The United States grabbing land from an ally sounds like the stuff of a Netflix political thriller. But every American should contemplate three realities about Donald Trump’s aggressive desire to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory. First, unlike his usual shtick, in which he floats wild ideas and then he and his aides alternate between saying he was serious and saying he might have been joking, he means it. The Danes seem to believe him, and so should Americans.

White House staffers, it seems, had better hope that they stay in Laura Loomer’s good graces. This week, Loomer—a far-right provocateur who has described herself as “pro–white nationalism” and Islam as a “cancer on humanity”—met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. After she reportedly railed against National Security Council officials she believed were disloyal to the president, the White House fired six NSC staff members the next day.

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In America, the chaotic first few months of Donald Trump’s term have featured roiling stock markets, mass deportations, and a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn. But if you look north, it has unified Canadians against a common threat: a country once considered a friend.

After Thursday’s stock-market sell-off provoked by Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be imposing new tariffs on almost every country in the world, the one thing we can say for sure is that Wall Street blew it. In the three trading days leading up to Trump’s much-anticipated “Liberation Day” speech, the market rose steadily as investors apparently convinced themselves that Trump would not do anything too crazy. Surely moderation would prevail.

President Donald Trump’s high-tariff regime will impose higher prices and lower growth on Americans. It will have another effect that nobody in the administration seems to have considered at all: a tsunami of smuggling.
In a few days’ time, every desirable consumer good will be dramatically more expensive in the United States than on world markets.

Déjà vu: TikTok’s time was nearly up, and then President Donald Trump stepped in to save it. This happened in January, and also earlier today, when Trump said that he will sign another executive order to delay a possible ban on the social-media app.
Out of concern about the app’s possible weaponization by the Chinese government, Congress passed a law in April 2024 that required TikTok to spin off from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or else stop operating in the United States.

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Last week in Los Angeles, the author Roxane Gay gave the keynote address at the AWP Conference & Bookfair, the U.S.’s largest annual gathering of creative writers.