As I write this on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 assault on the Capitol — the day our democracy nearly came undone — Donald Trump is showing the lesson he learned from that awful day.
It’s that he can get away with anything. I mean, he got re-elected despite January 6, didn’t he? Historians will be puzzling over that one for centuries.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, gets right to the point, arguing that January 6 marked the start of what he calls Trump’s moral equivalent to a “gangster state.”
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Who — in the immediate aftermath of Venezuela — would even bother to argue the point anymore?
The world, other than maybe China and Russia, is basically trembling at his feet. And who can blame them?
The way it looks is that the U.S. gets a slice, Russia gets a slice (say, in Ukraine) and China gets a slice (like, maybe, Taiwan). And everyone else just gets a front-row seat to the destruction.
The assault on Venezuela was an act of war, and not a police action, any more than the war in Korea was a police action. You call something a police action so that you don’t have to get Congressional approval to go to war. Trump never tried for Congressional approval. He never even told Congress about it. Why would he?
Trump either took out Nicolás Maduro, who clearly was a repressive dictator, for the oil — I mean, Trump said that was the reason — or he took out Maduro because he thought the whole invasion thing would look good on TV. Or, I worry, he took out Maduro as just one giant step backward toward the original Gilded-Age, gunboat-diplomacy era of U.S. imperialism, with Trump as its leader and with his face on Mount Rushmore as the goal.
Walk with Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick? How about swimming with the giant wartime armada Trump sent to the Caribbean?
What do you think this means to every Latin American country — the idea that Trump says he’s changing the Monroe Doctrine to the Donroe Doctrine, like no doctrine anyone has ever seen? The White House recently released its National Security Strategy report, saying, for all to see, that Latin America is in our “sphere of influence.”
Trump claims that Venezuela stole our oil and that he wants it back. The history — and the law — don’t quite support that claim. It was never our oil. It was never our land. A century ago, a Venezuelan dictator gave oil concessions to three major companies, who controlled 98% of Venezuelan oil production.
Ever since, Venezuela has been walking back those concessions, just as oil-producing countries around the world have been nationalizing their oil industry. Oil was nationalized in Venezuela in the mid-1970s. Do you remember being upset about it? Do you even remember it even happening?
We thought — or some thought, anyway — MAGA was supposed to be about America First, peace not war. But MAGA world won’t be upset about Trump’s change of heart. MAGA is a cult — not an ideology, more like a national test of cognitive dissonance. Trump is the cult leader. Whatever he does must be right and consistent, even if it’s the opposite of what he said, uh, two minutes earlier.
So now, Trump is talking about Columbia and says that Cuba is ready to fall. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is talking about Cuban regime change, even suggesting the United States might offer a shove.
And then there’s the Panama Canal. The betting markets have jumped to nearly 40% on the chances of Trump taking back the canal — a longtime goal of his. A newer policy goal, of course, is to turn Gaza into an Arab-free resort area, with slot machines ringing out in place of the evening prayer.
But I think the biggest concern on the world stage — aside from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — might be Greenland. As Trump was saying the United States runs Venezuela, his evil aide, Stephen Miller, was banging the drum again to take Greenland. No one, Miller said, could even dream of stopping the world’s most powerful military, even though I’m old enough to remember when our military was said to be in shambles. You think those guys who took out Maduro had just signed up for Trump/Hegseth’s no-fatties Army?
So what if taking over Greenland would essentially destroy NATO? You think Trump cares about NATO? But since the threat to take Greenland didn’t go over so well, Trump is now saying that he wants to buy Greenland. One problem: Greenland is not for sale. Of course, Trump might make an offer that nobody could refuse.
I don’t know why Trump is doing exactly what he’s doing. But there are intelligent guesses out there. Many have cited his, uh, reading of the autocratic playbook and its lesson that a military victory makes people forget, let’s say, a struggling economy and the fact that your approval rating is 12 points underwater.
This way glory — as, I don’t know, Napoleon might have said. Or was it Pete Hegseth?
The one thing we know is that Trump’s war against Venezuelan narco-terrorism was entirely phony, just as the phrase narco-terrorism is phony. In today’s world, you call your enemies terrorists because nobody likes terrorists. We learned how phony it was after Trump’s pardoning of the Honduran dictator, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of running a narco-state for 30 years, sending 400 tons of cocaine to the United States.
Why did Trump pardon him? Well, Trump said it was because Hernandez had been targeted by the Biden administration, just as he claimed the Bidens — you guessed it — targeted him. I’ll let you guess who was in charge when the Justice Department was investigating Hernandez’s crimes. Here goes: The investigation began in the Obama administration and then extended all the way through the first Trump administration.
And we can assume that Trump was blowing up Venezuela’s alleged drug-running boats — which clearly weren’t taking fentanyl to the U.S. because Venezuela doesn’t make fentanyl — as just a preview of more illegal acts to come.
We also know it wasn’t about democracy. Give Trump this much credit: He never said it was about democracy or human rights. Did he actually tell the truth for once?
One of the many twists and turns in the Venezuela saga is that Trump turned his back on Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan resistance. He said Machado didn’t have sufficient “respect” from Venezuelans to run the country. I wonder, as others have, whether she’d be president of Venezuela today if she had turned down Trump’s coveted Nobel.
Instead, Trump left the rest of the Maduro regime in place — for as long as they do what Trump says, which includes giving the U.S. “total access” to Venezuela’s huge oil reserves.
“This is the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’” Miguel Tinker Salas, a Venezuelan American historian at Pomona College, said on a podcast Saturday.
And so it is.
Machado continues to suck up to Trump, despite what he says about her, in the hope that he’ll allow new elections in Venezuela soon, which could bring the country something closer to a democratic state.
Trump, who says he runs the country, adds there won’t be elections soon, presumably not before U.S. oil companies can start pumping oil again. Some oil experts say that could take years, and that’s if the petro companies are actually willing to risk sending their personnel to Venezuela without direct military support.
Meanwhile, the new boss, Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice-president, is looking a lot like the old boss. On Tuesday, as many as 14 foreign journalists were arrested in Venezuela, though they were apparently later released. Authorities moved against ordinary citizens as ordered in a decree, published Monday, saying that Venezuelan police can arrest anyone “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America.” The Washington Post says that armed gangs — apparently not mentioned in the decree — are roaming the country.
We don’t know if this is so much bluster from the new regime, letting citizens know that whatever Trump says, they’re still the ones Venezuela’s people have to deal with on a daily basis. The decree also suspended the right to protest, which will likely shut down the anti-Maduro demonstrations, which seem to have lasted, at most, two days.
What does Rubio, whom they’re calling the Venezuela Viceroy, do now?
Should he send in the troops to let Venezuelans know that the U.S. has their interests at heart? Or is it just a wink-wink relationship between Rubio and Rodríguez, in which she can say what she wants so long as she does what Trump/Rubio want?
There’s no point in making predictions this soon about anything in Venezuela. But Trump claims that it’s nothing like Iraq, even though it seems as if it could very well turn into another Iraq.
But I can make a prediction about Trump and the Trumpian Restoration. Aside from his war on internal enemies, aside from sending in the troops to Democratic cities, aside from his jackbooted ICE thugs terrorizing those who talk Spanish or look Latino, aside from his attack on courts, aside from his destruction of USAID, aside from his refusal to keep the subsidies on Obamacare, Trump wants history to regard him as he regards himself — as a man of consequence.
The truth is, he is a man of consequence.
Unfortunately, the consequences are like nothing we’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean that in a good way. What I’m saying is, even as he’s tearing up democratic norms in the United States, he’s now keen on destroying geopolitical norms.
And I don’t know who is going to stop him.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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