It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. 'Shorter America' is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
By Emma Shortis
Fri 30 Jan 2026 15.10 AEDT
©2026 World Economic Forum / Ciaran McCrickard
January sure has been a year.
This week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than it’s ever been. The Clock uses “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.” It’s now set to 85 seconds to midnight.
And that’s not even close to the biggest news of the week.
This week:
The stories coming out of Minnesota are harrowing. The racist violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is deeply shocking, even if it is not surprising. Trump has been foreshadowing this kind of approach for a long time – during the election campaign, he used brazenly fascist language about immigration.
Atlantic writer Adam Serwer is particularly good at capturing both the violence and the ideology that drives the Trump movement. His account this week, “Minnesota proved MAGA wrong” is both terrifying and beautiful. Serwer is not new to this – his 2018 piece, “The Cruelty is the Point” remains a touchstone for understanding Trump’s America.
I say beautiful because there is so much beauty in the resistance in Minnesota. That was summed up by this piece, which randomly crossed my feed at some point and stayed with me, mostly because of the title: “There is no such thing as other people’s children”.
Organised resistance like this has been incredibly effective in Minnesota, and as that Serwer piece outlined, has clearly taken the Trumpverse by surprise.
Protest works. Governments wouldn’t try to ban it if it didn’t.
But be careful with takes that suggest Trump is “backing down” or blanket statements that the administration is “weak” in response to apparent concessions like the withdrawal of (now former) Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino (he of the Nazi-inspired trench coats). It may well be, but the weakness is uneven and fluid. And Trump is certainly not backing down. As this very NYT-y NYT piece put it:
“Mr. Trump has honed a survival tactic over many years facing criticism in the public eye: He creates diversions to barrel from one news cycle into the next. But in other moments, when he has faced particularly intense — and politically damaging — public outcry, he has taken stock of news coverage and decided to take a different tack, often temporarily.”
Often temporarily. The space is contested, Trump’s power is not unlimited, and things change quickly. But it’s far from over, in Minnesota, or anywhere else.
As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Ohio is warning – just next week, the Trump administration is planning a “surge” in Springfield, Ohio (yes, that Springfield) which will target 500,000 Haitians living in the United States legally. Or at least they will be, until the Trump administration unilaterally strips them of their temporary protected status on February 3.
The Canadian Prime Minister said just that only a week or so ago: we must name reality. And this is the reality of what the Trump administration is doing.
Still, though, so much political media struggles with even doing that. This excoriating piece by Parker Molloy – focused mostly on media coverage of Project 2025, but about so much more – outlines that failure in stark detail. I’ll be thinking about that one for a while.
Finally, back to the Doomsday Clock, because that’s our vibe. The statement outlining the Bulletin’s decision is a relentless march through catastrophic failures of vision and leadership. It’s worth reading in full, though it’s hard going and throws up many new nightmares (hello, “mirror life”:, welcome).
And speaking of…! jJust to end it on the usual cheery note. This immersive piece in Nature, on the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific research, reminds us that the violent destruction of the the MAGA movement knows no bounds, extending long into our shared futures.
The cruelty is the point.
Shorter America this week, link roundup:
