The Washington Post reports that their poll shows a split, 40 approve, 42 disapprove, with the usual partisan divide.
This is interesting:
Looking forward, The Post poll finds more Americans oppose than support the U.S. taking control of Venezuela and choosing a new government for the country, with a significant 30 percent saying they are unsure. Trump has said the United States will “run the country” for an unspecified period.
Normally there would be more Republicans in favor but they’ve been trained in phony MAGA speak about “forever wars” so they don’t yet know what to say.
An overwhelming majority of Americans say the Venezuelan people should decide the leadership of the country, while only 6 percent say the U.S. should do so.
There’s bipartisan agreement on this question, with upward of 9 in 10 Republicans, Democrats and independents saying Venezuelans should choose their leaders.
Trump will just mouth some BS to appease the Republicans but I don’t know if his oily nation building will go over with anyone else. These splendid little wars are going to be costly, possibly in blood as well as treasure and I’m not sure how much he can fake that.
It’s too early to know exactly how this is really going over. People have been on holiday and are just getting back to work. We’ll have to check back in a couple of weeks. But I suspect this isn’t going to boost his popularity. This war is unnecessary and confounding to most Americans who see the country as being mired in domestic problems. But we’ll have to see.
I can’t say I’m surprised to see the Republican support despite all the pretenses about isolationism. They love war. It’s one of the reasons they’re Republicans.
Update: For any of the 90% who think the Venezuelan people should decide their future, don’t get your hopes for that happening any time soon. Trump has his own priorities:
Reporter: Are you going to demand that Delcy Rodriguez allow opposition figures to return or free any political prisoners?
“Look at the size of this. It’s massive,” said Trump.
Okay, I missed it. Somewhere Donald Trump, the former professional wrestling owner, crossed over from theatrical bluster and fake punches to the real thing. The thuggish ICE raids and federal troops in the streets of Los Angeles last year should have been a strong clue. Now Trump the Somnolent has attacked Venezuela, deposed and captured its awful leader, and claims the U.S. is running the country.
“Under what legal authority?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked SecState Marco Rubio. Rubio filibustered and would not answer.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Trump said the US is going to 'run Venezuela.' Under what legal authority?
RUBIO: We want a better future for the people of Venezuela
STEPHANOPOULOS: I'll ask again — what is the legal authority?
Don’t forget Trump’s interest in Greenland seen in this tidbit from The Atlantic:
Trump told [Michael] Scherer that Greenland had not been on his mind when he’d been ousting Maduro—but he then proceeded to offer real-time foreign-policy musings on that very topic, in one of his characteristic verbal weaves. “You know, I wasn’t referring to Greenland at that time, but we do need Greenland, absolutely,” Trump said. “And we need it for defense. You know, it’s surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships. We need Greenland.” (Katie Miller, the wife of the top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, posted an image on social media on Saturday of Greenland covered by an American flag, with the caption: “SOON.” And Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, urged Washington yesterday to end its threats, which she said make “absolutely no sense.”)
⚡️🇩🇰🇺🇸JUST IN: Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in a statement responding to Trump regarding Greenland:
"I have to say this very directly to the United States: It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the need for the United States to take over Greenland.
The U.S. annexing Greenland makes “absolutely no sense” except to a man who’s obsessed with size and doesn’t understand the Mercator projection. Trump wants to make the U.S. a hemispheric hegemon. Trump has gone to Jack D. Ripper land and Republicans controlling Congress lack the balls stop him and his gang of vandals.
The U.S. already has “wide access to Greenland” for military purposes via NATO, Frederiksen noted. The New York Times adds:
A number of Denmark’s European neighbors, as well as the European Union, repeated their longstanding support for the country’s territorial integrity.
“We would recall that Greenland is an ally to the U.S. and is also covered by the NATO alliance, and that is a big, big difference” from the situation in Venezuela, Paula Pinho, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said at a news conference on Monday.
Greenland is not nearly as large as it looks on a flat map.
But Trump “has always been drunk on fantasies of power. His entire rhetorical repertoire consists of frantic boasts and foolish words,” observes The Bulwark. His boasts that U.S. oil companies will rush into Venezuela and reap huge profits smacks of Cloud Cuckoo Land:
“We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.
Trump lacked the WWE pyrotechnics, but the over-the-top bluster is the same.
The companies will pay for investments in Venezuela themselves, Trump claimed. They’ll be reimbursed. Wait, who, us? snarks The Bulwark.
Trump: "We're going to rebuild the oil infrastructure…that will be paid by the oil companies directly. They will be reimbursed for what they're doing…"
Trump states that "we're going to make Venezuela great again." I am not being facetious here either
“I don’t see anything that gives me the sense that this is a ripe opportunity,” Landon Derentz, an energy analyst at the Atlantic Council tells Politico.
Over my career, I was involved in major chemical plant engineer/design/construct work (though not oil refining). The lead times for assessment, design, procurement, contracting and construction will far exceed Trump’s term.
No U.S. oil executive will be committing billions to replacing decrepit refining infrastructure overseas based on Trumpish bullshitting. He was going to end the Ukraine war overnight, too, as you recall.
Trump will be long dead before any investment pays off. I’d stall until that happens and then see what comes next. There are so many IFs in the Politico piece, I can’t see an upside to rushing in to validate Trump’s boasting. The oil titans are not that stupid.
But Trump is. It is up to us to stop him, The Bulwark urges:
Trump is our president. He’s acting in our name. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to undo all the dangerous mistakes he’s already made. And we won’t be able to stop him from continuing to indulge in frantic boasts. But an awful lot depends on whether we can limit the damage that he seeks to bring about over the next three years, and whether we can at least hold out hope of a responsible road ahead.
The danger that “Trump’s vanity and grandiosity will lead him to try to seize Greenland is real.” The Danes think so too.
What was immediately a joke is no longer. The Atlantic lays out what the U.S. attack on Venezuela means for U.S. foreign policy, at least for those on Donald Trump’s “naughty” list (gift link):
In Marco Rubio’s telling, the stunning events in Venezuela on Saturday illustrate an essential truth—possibly the essential truth—about Donald Trump’s presidency: Global leaders cross him at their peril. “I don’t understand yet how they haven’t figured this out,” Trump’s secretary of state told reporters at Mar-a-Lago just hours after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
World leaders could be forgiven for not understanding the simplicity of the Trump Doctrine, especially those who assume that the world’s dominant superpower still possesses complicated mechanisms for the manufacture of foreign-policy strategies. The country that gave the world the Truman Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine as well as Trump’s apparent favorite, the Monroe Doctrine, now embraces the plainest and most ostentatiously bellicose of national-security policies: Fuck around and find out. Trump’s own Pentagon chief, the self-styled (until Congress approves the title change) secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, said as much when he told the nation that Maduro “effed around, and he found out.”
That’s when Hegseth wasn’t snapping towels with the boys in a Pentagon shower room.
If the Fuck Around and Find Out Doctrine doesn’t sound like a concept for a stable and predictable foreign policy—one purpose of Washington’s doctrine-articulation complex—then maybe you can sympathize with those who Rubio says are still struggling to get it. Some experts reject the idea that something this crude even earns the right to be called a doctrine. As John Bolton, currently a Trump nemesis but once one of his first-term national-security advisers, told us, “There is no Trump Doctrine: No matter what he does, there is no grand conceptual framework; it’s whatever suits him at the moment.” Kori Schake, the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned us that “we shouldn’t ennoble Trump policy by saying there’s a doctrine.”
Many on the left are still attempting to understand the U.S. action against Venezuela in rational, geopolitical terms. A lengthy post at Renegade Resources posits: The Venezuelan Oil Narative [sic] is PURE THEATRE. Our true goal is to eliminate threats in Venezuela posed by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian activities in our hemisphere.
Tracy Shuchart argues:
The Pentagon approved this operation because Venezuela presented a convergence of strategic threats from all three major US adversaries that exceeded the threshold for military action, with each adversary establishing operational presence that created compounding strategic vulnerabilities.
Read the detailed analysis for why this makes sense: strategic minerals exploited by China, Iranian drone manufacturing, and Russian weapons and training.
This convergence transformed Venezuela from a problematic narco-state into a strategic threat that exceeded the Pentagon’s tolerance threshold. Critical minerals are the foundation of modern weapons systems in the same way that oil access was foundation of 20th century military operations. Chinese monopolization of processing creates supply chain vulnerability that sanctions and market mechanisms cannot resolve, equivalent to hostile control of Persian Gulf chokepoints. Chinese operational control at extraction sites in the Western Hemisphere represents strategic encirclement. Iranian drone manufacturing 1,200 miles from Miami represents unacceptable adversary power projection. Russian military integration provides intelligence capabilities and force projection platform.
The Renegade Resources post is a sobering read and news to me. Not my area. I do not preclude the possibility that someone from Hegseth’s office came across Pentagon planning for addressing these strategic threats. Perhaps they took it to Hegseth who eagerly said, “Hey, let’s do that” and presented the idea to Trump.
Except. Trump 2.0 has lobotomized any government that could pull off any vaguely Mission Impossible strategery. I see no one in Trump’s inner circle (or left in the Pentagon) who possesses that depth of strategic understanding in the Renegade Resources post. As for Trump, his understanding of the world arrested its development in the late 1970s or early ’80s. Trump is the very image of a man who thinks with his dick. So is Hegseth.
So I’m still skeptical that we aren’t intelligent people pursuing our rationalist need to impose logic on Trumpish chaos. And perhaps to find it where it doesn’t exist.
Trump’s natural instinct is to pitch Venezuela as a rich source of oil, whatever strategic objectives may have been born deep in the Pentagon before he regained office. “Trump talks about oil because voters understand oil and the narrative has been established since Iraq,” writes Shuchart. The oil narrative may be theater, but it’s also the kind of simple bedtime story Trump reads to himself, and the only way he’s capable of understanding it. Others in his orbit, like Rubio (he’d like to topple the government in Cuba), have their own agendas that don’t involve oil.
Trump 2.0 is grifter’s all the way down, led at the top by Trump’s avarice, grievances, and his feral instinct for self-preservation. And by Miller’s raging xenophobia. And Trump is still desperate to join an international autocrats club that wouldn’t have an idiot like him as a member. Maybe a little muscular showing out will get him past the membership committee.
I do love this “Daily Wire” host’s inane disclaimer that he’s “as non-interventionist as anyone can possibly be.” And “International law is fake and gay” is a side splitter. What a comedian.
My only question is why these American heroes have such a small vision. It’s not the 1800s. so why are we restrained to just the Western Hemisphere? We have the most nuclear weapons and the biggest military. Why not take whatever we want on the whole planet? Who are these foreigners to tell us no?
I say that as a reflexive non-interventionist, of course.
If people actually watched the press conference yesterday what they saw was downright terrifying. As James Fallows wrote:
Trump himself looked and sounded very bad. He slurred and slumped more than usual. His eyes fluttered many times toward seeming shut. He had trouble working his way through big words in the written script. His off-script riffs were from a very small span of his standard repertoire. (“We’re a respected country again, like never before,” etc.) Yes, he had probably been up all night. But even for him, he looked bad.
When answering one of the many policy questions that Trump shunted to him, Marco Rubio found himself saying, “It’s a country run by incompetent, senile men.” He was talking about Cuba. But even as the words came from his mouth, with Trump standing with drooping eyes behind him (as shown above), you could see Rubio wishing he had phrased the point a different way.
It was one of his worst performances and his incoherent rambling has caused a tremendous amount of confusion.
I guess this is a Rubio operation but we’ve had reports that it’s really a Stephen Miller op and Hegseth and Vance are also hovering around trying to get in on the action. There are as many different goals as there are Trump toadies manipulating the tired old man.
Anyone who’s followed Latin American politics over the past few decades is familiar with Abrams. He’s an unreconstructed, neo-con cold warrior with a checkered past across all GOP administrations since Reagan. He was a big player in the Iran Contra scandal. Most recently he was Trump’s Venezuela envoy from 2019 to 2021.
He is unsurprisingly happy to see Maduro gone but seems to be somewhat shocked by the incoherence of the day after planning (such as it is.)
[N]ow what? Again, the answer should be easy: The United States should be backing Venezuela’s democratic parties. They united last year under María Corina Machado as their candidate for president, and she would have won the election. When Maduro barred her from running, they united under retired career diplomat Edmundo González as a substitute candidate. Though he was almost unknown in Venezuela, he won a huge landslide because Machado backed him, and because he represented a return to democracy. The unity and effectiveness of the opposition last year were remarkable as it fought an election under the worst circumstances—with the danger of arrest, exile, or worse constantly present, with rallies broken up violently, with no access to state media. Its victory is both a tribute to the opposition leadership and a measure of what Venezuelans want.
But President Trump seems much more concerned with Venezuelan oil than Venezuelan democracy. In his press conference he went out of his way to belittle Machado, stating that she lacked the necessary “respect” from Venezuelans to govern. There is simply no basis for that judgment (or prejudice) given the election results, her courage in remaining in hiding in Venezuela month after month, and now her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Instead, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken to Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Venezuelan democrats are now wondering whether Trump intends a deal with the remnants of the regime, in which they make all sorts of concessions on oil in exchange for being allowed to hang on.
That is a formula for disaster, and if that’s U.S. policy, Trump will have turned triumph into a new crisis. If Rodríguez hangs on, what of the rest of the regime? Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino is also under a drug indictment, as is interior minister and key regime thug and enforcer Diosdado Cabello. If they stay in office, Trump will have sold our souls for a small amount of oil production.
There is no reason to believe that those people are going to resign or be deposed through any legitimate means. Certainly Rubio and Trump seemed to say that if they do what Trump and his oil buddies want they can stay — otherwise they will unleash a “second wave” of violence. It’s now a full-fledged protection racket.
Abrams points out that a democratic government could, theoretically, accomplish the same their state goals. (Maybe — they might not be as thrilled with a bunch of oil companies coming in and exploiting their resources as people think…)
He is a neo-con so he still believes that you can enforce democracy, but be that as it may he’s not wrong that allowing the current government to stand as a puppet of the United States will not go well:
Everything Trump says he wants will be the product of a democratic transition in Venezuela. While news stories sometimes warn of another Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan, those comparisons are foolish. Venezuela has a homogeneous population and a strong democratic tradition. There are no social or religious divisions of the sort we see in the Middle East. Democratic institutions existed and need to be revitalized, rather than invented. Last year’s election showed exactly what Venezuelans want, and the country is surrounded by democracies. The only thing that could produce massive unrest and more migration is if the regime holds on—with U.S. support.
He then offers some interesting speculation:
This seems so obvious that one has to wonder about the sources of Trump’s information. I understand his allergy to the phrase “regime change,” but that is precisely what is needed, and he is more than halfway there. Were there intelligence analyses suggesting chaos if the regime falls and saying Machado lacked wide respect? If so, they are the biased product of a bureaucracy strongly opposed to the kind of military intervention we saw this weekend.
Nah, he’s doesn’t care what the CIA thinks. And the only reason he’s not going for an all out regime change operation is because what he cares about is the oil and he thinks he can do business with the regime. Everything is personal with him and since Maduro didn’t lick his boots, he needed to go. If the rest of them give him a prize or something he’s fine with them.
This is almost certainly what happened:
Were there Venezuelan plutocrats or U.S. oil executives coming to Mar-a-Lago and whispering about how easy life would be if we just made a deal with the regime once Maduro was gone? Were they the source of lies about María Corina Machado’s stature?
Who knows? It could just as easily be an influencer on Truth Social or Stephen Miller’s wife. Trump believes what he wants to believe.
As I said, Abrams is a neo-con who still thinks the U.S military invading a country will be greeted as liberators. And yes, there are some who see it that way. But they inevitably sour on the whole operation once it becomes clear that we are terrible at the Day After. For some reason these neo-cons never seem to learn that lesson. But maybe Trump’s crude avarice is showing even a few of these types that this method is fatally flawed? Maybe.
Stephanopoulos: He said, you cannot credibly argue that drug trafficking charges demand invasion in one case while issuing a pardon in another. What's your response?
Rubio: In the case of Maduro, look, it's very simple. This guy was indicted.
Stephanopoulos: He said, you cannot credibly argue that drug trafficking charges demand invasion in one case while issuing a pardon in another. What’s your response?
Rubio: In the case of Maduro, look, it’s very simple. This guy was indicted.
Stephanopoulos: Hernandez was convicted by a jury.
Rubio: I can’t just comment on it because I just wasn’t involved in those deliberations.
Stephanopoulos: Do you support it?
Rubio: I wasn’t involved in those deliberations. I haven’t looked at the case file. I haven’t looked at the arguments made by—I’ve got a bunch of other things going on
Except Trump said the U.S. is going to run the country.
BRENNAN: But you're describing the regime as still in place. I'm confused why the Trump administration only arrested Maduro. The chief thug who controls the police and has a $25m price on his head is still in place.
BRENNAN: But you’re describing the regime as still in place. I’m confused why the Trump administration only arrested Maduro. The chief thug who controls the police and has a $25m price on his head is still in place.
RUBIO: You’re confused? I don’t know why that’s confusing to you
BRENNAN: They are still in power
RUBIO: You’re gonna go in and suck up 5 people? They’re already complaining about this one operation
Huh?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Trump says the U.S. is going to “run Venezuela.” Under what legal authority?
RUBIO: We want a better future for the Venezuelan people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I’ll ask again — what is the legal authority?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Trump says the U.S. is going to “run Venezuela.” Under what legal authority?
RUBIO: We want a better future for the Venezuelan people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I’ll ask again — what is the legal authority?
RUBIO: We have court orders.
Welker: Regime change historically speaking has not gone very well for the United States. Can you assure Americans that this time will be different?
Rubio: We've got this phobia built up… I watched these experts and it's clown hour. Venezuela looks nothing like Libya. It looks… pic.twitter.com/JEgoOkiyTP
Welker: Regime change historically speaking has not gone very well for the United States. Can you assure Americans that this time will be different?
Rubio: We’ve got this phobia built up… I watched these experts and it’s clown hour. Venezuela looks nothing like Libya. It looks nothing like Iraq and nothing like Afghanistan
Lol. We have a phobia about regime change? Gosh, I wonder why?
JIM JORDAN: What fentanyl and other drugs have done to families in Ohio–
BASH: But fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela
JORDAN: Cozying up to China and Iran, which are part of that, certainly does
BASH: But that's different from what most people who voted for Trump heard him… pic.twitter.com/EOZsPtwqji
Bash: "[Trump] has been arguing since he first ran…that he was going to end forever wars and put America first. Now he says he's running Venezuela, he's totally open to putting boots back on the ground there, and he's signaling that Cuba and Colombia could be next. How is that… pic.twitter.com/rimRsuw5pk
Bash: “[Trump] has been arguing since he first ran…that he was going to end forever wars and put America first. Now he says he’s running Venezuela, he’s totally open to putting boots back on the ground there, and he’s signaling that Cuba and Colombia could be next. How is that America first?”
Jim Jordan: “I trust the president to make decisions that are in the best interest of Americans.”
BASH: The question is — what’s next?
JIM JORDAN: What I’m saying is, we’ll see. I trust Secretary Rubio, I trust Secretary Hegseth, I trust President Trump and him making decisions that are best for the American people
Remember the Trumpish bluster last year about Canada as the 51st state? And about Donald Trump acquiring Greenland from Denmark by hook or crook? After Trump’s toppling of the Venezuelan government, one might want to understand the reichsmarschall’s wife’s post above as more than trolling. It’s a threat against NATO member Denmark.
What we have before us is an addled president in failing health surrounded by a coterie of advisers eager to turn the U.S. into a hemispheric hegemon. At least until the music stops and Trump drops dead.
Reporters asked Trump to comment on the difference in treatment between former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump pardoned for drug crimes, and President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, militarily overthrown by U.S. forces over alleged drug crimes. Trump answered with a third-person non sequitur reflective of his desire to pursue “a highly personalized geopolitics,” writes Jonah E. Bromwich of The New York Times:
“The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country.”
Both Hernández and Maduro cases wound up before the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors asked that Hernández be allowed to die in jail for “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Instead, Trump pardoned him.
“Trump thinks he can use federal criminal prosecutions for any purpose, which is to say to promote his foreign policy views, to promote his vendettas, to promote his self-interest and to promote his perceived political interests,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor who teaches legal ethics at Fordham Law School in New York.
The Supreme Court gave Trump carte blanche as president to commit crimes. And so he has. Americans gave the felon and wannabe dictator another term to trample the Constitution. And so he has. American justice now is what Donald Trump says it is. So is American foreign adventurism.
Will Saletan writes at The Bulwark that Trump has already telegraphed his next colonialist moves. They are predicated on fighting drug trafficking for now. Later he’ll find justification for wherever his imperialist whims take him. As some day it may happen that a victimreason must be found, he’s got a little list.
Columbia: President Gustavo Petro had better “watch his ass,” says Trump.
Cuba: Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit.”
Mexico: “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.”
Canada: Drugs that enter the U.S. through Canada “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat . . . to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
You get the idea. On his list of prospective Trump victims, Saletan includes practically all the Americas plus Iran and Greenland. On the latter, Saletan includes:
At the press conference, Trump said regime change in Venezuela was part of “our new national security strategy” to counter “growing security threats in the Western Hemisphere.” That sounds like what he said two weeks ago when he announced the appointment of an envoy to acquire Greenland. “We need Greenland for national security,” he declared at that time. “We have to have it.”
I am reluctant to reach the easy conclusion many have that Trump invaded Venezuela for oil. Or as a distraction from the Epstein files. It is a fool’s errand to explain irrational behavior like kleptomania or hoarding via rational thinking. It is akin to a category error. That’s not to say oil or distraction were not factors. Nothing Republicans like better than a twofer unless it’s a threefer. Mere riches are for losers. Trump wants to be a one-man, hemispheric hegemon.
Remember how ignorant and backward-looking Trump is. The man’s cognitive development stalled sometime in the late 1970s. He considers himself the world’s premiere expert on topics based on the thinnest gloss of knowledge or on what he heard during a recent conversation.
Trump doesn’t grasp Greenland’s size distortion in a Mercator projection. Marvel’s Peter Quill thinks of himself as Star-Lord. James “Rhodey” Rhodes on first observing Quill famously says, “So he’s an idiot.” As is Trump. He patterned himself after mob bosses. He now imagines himself a strongman in the mold of Vladmir Putin or Kim Jong Un. His attempts to emulate them, while highly destructive, are pathetic.
What seem like logical and obvious motivators to rational people may not operate the same way in Trump’s head. Windmills don’t work. Coal is clean. Perhaps being stuck in the age of oil embargoes makes snatching Venezuela’s oil attractive despite the U.S. not needing it. He’s not doing things because he needs a distraction from the Epstein files. As Digby wrote, He’s doing this stuff because he wants to do it!
Trump discovered as president that power was a stronger aphrodisiac than money. Putin became impossibly rich as the gangster-president of Russia. But riches are not why he’s invaded Ukraine; he wants to rule a restored Russian Empire. Trump the Pathologically Insecure is still desperate to join an international autocrats club that wouldn’t have an idiot like him as a member. Perhaps he believes creating a police state and some gunboat diplomacy finally will gain him admission. He’s seen how feared and powerful his crushes are and says, “I’ll have what they’re having.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) of Georgia is disillusioned. Once the MAGAest of Donald Trump’s faithful, she posted a lengthy tweet Saturday morning as Trump began his press conference on his attack on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
I’ve served on the Homeland Security Committee for the past three years. I’m 100% for strong safe secure borders and stopping narco terrorists and cartels from trafficking deadly drugs and human trafficking into America.
Fentanyl is responsible for over 70% of U.S. drug overdose deaths and fentanyl comes from Mexican cartels made with chemical precursors from China and trafficked across the U.S. Mexico border.
Mexican cartels are primarily and overwhelmingly responsible for killing Americans with deadly drugs.
If U.S. military action and regime change in Venezuela was really about saving American lives from deadly drugs then why hasn’t the Trump admin taken action against Mexican cartels?
And if prosecuting narco terrorists is a high priority then why did President Trump pardon the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez who was convicted and sentenced for 45 years for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into America? Ironically cocaine is the same drug that Venezuela primarily traffics into the U.S.
The next obvious observation is that by removing Maduro this is a clear move for control over Venezuelan oil supplies that will ensure stability for the next obvious regime change war in Iran.
And of course why is it ok for America to militarily invade, bomb, and arrest a foreign leader but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only ok if we do it? (I’m not endorsing Russia or China)
Regime change, funding foreign wars, and American’s tax dollars being consistently funneled to foreign causes, foreigners both home and abroad, and foreign governments while Americans are consistently facing increasing cost of living, housing, healthcare, and learn about scams and fraud of their tax dollars is what has most Americans enraged. Especially the younger generations. Boomers and half of Gen X will cheer on neocon wars and talking points, but the other half of Gen X and majority on down see through it and hate it.
Americans disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going.
This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end.
Boy were we wrong.
As the baby boomers slip away both in votes and power, the electoral future will be decided for candidates that focus on American economic populism and promising prosperity for Americans only.
As of right now, neither party is offering the solution.
So how has MAGA reacted to the Venezuela invasion? Are isolationists who flocked to Trump’s America First marketing dancing in the streets to Y.M.C.A.?
The unanswered question is how Trump’s core supporters will respond. They are voters who helped upend a half-century of Republican hawkish instincts and who viewed regime change as a discredited relic of a bygone era. What is clear, however, is that this is a moment of enormous reset for U.S. posture in global intervention, and one whose consequences are difficult to predict.
“We’re going to be running it,” Trump said of Venezuela from his private club in Florida. And, he hinted, Venezuela might just be his opening gambit.
“It” is the opposite of the what Trump promised them.
Trump, lured by the promise of an oil-rich nation he might control as a viceroy, saw nothing but upside for the U.S. energy sector. But what he was unsure of—even among his inner circle—was the tolerance for this type of expansionist viewpoint. While Trump’s advisers have described the policy as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, many of his most ardent supporters have been far less comfortable with the notion that the hemisphere should fall under American political and commercial dominance. In the simplest terms, it was game on.
Trump’s posture now is a return to colonialism. In a sense, Elliot suggests, “the first steps at unfurling a new American empire.”
“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” wrote an exasperated MTG.
Trump the Narcoleptic feels unfettered. The Supreme Court gave him carte blanche to commit crimes. Americans obsessed with the cost of eggs gave a convicted felon another term in the Oval Office. He’s cast aside his base. He no longer brags about the size of rallies. He’s going for empire like his buddy Vlad.
In an hour-long news conference explaining the strike to the American people, Trump made no concessions that he perhaps betrayed his campaign pledges. Instead, he warned that the aggression may not stop inside Venezuela. Specifically, he called out Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who condemned the operation. “[Petro] has cocaine mills. He has factories where he makes cocaine. … He’s making cocaine. They’re sending it into the United States,” Trump said. “So he does have to watch his ass.”
One would think Trump might have to watch his. MAGA true believers staged a failed insurrection five years ago over not getting what they wanted from the November 2020 presidential election. Trump summoned them and they came. He won’t summon them again. They won’t come.
If there is a judgment coming that separates the MAGA sheep from the MAGA goats, the America First true believers from “my Trump right or wrong” MAGAs, it is too early to tell. For his part, Trump seems not to care. He never did. MTG found out the hard way.
