Who Approved This?
January 20, 2026
The president of the (arguably) most powerful country in the world recently sent this letter to Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway’s Prime Minister.
Source: https://x.com/nickschifrin/status/2013107018081489006
When a country leader sends a formal letter, what is the due process?
Possibility A
Multiple senior officials from multiple departments review it. State Department diplomats, NSC staff, legal counsel—people read this from different angles to check it grammatically, factually, diplomatically. And they all approved it.
Possibility B
There was no review process. Trump wrote the letter and just sent it without institutional oversight. No diplomatic vetting, just a MS Word spell-check and hit send.
Both possibilities are very alarming and they reveal different problems: A says there are guard rails to protect against things like this, and it failed miserably. B says there are no guard rails.
Either possibility leaves us with a terrifying final thought: in a functional system, both scenarios should be impossible.