"Trump boasts in ... the strategy that, at last, ‘America is strong and respected again”. The problem is that this obviously isn’t true. Countries ... treat it like an angry, incoherent drunk with a bazooka. You say whatever you hope might calm them down, but you certainly don’t respect them."

The CBS investigation portrays a modern concentration camp, similar to the Soviet GULAG (like CECOT, an acronym): sadistic guards, 24 hour lighting, isolation cells. Americans once opposed this inhumane system. The Trump administration sent innocent people there to suffer.

Nu skal jeg ikke lade som om, at jeg ved en masse om historie, men jeg er temmelig sikker på, at USA ikke havde både på Grønland for 300 år siden

He’s gilded the entire White House, slapped his name on both the Kennedy Center and Institute for Peace, installed a new Trump Gold Card, and now proposing a new “Trump class” of naval vessels. I know we keep saying this is insane but this is seriously fucking insane.

Wouldn't it be nice to sit back and wait for the Russian economy to implode. But are we ready for the non-trivial possibility that, choosing between collapse and massive escalation Putin would choose to escalate. No, this is not an argument for appeasing Putin, it's an argument for preparing for war

On the bright side, the person in charge of the economy is able to tell an elephant from a giraffe

"Well, I think right now, we are in the midst of, to put it bluntly, destroying every valuable part of the U.S. economic engine" Great interview with Daron Acemoglu in @foreignaffairs.com

I see the imminent invasion of Venezuela is no longer enough to distract from the fact that they have redacted all the mentions of Trump in the Epstein files. Greenland is back on the agenda.

Europe's fate is in the hands of Trump's son-in-law and a billionaire real estate investor and best friend of Trump if it doesn't step up

US intelligence says Putin still aims to capture all of Ukraine and reclaim former Soviet territories in Europe, six sources told Reuters. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

There is still hope for the US

2026 will likely be another bad year for global democracy. But on the bright side, it also looks like it will be a terrible year for Viktor Orban, who is more unpopular than ever in Hungary and is facing an election, and Donald Trump, who is losing the plot.

As someone who doubted that Putin would invade until a week before he did because he simply did not allot enough troops to achieve a stable occupation, the core lesson from 2022 is that even if a course of action is strategically stupid doesn't mean that a solipsistically deluded leader won't do it

PM Tusk: Now we have a simple choice. Either money today or blood tomorrow. And I am not talking about #Ukraine only, I am talking about Europe. And this is our decision to make. And only ours. I think all European leaders have to finally rise to this occasion. So this is all that I can say.

Interested in pursuing a career in climate governance, policy or politics research? Do you have a relevant PhD degree in political science, public administration or international relations? Then you should check out this opportunity! www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Min frygt som underviser på universitetet er, at de studerende bruger LLMs med det ene formål at bestå opgaverne og derfor ikke tilegner sig de analytiske og faglige egenskaber, der kræves på arbejdsmarkedet og kun fås ved hårdt arbejde. De studerende tror, at de snyder os, men de snyder sig selv.

"Finally, although they do not name any states that might threaten America, the authors do focus on one enemy ideology. It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy."

Being in a simulation is bad enough, but to be constantly remind of it is abusive

Must read piece from @gregsargent.bsky.social at @newrepublic.com

These Indiana Republicans are civic heroes. Shocking and inspiring to see after the collapse of resistance to illiberalism among so many of their counterparts over the last decade.

This should be the biggest story in the country right now. The sitting US President was extorting state lawmakers from his own party by threatening to withhold public money if they didn’t gerrymander for him. I don’t know how else to say it…

Så kan de jo give de penge vi sparer til russisk undervisning, så vi er bedre forberedt, når det bliver nødvendigt

Trump’s foreign policy isn’t “noninterventionism,” it is a kind of neo neo conservatism devoted to imposing authoritarian ethnonationalism abroad instead of democracy (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Picture a team of medical professionals observing him taking his dementia tests, cheering when he can tell the difference between a giraffe and an elephant, nodding in approval when he shows off his FIFA participation medal. Can you picture it? This is life in the West Wing.

Happy to announce that I have received an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator grant for the project "Authoritarian Threats to Scientific Knowledge". AutoKnow will study how authoritarian regimes and politics affect scientific progress, contents and topics in different fields. www.sv.uio.no/isv/english/...

Having your friends and allies buying up critical media outlets to get control over them is classical democratic backsliding. Trump is creating a propaganda state.

From October 2025 - Paths to Power: A New Dataset on the Social Profile of Governments - https://cup.org/47i6oKQ - @jacobnyrup.bsky.social, @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social & Ina Lyftingsmo Kristiansen #OpenAccess

Trump sucks at making peace deals

The fault line in international politics is not about the left versus the right or the West versus the rest. It is about whether political systems should be able to hold rich, authoritarian men accountable and curtail their power. That is why Trump, Putin, Musk, Orban and so on are on the same side

Legislative changes to Kyrgyzstan’s first-past-the-post system will make it harder for rivals to form a base from which to challenge Sadyr Japarov at the next presidential election in 2027

Would have thought he’d be pro-EU then.

“In Ukraine, the state itself is investigating the government, the cabinet, even the president’s closest advisers. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Kash Patel’s FBI investigating anyone in Trump’s White House.”

🚨Jobs!🚨 3-year PostDoc positions (aka Research Officers) at @lsegovernment.bsky.social to work with me on the local consequences of border change. Please reach out for questions and apply by Jan 4th to join the team and department: I’d love to hear from you! Job ad: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

The US is governed by a cult

Har jeg forstået det ret: USAs plan for Europa er at opløse EU og indsætte korrupte og autoritære Orban kloner som iværksætter en etnisk udrensning?

The headline, the main takeaway from a European viewpoint is this: The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a sppech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.

Remember: Trump or Russian propagandists might say otherwise, but Putin is not winning, and the Ukrainians are not losing.

Political communication research overwhelmingly relies on text. But parliamentary speech is multimodal! In our new @psrm.bsky.social article, Mathias Rask and I show that legislators also signal partisan conflict nonverbally— through changes in vocal pitch during floor speeches. 🧵 1/11 #polisky

I have a feeling that we are going from the stupid and scary phase of the Trump presidency to the really stupid and really scare phase of the Trump presidency

Oh no. My predictive model shows that all papers in polisci will be survey experiments by 2070

Which countries have the most representative governments? You guessed it; the Scandinavian countries. The graph shows the share in government in the given category minus the share in the population (from 2000-2021). Joint work with @peterla.bsky.social.

No wonder he is tired after posting more than 160 times on Truth Social the night before

there is no legitimate definition of the term "democracy" under which maps like these are "democratic." this level of stovepiping is banana republic shit. this is effectively no different from stuffing a ballot box

A White House website with a dedicated Lügenpresse tab marks a pretty bleak moment in US history.

Late stage kakistocracy. Future historians are going to spend years debating whether the key driver was honest stupidity vs. cynical corruption. My working hypothesis: why can't it be both?

1/ The Wall Street Journal reports that the main focus of the US-Russia peace talks is to get commercial advantage for American companies, and personal benefits for individuals linked to the Trump Administration. European officials are said to be shocked by the plans. ⬇️

This is murder. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Russia does not want peace. They want to control Ukraine, then other European countries. This helps them achieve that goal.

Det bliver spændende om præsidenten, der i sidste uge truede sine politiske modstandere med dødsstraf, er ham, der kan stoppe den politiske vold.