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.
Fri 16 Jan 2026 13.00 AEDT
The White House/Flickr
I laughed a bit with friends over the break over how American politics has a rude habit of being particularly busy in January. It’s not really funny, though. The “chaotic cruelty” of the Trump administration, as Professor Elizabeth N Saunders told me on our After America podcast this week, just keeps escalating. Shocking, but not surprising.
This title comes from a great video Jamelle Bouie posted this week, about the Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policies. The second is an extension of the first – we tend to pretend that foreign policy occupies this special plane, disconnected from domestic politics. It isn’t, and as he always does, Trump just makes that clear.
In the video, Bouie explains how it is just as simple as it looks – we don’t have to go looking for complex strategic games that aren’t there. Trump isn’t playing 4D chess. He’s just projecting his white supremacist misogyny out into the world. As Bouie puts it: “the vision of the world here is the vision of a rapist”.
I watched this alongside another piece on gender by Andi Ziesler in Salon – this time on the brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. It’s all one and the same.
It’s now a question of when, not if, Trump goes for Greenland. He’s flip– flopping on Iran now, but the momentum is always towards military intervention (as my colleague Allan Behm likes to say, if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).
As Elizabeth Saunders wrote after the Trump administration kidnapped Maduro from Venezuela, there are apparently no constraints on Trump’s foreign policy anymore. How exactly the United States’ (former?) allies in NATO respond to this is anyone’s guess – including their own. This piece in Politico games out some of the possibilities, none of which are particularly heartening. As the EU’s chief diplomat reportedly advised, it might be time to start drinking (“start”? Lol).
As Trump ratchets up his rhetoric on Greenland, he’s also toying with intervention in Iran, to “help” protestors there. The dissonance of that is of course pretty jarring, as his administration uses violence to suppress protest in Minnesota (if you haven’t seen this address by Governor Tim Walz, it’s worth watching).
As my colleagues at the Center for International Policy in Washington DC have been forced to point out yet again – military intervention will not liberate the Iranian people.
They don’t care, though. To once again quote Jamelle Bouie: “the white house is run by thirtysomething chuds who think grand strategy games are real life”.
I’ve recommended Pop Syllabus before, and in great news, there’s now a podcast! It’s a nice break from the chuds.
Australia’s $368 billion AUKUS pact is facing fresh scrutiny as the Albanese government continues to deepen its investment in a program critics warn may never deliver promised nuclear-powered submarines.
Hundreds of diplomats from almost every country just met for four weeks at United Nations headquarters in New York to review the most comprehensive nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the world. And they agreed to absolutely nothing.
