Trail Notes
A tale of two crackdowns / Widening sanctuary war / OD smokescreen / Buying off Greenlanders / Spiking food prices / The cost of "war" / Trump phones still on hold
A tale of two crackdowns
Okay, let me get this straight. Donald Trump has warned that he’s prepared to take military action against the Iranian regime if it continues to kill protesters. On Truth Social on Tuesday, he told those demonstrating against government repression there to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” But on the same day, he posted a message to Minnesota residents that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
Also on Tuesday, White House Dark Lord Stephen Miller sent the following message on the Homeland Security website to ICE agents: “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.” (Reality check: ICE agents are not entitled to absolute immunity for crimes they commit on the job.)
Minnesota resignations
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent, and the agency’s reluctance to investigate the shooter. One of those leaving is Joseph Thompson, second in command in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minneapolis, who was overseeing the investigation of widespread social services fraud, which, according to the White House, is why thousands of ICE and other federal agents were sent to the city in the first place.
Trump widens “sanctuary” war
Donald Trump is ratcheting up his threat to block federal funds to jurisdictions that have “sanctuary” policies limiting their cooperation with federal immigration agents. In the past, he’s targeted sanctuary cities. But in a speech earlier this week, he expanded that threatened freeze to cover states where those cities and towns are located. “Starting February 1, we’re not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities,” Trump vowed, “because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens and it breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come.”
The president didn’t go into specifics and, if he does take action against states, lawsuits will certainly follow. The Justice Department has identified the following states or jurisdictions as harboring sanctuary cities: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Overdose smokescreen
Not sure what Donald Trump’s latest tally is on the number of overdose deaths in America last year. Is it 300 million? Or 3 gazillion? It is hard to keep track because it seems to keep getting higher every day, even though the actual numbers have dropped since the pandemic (and there were only 62 million overdose deaths globally in 2025).
But, as you know, the reason the U.S. military blew up all those boats in the Caribbean is because they were allegedly smuggling killer drugs into the United States. So what if they would have been carrying cocaine (if anything) and the vast majority of drug deaths here are due to fentanyl or meth. And so what if that cocaine—if there were actually cocaine in the boats—was most likely headed to Europe or Africa. Why get hung up on details? Those boat explosions sure made for some fine video highlights.
Still, for all the performative angst over the pernicious threat of drugs, one had to wonder what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was thinking when he sent out letters Tuesday night canceling nearly $2 billion to more than 2,000 nonprofits providing care to people experiencing addiction, mental illness and homelessness. It took less than 24 hours for the administration to frantically backpedal and respond to a furious bipartisan backlash by restoring the grants. Kennedy had no comment.
Buying friends in Greenland
Reuters revealed that one of the ideas proposed for the United States to take over Greenland would involve actually paying off residents of the territory to encourage them to secede from Denmark. Figures ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 have reportedly been discussed. According to person-in-the-street interviews in print and on television, Greenlanders aren’t buying it.
Grocery prices spike
In Trump world, inflation is “very low” and we’re at the beginning of a “Trump economic boom.” In the real world, the inflation rate of 2.7 percent in December was the same as in November. Food prices, meanwhile, jumped 0.7 percent from November—the largest one-month spike in the cost of groceries since October 2022—and were 3.1 percent higher than they were in December 2024. As much as he likes to say the word “groceries,” Trump didn’t bring it up when the December data came out.
The cost of “war”
Money Trail readers of a certain age may remember Edwin Starr’s hit song “War” from 1970. Its opening line is: “War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” But it turns out that the word “war” itself could now be worth tens of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars.
The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that carrying out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s swagger fantasy of changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War would cost from $10 million to as much as $125 million.
Trump phones still on hold
Nearly 600,000 customers who began ordering Trump Mobile gold phones last June are still waiting. They made $100 deposits on the $500 phone, which they were told was a device that would be “proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best.” They were also told they’d get their phones by the end of last summer. That didn’t happen. While blaming the government shutdown for the delay, the Trump folks promised phones by the end of the year. That didn’t happen, either. The Trump Organization also backed off the claim that the phones would be made in America, which, from Day One, skeptics said wasn’t possible. Now they’re being promoted as “American-proud.”
Let’s Go Saudi Arabia!
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, the Trump Organization is promoting the $10 billion in projects it’s developing in the country with Dar Global, a real estate firm closely tied to the Saudi government. The projects include a world class golf course, a luxury hotel, and a development called Trump Mansions, which a video ad describes as “Private. Gated. Limited. The hottest ticket in town. Inside these gates, the Trump Mansions. Where winners reside.”
Environmental grants restored
A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration violated the Constitution when it cancelled clean energy grants to states that Donald Trump lost in the 2024 election.
During the government shutdown last October, the Energy Department stopped grants for 223 projects worth about $7.5 billion, prompting Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to crow that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”
But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, noting that similar projects in red states continued to receive money, said the Fifth Amendment equal protection rights of the states that lost their grants had been violated. He ordered the return of $27.6 million to cover the cost of seven terminated grants that a coalition of energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, sued over last November. His ruling didn’t mention the hundreds of other grants that the agency killed.
A potentially big win for polluters
But there was also bad environmental news this week. According to internal documents obtained by The New York Times, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to make it easier to repeal limits on fine particulate matter and ozone, two of the more harmful air pollutants. The move would be part of a shift in the agency’s focus. Instead of basing pollution regulations on how many lives they may save or how many illnesses they may prevent, they will be based primarily on what they cost businesses, a clear violation of environmental statutes.
Trump goes blank
It wasn’t all that long ago that the president promised that because his tariff policy is bringing in so much money (mostly from American businesses and consumers), the government would start issuing a $2,000 check to each U.S. taxpayer. But when asked about the checks during a recent interview, Trump responded, “I did do that? When did I do that?” As any neurologist will tell you, when it comes to dementia, short-term memory is the first thing to go.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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Really strong compilation of the contradictions here. The parallel between encouraging Iranian protesters to "take over institutions" while threatening Minnesota residents with "retribution" pretty much sums up the whole mess. I remember covering similar doublespeak during other administrations but this level of cognitive dissonance is something else entirely, especially when Miller's ICE immunity memo gets thrown into the mix. The grocery price spike buried in there is probly the most under-discussed story too since it directly contradicts the whole "economic boom" narrative being pushed. Glad somebody's tracking all this because its getting harder to keep up with hte sheer volume of stories.