On Wednesday, a letter arrived at the office of Don Berthiaume, the acting inspector general at the US Department of Justice, on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was signed by 19 survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes, with Sky Roberts signing on behalf of his late sister, Virginia Giuffre.
It called on Berthiaume to “oversee all future releases to ensure full compliance with US law”, and was another reminder that the full consequences of Epstein’s ghastly existence – through the release of a further two million documents by the department – have yet to play out.
For a time last year, it seemed as though Epstein’s smirking ghost was trailing his former compadre Donald Trump through what was an otherwise high-rolling first year for the 47th president. The story just would not go away, despite Trump’s repeated wishes, and it culminated in a public falling out with, and subsequent resignation from congress by Marjorie Taylor-Greene, formerly one of Trump’s Maga loyalists.
But in recent weeks, the Epstein story fell out of sight. Little wonder. Most people weather the first month of the year by vowing to take another stab at Dry January or cutting down on phone-time. Donald J Trump’s resolutions were on a different realm: the audacious overnight raid on Nicolás Maduro’s compound in Caracas; the exuberant aftermath leading into the renewed threat to acquire Greenland by hook or by crook, and the international commentariat issuing alarmed pronunciations about a postwar world order ripped asunder.
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Atlantic magazine columnist Tom Nichols suggested that if Trump uses force to gain control of Greenland, “he would not just blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe – or even World War III.”
Meanwhile, Americans nightly tuned in to scenes of wintry, violent confrontation between Minneapolitans and Ice agents, described by state governor Tim Walz as the blunt instrument of “a campaign of brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government”.
The shocking video of the killing of protester Renee Good, the 37-year-old American woman who was shot in the head on January 7th after a confrontation with Ice officers on a suburban street in the Twin Cities, hangs over the opening weeks of America’s 250th year as a dark, unforgettable reference point.
“You don’t want militarised people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to be US citizens that just don’t have their papers on them,” Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster broadly sympathetic to the Republican agenda, said on air this week. “Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers. Is that what we’ve come to?”
Filmed from myriad angles including the bodycam footage of Ice agent Jonathan Ross, who fired three shots at Good as she sat in the driver’s seat of her car, the footage is shocking in its suddenness and brutality. The episode was quickly interpreted according to ideology and political persuasion, with president Trump denouncing the deceased woman as “deranged” and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, declaring that Good had attempted to “ram” the Ice agent with her car after being told to exit the vehicle. Democratic lawmakers, meantime, declared the episode to be an act of murder.
Told on Tuesday that Renee Good’s father was, in fact, a Trump supporter, the president softened his stance momentarily, saying: “I want to say to the father that I love all of our people. They can be on the other side, and as you say, he might be on my side. And I think that’s great. And she might be under normal circumstances a very solid wonderful person. But her actions were pretty tough.”
Nobody can know exactly what Renee Good was thinking in those vital seconds, in which she was filmed smiling while sitting in her car and telling the approaching Ice agents “I’m not mad at you,” because she died instantly.
The only certainty is that the incident was avoidable and that it is a terrible, bleak tragedy. The only significant voice to attempt to pull both the left and right into something approaching common ground belonged to that of Timmy Macklin, the former father in-law of Renee Good. (His son, Timmy Macklin Jr, predeceased Renee Good. They leave a son, aged six, now orphaned).
“I’m a Trump supporter also,” Macklin Sr said. “Renee was an amazing person – full of life, full of joy. Really gentle. A good mother. I just think we make bad choices. And that’s a problem – there is so much chaos in the whole world today and that’s what the Bible says. If my people would hunger themselves and seek his face and pray and turn from their wicked ways ...
“And that’s what we need to do. I’m not blaming anybody. It’s a hard situation for everybody all round. The Ice agent ... I seen the bumper of the car hitting his legs and in a flash like that, it’s hard to say how you would react. My understanding is he had been that before ... maybe dragged or something. Renee was a great person as well.”
On Tuesday, Trump was in Detroit to visit the Ford factory and deliver a speech to the city’s economic club. While touring the factory, an employee shouted from the floor that he was a “paedophile protector.” Trump instantly gave the heckler the middle finger and appeared to shout “f**k you”.
His speech that evening was classical Trump: over an hour long, freewheeling, meandering, breaking into crude mimicry of Joe Biden at one stage, an occasional funny one-liner and buried among the usual recitation of old triumphs and old grievances, this revelatory message to the citizens protesting against the regime in Iran despite mass killings.
“To all Iranian patriots, keep protesting, take over your institutions if possible and save the names of the killers and abusers that are abusing you. I hear five different sets of numbers. Look, one death is too much. I hear much lower numbers and higher numbers but I say save their names because they will pay a very big price.
“All I say to them is that help is on its way. I say: make Iran great again. It was a great country until these monsters came in and took it over. It’s all very fragile. It would have happened to us, I’m telling you. If I didn’t win this election, it would have happened to us. In the coming weeks, I will be letting out even more plans to help bring back affordability – and remember, that is a fake word by Democrats. They caused the high price.”
“Look, one death is too much.” Millions of Americans, Republican and Democrat, must have wondered why Trump could not find those simple words in the hours after the death of Renee Good. No blame, no interpretation: just presidential empathy.
And that other line – “it’s all very fragile” – seems like a perfect banner line for the national mood in the US in 2026.
Trump took office in January 2025 with a blizzard of executive orders and claims to the Panama Canal and Greenland and tariff forecasts that bamboozled leaders across the globe. This year has opened with another January spectacular to leave everybody guessing as to what happens next.
So, what is going on?
“Here’s my take,” said Virginia Democratic senator Tim Kaine on Wednesday night.
“He is bored and concerned about his efforts at home. The economy is suffering. People are paying more for healthcare and energy and groceries and child care and housing. So why not focus on external adventurism? Let’s talk about Venezuela. Let’s talk about Greenland and Denmark. Let’s talk about Iran, or Nigeria, or Cuba, or Colombia, or Mexico. This foreign adventurism is a bored president, and frankly a somewhat frightened president, who is really worried about the economic conditions at home trying to change the subject.”
And the unavoidable fact is that as the audacious military success in Venezuela fades and the Danes reveal their intractable character in relation to Greenland, the routine affairs of the US economy – healthcare and elections – are coming down the track. In the second year of his second term, Trump is facing into an unpromising midterm election scenario and a cost-of-living crisis which, despite his protests that it is an inheritance from the Biden administration, is now his problem to fix.
[ The battle for Greenland: The billionaire behind Donald Trump’s obsessionOpens in new window ]
“They say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm,” Trump lamented at a Republican retreat on January 6th.
“So, you’re all brilliant people. Most of you are in this business longer than me. That makes me smarter than you, because look where I am right? No, it doesn’t. But I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public. Because we have a – we have the right policy. They don’t. They have a horrible policy. They do stick together.”
A recent CBS poll found the approval rating for Trump’s management of the economy had fallen from 51 per cent in March to 39 per cent. Approval ratings for Ice have fallen dramatically since the street clashes in Minneapolis. On Thursday, Trump took to Truth Social vowing to deploy the military by invoking the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, “which many presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that great state”.
It is hardly the happiest beginning to a milestone year for the United States. January is a long month and its infamous gloom point, “Blue Monday”, arrives after the weekend. The occupant of the Oval Office may not be immune to its lows.
