I have often spoken about how much I admire the British weekly publication, “The Economist.” Well, I’m going to do it again. The current one arrived in Monday’s mail and it has on the cover a picture of a shirtless Donald Trump riding a polar bear. In its top-of-the-page list of this issue’s features, the first is “The meaning of Minneapolis.” As a follower of American and European politics and a one-time Minnesotan, who was there just over a month ago, I had to read this one.

Actually to get a full idea of this you also need to read the longer and deeper articles, “Get On With Phase II” and “Ice and Heat,” but start with the lead(and relatively short)”America’s Endangered Alliances” which will give you the basic idea. They begin with the threats (military included)on Greenland, then Trump’s apparent backing off. They point out that a serious lesson to be drawn from this is that Trump will yield to pressure, but will not reverse or abandon his goals. He will put things off and think about different ways of accomplishing them. He will certainly not give up right away, maybe not at all.

European leaders greeted his Greenland ambitions, particularly the reckless and foolish threat to use military force, with negative attitudes ranging from fairly soft spoken dissent to defiance. Several nations arranged to send at least token military forces to Greenland. This was enough, The Economist concludes. In order to “get America’s president to retreat, you have to convince him that you will impose a price on him,” in this case serious trade restrictions. It worked.

The “The Economist” also says that this is about the end of the good news from the Davos conference. He clearly still intends to have some kind of ownership or at least recognized domination of Greenland and he showed “an ominous contempt for Europe and for the value of America to the transatlantic alliance as it works today.”

They go on with some pessimistic ideas about the future of US-European relations which I will not go into, at least not right now. Further into the publication we get a short article “ICE in a cold climate,” a title I don’t think I need to explain. They take a skeptical, in fact fairly critical view of the Trump Administration and MN. But their article went to press before the latest, which we began to hear about yesterday and is quite apparent today. And it relates to the article on Trump and the Europeans.

Yesterday Trump had phone conversations with both MN Gov Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Frey. Each of these conversations seems to have been cordial enough and maybe successful in offering an “off ramp” to get leaders out of a mess and a several Hundred Thousand people(Minneapolis-St Paul is the 15th–I think— largest urban area in the US)back into fairly normal lives.

This came after several things happened which seem to have calmed Trump’s hostility(or expression if it , anyway) toward MN and especially Minneapolis and made him tread more softly. As with Greenland things seemed on the point of serious conflict, when suddenly the President turned more reasonable(or maybe “more reasonable sounding” would be more accurate). And this harks back to the statement “The Economist” made about Trump and Greenland. Trump will back down if presented with enough pressure and resistance and with a real possibility he will feel consequences if he doesn’t.

This is what sees to have happened. The obstreperous and supremely irritating Gregory Bovino, head of the Border Patrol contingent in Minneapolis has been pulled off the case and re-assigned. Trump is being friendly with but still keeping his distance from Kristi Noem and some of the other more ardent proponets of going after protesters in a serious, perhaps repressive, way.

Trump was faced with a rising nationwide shout of resistance from people, many of them Trump voters, who were disgusted by the whole ICE thing and particularly the violence in MN And for the first time in his Presidency, including both the first one and this one, there were serious and possibly irreparable cracks appearing in the Republican Party and the Trump coalition. Several Republican members of Congress, including a number of Senators were speaking critically of the Administration. The leading candidate for the MN Republican gubernatorial nomination, Chris Mandel, dropped out with a news conference during which he said he could no longer support the Administration’s policies in dealing with MN. He did not overtly threaten to leave the party, but he left no doubt of his current lack of affection for it.

So, the waters of dissent were rising, allies were deserting, the people, in MN and the rest of the USA were losing patience with the ICE violence and overall everything looked as if it were heading for a Trumpian disaster. And what happened? Trump backed down, just as he did with Greenland. In neither case did he back all the way. We have already seen that the Greenland “deal”(if there is one)is tentatative and not clearly understood. With MN it seems so far to be more a lowering of voices and an agreement to engage in more or less non-hostile conversations, at least for awhile.

But it is impossible to miss the similarity in the two situations. They may turn out wildly different from each other,. There may be a different configuration of winners and losers(though everyone is a winner if they avoid invading Greenland–as I think they will–and stop the hysterical mistreatment of people on the streets of Minneapolis. I may be willing to praise Trump slightly–if all of this works.