Today Trump affirmed that he still plans mass deportations, and his plans involve him  using presidential emergency powers and “military assets.” Whether there is much more to these plans is hard to tell. Josh Kovensky at TPM writes,

For Trump, the lack of seriousness or specifics here is tangled up with the broader point: he wants “military assets,” whatever that may mean, in the United States. And, he wants you to know about it.

Policy shops staffed with officials from Trump’s first administration spent much of the once and future President’s time in the political wilderness drafting plans for domestic deployment of the military. One piece invoked War on Terror-era legal justifications to argue that the President could use active duty soldiers to conduct domestic immigration enforcement.

See Trump’s immigration crackdown is expected to start on Day 1 at Politico to appreciate the complexity of this issue. It’s going to be a mess.

A sign of the times — Sweden issues pamphlet telling citizens what to do if Russia attacks.

A Message from Vlad — This is from a few days ago. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.  Fred Kaplan at Slate writes,

First, Putin waited two days before congratulating Trump on his victory. One can imagine Trump receiving phone calls from kowtowing leaders the world over—Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, the chief of NATO, the European heads of state—all the while wondering about the man whom he’s admired publicly and privately for the past eight years: When is Vladimir going to call?

Then, in response to Trump’s claim that during their phone call, he asked—in some accounts, warned—Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine, a Kremlin spokesman denied that the two had spoken on the phone at all. (Putin issued his belated congratulations at a news conference.)

I don’t know who’s telling the truth, a practice for which neither man has a sterling reputation. But either way, in the next few weeks, when Putin orders 50,000 fresh recruits (including 10,000 imported North Korean soldiers) to go on the next rampage—ousting Ukrainian soldiers from the thin slice of Russian territory they hold, then retaking soil across the border in Donbas province—he can tell a complaining Trump that he doesn’t recall any such conversation. If Trump thinks Putin actually will refrain from stepping up attacks on Ukraine as a friendly favor … well, maybe our once-and-future president will learn a lesson about the limits of personal relations in the face of perceived national interests early in his second term.

The final twist of this saga came on Monday, when Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to Putin who was previously director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, made the following comment in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Kommersant:

The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.

This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare! The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.

No pressure or anything.