It certainly looks as if what he is saying is not just America is going to be the country controlling the Western Hemisphere,

but also the way to get along with the United States is not to spread democracy or public health or all the things that we have tended to emphasize

in the past, the way to get along with the United States is to give expletive to the president,

whatever he wants, give crap to the president, and then he'll back off. And that is, I mean,

that is actually slightly different than the United States is going to become a colonial power.

That is a personalized power that looks very much like Vladimir Putin.

Hi again, everybody. It's five o'clock in New York.

It's just about the closest thing Donald Trump has to a governing ideology.

It is not an adherence to democracy. It is not

prosperity for all citizens. It is certainly not the rule of law. No. For Donald Trump, both at home

and abroad, it has always been about dominance and control, and the lengths he's apparently

willing to go to get those things.

Donald Trump threatening Americans in Minnesota with the Insurrection Act only scratches

the surface of what Heather Cox Richardson just described there in that soundbite,

the Putinization of a presidency already defined by what it does for those who kissed Trump's boot and other parts, and to anyone, and to anyone

who refuses to do that. Of course, those who do fall in line aren't always rewarded. Those who voted

for Trump in the name of lower grocery prices or transparency when it comes to the Epstein

files or retreat from the, quote, forever wars and foreign conflicts,

certainly understand that Donald Trump didn't mean anything he said when he was a candidate.

But the point stands, go down the list, starting with threats to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico,

Greenland. As our friend Tom Nichols writes today, quote,

most Americans probably couldn't care less about Greenland,

...