Outside the Beltway

January 2026 Was a Long Month

Just exhaustingly long...

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, February 1, 2026 · 1 comment

When I was a university administrator, I used to joke that February, despite being the month with the fewest days, was the longest month. First, it had no holidays, and the academic calendar was uninterrupted by any natural breaks (e.g., the end of winter break, Spring break, final exams, or commencement). Second, and more importantly, February was the month wherein everyone seemed to remember all the things that didn’t get finished in the Fall semester, as well as the things that needed to be done for the Spring semester, as well as also worrying about the coming Summer term. And somehow, for most of my colleagues, it was a surprise every year that all these things needed to be addressed. February was always full to the brim and then some. I worked with a lot of people who seemed to forget how the calendar worked every year (but I digress).

Well, I guess the Trump administration didn’t feel like easing into the new year, and to the general point of James Joyner’s post this morning, it got right to the chaos-making. Let me note the following timeline and various other bits of context.

January 3, 2026: The US invades Venezuela for the purpose of arresting and removing its head of state, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife. Trump then asserts that the US is running the country. We later learn that revenues from Venezuelan oil are being deposited offshore and that Trump controls those accounts.

January 5, 2026: Stephen Miller starts loudly proclaiming that the US has the right to take Greenland. This rapidly becomes a major theme for the administration. Indeed, his wife, Katie Miller, seemed to be the first Trump ally to draw attention to the matter via a tweet on January 3.

January 7, 2026: ICE operatives shoot and kill Renee Good in the streets of Minneapolis, and the administration immediately lies about what happened.

January 15, 2026: Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado visits the White House and gifts Trump her Nobel Prize medal.

January 18, 2026: Trump informs the Prime Minister of Norway that “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…The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

January 19-23, 2026: The 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is held in Davos, Switzerland.

—January 20: Canadian PM Mark Carney basically tells the world in his speech that the post-WWII rules-based order is finished as a result of US behavior.

—January 20: Trump gives a rambling speech that both sounded mob-boss-like over Greenland, but at least ruled out using force (for now).

—January 21: Trump announces a “deal” over Greenland that sounds very much like exactly what he would have gotten if he had just asked in the first place. Details are vague, but it sounds like he TACO’d over the whole thing in the face of serious financial pressures.

January 24, 2026: ICE operatives shoot (ten times) and kill Alex Pretti (who was face-down on the ground) in the streets of Minneapolis, and the administration immediately lies about what happened.

The three weeks between January 3rd and January 24th are astounding if you stop and realize how much of consequence happened in 21 days.

And those are just the highlights (or should that be lowlights?) of January. We start the month with an assertion (the “Donroe Doctrine“) of dominance over the Western Hemisphere and a bold, but quite questionable, seizure of a foreign leader that includes claiming control over another country’s natural resources. Before we can digest all of that, the Greenland noise starts at a whole new level, and ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis leads to the death of Renee Good. As we all try to come to terms with the torrent of videos of ICE abusing citizens and noncitizens alike, Davos happens. There, we see both the Trump administration making baldly imperialist claims over Greenland in a way that could permanently rupture NATO, and our closest ally and trading partner, talking about permanent change to the international system. And before we can digest that, ICE kills another protestor for the crime of helping someone they shoved and filming with his phone.

Let’s add something that is outside of the administration’s control, but could still be an item to which they insert themselves: the unrest in Iran. Indeed, as a friend noted to me the other day, an attack on Iran could still fit within the same month as the Maduro exfiltration. (See CNN: US carrier strike group is now in the Middle East region, sources say.)

BTW, here are some other stories from January, and I know I am missing some:

• Blowing Up Boats Using Disguised Aircraft?
• In Front of Our Noses: Abuses of the Pardon Power
• FBI Raids Georgia Election Center

No wonder we are all exhausted.