The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump USDA has discovered a bold new frontier in national security: making crop scientists moonlight as FBI informants with a Google search bar. Under a new directive, researchers in the Agricultural Research Service are ordered to investigate every foreign co-author on their papers for signs of "subversive or criminal activity" and send the names of anyone "concerning" to the agency’s Office of Homeland Security. Because nothing says cutting-edge agricultural research like turning your co-authors into case files.

Supervisors literally called the policy "dystopic" in a meeting, which, in the Trump era, is less a warning and more a product requirement. The order doesn’t just blacklist scientists from the usual "countries of concern" like China, Iran, and Cuba; it also forces staff to vet collaborators from places like Canada and Germany and ship their names off to a homeland security unit that works with federal intelligence agencies. No one will say what they’re doing with those lists, but sure, this is just about "protecting research," not building a handy little registry of foreign scientists who dared to work with Americans.

Jennifer Jones of the Union of Concerned Scientists called it a "throwback to McCarthyism" and a "classic hallmark of authoritarianism"—which is polite academic-speak for this is some straight-up police-state garbage. USDA staff say they’re worried this will put foreign students and postdocs—people here on temporary visas—in the administration’s crosshairs. Meanwhile, the agency’s own website still brags that international collaboration is essential to stopping crop diseases and boosting yields. So naturally, Trump’s agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins rolled out a policy that bans co-authoring papers with scientists from entire countries and frames international research as a national security threat that only "America First" surveillance can fix.

All of this slots neatly into the broader Trump second-term project of criminalizing foreign brains: a French scientist detained over anti-Trump messages on his phone, Chinese and Russian researchers locked out of NIH databases, and new moves to shorten how long foreign students can stay in the U.S. The message is clear: if you’re a foreign scientist, the United States would love your talent, your data, and your breakthroughs—just not your presence, your rights, or your name on a paper that hasn’t been cleared by the Google Stasi at USDA Homeland Security.

Donald Trump has once again discovered maps and immediately decided other people's land should be his. This time it's Greenland, which he says the US needs to "own" to stop Russia and China from doing it first, because nothing says defending the rules-based international order like threatening to annex part of a fellow NATO member "the easy way or the hard way." The White House is openly musing about buying the semi-autonomous Danish territory, while very pointedly refusing to rule out just taking it by force. So yes, we're now workshopping colonial conquest strategies against our own alliance partners.

Denmark and Greenland have responded with the radical position that their territory is not for sale and that military action would kind of, sort of, end NATO. Meanwhile, Trump insists leases and long-term defense agreements are for losers — "countries can't make nine-year deals or even 100-year deals," he says, they have to have ownership. This is extra adorable given the US already has a permanent base there and the right to bring as many troops as it wants, but sure, let's threaten war with Denmark because the landlord-tenant relationship offends Dear Leader's real-estate brain.

Trump claims, without evidence, that Greenland is "covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place," which is a bold statement considering it's mostly covered with, you know, ice. But never mind: he's decided he doesn't want Russia or China as a "neighbour in Greenland" and NATO needs to "understand that" — translation: toss out the UN Charter, sovereignty, and the "inviolability of borders" so Donald can cosplay 19th-century empire-builder with melting Arctic real estate and rare earth minerals. America's allies have lined up behind Denmark to remind him that only Denmark and Greenland get to decide Greenland's status, but he's fresh off using military force to snatch Venezuela's president, so the whole "we don't invade people to steal their stuff" norm is already on life support.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio now gets to fly to Copenhagen and explain why the US president is threatening to nuke the transatlantic alliance over an island that already hosts a US base under existing agreements. In other words: NATO is scrambling to reaffirm basic international law while Trump is busy reinventing Manifest Destiny: Polar Edition. But hey, as the ice caps melt and resource fever rises, at least we know Washington's Arctic strategy is: if it looks valuable, annex first, read UN Charter later.