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It was shocking how quickly the psychopaths in power launched their vicious lies about Renée Good—"violent rioter," "domestic terrorist," "self-defense"—shot in the face for trying to drive away from ICE. It's all bullshit, proven by stunning new video from the killer's own phone. Bafflingly, JD Vance posted it, thinking it proved his smears. How sick is he? Good was "pure sunshine ...kindness radiated out of her," says her wife. "We stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns."
Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and widow of a veteran, was dropping off her youngest child, 6, at a Minneapolis school when she encountered an ICE raid at 34th Street and Portland Avenue; it was the second day of a 30-day "surge" of siccing America's Gestapo on the state's Somali-American population. On Instagram, Good described herself as "a poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado"; she and her wife Becca had recently moved there, finding what Becca called "a vibrant and welcoming community" with a strong sense of people "looking out for each other."
Horrific, widely viewed footage shows what happened next: The sirens and unmarked cars, masked thugs getting out, Good's car straddling the road, protesters shouting and then, suddenly, screaming as one goon approaches her window, yells "Get out of the fucking car," and fires off three shots through the windshield as Good's car careens wildly off and crashes. Multiple cellphone videos and eyewitness accounts concur: Good was trying to turn around, let one ICE car pass ahead, backed up slightly to turn to the right, pulled forward and around the agent - a few feet away - as he shot her three times in the face.
The horror kept coming. Witnesses said Good slumped in her car onto a blood-soaked air bag for up to 15 minutes with no medical attention as protesters yelled and wept. One man asked agents if he could check her pulse. They said no. "I'm a physician," he pleaded. "I don't care," said the thug, claiming "we have our own medics." "Where the fuck are they?" shrieked a distraught woman. Emergency responders finally arrived without a stretcher; they carried Good away, said one woman, "like a sack of potatoes." Mayor Jacob Frey was livid: "To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here."
Despite the clear, stark evidence, the fascist propaganda machine shot into high gear. In Texas, ICE Barbie, cosplaying in a ludicrous cowboy hat, proclaimed "an act of domestic terrorism...a woman attacked (ICE) and attempted to run them over." Dead-eyed DHS spokesbot Tricia McLaughlin raved about "a violent rioter” who "weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over law enforcement officers." Vance called Good "a deranged leftist." In an incendiary post, Trump ripped a "disorderly" woman "obstructing and resisting" who "then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer...It is hard to believe he is alive."
More to the point, it is hard to believe how brazenly, brutishly, remorselessly these motherfuckers can spew their fucking lies in the face of demonstrable, overwhelming reality, demanding we not see what we see or hear what we hear. Eventually, even Trump had to back down, slightly, after both the Washington Post and New York Times committed a rare act of journalism - the Times, to his face - and declared the video entirely contradicted his vile fantasy. Then, on Friday, the right-wing, Minnesota-based Alpha News released 47-second footage of the scene from the phone of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, Renée Good's murderer.
An Iraq War veteran, Ross has worked for ICE since 2015 and is also a firearms instructor and SWAT team member; he was injured last summer when he was dragged by the vehicle of a fleeing suspect. The footage shows Ross arriving and walking around Renée Good's red Honda recording with his phone; he circles back to her window as another agent curses and tries to open her door. Sitting behind the wheel, her dog in the back, Good smilingly tells the agent, "It's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you." Seconds later, shots ring out. Ross stands safely away as her car veers off. Audio catches a man muttering, "Fucking bitch."
Inexplicably, both Fox News and J.D. Vance posted the footage. "Watch this, as hard as it is," Vance wrote. "Many of you have been told (Ross) wasn’t hit by a car, wasn’t being harassed, and murdered an innocent woman." The footage, he said, proves Ross "fired in self-defense” when his "life was endangered” by Good. What the ever-loving fuck. Ross, he adds, "deserves a debt (sic) of gratitude. This is a guy who’s actually done a very important job for the United States of America." AOC speaks for us all: "I understand that Vance believes shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not... I do not believe the American people should be assassinated in the street."
Good was ICE's ninth victim. Her murder - a white woman, not brown guy, it must be noted - has prompted nationwide outrage, and a GoFundMe that aimed to raise $50K is now at over a million. “This is an execution plain and simple,” said journalist Krystal Ball. "If your Trump love or immigrant hatred has you justifying murder, please seek help.” "We're a Third World country now," said Jesse Ventura, citing the history of 1930s Germany. "That's what happens in a dictatorship - in comes the military." And on the "giddy sadism" we see daily, "All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience."
Still, it goes on. They are still assaulting people, usually brown, sometimes citizens. In a clumsy, nasty encounter in North Carolina, they attacked two U.S. citizens in their car and only gave up when both guys kept filming the abuses. The lesson: "Film them. Always." In Minneapolis, they blithely moved on from murdering Renee Good to terrorize workers at a nearby childcare center and students at a high school, tackling people, handcuffing two staff members and firing teargas at bystanders until the schools were forced to shut down. "They're just animals," said one school official. "I've never seen people behave like this."
Meanwhile, Renée Nicole Good is being mourned, in the words of her mother, as "an amazing human being" and "one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.." On Friday, Renée's wife Becca Good released a moving statement thanking all the people who have reached out to support their family: "This kindness of strangers is the most fitting tribute because if you ever encountered my wife, Renée Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind. In fact, kindness radiated out of her...Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow."
She described moving to Minnesota, "like people have done across place and time...to make a better life for ourselves. Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever... We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renée lived this belief every day... We thank you for ensuring that Renee’s legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love."
Climate change driven by human burning of fossil fuels helped make 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded, a scientific report published Monday affirmed, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.
Researchers at World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that "although 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024 globally, it was still far hotter than almost any other year on record," with only two other recent years recording a higher average worldwide temperature.
For the first time, the three-year running average will end the year above the 1.5°C warming goal, relative to preindustrial levels, established a decade ago under the landmark Paris climate agreement.
"Global temperatures remained very high and significant harm from human-induced climate change is very real," the report continues. "It is not a future threat, but a present-day reality."
"Across the 22 extreme events we analyzed in depth, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and wiped out crops," the researchers wrote. "Together, these events paint a stark picture of the escalating risks we face in a warming world."
The WWA researchers' findings tracked with the findings of United Nations experts and others that 2025 would be the third-hottest year on record.
According to the WWA study:
This year highlighted again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed, consistently hitting those who are already marginalized within their societies the hardest. But the inequity goes deeper: The scientific evidence base itself is uneven. Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, and time and again we found that gaps in observational data and the reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North prevented us from drawing confident conclusions. This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis.
The events of 2025 make it clear that while we urgently need to transition away from fossil fuels, we also must invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be prevented with timely action. But events like Hurricane Melissa highlight the limits of preparedness and adaptation: When an intense storm strikes small islands such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, even relatively high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage. This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; rapid emission reductions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of 1.5°C, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto—who is also an Imperial College London climate scientist—told the Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”
The WWA study's publication comes a month after this year's United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP30—ended in Brazil with little meaningful progress toward a transition from fossil fuels.
Responding to the new study, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt said in a statement that "2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now."
"Today’s report is a wake-up call," Alt continued. "Unfortunately, [US President Donald] Trump and Republicans controlling Congress spent the past year making climate denial official US policy and undermining progress to stave off the worst of the climate crisis. Their reckless polluters-first agenda rolled back critical climate protections and attacked and undermined the very agencies responsible for helping Americans prepare for and recover from increasingly dangerous disasters."
"Across the country, people are standing up and demanding their leaders do better to protect our families from climate change and extreme weather," Alt added. "It's time those in power started listening.”
The collective wealth of US billionaires surged to $8.1 trillion in 2025 as working-class Americans faced a cost-of-living crisis made worse by President Donald Trump's tariff regime and unprecedented assault on the social safety net.
An analysis released Friday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found that the top 15 US billionaires saw the largest wealth gains last year, with their collective fortune growing from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion. That 33% gain was more than double the S&P 500's 16% increase in 2025.
What IPS describes as the "elite group" of US billionaires includes Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the richest man in the world; Google co-founder Larry Page; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison.
IPS emphasized that "these staggering combined billionaire wealth totals come as the Trump-GOP budget bill passed in 2025 defunded health insurance, food stamps, and other vital anti-poverty safety net programs, in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and budget increases for militarism and mass deportations."
"The affordability crisis is hitting ordinary Americans particularly hard as we head into the new year, but not everyone is feeling the pain: Billionaires are raking in staggering profits off the backs of ordinary workers,” Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, said in a statement.
“These extreme concentrations of wealth and power," Collins added, "undermine our daily lives and further rig our economy in favor of the ultra-rich and corporations, while ordinary Americans get a raw deal once again.”
IPS released its analysis days after Bloomberg reported, based on its Billionaires Index, that the world's 500 richest people gained a record $2.2 trillion in wealth last year.
Omar Ocampo, an IPS researcher, said that in the US, billionaires are "paying far less in taxes compared to the huge amount of wealth they amass," allowing them to continue accumulating vast fortunes, supercharging inequality, and using their wealth and influence to subvert reform efforts.
“Not only are a small number of Americans holding more wealth than the rest of America, but they’re also not paying their fair share in taxes," said Ocampo.
The new report comes as families across the US struggle to make ends meet amid high and still-rising prices for groceries, housing, and other necessities. A Century Foundation survey released last month found that "roughly three in 10 voters delayed or skipped medical care in the past year due to cost, while nearly two-thirds switched to cheaper groceries or bought less food altogether."
The mayor of Portland, Oregon told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave the city after federal agents shot and wounded two people on Thursday, just a day after an ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.
"We cannot sit by while constitutional protections erode and bloodshed mounts," Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement. "Portland is not a 'training ground' for militarized agents, and the 'full force' threatened by the administration has deadly consequences. As mayor, I call on ICE to end all operations in Portland until a full investigation can be completed."
The shooting took place Thursday afternoon during what the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described as a "targeted vehicle stop" conducted by Border Patrol agents. Echoing its narrative about the deadly Minneapolis shooting—which was contradicted by video footage from the scene—DHS said the driver "weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents."
But Wilson said Thursday that the Trump administration could not be trusted to provide an accurate account of events or conduct an honest investigation.
"We know what the federal government says happened here," said Wilson. "There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time has long passed."
The man and woman shot by Border Patrol agents were reportedly married, and both were taken to a nearby hospital. Neither their identities nor their conditions were immediately made public.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said late Thursday that his office was investigating the shooting to determine “whether any federal officer acted outside the scope of their lawful authority."
"We have been clear about our concerns with the excessive use of force by federal agents in Portland, and today’s incident only heightens the need for transparency and accountability," said Rayfield. "Oregonians deserve clear answers when people are injured in their neighborhoods."
The shootings in Minneapolis and Portland were hardly the first time federal immigration officers have used deadly force during US President Donald Trump's lawless mass deportation campaign.
The Marshall Project noted earlier this week that "federal officers have fatally shot at least three other people in the last five months."
"Agents have also shot other people," The Marshall Project added. "The Trace, the nonprofit news organization covering gun violence, has counted more than a dozen such shootings. In some cases, the victims survived, including a woman who suffered multiple bullet wounds in an incident in Chicago in October. The Border Patrol officer who shot her appeared to brag about it in a text message, later presented in court evidence. The message reportedly read, 'I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.'"
Amidst national outrage this week over the killing by Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent, members of Minnesota's congressional delegation on Saturday were blocked from full access to a federal immigration detention center in the city—but at least one lawmaker among them warns something much more sinister is now taking place in the state.
"I was just denied access to the ICE processing center at the Whipple Building," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents the state's 5th District. "Members of Congress have a legal right and constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight where people are being detained. The public deserves to know what is taking place in ICE facilities."
Omar shared a video of herself, along with Reps. Angie Craig and Kelly Morrison, outside the facility as large numbers of masked federal agents in protective gear blocked the driveway entrance.
Happening NOW: US Reps Ilhan Omar and Angie Craig are attempting to enter Whipple Fed Building- met with federal agents on other side. @wcco pic.twitter.com/3eIWxiLaW7
— Adam Duxter (@AdamDuxter) January 10, 2026
In a telephone interview with MSNOW, Omar later explained that she and her colleagues arrived at the facility Saturday morning in order to conduct oversight activities. While Omar said they were initially allowed to enter the building, they were shortly after told they "had to wait until higher-ups were able to come speak with us."
It seemed to Omar, she said, that the order to halt their visit "maybe came from Washington to deny us the proper access that we needed to complete those oversight duties that we are obligated as members of Congress."
Calling it a clear violation of their oversight authority, Omar and Craig explained to reporters what happened after they were denied further access to the facility:
"This is beyond the pale." Democratic Congresswomen Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Annie Craig had their access to a federal detention facility revoked while touring the building. pic.twitter.com/KthvotCREX
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) January 10, 2026
Congresswoman Craig also spoke to MSNOW's Ali Velshi:
Rep. Angie Craig: "We were told because this facility is being funding by the 'Big Beautiful Bill,' not the congressional appropriations act, that we would not be allowed to enter the facility. That's complete nonsense ... I informed them they were violating the law. They said… pic.twitter.com/vCOqgldB2Q
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 10, 2026
Noting the size and scale of the presence of armed federal agents now deployed in her state, Omar suggested in her interview with MSNOW that the recent Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) operations being conducted serve no purpose other than to harass and terrorize local communities. That militarized presence has only grown since Trump ordered more agents to the city following Wednesday's killing of Good and the protests that have erupted as a result.
" Protest is as American as apple pie," said Omar. "People come out to register their opposition to what they do not like or want to accept. It is important for people to be able to do that in a democracy."
"What we are seeing right now, not only from the surge of 2,000 federal agents—now we have another 1,000 apparently coming in—it is essentially trying to create this kind of environment where people feel intimidated, threatened, and terrorized. And I think the ultimate goal of [Homeland Security Security Secretary] Kristi Noem and President Trump is to agitate people enough where they are able to invoke the Insurrection Act to declare martial law."
"There is," she continued, "no other justifiable way to describe what is taking place in Minneapolis at this moment. There is no justifiable reason why this number of agents is here in our state."
Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard expressed agreement Thursday that the US under President Donald Trump is tearing down world order, while also pointing the finger at other major Western powers for being part of the problem.
In a post on X, Callamard reacted to a warning delivered by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the Trump administration was undermining systems developed decades ago with the help of the US to ensure greater international stability.
Callamard agreed with Steinmeier's basic argument, but added that Germany has not been an innocent bystander.
"The US is destroying world order," wrote the Amnesty International chief. "And so did Israel for the last two years. With Germany support."
She then accused Germany and other US allies of ignoring past US violations of international law and only getting upset now that it's come back to bite them.
"German and other European leaders cannot suddenly discover that the rule-based order is on its knee when they have governed over its demise for the last two years," she wrote. "Complicity, tacit agreement, appeasement, silence: these have a cost. A high cost. And you/we will all end up paying for it."
Steinmeier's remarks came in response to increased US aggression against both Latin America, where Trump ordered the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, and Europe, where Trump has once again stated his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark.
"Then there is the breakdown of values by our most important partner, the USA, which helped build this world order," the German president said. "It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want, where regions or entire countries are treated as the property of a few great powers."
Truly extraordinary language by German President Steinmeier: pic.twitter.com/povGBrPmr9
He says the US's values are "broken", that they're changing the world "into a den of thieves in which the most unscrupulous take what they want," and treat "whole countries" as their "property".…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 9, 2026
Top Trump aide Stephen Miller earlier in the week explicitly advocated returning to an era in which great military powers are free to take whatever they want from weaker powers.
"The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere,” Miller said during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. “We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us.”
"I never imagined that my government would so blatantly lie like this," said one author and attorney.
As Americans have continued to document federal agents violently pushing a bystander to the ground during an arrest, handcuffing a screaming mother, and demanding to see citizenship papers of people of color, observers said the US Department of Homeland Security's latest video about a federal officer's killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week showed it has resorted to "blatant propaganda" to shape public opinion on the Trump administration's violent crackdown on immigrants and dissenters.
"This agency, and the way it now speaks, is the most repulsive and un-American things I have ever seen," said one writer of a video featuring Lauren Bis, the deputy assistant secretary of homeland security, that was released four days after Good was fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer.
The video was posted to social media Sunday, accompanied by the text: "Defend the Homeland. Protect the American way of life." Bis presented footage of Good's vehicle before and after she was shot while sitting in the driver's seat of her car by an ICE agent who had approached the driver's side of the front of the vehicle.
Bis repeated claims that have been pushed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump: that Good was a "rioter" who "weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them."
She said that "the American people can watch this video with their own eyes and ears and judge for themselves," but legal experts, news outlets, and members of the public have already spent the past several days doing just that.
Experts and media organizations have extensively analyzed footage of the killing and said that despite the administration's repeated claims, there is no evidence that Good was part of any riot. As the Guardian reported last week, "The officer who fired the fatal shots walked up to the front of Good’s car, which was turning away from him as it began to move forward, and he remained on his feet as the vehicle passed him."
Author and University of Missouri law professor Thom Lambert said that the government "may argue that the ICE agent feared for his life, perhaps even reasonably, but the video CLEARLY shows that Good had turned away from the officer."
"I never imagined that my government would so blatantly lie like this," added Lambert, who also took issue with Bis' insistence that the administration "pray[s]" for Good and her family—even as another White House official, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, called the victim a "lunatic" in comments to reporters on Monday.
Despite DHS' display of footage that many observers have said proves Good's wheels were turned away from the ICE agent when she began driving, David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute said: "They are still using verbatim the utterly inaccurate statement from the first day. This is pathological."
Another critic noted that the video was edited by DHS to make it appear that Good "weaponized her vehicle" by "speeding across the road"—"obviously failing to mention that footage is of when she had just been shot in the fucking face and her dead foot hit the pedal."
Jessica Simor, an expert in human rights law in the UK, said that Joseph Goebbels, the architect of Adolf Hitler's propaganda machine in Nazi Germany, "could not have improved" on Bis' video.
As the video circulated online Monday, ICE and Border Patrol agents were seen in numerous new footage treating people in Minneapolis and elsewhere violently and appearing the warn them against even acting as bystanders to their enforcement actions.
Federal agents were seen chasing and tackling a man to the ground, apparently for filming with his cellphone as they carried out an arrest at a gas station in St. Paul, Minnesota.
In another video, a federal officer approached a woman who was filming him and said, "Listen, have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" before snatching her phone.
It is legal under the First Amendment for bystanders to film ICE and other federal agents as long at they are not obstructing their operations.
Organizer and attorney Aaron Regunberg said in response to that video that the US will ultimately "need some serious Truth and Reconciliation/Nuremberg shit for every fascist scumbag member of this administration."
"If the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer."
The US Department of Justice's decision to open a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has ignited a major backlash that even has some Republican senators drawing a line in the sand.
Shortly after Powell released a video on Sunday accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of waging an "intimidation" campaign against him on behalf of President Donald Trump, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) blasted the administration, accusing them of trying to compromise the independence of America's central bank.
“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” said Tillis, who further vowed to "oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved."
On Monday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) backed up Tillis' pledge to oppose any nominees for the Federal Reserve until the criminal probe of Powell, whose term as Fed chair is due to end in May, has been resolved.
Murkowski also revealed that she spoke with Powell and determined that "it’s clear the administration’s investigation is nothing more than an attempt at coercion" aimed at affecting his decisions on US monetary policy.
"The stakes are too high to look the other way," Murkowski emphasized. "If the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer."
Trump can only afford to lose the support of four Republican senators in a vote for a new Fed chair, which means Tillis and Murkowski's vows not to support any nominee until the case against Powell is resolved carry significant weight.
A bipartisan group of economists who have served under US presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan—including former Federal Reserve Chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellin—released a joint statement on Monday denouncing what they described as an effort to strong-arm the Federal Reserve into doing the president's bidding.
"The reported criminal inquiry into Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell is an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine... independence," they wrote. "This is how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions, with highly negative consequences for inflation and the functioning of their economies more broadly. It has no place in the United States, whose greatest strength is the rule of law, which is at the foundation of our economic success."
Trump, who nominated Powell to be Federal Reserve chairman in 2017, has been openly pressuring Powell for months to more aggressively cut interest rates in the face of a faltering jobs market.
Powell, however, has continued to take a more cautious approach, and has cited the price instability caused by Trump's tariffs as a reason to hold off on more aggressive rate cuts.
"Among people it will be also very, very negative," said EU defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius.
The European Union's defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, said Monday that Europe must build up its military capabilities as President Donald Trump threatens to rip up the central agreement that's underpinned the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for more than 75 years with his escalating demand that the US should be able to take control of Greenland—a semiautonomous territory of NATO founding member Denmark.
Kubilius said he agreed with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's recent assessment that a US takeover of Greenland, home to about 56,000 people, "will be the end of NATO."
"But also among people it will be also very, very negative," Kubilius told Reuters at a security conference in Sweden.
Trump first expressed a desire to take control of Greenland during his first term. The vast island is in a geopolitically strategic location as countries begin to use the Arctic Ocean for shipping routes, and has stores of rare earth minerals.
The president has intensified his threats against the territory following his invasion of Venezuela and the US military's abduction of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, with White House officials saying Trump has the right to take control of any country he wants to in order to control their resources.
On Air Force One on Sunday, Trump told reporters that he has not yet proposed a deal to Denmark and said "Greenland should make the deal." He added that he does not care whether a takeover of Greenland "affects NATO."
"They need us more than we need them," said the president.
“If it affects NATO, it affects NATO. They need us more than we need them.”
Trump says Greenland should take a deal he admits he hasn’t offered, makes it clear he does not care if attacking Greenland ends NATO.
Again: ending NATO is a Putin goal. That is no coincidence. pic.twitter.com/9jTfHedgFJ
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) January 12, 2026
Trump also said in the Oval Office Sunday that owning Greenland is “psychologically important for me.”
"Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base," said Trump.
The US already owns a military base in Greenland, but Trump has claimed military presence in the territory is not enough to fend off what he claims are imminent threats from China and Russia.
Kubilius said that should NATO fall apart due to a US operation aimed at taking Greenland by force from its longtime ally, "it will be a very big challenge to be ready to defend Europe, being independent, being without the United States."
"The question would be how we can use in that case NATO structures, how they can be, you know, become a basis for European pillar of NATO," he said. "But NATO such as it is now definitely will not exist anymore."
Greenland's govermment on Monday issued a statement reiterating its previous warnings that it is "part of the kingdom of Denmark."
“As part of the Danish Commonwealth, Greenland is a member of NATO and the defense of Greenland must therefore be [done] through NATO," reads the statement.
Considering that six NATO member states in Europe have expressed firm opposition to Trump's plan, the government said, "Greenland will increase its efforts to ensure that the defense of Greenland takes place under the auspices of NATO."
"The government coalition in Greenland will therefore work with Denmark to ensure that the dialogue on and development of the defense in Greenland takes place within the framework of NATO cooperation," officials added.
In addition to the NATO agreement, Kublius said, Article 42.7 of the European Union Treaty obligates member states to come to Denmark's defense if Greenland is attacked.
"It will depend very much on Denmark, how they will react, what will be their position, but definitely there is such an obligation of member states to come for mutual assistance if another member state is facing military aggression," he said.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Sunday also expressed concern that a military attack on Greenland would mean the US was at war "with Europe, with England, with France."
Chris Murphy: "Let's talk about what's at stake here. The president is spending every single day thinking about invading Greenland, managing the Venezuelan economy, building a ballroom. He's not thinking about the American people at all." pic.twitter.com/LVorATNTuZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2026
"An attempt to 'annex' Greenland would be the functional end of NATO," said Murphy. "And final evidence that Trump is permanently distracted by things that have nothing to do with the American people—like Venezuela, his new White House ballroom, and now Greenland."