Le Journal

By Leah Dolan, CNN (CNN) — Bandanas have long been the crowning glory of festival looks, Instagrammable beach outfits and, more recently, the fashion week front row. Rarer is it to see the casual headscarf on the red carpet circuit — a space usually reserved for sartorial extravagance. But on Saturday night, Norwegian actor Renate The post Look of the Week: The surprising elegance of Renate Reinsve’s red carpet bandana appeared first on KRDO.

This one’s a stunner. The Buffalo Bills have fired head coach Sean McDermott following another disappointing playoff loss. The move comes less than 48 hours after the team’s 33-30 overtime loss to the Broncos in the divisional round of the playoffs. McDermott went 98-50 over nine seasons in Buffalo and the Bills advanced to the […] The post BREAKING: The Buffalo Bills Have Fired Sean McDermott appeared first on Daily Snark.

Let me begin by quoting, in full, a letter that the president of the United States of America sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is: Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.[Eliot A. Cohen: How to understand Trump’s obsession with Greenland]Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear…

The massive scandal around welfare fraud in Minnesota became a big story the same way the character Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises describes going bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly.” Federal prosecutors first filed criminal charges in 2022 against the fraudsters at a Minnesota nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, who stole hundreds of millions of dollars while supposedly serving meals to low-income children and adults. Nearly 80 people have already been convicted or pleaded guilty, and more are expected. But only in recent months has this case—which the lead prosecutor has described as “industrial-scale fraud”—become a national fixation.President Trump is cannily exploiting this matter to push his anti-immigrant agenda, given that many of the convicted offenders are Somali Americans. Trump has also turned Minnesota’s failure, under Governor Tim Walz, to adequately supervise its social-benefit programs into a broader indictment of financial mismanagement in Democrat-led states. The White House announced earlier this month a plan to freeze billions of dollars in federal social-services funding to five blue states until they delivered reams of data on recipients, providers, and the measures they’re taking to combat fraud—a move that a judge has temporarily blocked. Some Republicans have joined the president in dismissing the entire welfare system as little more than institutionalized theft.Given the politics involved, it might seem best for Democrats to simply downplay what happened in Minnesota as the product of a few proverbial bad apples. Accusations of welfare fraud have been a staple of right-wing discourse for decades, after all. Ronald Reagan famously rode into office in 1981 with speeches about the wasteful, slothful cunning of a “welfare queen.”It would be a mistake, though, for Democrats to try to duck and dodge this case. What happened in Minnesota is a disgrace, and one that should prompt reforms to how states handle and monitor social-welfare benefits. The people leading the fight against fraud should not be those who want to dismantle the social safety net but those who want to keep it.Problems of fraud and abuse are more likely in the United States than in other Western countries because the U.S. has chosen to outsource to private businesses and nonprofits social services such as health care, child care, food banks, and help for the disabled. This move, driven by a faith in the private sector to offer better services at lower costs, isn’t inherently problematic, but it creates incentives for people to game the system. Firms and organizations can juice their federal reimbursements either by falsifying client data to make more people eligible for benefits or by making fraudulent claims about how many clients are being served or what services they are receiving. Feeding Our Future, for example, received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government thanks to fake invoices and meal-count data.[Kevin Carey: Scammers are coming for college students]When Elon Musk’s DOGE sought to crack down on instances of government waste, fraud, and abuse last year, the narrative was that Uncle Sam was ripping off taxpayers, when many cases of fraud actually involve businesses and schemers ripping off the government.In principle, both parties should be interested in fighting fraud. In practice, Republicans rarely want to spend more money on government programs that they’d prefer to shrink, and Democrats are reluctant to amplify concerns that fraud is a significant problem at all. Some also worry that ham-fisted attempts to counter fraud can end up denying worthy people necessary services. In 2013, Michigan used a fraud-detection algorithm to strip benefits from about 40,000 people, yet more than 90 percent of these recipients were, in fact, eligible.Other hurdles include the fact that many data-technology systems at government agencies are outdated, unwieldy, and hard to change. Keeping track of every program and…

European leaders are in a dither, understandably but inexcusably, about Donald Trump’s threats to take Greenland by force, and to use tariffs to slap around anyone who objects: understandably, because no previous president would ever have acted this way; inexcusably, because a clear if unpalatable solution lies right before them.If European countries were to permanently deploy, say, 5,000 soldiers armed with surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles to Greenland, keeping them there with orders to fight invading American soldiers to the last round of ammunition, Trump would not order the paratroops and the Marines to assault that frozen wasteland—too many body bags. If they were willing to put comparable economic sanctions in place—denying American companies access to Europe’s economy, still collectively the world’s third largest—he would back down from those threats as well. Such policies go against the grain of a continent that is, to use the word popularized by the British military historian Michael Howard, debellated, but that’s the world they are in.The Greenland episode, disgraceful and shameful as it is, should be seen in the context of Trump’s other foreign-policy escapades—the capturing of Nicolás Maduro; the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program; the attempt to rebuild and reorient war-shattered Gaza; the on-again, off-again relationships with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky; the tariff bazookas that get downgraded to squirt guns with China. Erratic as the president sounds, the Trumpian worldview is comprehensible and even, in some respects, predictable.Trump is an ignorant man; unlike many other would-be or actual dictators, he does not read books and has difficulty writing more than a few badly spelled sentences on social media. But he does intuit certain truths, and one must give him credit for those, because he is not stupid and they animate his policy. Greenland really has been neglected by Denmark and, since after the American Civil War, has been coveted by the United States. The Iranian nuclear program was a regional and in some respects global menace, and, after a week and a half of Israel softening up, was vulnerable to a single heavy punch. Europe has long underspent on defense, and where American cajoling for decades had not worked, a few face slaps succeeded.Trump’s domestic political gift is the feral instinct for weakness that characterizes most authoritarians. That instinct is shakier in international affairs, but it shapes the way in which he views the world. With an image of American industrial and military power that is rooted in the world of several generations ago, he has enormous confidence in American strength and therefore assumes that bullying is preferable to negotiation, unless you are up against someone who is as tough as you, even if less muscle-bound.He knows what he hates in foreign affairs—the mealymouthed multilateralism of the Biden administration, its catering to deadbeat allies, and its weakness in fleeing Afghanistan. He likewise despises the caterwauling about liberal values and democracy and the long-term military commitments of the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, although he cannot get over Joe Biden—Trump’s insecurities and grievances about the 2020 election and the various prosecutions he has faced between then and now prohibit it—from a foreign-policy point of view, he is at least as anti–George W. Bush as he is anti-Biden. And he despises the reverence for deliberate decision making, consultation with experts, and the willingness to engage in the conventional diplomacy that characterizes both. He views talk of international leadership, much less its practice, as claptrap.Above all, he has three principal instruments in foreign policy: tariffs and kindred economic sanctions, brief bombing campaigns, and commando raids. He has no tolerance for bloody battles, which is why he will not authorize an Arctic amphibious campaign that faces real opposition. If he is going…