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Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, a newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
Happy Friday — and for those of you in the path of a winter storm this weekend, good luck.
Today’s edition includes a report from our White House team on how Trump’s words and choices in Davos might permanently shape American alliances, as well as a profile of Vivek Ramaswamy — but a very different Vivek Ramaswamy from the one you might remember from the 2024 presidential race. Plus, Kristen Welker previews her conversation with historian and filmmaker Ken Burns on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”
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— Scott Bland
‘The damage has been done’: As Trump claims victory on Greenland, Europe loses trust
By Peter Nicholas and Peter Alexander
DAVOS, Switzerland — President Donald Trump flew home from an international conference here Thursday with a parting message: “It was an incredible time in Davos.”
For him, perhaps. For many of the United States’ European allies, it was a sign of global “rupture” that could reverberate for years.
Trump has appeared to back off his maximalist demand that the U.S. take ownership of Greenland, moving instead toward a deal that would allow the U.S. to place more troops, bases and military hardware on the island, a territory of Denmark.
In an interview with Fox Business, he said, “We’re getting everything we wanted — total security, total access to everything.”
Yet all of that was available to Trump from the start, without the drama that sent the NATO alliance barreling toward an internal crisis, a Danish official told NBC News on Thursday.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, told NBC News, “As an American, as an Alaskan, I was concerned that in this global forum, the relationships that have been built up with so many, perhaps, were fractured.”
Before Trump touched down in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned in a speech that geopolitical relations are undergoing a “rupture.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz echoed Carney’s point in his own speech in Davos on Thursday. He warned that the “international order of the past three decades — anchored in international law — has always been imperfect. Today, its very foundations have been shaken.”
How Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for Ohio governor returned him to the ‘real world’
By Henry J. Gomez
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — The Vivek Ramaswamy running for governor of Ohio in 2026 is different from the one you might remember running for president in 2024.
Back then, Ramaswamy positioned himself at the far-right flank of a Republican Party that was about to once again nominate Donald Trump. The son of legal immigrants, he proposed ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and condemned “woke” culture. He invoked the “great replacement theory” — the idea that white people are being marginalized by migrants and people of color. He was very online.
This time, Ramaswamy has Trump’s endorsement for a job that a Democrat hasn’t won in 20 years. He is also calling out bigotry and racism, while adopting a congenial tone more reminiscent of the Republican he hopes to succeed, term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine. Once a brash showman, Ramaswamy now presents himself to Ohioans as an open-minded statesman.
Most strikingly, Ramaswamy, known for his provocative tweets, recently swore off social media. He is attempting to reorient his political identity in “the real world” — a phrase he used no fewer than seven times in an interview with NBC News this month. He acknowledges, in a roundabout way, that he has changed.
“I think that when I ran for president, I was such an outside candidate that it was a constant game of momentum, and really it just had a different velocity to it,” Ramaswamy said.
If Ramaswamy’s Trumpier-than-Trump bid for president reflected his vision of the GOP then, as well as what he believed he could contribute to it, his different calibration for 2026 hints both at where he sees the party going and and how he sees himself at its center. His approach this time also suggests an understanding that, given his lock on the Trump endorsement and front-runner status in the primary, his time is better spent appealing to mainstream voters who are more impressed by maturity and competence than by hot takes and right-wing sound bites.
Whether Ramaswamy’s rebrand is sincere or cynical is something Ohio voters will decide. Early polls show a general election that is up for grabs. But Republicans enjoy profound structural advantages in a state where they very rarely lose statewide elections. Vice President JD Vance, a former senator from the state, has loaned his top political advisers to Ramaswamy, an old law school friend.
The view from history
Analysis by Kristen Welker
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
Historian Ken Burns evoked that important adage during my conversation with him for this Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” a fascinating discussion that stretched across hundreds of years of American history and some of our nation’s most perilous moments.
We spoke at length about Burns’ new PBS documentary series “The American Revolution,” what the war reveals about our country today, and the value of, in his words, looking to history to “digest the present.”
It’s easy to feel like many of these moments in our history are unprecedented, but Burns shared why he’s finding similarities between the present and many episodes in America’s past — including a Revolutionary War-era invasion of Canada aimed at making it the 14th state — that shed some important perspective on our challenges today.
“The rhymes to this moment are so particularly helpful because I think we can, as Chicken Little [said], ‘The sky is falling,’ you know, ‘everything is bad, we’re so divided.’ We are really divided, but we were way more divided then, way more divided during the Civil War, way more divided during the Vietnam period,” he said.
“I see that division as sort of a mile wide but an inch thick, and it takes a good story to remind people of the thing that we share in common.”
Burns noted the fragility of democracy across the world and said he thought the country’s founders “would not be surprised, at all, that somebody was seeking more authoritarian power.” And that they’d be “abjectly disappointed” that Congress “has abdicated so much of the power.”
But because he’s spent so much time studying our nation’s history, Burns remains hopeful.
“I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire, and people have various points of view — like, widely varying points of view — and we listen to each other and we talk to each other. And obviously things get frayed at times, but we have built in our system the mechanisms for repair and the restoration that I think are central to the response to this moment,” he said.
“We have a chance to sort of reconcile this, and why not take the path of reconciliation rather than the drama, the needless drama of further disunion and dissipation and violence?”
You can listen to more from the interview on Sunday’s episode of “Meet the Press,” along with exclusive interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff.
🗞️ Today’s other top stories
- 🌨️ The storm: Most of the U.S. is bracing for a severe winter storm, with emergencies declared in more than a dozen states. The extreme cold will test Texas’ power grid, and electric bills could jump for customers across the country as natural gas prices soar. Here’s how to prepare for the icy weekend →
- 💰 Foot the bill: The House sent a sprawling spending package to the Senate as seven Democrats broke ranks with colleagues furious about ICE’s aggressive operations in Minneapolis. Read more →
- 🚫 ‘ICE Out’: Organizers in Minneapolis are calling for no work, no school and no shopping, and some businesses said they would close their doors to protest immigration enforcement. Read more →
- ⚖️ In the courts: The city of Philadelphia sued the federal government over reports that slavery exhibits were being dismantled in the city’s historic district. Read more →
- 👀 Eyes on Iran: Trump said an American “armada” is heading toward Iran, as the death toll from the regime’s crackdown on nationwide unrest rose past at least 5,000, activists said. Read more →
- ➡️ ‘Catch of the Day’: Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills spoke out against “secret arrests,” saying residents have been left largely in the dark about ICE operations in the state. Read more →
- 🔄 ‘Mexico City’ policy: A Trump administration policy that restricts U.S. aid to foreign organizations that provide or promote abortions will include advocates of gender-related and DEI policies, Vance announced at the March for Life. Read more →
That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Scott Bland and Owen Auston-Babcock.
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