Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.

But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.

The real story here isn't about electoral math. It's about a sitting president who talks about invading allied nations while referring to their democratically elected leaders as though they were already his subordinates. It's about the continued deterioration of democratic norms. It's about how the institutions meant to protect democracy — including the press — seem increasingly unable or unwilling to call out authoritarian behavior for what it is.

The press needs to stop treating politics like a game of electoral mathematics and start treating it like what it is: a serious business with real consequences for democracy and human lives. When the president starts talking like a mad emperor, that's the story, not how many House seats his delusions might hypothetically affect.

While Trump can justify his decisions based on some of the recent failures of the WHO and the Paris Agreement, the withdrawals still carry significant risks for public health and climate change mitigation, which the Trump administration has not shown a plan to address.

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t affect our climate change outlook much, but it is a missed opportunity to redirect U.S. climate policy toward a more realistic objective. The treaty’s goal of keeping global surface temperatures to roughly 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels is now practically unattainable after record-hot years in 2023 and 2024, and its secondary 2°C goal also appears to be in peril — a 2024 UN Environment Programme report stated that “emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030 and 37 per cent from 2019 levels by 2035” to maintain the 2°C goal. Achieving those reductions would undoubtedly require massive, destabilizing changes to economic systems, which are neither desirable nor plausible. However, that provides more justification for the United States to stay in, not to drop out of, the agreement. In his executive order announcing the withdrawal from the Paris accords, Trump even said the U.S. must play “a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment” — but how can we lead from the sidelines? Withdrawing is a huge missed opportunity to direct international climate policy towards its biggest problems: China’s rise and finding alternative fuel sources.

Domestically, Trump is also missing a large opportunity to combine a center-right "all of the above" energy policy with a center-left "abundance agenda," one that maintains a seat at the table for petroleum and natural gas while we continue to invest in renewable technologies. Nuclear energy should also be part of this effort, and its adoption is squarely in line with both the Trump administration and Paris Agreement’s goals.

The WHO does critical work tracking new disease outbreaks and identifying emerging pathogens, and the U.S. withdrawal threatens its ability to aid this work and maintain the benefits we all receive from it.

Furthermore, our status as a global health leader within WHO is smart diplomacy and advances our national security interests. We can guide ongoing efforts to eradicate polio, protect children from diseases, and mitigate future outbreaks. We also receive benefits, like communications on transnational spread of dangerous viruses, scientific collaboration for each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, and access to information about emerging threats. Lastly, we can investigate global threats, as we did when U.S. scientists joined the WHO delegation that visited China in February 2020 to assess its Covid response.

Both Trump and public health experts have rightly criticized the effusive praise the WHO heaped on China in the early days of the pandemic, even as questions swirled about how the virus spread. In a critical moment for its mission, the WHO seemed more occupied with keeping China happy than fulfilling its obligations to the rest of the world. The organization also failed to acknowledge that Covid was airborne early on, providing more evidence that it was ill-prepared to meet the moment.

Trump is right that the U.S. contributes a disproportionate amount to the WHO compared to China (even though he has exaggerated the magnitude of that difference), and we should push for fairer standards. While it is now starting to diversify its revenue sources, the organization’s reliance on the U.S. is evident in the measures it has already taken since Trump announced the withdrawal order — freezing recruitment and drastically scaling back its travel budget.

With all these issues in mind, leaving the WHO is still not the answer; in fact, leaving will make our problems worse. In our absence, China would likely seek to step up to mold decisions to its will — how does that help the U.S.? If Trump wants to play tough with the WHO, why not stay involved but slash our funding commitments?

Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.

Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term.  China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time.

This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.

“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.

The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes. If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”.

Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent. “What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug

Consider this: Russia threatened "escalation" and promised attacks on NATO allies if we sent M1A1 tanks. We did, and nothing about their approach fundamentally changed. They made the same threats with HIMARs rocket launchers; again, we did, nothing changed. The Patriot Air Defense system, the cluster munitions, the F-16 fighter jets — over and over and over Ukraine has asked for support that the Biden administration has balked on giving immediately, all while Russia said "if you do this, we are really going to make you pay" — then we eventually do it and Russia doesn’t change its strategy. Is it risky to bet that Russia will continue to bluff? Of course. Do I think Russia has any interest in widening this war — including a nuclear escalation — beyond the territories in Eastern Ukraine it is now struggling to defend or capture? No. NATO involvement would be a death-knell for Putin's war, and he knows that. Instead, after 1,000 days, the U.S. should start acting confidently, with the understanding that Putin is doing more flexing than punching.

It’s possible that threats exist I don’t fully understand. But with 20/20 hindsight, if I could go back to the first week of this war, I think I would have advocated that the U.S. give Ukraine everything it wanted right away and allowed them to better defend themselves — within their borders, in the skies, and on Russian territory. What we've done instead is create exactly the kind of war of attrition Russia is built to win, spent exorbitant amounts of money on weapons, and allowed a million Ukrainians and Russians to die.

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

anyone claiming that I'm biased in describing climate change as driven by humans is actually experiencing what Daniel Stone (in our subscribers-only interview) called "affective polarization:" "So if you dislike someone, you're not going to admit they're right, even if the evidence is really clear they're right. It's sort of another example of how polarization drives inefficiency. It could stop us from implementing policies that we would agree on otherwise."

We know what factors drive the Earth's heating/cooling cycles. We know that our planet receives energy from the sun, radiates heat to the atmosphere, and that our atmosphere has certain "greenhouse gasses" that re-radiate that heat back to Earth. In other words, we know that heating/cooling cycles are driven by changes in energy coming in (solar cycle and Earth orbit), changes to the Earth's surface (ice cover, plant cover, and other life) that affect energy going out, and changes to the Earth's greenhouse gasses (concentration of CO2, CH4, water vapor, and others in our atmosphere) that affect energy retention. We can measure those factors today. We have a very good understanding of the solar cycle and our Earth's orbit. We have a very good understanding of our planet's surface. And we have a very good understanding of historical changes to the atmosphere, through ice core data and direct atmospheric measurement. Of the factors that contribute to warming, it's very apparent that only greenhouse gasses have increased over the past century to any significant degree (and the degree of increase is very significant). We are aware of what's causing those factors to increase. The long-lived greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere that keep our planet warm eventually return to the earth, and again to the atmosphere, through a process called the carbon cycle. Many things contribute to this cycle, and there are a lot of great arguments that support that the excess carbon is anthropogenic. One of the best arguments is that the proportion of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere is consistent with an increase in the carbon from organic matter (i.e. burned fossil fuels), and that the increase of these isotopes began with the Industrial Revolution and has increased ever since. The Earth is getting warmer. There is essentially unanimous consensus that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years.

I think suggesting that the identifiable excess emissions from human activity are not causing the definite increase in global warming is kind of like saying, "sure, there have been a lot more deaths from car accidents after the invention of the automobile, but hey — who can say if that has anything to do with cars? People have been dying in accidents forever."