The Free Press

In 25 years of attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, I have never heard the Europeans as worked up as they are about Donald Trump’s threats to Greenland this week.

To listen to some of them, this is the start of a complete breakdown in the international order: One minute the U.S. is seizing Greenland, the next minute it’s Iceland, and before you can blink, Canada will be forced to become the 51st state. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin will feel emboldened to move on from Ukraine to the Baltics, and China will start in Asia by gobbling up Taiwan. The only time I have heard Venezuela mentioned is by people amazed at the extent to which it has been forgotten.

As with many Trump policies, the Greenland affair has a nugget of common sense at its core: If Europe cannot defend itself, can it be relied on to help defend U.S. interests in the Arctic, particularly as ice melts and opens up new routes to China and Russia? But even if the diagnosis is correct, one has to worry if the cure is worse than the disease. Breaking up the strong alliance between the U.S. and Europe cannot possibly be good for anyone except China, Russia, and Iran.

Look, I’m a patriotic American. I voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and after moving to Hungary in 2022, I supported his election in 2024 from abroad. I also agree with Donald Trump that it is strategically important for the United States to acquire Greenland.

But with his latest bid to use tariffs to extort Europe into selling Greenland to America, Trump seems to have lost his mind.

This past weekend, Trump declared that he will punish eight European countries with 10 percent tariffs until Denmark surrenders Greenland to the United States. He then tied his Greenland pique to his failure to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The mind reels at the insanity of an American president acting with such petulance. He’s an Outer Borough Julius Caesar, the Don(ald) Corleone of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I have no undue sympathies toward Europe. The Trump administration has long taken a hard-line stance toward the continent, and I have defended that position to European audiences since Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich speech last February. Vance was right to call Europe decadent. He was right to criticize its governments for suppressing free speech and failing to deal with its migration problems. Many conservative Europeans agree with Vance that the continent is facing a civilizational crisis: fertility rates are falling, illiberal speech codes leave citizens behind bars for political dissent, and mass immigration has been a disaster.

“Healthcare, it’s never been our issue,” President Donald Trump told House Republicans at their annual member retreat earlier this month, alluding to previous Republican swings at reform. “It should be our issue.”

Rising healthcare costs pose an existential threat to the slim Republican majorities in Congress, and losing just the House or Senate in the midterm election to Democrats would spell doom for the GOP’s domestic agenda.

The cost of healthcare is now the most pressing health problem in America, ahead of healthcare access and obesity, according to a poll released by Gallup in mid-December. Seventy percent of Americans now believe that the healthcare system is in crisis or has major problems. No wonder Republican members of Congress are so worried.

A small group of incumbent lawmakers is coming to grips with the fact that they need to do something about it.

Earlier this month, 17 Republican members of the House bucked party leadership and voted to extend Covid-era healthcare tax credits, officially named Enhanced Premium Tax Credits, for three years. Most of those Republicans represent vulnerable swing districts. The group ranges from moderates like Mike Lawler of New York to staunch conservatives Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin and María Elvira Salazar of Florida. Her district in South Florida has one of the highest Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollment rates in the U.S.

For the past 23 days, thousands of Iranian protesters have flooded the streets in the largest anti-government protests in the Islamic Republic’s history. In response, the fundamentalist regime has unleashed a violent crackdown, reportedly killing more than 16,000 protesters.

The exact number of people killed and injured remains unknown, because Iran has …

Every day, millions of sports bets are placed in the United States—on phones, at work, often while games are still unfolding. With the click of a button, gamblers can wager not only on who wins, but on nearly every moment in between.

For most of American history, this kind of gambling was illegal in much of the country, driven by fears it would taint our sports. That changed in 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting. Almost immediately, addiction, debt, and harassment surged—as did gambling and game-rigging scandals worth millions.

Why has this happened? And what does it mean for American sports?

That’s the subject of “Everybody Loses,” a new book from journalist Danny Funt. Hitting shelves January 20, it’s one of the first major investigations into the consequences of that 2018 decision. And in the following essay, adapted from the book, Funt confronts a question at the heart of it all: How has legalized gambling corrupted not only the games, but the fans who watch them? —The Editors

The Purdue University men’s basketball team was a favorite to win the 2024 national championship, but hardly anyone was paying attention to their walk-on guard Carson Barrett. After suffering a serious knee injury earlier that season, Barrett had postponed surgery so he could practice with the team, painful as it was, and cheer his teammates from the bench. In their first game of the March Madness tournament, Purdue cruised to victory, and in the closing minutes, both teams emptied their benches.

The ball swung to a wide-open Barrett in the corner with 35 seconds left and Purdue up 75–50. With a brace on his knee, the lefty caught and fired, swishing a 3-pointer for the game’s final basket—just the second shot he’d made that season.

On December 31, The Washington Post carried the headline “Washington Monument illuminated on New Year’s Eve to mark country’s 250th.” The article described an installation that projected patriotic images onto the monument and noted that the display “kicks off a year of events on the National Mall to mark the nation’s 250th.”

Such peculiarly vague locutions, an adjective without a noun, are everywhere in this year’s civic festivities. We say “America’s 250th” or “America at 250.” In 1976, people did something similar by calling that year’s celebrations simply “the bicentennial.” Some call this year “the semiquincentennial,” which is just as indeterminate as “the 250th” but harder to pronounce.

This vagueness is not a coincidence. It points to our uncertainty about how to approach what ought to be a year of patriotic celebration. When you mark a wedding anniversary, you don’t just call it “the 25th.” When you wish someone a happy 40th, they know perfectly well you mean a birthday. But as we approach this civic milestone, we are oddly at a loss for words—because we are unsure quite what kind of occasion we are marking, and therefore how we should mark it.

So let’s ask plainly: What kind of occasion is “America’s 250th”?

The natural answer is that we are celebrating a birthday. America is turning 250 years old, and that calls for a national birthday party.

This is almost instinctively how a lot of our plans are taking shape. The first image projected onto the Washington Monument on New Year’s Eve was a 250-foot birthday candle. Many of the grandest public events being planned aim to feel like a birthday party.

And it makes sense. Abraham Lincoln thought about the founding this way. In 1863, he opened the Gettysburg Address with words so familiar that we can forget what image they were meant to convey: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” What happened in 1776, Lincoln said, was that a new nation was conceived and brought forth. And he closed by urging that the Civil War might yield “a new birth of freedom,” echoing that first birth at the founding.

Yet the limits of the birthday metaphor are already implicit in Lincoln’s language. The new nation, he said, was not merely conceived and born; it was dedicated to a proposition. Lincoln wanted to point beyond a beginning to an achievement: a distinct commitment, an ambition meant to exert a lasting pull on the minds of later Americans.

That is not how a birthday usually works. Birthday celebrations do not really mark the meaning of the birth itself; they mark the time since that moment—the path traveled, the age achieved, the growth and development that followed birth.

To be sure, 250 years of growth is part of what we celebrate this year. The sheer age of our republic is an achievement. Ours is among the oldest regimes in today’s world, and that is nothing to sneer at. Long life is a mark of health.

Still, the birthday of an older person is rarely an occasion to look forward. And even at its most appropriate, the comparison to a birthday doesn’t capture what we celebrate on the Fourth of July. When we mark that day, we point to what was said and done in 1776, and what it made possible.

What you and I did on the day we were born was not very impressive. What happened in the founding era was. So while there is nothing wrong with a birthday party for the nation, it is not exactly the right way to express our admiration.

America’s 250th isn’t just a birthday.

Many families have a multigenerational line of work. Think of the Bushes (politics), the Rothschilds (banking), or the Gambinos (mob stuff).

In my family, the business is academia. My late father was a lifelong mathematics professor; his father, a college dean and theologian. On paper, it looks like the apples don’t fall far from the tree. But look closer, and big professional differences emerge. My dad and his dad led intensely private, scholarly lives, whereas I, though I teach at a university, also write popular books and columns about happiness for nonacademic audiences and travel weekly for public speaking and media appearances.

I love my life, but my dad would have hated to do what I do. Inexplicably, he didn’t see the charm in spending 150 nights a year in Courtyard Marriotts. Different strokes, I guess. But for me, this kind of “public intellectual” career is wonderful. I see new airports every week, and regularly get recognized as that happiness guy who kind of looks like Stanley Tucci.

It’s Monday, January 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today, the United States honors Martin Luther King Jr. Read King’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jonathan Eig in our pages, on the last speech the great American ever gave:

Coming up: Haviv Rettig Gur on how to help Iran. Can prediction markets be tamed? The Oscar short-listed period drama that writes Jews out of the story. Jed Rubenfeld on the reported Justice Department investigation into Tim Walz. And much more.

But first: Donald Trump ups the ante over Greenland.

“It is time for Denmark to give back—World peace is at stake!” So said the president of the United States in a post on Truth Social over the weekend.

The claim was part of a significant escalation in the president’s push to acquire Greenland. On Saturday, Trump demanded a deal to buy Greenland, and said he would impose 10 percent tariffs on all imports from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the UK, France, and Germany on February 1. Those tariffs will increase to 25 percent on June 1 and remain until a deal for the “complete and total purchase” of Greenland, Trump said.

On Sunday, European leaders were weighing how to respond, considering hitting the U.S. with tariffs worth $93 billion.

A European freak-out over comments from Donald Trump isn’t necessarily anything to write home about. But this time is a little different. We explain why in our editorial. Read about Trump’s geopolitical petulance, and why it risks undermining his foreign policy achievements.

—The Editors

• The Pentagon is preparing 1,500 soldiers for possible deployment in Minnesota. In response, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey is gearing up to push back. “I never thought in a million years that we would be invaded by our own federal government,” he said Sunday.

• A majority of Americans say that ICE is making communities where it is conducting operations less safe; 31 percent say it is making communities more safe, according to a CBS News poll. Sixty-one percent of Americans say that ICE is being too tough when stopping and detaining people.

• Josh Shapiro was asked by Kamala Harris’s vice presidential search team whether he was an Israeli agent, the Pennsylvania governor claims in his new memoir. “Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding? I told her how offensive the question was,” Shapiro writes in Where We Keep the Light.

• A high-speed train derailed in Spain on Sunday, jumping onto another track and hitting an oncoming train. At least 21 people died in the accident, according to Spanish authorities.

• The Israeli government is pushing back against the U.S.’s Gaza oversight committee. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the committee, which includes countries like Turkey and Qatar, was “not coordinated with Israel and contrary to its policy.”

• President Trump endorsed Louisiana Representative Julia Letlow for a potential primary challenge against Senator Bill Cassidy. The announcement comes as a significant blow to the Republican senator, who once voted to convict President Trump in his impeachment trial.

• For the second time in the past two years, parts of Florida are covered in snow. The weekend’s snowfall in the Sunshine State was part of a vast cold front that is projected to continue across the American South.

In the last year, President Donald Trump has racked up impressive foreign policy achievements. He authorized the bombing run that decimated Iran’s nuclear program. His hardball diplomacy with Qatar and Turkey helped bring enough pressure on Hamas to return the remaining Israeli hostages the terrorists kidnapped on October 7, 2023. And he ordered one of the most stunning special operations missions in U.S. history this month with the raid that brought Venezuela’s tyrant, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, to a New York courtroom.

These victories are a testament to the virtues of muscular unilateralism. While past presidents often bowed to the constraints of the United Nations, Trump has ignored the bureaucrats in Turtle Bay. Quaint respect for the sovereignty of Iran and Venezuela did not deter them from threatening their neighbors. Operations Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve did.

But Trump’s my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy has downsides as well. He risks turning his foreign policy successes into a strategic liability. Instead of striking fear into the hearts of America’s adversaries, he is now alienating America’s allies.

In 2023, shortly before Hamas’s invasion of Israel, Oren Kessler published Palestine 1936, an acclaimed and masterful work that sheds light on the origins and history of an old conflict. This year, a movie covering the same period, Palestine 36, is short-listed for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. We asked Oren for his view, and to divine fact from fiction in a story “inspired by actual events” that, he reports, tells its tale without Jews. —The Editors

If there is one darkly positive consequence of the horrors that have engulfed the Middle East since the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, it is the renewed public interest in the conflict’s origins. It is a history I know intimately. My book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, published just months before the attacks, chronicles a seminal chapter in the conflict and its enduring consequences until today.

That renewed interest is visible in the film industry as well. Of the 15 films short-listed for this year’s Oscar for Best International Feature, three center on Palestinian stories—two of them period dramas. One is titled Palestine 36.