At least in my own siloed echo chambers, the three stories getting discussed most often as of writing this are the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the colonial conquest of Venezuela, and the threats of conquering Greenland. A fourth undertone is that all these other stories are meant as distractions for (it is implied) the real story, which is the Epstein file release (or lack thereof). I’ll give my opinion on each of these in turn.

The death of Renee Good, videos of which show the events from multiple angles, was clearly unjustified. The ICE agents should not have been out of their vehicles harassing her. They shouldn’t have been in front of the vehicle, or anywhere near the vehicle. The front tires, when she accelerated, were pointed away from Ross, not toward him, so clearly she had no intention of hitting him. He was not even hit hard enough to drop his phone he was using to record the incident or throw off his aim when he shot her three times. And even if your identity politics requires you to presuppose that ICE can do no wrong and being shot is proof enough that Renee Good had to be a a murderous, leftwing radical (which requires drinking a toxic dose of the Trump regime’s Kool-Aid), killing someone driving a car is not going to prevent them from hitting you. This means that in the best case scenario for Trump’s propagandists and the rubes who believe them, killing Renee Good was completely pointless. The sycophants surrounding Trump (though who knows for Trump himself, who at this point may actually believe his own delusions) know this to some extent. It’s why they had to start disgorging obvious lies within hours of the murder, because if they were in the right, then they’d only need to tell the truth. But, as with much of what is going on, while the lies being told are bad enough, it’s that a worryingly large subset of the U.S. population believes those lies. While not a majority, the fact that it can’t seem to fall below about a third of the population is utterly mind-boggling and demoralizing. 

The bigger picture aspect to the murder of Renee Good is that the occupation of cities like Minneapolis by the paramilitary ICE agents is, just that, an occupation. But also an occupation meant to cause friction in hopes of sparking violent retaliation that can be used as a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act and cracking down harder and with more state-sponsored violence. This puts the people of Minneapolis in a strange predicament, having to resist the occupation with both hands tied behind their backs: they cannot be violent, lest they look like the bad guys and supply the Trump regime with its pretext for escalation, but their occupiers can use all the violence they want. I can’t help but be reminded of the JFK quote:  “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

As for the U.S. getting involved in transparent, unapologetic colonialism in Venezuela (as opposed to the more typical covert imperialism wrapped up in humanitarian rhetoric), I of course have to preface with the usual qualification: Maduro was a bad guy who immiserated his country and deserves to be in prison. However, that should be a Venezuelan prison after being convicted by Venezuelans. That being said, the colonial conquest was clearly not a humanitarian mission. The authoritarian regime was not ousted, just the man who happened to be at the top of it at the time. The original pretext – that this was about drug smuggling from Venezuela – was quickly jettisoned in favor of the real reason: resource extraction. I mean, there isn’t a whole lot to read into here, since colonial resource extraction is now the stated goal. All that remains to be seen is how things turn out if this policy remains in place. Although I’m terrible at making predictions, to me the best case scenario is that little changes for people in the ground in Venezuela, nor for the people of the U.S., since the repressive regime was left in place. There is, of course, the very real possibility that Venezuela descends into chaos and insurgency and we have another Iraq War on our hands, which will be an even worse nightmare for the people of Venezuela than what they suffered under Maduro. 

The Greenland thing seems most bizarre. Especially since a lot of the media coverage almost makes it seem like Trump’s saber rattling is both new and completely unprompted. Don’t get me wrong, Trump’s desire to conquer Greenland is stupid and evil, but the U.S. government has been concerned with Greenland for a while (see this video from summer of 2023). I think it’s especially ironic that much of the growing concern for Greenland is because of anthropogenic climate change making the arctic ocean become more open for sea travel (e.g., by the Russian navy), yet the Trump regime that wants to conquer the island says that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. There are, of course, other reasons, such as wanting to keep China from giving loans and building infrastructure in Greenland, but I couldn’t help but be mildly amused by the irony. 

Again, while it is the case that Greenland has geopolitical importance for the U.S. government (i.e., concern for Greenland isn’t just born of Trump’s demented brand of increasingly senile narcissism), it’s stupid and evil for the U.S. to conquer the island. Stupid in that it will disrupt trade and drive away treaty allies (perhaps even collapsing NATO), and evil in that it is an unprovoked war of aggression and expansionism that will help nobody (except maybe further enriching a handful of wealthy U.S. oligarchs). That military conquest of a treaty ally’s sovereign territory is even being discussed as a serious option is beyond the pale. Even the Achaemenid Persians had more justification for invading Greece in 480 B.C.E., yet it’s the Spartans at Thermopylae that we view as heroes. Should Trump invade, it is the Greenland natives and the Danish soldiers (and their allies) who will be the 300. 

In both the Venezuela and Greenland cases, it seems like a lot of the coverage I’ve seen paints this as either a break from the so-called rules-based liberal order set in place after World War 2, or at least as an unprecedented escalation of U.S. imperialism. The rules-based liberal order has always been a facade, so to say that this is a break with the liberal order is hearkening back to a golden age that never existed. As for an escalation of imperialism, I don’t know how much that is true in the case of Venezuela, though certainly an unprovoked war of aggression against Greenland would be an escalation. The reason I called Trump’s conquest of Venezuela “transparent, unapologetic colonialism” is because the escalation is primarily in optics, not in policy. Previous imperialist interventionism in Latin America has been draped in the rhetoric of either liberation (e.g., from communism) or national security, not resource extraction, but it’s always been about resource extraction. It seems like there is a tendency for people to think that it was somehow better to use the high-minded rhetoric when doing imperialism, and so that’s why Trump’s adventurism in Venezuela is worse that what’s been done before. But that’s just because we no longer have the soothing balm of fooling ourselves into thinking the U.S. are the good guys for ravaging other countries. Trump’s colonialist project is equally as bad as past imperialism. We certainly don’t have to ‘hand it to him’ for being more honest about the U.S. wanting to be colonial overlords, since he isn’t changing that policy, but maybe the brazenness will reveal to people that U.S. foreign policy is not benevolent. 

And finally, the Epstein files. The Epstein Files Transparency Act of November 2025 was supposedly supposed to force the Trump administration to release the files by December 19 of 2025. To me, I don’t know if the bill was even meant to work, since it did not stipulate that there would be any consequences for failing to comply. In other words, it was barely a notch up from a strongly worded letter, just a way for politicians to look like they’re on the right side of the issue without actually having to do anything tangible. 

Everyone implicated in the Epstein files should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. While I’m not naive enough to think that will ever happen, even if the files do eventually get fully released, that is what everyone, regardless of political affiliation, should want. The whole Epstein saga is bizarre and disgusting and everyone, especially the victims, deserve justice and closure. 

That all being said, the recent narrative that everything else happening is a distraction meant to pull attention away from the Epstein files is odd. It seems to downplay the seriousness of everything else going on. While I’m sure the Trump regime is not displeased that people are talking about the Epstein files less, the heavy implication by the “distraction” narrative is that everything else is being done intentionally and for the purpose of distracting people’s attention away from the Epstein files.

Multiple things can be true at once: that everything else I’ve discussed here (along with numerous other stories I haven’t mentioned, e.g., Iran) are their own horrors not related to the Epstein files, that the other events are deserving of attention, that the other events do distract people from the Trump regime’s coverup of the Epstein files (intentionally or not), and that the regime needs to somehow be held accountable for their gross mismanagement of the Epstein files (and for whatever crimes they become implicated in by the full release of the Epstein files). In other words, no single crime committed by the Trump regime should make anyone forget all the other crimes being committed by the Trump regime, nor should pursuit of justice for one crime mean that pursuit of justice for all the others fall by the wayside. 

Concluding Remarks

Present Trump and his cronies deserve to be tried and prosecuted for their crimes. But Trump is more a symptom of a disease rather than its cause. Even if, after the 2026 midterms, Trump is reigned in for the latter half of his second term, or even impeached and removed from office, that would really only mean that the easy part is over. A third of the country still loves him and will lap up any of his lies no matter what he does. Political polarization and loss of institutional trust is dangerously high, with reconciliation feeling like something that can only be achieved one funeral at a time (to clarify: not by violence, but by those clinging to grievances getting old and dying off). The amount of institutional damage Trump’s regime has inflicted even just so far will take at least a decade to repair (and that’s assuming there will be political will to do those repairs), and that would only get us back to where we were before the U.S. state institutions were decimated. Many of the weaknesses of the U.S. system have been exposed, where much of what people assumed to be ironclad laws are either just norms, or are laws that are either unenforceable or requiring political whim to enforce. Who is to say the next president, or the next one after that, won’t simply see that ignoring laws and bucking norms is the way to “get things done” and just do it all over again? Or worse, that people will demand this of a future president?

And the answer from the opposition is often just putting things back to “normal” (i.e., what it was like when Obama was president). Yet normal wasn’t working for a lot of people, and it’s going to work less in the future. Obama ran on “hope and change” but ended up just being normal (for all the right like to demonize him, Obama was a very business-as-usual president in most respects, it just turned out that business-as-usual was reaching a breaking point). A lot of people hated that and many had different reactions to it. I myself, while already libertarian-curious at the time when I voted for Obama in 2008, went into full libertarian mode for over a decade in some part because of my disappointment with Obama. Many others radicalized even more, leading to Trump (I know blame for Trump’s cult cannot be laid completely, or even perhaps mostly, at the feet of Obama, but the cult did not grow in a political vacuum). Others were radicalized to the left. My point being, “normal” (if ever there was such at thing) was not working for most people and so they sought an alternative. That alternative has burned everyone badly, but the answer is not to go back to the normal that wasn’t working before, the normal that prompted the failed alternative in the first place. At best, that will only postpone yet another radical departure from normal. 

But even if we thought that going back to business-as-usual pre-2016 was desirable, it just isn’t going to happen. The world now is a very different place than it was in 2015. Differences including, but not limited to, the rise of artificial intelligence and the various economic and social disruptions that brings. And now, with all the damage done by the Trump administration, and the grievances festering within the wounds he and his acolytes have inflicted, we are in dire need of a new normal, not the old normal. If we in the U.S. can accomplish that, then perhaps the Trumpian shakeup we’re all experiencing can be made to be worth the suffering it’s currently causing. While I expect the worse, I’ll hope for the best.