The dangerous delusions behind Trump’s illegal Venezuela invasion
Far-right activists across the world have sought to replace international peace organizations with the antiquated ‘spheres of influence’ model that generated two world wars
Faced with massive intra-party dissent over his repeated cover-ups for the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and with his political support at all-time lows, President Donald Trump decided to wag the dog on Saturday, directing American military forces to invade Venezuela and abduct its president Nicolás Maduro. It’s an exact parallel to the last time that his approval rating was in the low 30s when he launched an ineffective bombing campaign against Iran.
While the U.S. has denounced Maduro and his fellow thug predecessor, Hugo Chávez, for decades, conducting an armed kidnapping of Maduro was something that Trump officials explicitly told Congress that they were going to avoid.
“We actually had briefings before this,” Sen. Ruben Gallego said in a Saturday interview with Fox, describing private statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former lifestyle television host/Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to members of Congress. “In those briefings, Secretary Rubio and Secretary Hegseth said this is not a precursor to us doing regime change.”
And yet, this is exactly what Trump and his cronies did.
At a hastily arranged Saturday news conference, Trump, Rubio, and other regime officials couldn’t keep their pretend justifications straight as to why they violated international law and abducted a head of state. For months, the White House pretended that Trump-ordered assassinations of passengers on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea were because the boats supposedly carried drugs like fentanyl, despite never presenting any evidence to that effect, and deliberately killing survivors of the airstrikes to prevent them from sharing their views in a trial.
On Saturday, however, the pretend concern about narcotics had completely vanished, as far as he was concerned. Instead, it was about oil.
“We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump stated, completely undercutting Rubio’s deceptive claims that the Maduro abduction was just a legal enforcement matter about alleged Venezuelan drug trafficking. No one bothered to mention that. Ditto Trump's earlier pardon of ex-Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez.
Shortly after the conference ended, we learned that despite the Trump regime’s claim to be working with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, she denounced the kidnapping on Venezuelan television.
“There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” she said. “What is being done to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law.”
It’s certainly possible that Rodríguez is putting up a public front after capitulating to Trump privately, but it’s obvious that, as Gallego told Fox, the White House cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything: “They’re just going to lie,” he noted, when asked what he expected to hear at future military briefings.
Beneath the deceptive and shambolic nature of the whole affair, however, the Venenzuelan invasion represents something much bigger and more insidious, because it signals that the Trump regime has absolutely committed to an international strategy the administration laid out in a November memorandum that, in short, described a desire to turn the former leader of the free world into a rogue nation that is explicitly racist.
That’s not hyperbole. Take a look at what the document says about how Europe is allegedly facing “civilizational erasure” and that “we want Europe to remain European:”
