all Trump’s bluster and surprise tweets, Europeans have been fairly successful at keeping him onside over the past year when it comes to NATO in general and continuing material support for Ukraine in particular. This is likely one major reason why European governments have been reluctant to criticize Trump’s Greenland ambitions too strongly.
So the question is, would European governments really be willing to blow up the transatlantic security alliance over Greenland? The answer — particularly from Denmark, as Frederiksen’s comments this week indicated, is that by taking Greenland against their will, Trump would have blown it up anyway.
“Basically, all the important European countries understand and agree that Europe will need to be independent from the US in the long run,” said Gad, the Danish analyst. “The basic dynamic is still that we need to make this [alliance ] fall apart so slowly that we don’t get in a lot of trouble before the process is over.”
In other words, policymakers in Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, London, and elsewhere would no doubt prefer the process of weaning themself off dependence on the United States for their security to happen on their own timeline rather than one dictated by Trump, particularly with a major war raging on their doorstep, but they may no longer have that luxury.
“Why on Earth would we want to make a deal with Donald Trump [over Greenland] when the expectation is that he won’t keep it anyway?” Gad said. The distrust is likely to outlast this presidency.
“You elected the guy twice; we can’t trust you,” Gad added.
2026-01-08 19:30:00
A version of this story appeared in Good Medicine, a new Vox newsletter for anyone trying to make sense of their health.
Inflammation is on everybody’s minds these days, and it seems like wherever you look, someone is telling you how to reduce your inflammation, from influencers on your TikTok feed or Instagram reels to even Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s the subject of countless papers in scientific journals, and the focus of self-help guides and so many news stories — like the one you’re reading right now.
When White House officials announced their new dietary guidelines on Wednesday, they said their approach would help people reduce the “general body inflammation” that they blame for driving America’s chronic disease crisis.
You’d be excused for wondering if inflammation is the cause of all our ailments and reducing it is the skeleton key to a healthy life.
But the story is more complicated.
“Inflammation has become a catch-all culprit,” Shruti Naik, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me. “It’s a convenient shorthand, but it flattens a very complex biology.”
Chronic inflammation is indeed on the rise, a phenomenon that researchers have linked to industrialization and modern life. But inflammation isn’t all bad — it’s actually one of the most important things your body can do to fight infections and repair tissue. It is a flashing signal from your immune system. We just aren’t very good at reading it yet.
That uncertainty has created a vacuum, filled by oversimplified advice and dubious cures. In reality, managing inflammation requires far more nuance than a single supplement or a “clean” diet hack.
And today, scientists are starting to figure out that nuance. At major academic medical centers like Stanford and Mount Sinai, new clinics are measuring inflammation in patients over time, trying to define what “normal” actually looks like — and when it becomes dangerous.
Right now, when we go in for a health check-up, we might ask our doctor, How is my blood sugar? What’s my blood pressure? But none of us asks, How is my immune system doing? “Even if we did, they would look at us perplexingly,” said Bali Pulendran, an immunologist at Stanford University.
But, Puledran continued, “I think the time will come, not so far in the future…when inflammation will become sort of a vital sign like a blood pressure or glucose.”
That future isn’t here yet. And until it is, anyone promising a quick fix for inflammation — especially on TikTok — deserves your skepticism.
Here’s what the real experts want you to know about the state of inflammation science right now — and where it’s going.
Even though inflammation is a process our bodies have always performed, our current fixation on “chronic” inflammation is new.
For most of our history, physicians focused on what they could see, like the red, puffy skin around an infected wound, the visible side effects of a medical problem.
But the world has changed. Now we can see the invisible processes of our bodies at the molecular level. Thanks to advances in genomics, cell sequencing and imaging, we’ve learned that inflammation is present within every tissue and every cell.
“Every cell in your body can experience inflammation. That means every cell can remember it,” Naik said.
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
For most of human history, inflammation has provided vital protection. In the time before modern medicine offered treatments like antibiotics, prescription drugs, medical devices and lifesaving surgeries, the only defense your body really had against outside invaders was its own innate ability to counteract them. Inflammation was the engine for your immune system to fight back.
But now that we do have these things, our bodies exist in a state of evolutionary confusion.
A baseline level of high inflammation may have made sense when life was short and pathogens were everywhere. But today, people live longer than ever and have access to modern medicine. (There is growing evidence, too, that inflammation increases with age; scientists call this “inflammaging.)
“Inflammation is always induced when there is a problem. Sometimes there is nothing to protect from — but it’s induced anyway, and then it makes matters worse,” Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunobiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, told me. “For thousands of years, the immune system evolved to deal with infections. Suddenly, the world changed, but the immune system did not.”
At the same time that our inflammatory drive is working overtime, the environment around us has changed dramatically. Studies have found that more industrialized countries tend to have higher rates of chronic inflammation than less developed countries — cultures that are more steeped in environmental pollution and artificial substances that didn’t even exist a hundred years ago.
And nothing has changed more in these societies, scientists say, than what we eat.
Foods that interfere with your metabolism can increase inflammation — especially foods high in unhealthy fats and sugar. These are the same types of foods that have contributed to modern health problems like obesity, heart disease, and high blood pressure, all of which are linked to higher levels of inflammation.
Ultra-processed foods are also associated with higher rates of chronic inflammation: At its most basic level, inflammation starts when the body detects unusual presences. Processed foods are chock-full of ingredients that our bodies would have considered strange just a few decades ago.
So that inflammation is happening more isn’t that surprising. This is our body reacting to new stimuli. But when should we reduce it?
There are at least three different kinds of inflammation — and most of them are actually good. The first, acute inflammation, occurs when you have an illness or an infection and is an important protective layer that your body provides itself. That is not the kind of inflammation that we want to reduce.
And then there is homeostatic inflammation, which keeps your immune system at the ready and allows your tissues and organs to repair themselves — the same process that allows your muscles to rebuild stronger after lifting weights. It’s necessary for your body, and it definitely isn’t the kind of inflammation we want to get rid of.
The kind of inflammation that scientists are concerned about is chronic low-grade inflammation above those levels that are necessary for a healthy functioning body. This is the kind of inflammation that can be brought on by a poor diet, by environmental pollution, or by an infection that lingers for a long time. (Researchers think that long Covid, for example, may be associated with persistent inflammation even after the acute infection has subsided.) Over just the past decade, investigators have detailed how this low-grade chronic inflammation can cause damage to people’s tissue and organs at the cellular level over the long term.
Scientists are still figuring out when this kind of inflammation is the cause of a disease and when it is simply a symptom.
Obviously, when inflammation is a response to an injury, virus or bacteria, it is a symptom. But chronic metabolic diseases and even cognitive problems associated with aging may be the result of persistent and unresolved inflammation: Atherosclerosis, the hardening of arteries that is associated with high blood pressure and heart disease, for example, is one common condition that seems to be caused by long-term inflammation. Researchers are also investigating whether dementia and Alzheimer’s disease may be the outcome of an overly inflamed brain.
From person to person, we still don’t have the full picture. It’s not possible to say that you or I at any given time have too much inflammation. Your individual baseline for a healthy amount of inflammation, and when that crosses over into something unhealthy, is the next frontier of inflammation science.
So what would it take to get there?
First, researchers would need to figure out how to establish personal baselines.
We have only recently identified biomarkers — such as cytokines, the immune-signaling proteins, and metabolites produced by the gut microbiome — that can tell us how much inflammation an individual person actually may have. But as with a lot of things in medicine these days, our ability to measure something does not mean that we necessarily know how to interpret it.
So you might be able to find a doctor willing to order a test that measures your own cytokines. But whether the results are really a cause for concern or simply what’s normal for you is not yet clear.
“Biomarkers are always a proxy. Sometimes they’re a good proxy, sometimes they’re very generic,” Medzhitov told me. “It’s a very gray area still. We know the answers at the extremes — but not in the middle.”
“There is no magic bullet. If something sounds too good to be true, especially when it comes to inflammation, it probably is.”
Shruti Naik, immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
That’s why teams at Stanford, Mount Sinai, and other top academic medical research centers have begun what are called human immune monitoring programs, which will allow scientists to collect the longitudinal data that can start to tell them what is normal for different individuals with different backgrounds and health histories.
If you see a doctor at a major academic research hospital, you can inquire about whether they have such a program and if you could participate. From the patient’s perspective, you would be committing to a series of blood draws and possibly providing other types of samples (your saliva and stool) over an extended period of time. The samples would then be measured by new technology that can detect inflammation biomarkers. By collecting data over an extended period of time, scientists can see how your inflammation changes after an infection or after you receive a medical treatment or a vaccine.
That could allow you to play a small part in figuring out what normal inflammation actually looks like and what is actually a cause for concern.
We are inching toward a future in which we can measure and track inflammation in every patient in the same way we measure and track blood pressure and blood sugar at every primary care appointment. It could serve as an early warning system for certain kinds of health conditions that are not always obvious or measurable through other means; Medzhitov told me that we might be able to get to a point where it becomes a diagnostic tool: Once an inflammation metric has reached a certain threshold, it’s a clear sign that the patient has a specific health problem.
“I can envision a future where inflammation is a pre-symptomatic warning sign — something you notice before you feel sick,” Naik said.
That is what inflammation care could soon look like — but not yet.
Scientists are investigating the anti-inflammatory properties of GLP-1 drugs; their ability to reduce inflammation may explain why they are associated with a wide range of health benefits, such as reducing the risk of dementia and heart disease and more. But proving that effect and establishing the actual biological mechanism that makes it happen is the subject of ongoing research. Is it the result of lifestyle changes and better diet? Or is it the result of how GLP-1 medications affect the brain, which does help to manage inflammation throughout the body? A combination of lifestyle and biological effects?
The future of inflammation care is still in the lab — not on TikTok, where influencers are promoting sea moss as a treatment for inflammation, promising it’ll help to clear up your skin and improve your digestion.
“A lot of the remedies that are touted, whether they’re natural or not, have not been tested,” Naik said. “Just because someone makes an awesome video…does not mean there is evidence behind it. There is no magic bullet. If something sounds too good to be true, especially when it comes to inflammation, it probably is.”
In the meantime, the best advice from the real experts on how to maintain good health is pretty simple: Don’t fixate on the inflammation you can’t see, and instead focus on maintaining a healthy diet, low in fats and sugars, with a lot of whole foods and unprocessed ingredients. They also recommend getting regular exercise, which has been shown to reduce chronic inflammation.
The obsession with inflammation is symptomatic of so much of our health and wellness discourse these days: It is a reasonable area of concern, but the messages about what’s good and what’s bad have become too simplistic — fertile ground for grifters trying to sell you on a cure.
2026-01-08 06:20:00
A federal officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, shortly after the Trump administration deployed thousands of immigration agents to the city. Although the full circumstances of the killing remain unclear, video of the shooting shows an officer opening fire on the woman as she drove away.
Realistically, there’s virtually no chance that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department will bring federal charges against the officer who killed this woman. Trump already claimed on Truth Social, his personal social media site, that the officer shot the woman in “self-defense.” (The officer could potentially be prosecuted after Trump leaves office.)
But many local officials are quite upset about this incident. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey gave a press conference Wednesday afternoon, where he told US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” If further investigations reveal that the shooting was not legally justified, state prosecutors could potentially charge the officer responsible with a homicide crime.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has made it very difficult for private citizens to sue federal law enforcement officers who break the law. But can a federal officer actually be charged with, and convicted of, violating a state criminal law?
Until fairly recently, the law was favorable to federal officials who allegedly violate state criminal laws while they carry out their official duties. The seminal case, known as In re Neagle (1890), held that a deputy US marshal who shot and killed a man could not be charged with murder in state court, because this federal officer did so while acting as a bodyguard for a US Supreme Court justice.
Last June, however, the Supreme Court handed down Martin v. United States (2025), which held that Neagle does not always protect federal officials who violate state law. The rule announced in Martin is vague, so it is unclear how it would apply to the shooting in Minneapolis. But the gist of the ruling is that a federal officer is only protected if they can demonstrate that “their actions, though criminal under state law, were ‘necessary and proper’ in the discharge of their federal responsibilities.”
If the officer responsible for the Minneapolis killing broke Minnesota law, in other words, any prosecution against them would turn on whether the courts decide shooting this woman was a “necessary and proper” exercise of the officer’s official duties.
There is one other potential complication. A federal law provides that state criminal charges against “any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or any agency thereof” may be removed from state court and heard by a federal judge. This statute does not prevent state prosecutors from bringing charges or from prosecuting a case. But it does ensure that the question of whether Neagle applies to this case would be decided by federal courts that are increasingly dominated by conservative Republicans.
Federal cases out of Minnesota appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, a very conservative court where 10 of the 11 active judges were appointed by Republicans. And, of course, any decision by the Eighth Circuit might be appealed to the Supreme Court, where Republicans control six of the nine seats.
All of which is a long way of saying that, while the law does not absolutely preclude Minnesota prosecutors from filing charges against this officer, it is far from clear that those charges will stick.
The facts underlying the Neagle case are simply wild. David Terry was a lawyer and former chief justice of the state of California, who had served with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field while the two were both state supreme court justices. At the time, federal justices were required to “ride circuit” and hear cases outside of Washington, DC. And so, Field wound up hearing a dispute about whether Terry’s wife was entitled to a share of a US senator’s fortune.
At the court proceeding, where Field ruled against Terry’s wife, Terry punched a US marshal, brandished a Bowie knife, and was jailed for contempt of court. After his release, he and his wife continued to threaten Field’s life, and so, the attorney general ordered Deputy Marshal David Neagle to act as Field’s bodyguard.
Then, Terry attacked Field while Field was traveling through California by train, and Neagle shot and killed Terry.
Given these facts, it’s unsurprising that the Supreme Court ruled that California could not bring charges against Neagle for this killing. The case involved a physical attack on a sitting justice! And, besides, Neagle acted within the scope of his responsibilities as Field’s federally appointed bodyguard.
135 years later, however, the Court decided Martin. That more recent decision focused on language in the Neagle opinion that suggested that its scope may be limited. Neagle, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in Martin, arose from concerns that “California could frustrate federal law by prosecuting a federal marshal “for an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States.” Protecting Field was something that “it was [Neagle’s] duty to do.” And, in shooting Terry, Neagle “did no more than what was necessary and proper.”
Thus, Gorsuch extracted a rule from Neagle that federal officials are only protected from state law when their actions “were ‘necessary and proper’ in the discharge of their federal responsibilities.”
In the wake of Martin, Minnesota may very well be able to prosecute the officer responsible for the Minnesota killing. As a general rule, federal law enforcement officers are not authorized by the law of the United States to shoot people without justification. So, if it turns out that this killing was legally unjustified, federal courts may conclude that the officer’s actions were not necessary and proper in the discharge of his official duties.
That said, Martin is a fairly new opinion, and the rule it announced is vague. And any prosecution against a federal immigration officer would be unavoidably political. So, it is unclear whether the judges who hear this case would approach it as fair and impartial jurists or as partisans.
The bottom line, in other words, is that the law governing when federal officers may be charged with state crimes is quite unclear. So, it is uncertain whether a prosecution against this particular officer would succeed — even assuming that a state prosecutor could convince a jury to convict.
2026-01-08 04:00:00
A woman was fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis on Wednesday, just days after the Trump administration deployed thousands of new immigration agents to the city.
What happened? This is a breaking news story, and more details will almost certainly continue to emerge. What we do know is based on local reporting collecting video and eyewitness accounts from the scene, including multiple angles of the shooting:
What’s the context? This kind of violence has seemed all but inevitable since federal immigration officials began military-style deployments to US cities last year, resulting in a tide of videos capturing excessive use of force against Americans by immigration agents.
In one similar incident last year, Customs and Border Protection agents in Chicago shot a woman who the government initially accused of “ambushing” them, only for the case to later be dismissed with prejudice at the request of the Justice Department, meaning it cannot be brought again. The woman survived.
There’s also the question of accountability, or the lack thereof: As Vox’s Ian Millhiser reports, the Supreme Court has repeatedly acted to place ICE and other immigration agents above the law even in cases of clearly egregious, violent conduct toward bystanders and peaceful protesters.
How is the Trump administration responding? In confirming the shooting, DHS officials, including Secretary Kristi Noem, have described it as “an act of domestic terrorism” and an attack on ICE officers. It’s important to emphasize that Noem’s characterization of the shooting is not supported by the limited video of the incident.
However, it’s also consistent with a narrative that the administration has attempted to drive in public statements and court filings, one that portrays federal immigration officers as constantly under threat. In at least one instance, that narrative has been explicitly debunked by a federal court.
Why was ICE in Minneapolis? The DHS presence in Minneapolis, which administration officials have described as the “largest immigration operation ever,” comes after weeks of Republican outrage focused on Minnesota and Minneapolis immigrant communities.
Most recently, right-wing media has seized on a welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota as an opportunity for viral content; most of the alleged perpetrators charged in the scandal are Somali Americans, and President Donald Trump and others have used the story to attack Minneapolis’s Somali community writ large. (The Twin Cities area, including Minneapolis, is home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the US.)
In December, Trump attacked Somali immigrants in a Cabinet meeting, calling them “garbage” and telling reporters that “I don’t want them in our country.” He also described Minnesota as “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”