If you’re sitting in Copenhagen or Nuuk and looking for bespoke lessons from the trade war that President Donald Trump just declared on the world, here are two.

First, what this American president signals, he also carries out. Second, it does not matter whether the object of his fixation is obviously self-defeating or nonsensical; he’ll press on regardless, just because. Put both insights together, and you may conclude that when Trump says he’ll “get” Greenland from Denmark — “100%,” with or without force — he will try.

Among the latest indicators is the firing of Colonel Susannah Meyers. She commanded the Pituffik Space Base (formerly named Thule Air Base), an American outpost in Greenland that monitors the Arctic skies for incoming enemy missiles. At first blush, Meyers might seem to be just one more victim in the ongoing purge of national-security and military officials deemed disloyal to Trump or suspiciously woke. In this case, though, the Pentagon specified that actions “to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated.”

What could have been Meyers’ transgression? It occurred just after a visit to the base by JD Vance and his entourage, during which the vice president wantonly snubbed the host country. “Our message to Denmark is very simple,” Vance said. “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”

Danes and Greenlanders were understandably offended. So Meyers sent an internal email to all her staff, including the American service members and the Danish and Greenlandic contractors working with them, reassuring them that Vance’s “concerns” are “not reflective of Pituffik Space Base.” And now she’s out, on grounds of subversion.

Washington, meanwhile, is abuzz with other planning. The Office of Management and Budget has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis that balances such items as the expense of subsidizing Greenland’s 56,000 residents (so that Trump can outbid the block grants that Copenhagen sends to its semi-autonomous Arctic territory) against the value of extracting minerals from the frozen land. Will the Pentagon draw up invasion scenarios next?

To grasp the insanity of these developments, you need to appreciate the long and intimate relationship of the U.S. and Denmark in Greenland. Its military roots date to World War II, when the Third Reich overran Denmark, and the Danes discreetly invited the U.S. to defend Greenland. The Americans did just that, building bases from which they took out Nazi planes and submarines in the North Atlantic.

The cooperation continued and deepened during the Cold War, formalized in an agreement in 1951. It regulated the Thule Air Base, but also about a dozen others, with colorful names like Bluie West One and Bluie East Two. (“Bluie” was code for Greenland, and the directions and numbers spared American aviators from mispronouncing Inuit place names.) The U.S. and Denmark also have five other defense agreements, weaving together their logistics, spying and fighting prowess. A sixth was signed under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden; impressively, under the circumstances, the Danish parliament just ratified it last week.

The Danes, in short, usually like working with the Yanks, and have always been open to doing more together. Even so, both Copenhagen and Washington, like other Western capitals, concluded after the Cold War that a peace dividend was due. The Arctic seemed less threatening, so the Americans closed all their bases in Greenland except Thule/Pituffik.

More recently, that risk environment has changed again, and as dramatically as the climate, which causes the Arctic ice to melt and frees shipping lanes for commercial and military craft. Russia and China are now vying with the West for access and dominance in the region, in what resembles a new Great Game. Moscow and Beijing are even teaming up for joint patrols in the Arctic.

In response, NATO countries are boosting their defenses. Norway is fortifying its Svalbard archipelago, and Canada is modernizing and growing its forces in the region. Denmark, the U.S. and their partners are right in planning to do more.

Together, that is. That’s as it has been since World War II and as it should be. Canada’s new defense investments, for example, go into the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a bi-national operation between the U.S. and Canada in which each ally contributes its expertise.

That’s the spirit in which Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, now appeals to the U.S. “We do not appreciate the tone” in which Vance and Trump talk to Copenhagen, he says, because “this is not how you speak to close allies.” At the same time, he agrees that “the U.S. needs a greater military presence in Greenland” and offers that “we, Denmark and Greenland, are very much open to discussing this with you.”

Geopolitically and strategically, Greenland is as important as everyone including Trump thinks. For that reason, the West needs to do more to secure the territory and its waters and skies.

The good news is that the U.S. already has the time-tested friendships to do that. The bad news is that the American president doesn’t understand this.

Instead, he alienates America’s allies by bullying and threatening them, increasingly resembling the imperialist adversary in the Kremlin that NATO should jointly stare down. Trump has got Greenland, like his entire foreign policy, exactly upside down.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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President Donald Trump’s contemptuous view of the courts was bound to lead to bring the country to this: A federal judge writing, “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders.”

D.C. Federal Judge James Boasberg, in a nearly-50-page opinion, explains why he’s reaching for a nuclear option: potentially holding federal officials in contempt for their violations of his order instructing them to turn planes of El Salvador-bound detainees around after Trump’s recent invocation of an 18th-century wartime power to remove them.

It’s incredible that under three months into the administration, we seem headed for the constitutional courts-versus-executive showdown that democracy observers have long pointed to as the real, final stress test of our constitutional system by a president that has seemed hell-bent on destroying it.

Thankfully this judge, unlike Congress, is unwilling to allow his power to be usurped freely without a fight.

Any other party that had engaged with the court in the manner that the administration has would have faced contempt long ago. The second a private lawyer told a federal judge that his oral orders carried less weight somehow than written ones and that they would not answer questions about the very basic facts of the case, they would have been instructed to make arrangements for any kids or pets and come back to court with a toothbrush.

That this hasn’t happened is only because the courts have traditionally given some deference to the executive and generally assumed that it and its officials and lawyers are acting in good faith. It seems long past time to acknowledge that, unfortunately, this is not true.

This administration in particular has no interest in complying with the law or acting in ways that uphold traditional separation of powers, due process, reasoned governance, equal protection or any of the other deep-seated principles that despite imperfect application have long undergirded our system.

They’ve made this clear by all but daring the courts to do something about it, hoping to call a bluff. In the separate case of Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland father illegally sent to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador, the administration has gone from acknowledging that they made a mistake to insisting that they will not only not comply with Maryland Federal Judge Paula Xinis’ order to take steps to facilitate his return but will in fact detain and remove him again if he somehow ever finds his way back.

This is after the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the government had to comply with Xinis’ directives; now the White House press secretary and Trump himself are mocking the very idea that they would. The Justice Department fired a career lawyer for daring to candidly answer the judge’s questions as opposed to fully adopting the administration’s stance of aggressive pushback.

The federal judiciary, starting with trial judges like Boasberg and Xinis and up through the Supreme Court, must show that their authority is not a bluff, and that there will be consequences for flouting it.

— The New York Daily News

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On a recent Saturday morning, in an over-100-year-old former church near Stillwater, a ballet student glided across the hardwood floor before leaping upwards.

“Use your arms to help you in the glissade,” Laura Daugherty reminded the dancer, who is playing a villager in St. Croix Ballet’s upcoming performance of the ballet “Coppélia.”

Daugherty, the owner and director of St. Croix Ballet and herself an alumna of the school, paused the music and scrawled a note on her yellow pad of paper. This was the first rehearsal after spring break, she explained, and it was time to refine more technical details before the show opens next month.

Students at St. Croix Ballet, ranging from elementary to high school, will present “Coppélia” at 7 p.m. May 2; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. May 3; and 2 p.m. May 4 at the Stillwater Area High School Auditorium (5701 Stillwater Blvd., Oak Park Heights). All tickets are $24 and can be purchased online at www.stcroixballet.com.

“Coppélia,” a love-triangle romantic comedy that premiered in 1870, is based on stories by the 19th-century German author E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writing also served as the inspiration for the iconic ballet “The Nutcracker.”

Fairly uniquely for a youth ballet school, Daugherty said, St. Croix Ballet just presents full-length classic ballets, rather than recitals showcasing shorter or one-off pieces. The school’s major spring ballets rotate annually among “Coppélia,” “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the school also performs “The Nutcracker” during the holidays.

“Dancers grow up seeing how (a show) all fits together,” Daugherty said. “They start when they’re 6 or 7 and see the older dancers doing the harder roles, and they know, if they work hard, they’re going to develop and be able to progress. … So it helps them grow as dancers, with their technique and their artistry, and it also helps build a cool community.”

Students generally progress through the school’s curriculum in four divisions: Preparatory division, or pre-kindergarten and kindergarteners, focuses on creative movement. In Division I, elementary schoolers learn foundations. As students develop strength and skill, generally around upper middle school grades, they’ll begin dancing in pointe shoes in Division II, and by high school in Division III, they’re taking on more prominent roles in the school’s annual ballets.

Rehearsals for “Coppélia” began at the end of January, but the shows don’t just represent these several months of intense rehearsals, Daugherty said: What audiences see on stage is actually years of work.

“When kids do snowflakes in ‘The Nutcracker’ and it’s really clean and together, that’s four or five years of their training we’re seeing right there,” Daugherty said. “That’s not just a few months of rehearsal. It takes years of training and commitment. But I find that very rewarding and interesting, and I think they do too.”

Daugherty, who took over the school in late 2022, was one of founder Karla Sweeney’s first students when the school opened in the early 1990s, initially in Sweeney’s house. Daugherty trained at North Carolina School of the Arts and the University of Utah, then danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Colorado Ballet and returned to teach at St. Croix Ballet between 2012 and 2019.

Meanwhile, Sweeney moved the school in 1994 to its current home, a former Lutheran church officially in the city of Grant. She retired in 2012 amid a 13-year battle with aggressive breast cancer and ultimately passed away in 2015.

For much of the studio’s history, Sweeney, her successor Susan Hovey and now Daugherty have taught the Vaganova method, a classical Russian ballet technique. And, with a few adjustments, Daugherty maintains the traditional choreography in shows like “Coppélia.”

During that recent Saturday rehearsal, Daugherty was cross-referencing the dancers’ movements against a video of St. Croix Ballet’s 2022 performance of “Coppélia” — similar to what Daugherty’s own ballet teachers once did for her, albeit with a VCR and large television on a rolling cart, rather than on a slim laptop.

“This is very much how ballet works,” she said. “This is how ballet is passed on, from one generation to the next. I was taught to do (a certain movement) with my arm; now, I pass that to my students.”

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Today we’ve got children’s picture books that emphasize kindness and anti-violence, and a new collection about New York from a Twin Cities baker/poet.

Minnesota author and graphic designer Michael Hall launches his new book “Punch!: A Story About Kindness” April 26, 2025, at Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul. (Courtesy of the author)

“Punch!”: by Michael Hall (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins Publishers, $19.99)

Michael Hall (Courtesy of the author)

It’s always good news for the little ones and grown-ups when there’s a new picture book from nationally known author and graphic artist Hall. Subtitled “A Story About Kindness,” this one tells the story of Badger, who was looking for trouble. And he found it. “Badger tripped Frog/shoved Moose/kicked Elephant/and poked Bear with a shovel.” So Bear makes a three-part plan to teach Badger a lesson. In the end, we realize why Bear is so mean. Key words in big, bold colorful type are “Slug! Smack!”

Badger and all the animals in the story are blocky-bodied and big-eyed as are most of Hall’s funny characters in his previous books, including “Red: A Crayon’s Story,” “Perfect Square,” ‘It’s An Orange Aardvark,” and his 2015 debut, “My Heart Is Like a Zoo,” winner of a Minnesota Book Award.

Hall explains the new book this way: “When I was collecting homophones for my book ‘Cat Tale,’ I noticed an alarming number of them included synonyms for the word ‘hit.’ And I realized that if you were to say someone ‘socked, belted, cuffed, and crowned’ another person, you could mean either that they beat them up or got them dressed. This wordplay eventually led me to write ‘Punch!’, about the power of forgiveness and compassion over the impulse to seek revenge.”

Hall will launch his book, which has received two starred reviews, at 10:30 a.m. Saturday to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day at Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul. At 1 p.m. Drew Brockingham will be at the store to discuss “Kitty Camp,” latest in his Catstronauts graphic novel series.

(Courtesy of Herald Press)

A more serious picture book is “Sparking Peace,” which looks at gun violence in a way children will understand with help from adults. Written by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky and Hannah Roe Martin, illustrated in bold colors by Gabhor Utomo, the story is about a boy who is taken by his father to a forge where the blacksmith heats a piece of metal that an older woman is pounding out in fury into something new: “As the blacksmith works/I see the faces of/people around me./They are sad./Some are crying./The blacksmith invites them/to take the hammer/and swing.” The piece of metal, once a gun barrel, becomes “…a garden tool/A shovel./Something that doesn’t/break hearts.”

This might not make sense to children of picture book age since they are too young to understand “swords into plowshares” (which is not explicitly in the book). But the authors say they are trying to find a way to begin discussions with children about gun violence.

“Sparking Peace” is published by Herald Press in cooperation with RAWtools Inc., a Colorado-based organization that turns guns into garden tools through blacksmithing.

(Courtesy of Paris Morning Publications)

“We Talked About New York”: by Klecko (Paris Morning Publications, $20)

To be a successful poet

You only have to follow two rules

# 1- Observe

# 2 –Love

it’s really that simple

if you are a poet

if you follow these rules

The fish will jump into the boat — from “We Talked About New York”

Danny Klecko (Courtesy of Danny Klecko)

“I’ve conquered New York,” Danny Klecko modestly says of his new collection about the sounds and sights of the Big Apple that inspired his 16th book, as well as having his poetry published seven times in the New York Times Metropolitan Diary feature. Add his public interview last year with New York-based actor Isabella Rossellini and you’ve got a book about a tall, multi-tattooed guy from Minnesota whose poems were inspired by E.B. White’s “Here Is New York.”

These poems, told in Klecko”s signature outsider-observing mode, range in topic from kids playing video games on the D-Line subway, his experience reading poems aloud in the rain in Central Park (“nobody paid attention”), to a visit to the Algonquin Hotel, home of the famous writers Round Table, as well as drinking with his entourage in a jazz club.

Instead of writing long poems, Klecko divides them into three and four short sections including Strawberry Fields, Coney Island and Kettle of Fish.

Klecko claims to “talk to everyone,” even (or especially) those who irritate him. He writes about conversing with a woman drummer and a taxi driver who now considers Klecko his brother. But he’s also a listener, as he shows in a poem about a woman with an umbrella who sits with a man having a bad day.

And then there’s Rossellini, who Klecko interviewed on-stage last year during Home For Life Animal Sanctuary’s gala. In 11 short poems he recalls that night and Rossellini’s graciousness, including her familiarity with his skills as a master bread maker: “She never mentioned herself/She never mentioned our show/Instead, she said with an accent/I won’t try to replicate/Good evening Mr. Klecko/What shall we discuss/Your poems/Or your sourdough starter?”

Klecko will launch his book at 4 p.m. April 27 at Black Forest Inn, 1 E. 26th St.,  Mpls., with guest poet Donna Isaac and poet/essayist Erica Christ. Klecko, who left St. Paul to live in Minneapolis (which he refers to as Babylon), is as much showman as poet. He is proud to say of his audiences: “At first they are stunned… because there is nobody like Klecko.”

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