From The Bulwark, by Andrew Egger:

There’s an old episode of The Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life,” that centers on a six-year-old boy, Anthony Freemont, who has the powers of a god. Little Anthony is the tyrant of his small town, which he’s somehow cut off from the rest of the universe and immiserated with a series of thoughtless, pointless whims: no cars, no electricity, and so on. The people in his thrall live in terror of him, but they don’t dare show it—he has a habit of shooting the messenger, and a cheerful, contented god-boy is better than an angry one. Instead, they shower the kid in constant, petrified praise, telling him his every decision is wise and good.

Donald Trump has always had a lot in common with Anthony Freemont.1 But his months-long tantrum over his own failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize has taken things to another level.

Last week, in the midst of a Truth Social rant about the supposed uselessness of NATO, Trump whined that “I single-handedly ENDED 8 WARS, and Norway, a NATO Member, foolishly chose not to give me the Noble [sic] Peace Prize.” Trump did not end eight wars. The nation of Norway does not select the winner of the Nobel prizes, which are also not called the “Noble” prizes. And it’s hard to imagine a crazier metric by which to assess the merits or demerits of NATO in the first place. This isn’t the ranting of a supervillain; it would never occur to Stephen Miller to say something like this. It’s the tantrum of a child.

But a child with godlike powers tends to get what he wants. And so it was yesterday that María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and actual recipient of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, showed up at the White House to hand the thing over. Feast your eyes on the most powerful man on earth, the Make-a-Wish president, the septuagenarian birthday boy:

Later, Trump headed back to Truth Social in a very good mood. It had been his “Great Honor” to meet Machado, he said, who had “presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.” After giving Trump her medal, Machado was later spotted leaving the White House with a gift bag bearing Trump’s signature. Mutual!

Trump, of course, had really only been presented with the Nobel medal. Earlier in the day, the Nobel Peace Center deadpanned online that, while “a medal can change owners,” “the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.” But Trump isn’t concerned. The mind of a child has trouble with abstract concepts like “title.” He’s got the prize now, doesn’t he? It’s right over there on the wall!

It takes the mind of a child, too, to see Machado’s gift as a gesture of real respect. To the Venezuelan leader, an adult, a hunk of metal matters far less than achieving her political aims. But she understands that Trump, a child, doesn’t see things that way. She is happy to bribe him like a child. And he is too childlike to understand the patronizing nature of her praise.

From Charlie Sykes:

Imagine for moment what it must be like to be a Greenlander, or a Dane, or frankly, any sentient being on the planet, trying to get your head around this moment. After a decade of Trump’s fabulism, we’ve grown accustomed to the figments of his fetid mind: stolen elections, fictitious enemies, make-believe Nobel Prizes.

But a threat of war over a Trumpian brain-bubble? Military action against a loyal NATO ally based on a pretend threat?

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, reportedly said that this might be a “good moment” for the world to start drinking. She spoke for all of us.

To be sure, Trump is not the first leader to invent bogus pretexts for war (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, WMDS, the Mexican-American war, the Spanish-American War… and we could go on.) But Trump is taking bogus war-drum propaganda to a whole new depth.

Donald Trump continues to insist — evidence to the contrary be damned — that the United States needs to swallow its NATO ally because it was “covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place”.

“We need that because if you take a look outside of Greenland right now, there are Russian destroyers, there are Chinese destroyers and, bigger, there are Russian submarines all over the place. We’re not gonna have Russia or China occupy Greenland, and that’s what they’re going to do if we don’t.”

It seems important to note that nobody believes this, because it is bullshit with hair on it.

“It is not a true narrative that we have, you know, Chinese warships all around the place,” said Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. “According to our intelligence, we haven’t had a Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade or so.”

His astonishment is echoed through the region. “This idea that the waters around Greenland are crawling with Russian and Chinese ships or submarines is just not true,” says a diplomat from another Nordic country. “They are in the Arctic, yes, but on the Russian side.”

But clinging to his deepfake image of swarming Russian/Chinese subs, Trump has gone full mob boss in his attempts to bully Denmark, threatening to “do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.”

“I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”

The Danes (and Europeans in general) are clearly dumbfounded by this level of thuggish deception. We’ve lived with it for a decade now, but until now they’ve only watched it from afar; and are only now seeing its full are-you-fuqqing-kidding-me insanity close up and personal.

“It’s clear the President has this wish of conquering Greenland,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told a news conference after a closed-door meeting attended by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Nota Bene: “Conquering.”

Exit take: Europe may call Trump’s bluff. “European troops arrive in Greenland as Trump throws another curveball.”

Small numbers of military personnel from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden were arriving in the Arctic island early Thursday.

By Andrew Sullivan:

One key context for my worries about Trump/Vance’s masked, anonymous ICE officers.

We know that they have total immunity because of Trump’s use of the pardon power. There is no crime they could commit that he won’t pardon.

So we know that there is no rule of law with respect to these armed masked men. They are outside the law. If a jury convicts them, they know it means nothing because Trump will pardon. The J 6 pardons were a declaration of the end of the rule of law for Trump supporters. Violence – even against cops – was proactively legitimized. If it’s pro-Trump it’s not a crime.

So we have a completely unaccountable armed paramilitary on our streets with a license to kill or harm anyone with impunity – answerable only to one man who will always back them.

Trump too has immunity for abusing the pardon power [because] of SCOTUS.

That’s tyranny. Period. It’s here. It’s not coming. It’s here.

The truth behind Trump’s black, sticky fantasy

By Paul Krugman:

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he claimed that the goal was to establish a democratic regime. Some members of his administration may even have believed that. But many leftist critics insisted that it was all about seizing Iraq’s oil.

Although I was an outspoken opponent of that war, and deeply cynical about the Bush administration’s motives, I never believed the “war for oil” story. The principal motivation for the war, I still believe, was to wag the dog — to use a showy military victory to secure Bush’s reelection. According to some political scientists, that was a mission the war did, in fact, accomplish.

Donald Trump’s Venezuela venture is a very different story. During his triumphalist press conference after the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Trump never used the word “democracy.” He did, however, say “oil” 27 times, declaring, “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”

Even so, whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.

You may have heard that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — 300 billion barrels. You probably don’t know that Venezuela’s reported oil reserves tripled while Hugo Chavez was president. This increase, from roughly 100 billion to 300 billion barrels, didn’t reflect major new discoveries or exploration. Instead, it reflected the Chavez government’s decision to reclassify the country’s Orinoco Belt heavy oil as “proved” — oil that can be recovered with reasonable certainty under existing economic and operating conditions:

Source: Torsten Slok

As Torsten Slok of Apollo, who recently made this point, notes, “Much of the oil is extra-heavy, which has low recovery and a high cost to produce.” This suggests that Venezuela’s claims to have immense usable oil reserves were politically motivated hype.

This view is supported by the fact that the huge increase in Venezuela’s reported oil reserves wasn’t followed by a surge in production. On the contrary, Venezuelan oil production soon plunged:

Source: Torsten Slok

Plunging production was associated with a steady degradation of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, which would take years and many billions of dollars in investment to restore. Given these costs as well as political instability, major oil companies clearly aren’t enthusiastic about the idea of sinking money into Venezuela.

On Monday Trump suggested that he might reimburse oil companies for investment in the nation he claims — with no basis in reality — to control, reimbursing them for their outlays there. That is, we’ve gone in a matter of days from big talk about huge money-making opportunities to a proposal to, in effect, subsidize oil-industry investments in Venezuela at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

Which is not to say that nobody has profited from the abduction of Maduro. A few months ago Trumpist billionaire Paul Singer bought Citgo, the former U.S.-based arm of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Citgo owns three Gulf Coast refineries custom-built to process Venezuelan crude, refineries that have suffered from the U.S. embargo on imports of that crude. If Trump lifts that embargo, Singer will receive a huge windfall. But this windfall will have nothing to do with reviving Venezuelan production.

Singer has made huge political donations to Trump, raising questions about how much he has influenced policy. His purchase of Citgo was also remarkably well-timed. What did he know?

At a deeper level, Trump’s apparent belief that oil in the ground is a precious asset is decades out of date.

These days oil is cheap by historical standards. Here’s the real price of oil — its price adjusted for overall inflation — since 2000:

Source: Energy Information Administration

Oil prices are low mainly because of increased supply due to fracking, and the potential for more fracking is likely to keep them low for the foreseeable future. The breakeven price of fracked oil — the price at which it’s just profitable to drill a new well — is around $62 a barrel in the most important U.S. producing regions. While global oil prices fluctuate, they tend to return to that breakeven price after a few years:

And $62 a barrel wouldn’t be high enough to make investing in the Orinoco Belt, where the estimated breakeven is more than $80, profitable even if there were no political risks.

In short, Trump’s belief that he has captured a lucrative prize in Venezuela’s oil fields would be an unrealistic fantasy even if he really were in control of a nation that is, in practice, still controlled by the same thugs who controlled it before Maduro was abducted.

An oil spill in the Orinoco Belt.