This has not been a good week. First, there was the utterly devastating spectacle of Vice President Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral College win. Four years since Trump triggered an insurrection in a desperate attempt to cling to power, Harris called Monday’s result a “good day” for democracy. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t a good day.

Sure, Harris really had no choice but to certify her opponent’s win. But since she wasn’t wrong when she identified Trump as a fascist in the last weeks of the 2024 campaign, Monday was not a day for celebration. After all, if the result had been different, and if Harris had won, does anyone believe that Trump would have gracefully accepted his defeat? Does anyone believe his odious armed mob—some of whom have spent the past four years intimidating elections officials and threatening to rain death and destruction on his political opponents—wouldn’t have taken to the streets and attempted to storm the Capitol again? Does anyone really believe the GOP-led Congress wouldn’t have done everything in its power to disrupt proceedings?

But for the Democrats, wedded to process in a system their opponents have spent years hollowing out and plotting end runs around, all that mattered was that they showed decorum. It conjured up images of the well-mannered upper-crust passengers on the Titanic listening to chamber music performed by on-board musicians desperate to keep the passengers calm as the ship began to flounder: honorable, decent, yet, ultimately, entirely futile.

Then, wildfires fueled by 100 mph winds and worsened by a paucity of rainfall exploded in Los Angeles. As I write this column, on Thursday evening, at least 10 people are dead, thousands have been left homeless, tens of thousands have been evacuated, and many of the most beautiful coastal properties in LA have been reduced to piles of ash. Over the course of my lifetime, I must have driven around the Pacific Palisades area hundreds of times. The beauty of the landscape as Sunset Boulevard descends to the Pacific Ocean has been transmogrified, overnight, into a vista of apocalyptic devastation. It’s catastrophic.

Again, this really hasn’t been a quality week.

Add into that the growing drumbeat of threats against lawyers and judges and elected officials who attempted to hold Trump accountable for his misdeeds over the last four years. In the past week, Trump has called for the political figures involved in congressional hearings into the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to be incarcerated. (He previously stated that special counsel Jack Smith should be exiled from the United States.) And he’s called for New York judge Juan Merchan, who presided over his hush-money trial, to be “disbarred.” Trump has, also this week, promised to fire the National Archives figures who reported his taking of classified documents to the Justice Department.

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And, far from anyone holding him to account, he is being rewarded again and again and again for his vile rhetoric and actions. This week, Merchan made it clear that despite a jury’s having found Trump guilty on more than 30 charges, he was going to impose no penalties in the hush-money case. Days later, the shameless judge Aileen Cannon, serving now more as a shill than a judicial figure, blocked the release of Smith’s report into the evidence that led to the charges in the secret documents case.

Meanwhile, as Trump rounds out his inner circle, the incoming president’s henchmen are itching to unleash the US military on domestic protesters and on would-be asylum seekers, as well as to use the full might of the Justice Department to launch a series of show trials that would look right at home in totalitarian mid-century Europe. And he has done so in a media environment where tech tycoons like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are lining up to kiss the ring, by recalibrating fact-checking rules so as to basically dispense with any efforts to rein in far-right propaganda, and showering Trump with donations to his inauguration festivities, as did Apple CEO Tim Cook, joining Zuckerberg and others.

At the same time, Elon Musk, the owner of X and unelected-president-in-the-wings, has gone full-blown fascist. After calling for the Germans to elect the neo-Nazi AfD party to power in December, he declared that the Brits should imprison Prime Minister Starmer, free from prison far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and invite America in to “liberate” them from their own elected government. It’s not exactly business-as-usual for how the United States intends to interact with its closest allies. In fact, so outrageous and contemptible is Musk’s behavior that senior political figures in the UK have called on Starmer to demand a meeting with the US ambassador to express the country’s displeasure at the tycoon’s meddling in the UK’s internal politics.

Rounding out the shit show, Trump held a press conference on Tuesday in which he threatened war and economic ruin against Panama, Denmark, and Canada (the latter two both NATO allies, and presumably able to trigger NATO’s Article 5 were the US to attack them) unless they immediately roll over and cede territory and sovereignty to sate Trump’s increasingly megalomaniacal demands. Almost as an afterthought, he promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” to which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded by proposing that North America be renamed “América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America.” Well played.

Why would Donald Trump want the huge, icy, expanse of Greenland (population 56,000)? Probably because, despite his climate denialism, he knows that in a warming world, Greenland’s huge reserves of rare earth elements, such as yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and dysprosium will become increasingly accessible over the coming decades, and increasingly important geostrategic assets given the world’s reliance on cell phones, computers, batteries, and other products that incorporate these elements. It also has the world’s sixth-largest deposit of uranium, which Greenland’s government has banned from being mined, but which nuclear powers would clearly covet. The Arctic region has, in addition, some of the world’s largest unexploited oil and natural gas deposits. Moreover, as the Arctic waters melt, it will eventually control a vital shipping channel for global sea trade—making Trump’s rationale for seizing the vast island not dissimilar to that of Britain’s grand imperialists in securing Singapore, Gibraltar, and the Falkland Islands in bygone times.

As my old friend Anders Krab-Johansen (born in Greenland to Danish parents), CEO and publisher of the Danish media company Berlingske Media, explained to me, “Greenland is of major strategic importance to Denmark, the US, and Europe in a world with global tension between the West against China and Russia. Greenland has rare minerals and is key to Arctic trading routes.”

In Trump’s might-is-right view of the world, that means it’s an asset America should grab.

On myriad fronts, Trump’s America First policy is taking shape. If anyone seriously thought version two of his presidency would be about bringing down the price of eggs and pressuring the feds to lower interest rates, they’ve got another thing coming. All of that economic populist campaign blather was, to tweak a phrase, a Trump l’oeil, an optical illusion hiding the real intent within.

Sure, he’ll pressure the feds on interest rates, and he might even succeed in getting egg prices down, but that will be a sideshow. The real story is shaping up to be a brutal domestic and international power grab.

We would do well to take him at his word this time around, as we all should have done eight years ago. Back then, many commentators assured those of us who were genuinely horrified at what Trump’s presidency portended that his promises were simply bluster. Then he got elected and did exactly what he said he’d do: implement a Muslim travel ban, separate families at the border, cut immigrants off from numerous forms of public assistance, and so on. This time around, he’s promising an America First policy that threatens to destroy century-old alliances and remake America as a nakedly imperialist Great Power, demanding Lebensraum and obeisance on all sides.

The Democrats, instead of blathering on about how acquiescence and cooperation is good for democracy, must offer some principled, fiery, words of opposition to this increasingly megalomaniacal agenda. It will only get worse from here, and the world needs a principled opposition to be in place in the United States.