Trump's Venezuela coup sends America down a dark path
He got a taste of violence and clearly wants more.
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Early Saturday morning, US forces illegally invaded Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. President Donald Trump watched the operation from his resort at Mar-a-Lago accompanied by various flunkies. He boasted about the experience hours later in a phone interview with Fox & Friends.
“If you would have seen what happened, I mean, I watched it literally, like I was watching a television show,” he burbled. “If you would have seen the, the speed, the violence, you know, they say that the speed, the violence, they use that term. It’s just, it was an amazing thing, amazing job that these people did. There’s nobody else could have done anything like it.”
Trump regime spokespeople have offered a range of explanations for the unprovoked and unnecessary violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and international law. But Trump’s breathless enthusiasm for illegal violence, beamed to his home/entertainment hub for his personal delectation, is perhaps more telling than any post facto rationalization.
The United States appears to have attacked Venezuela primarily because Donald Trump has been granted broad dictatorial latitude by Congress, the courts, and the American people, and because he likes inflicting violence on relatively weak foes. That’s a bleak state of affairs — for Venezuela, for the United States, and for the world.
It’s not about drugs
The US attack on Venezuela involved at least 150 aircraft. Secretary of State Marco Rubio downplayed the raid as an “arrest operation,” but the New York Times reports that at least 80 people were killed. None of them were Americans, according to Trump, though he said that a couple service members were “hit.”
The administration has given a number of reasons for its escalating antagonism towards Venezuela. In recent months, it has targeted boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific which it claims are piloted by “narcoterrorists” — though some appear to simply be fishing boats.
US forces killed over 100 people in attacks which are supposedly meant to stop drug trafficking. That includes two people the military murdered by airstrikes while helpless and clinging to a wreck. Lawmakers and analysts say that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was in direct charge of the operation, and subordinates who carried it out may have committed war crimes.
Drug trafficking is generally a law enforcement issue, not a justification for mass murder or kidnapping foreign leaders. Nonetheless, Trump’s primary stated rationale for the attack on Venezuela is that Maduro is “the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” Maduro has been taken to New York where he and his wife were recently indicted on drug and weapons charges.
It’s hard to credit Trump when he claims to be committed to fighting narcoterrorism since he has pardoned a startling number of major drug criminals. These include, among others, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of smuggling 500 tons of cocaine into the US; Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted on charges relating to his founding of Silk Road, a dark web site used by drug traffickers; and Larry Hoover, a leader of Chicago gangs responsible for crimes including drug-trafficking.
Notably, when Trump flunkies like Rubio are asked to explain the disconnect between Trump’s stated rationale for the Venezuelan raid and his pardons of drug traffickers, they aren’t able to respond coherently.
So if Trump doesn’t actually care about drugs, why target Venezuela? The most popular alternate explanation is petroleum reserves.
It’s partly (but not entirely) about oil
Trump has flat out said he wants Venezuela’s oil assets. Following the strikes he said “we’re going to run the country,” and then he made brutally clear what he means.
“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela,” he declared. “And it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
As with the drug war rationale, though, the imperial resource extraction rationale is oddly slippery when you think about it.
No doubt Trump would like to enrich himself. Enriching himself is one of his few true moral principles. But seizing oil revenue requires a lot of logistical work which doesn’t seem to have been done and cooperation from a lot of people who seem uninspired at best.
Trump claimed that US oil companies are going to spend “billions and billions of dollars” to get Venezuelan petroleum pumping. But those US companies have all been notably silent following Maduro’s removal. The one exception is Chevron, which is still operating in Venezuela, and which issued an anodyne statement saying it would continue to follow “relevant laws and regulations.” Reporting suggests oil companies are skeptical of the financial returns and worried about the safety of their personnel.
Trump also claimed he had struck a deal with Venezuela’s vice president and oil minister Delcy Rodriguez.
“She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said.
But those words had barely slunk out of his orifice when Rodriguez issued a defiant statement in which she insisted Maduro is still president, accused Trump of trying to loot the country of its energy resources, and said “what is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity.”
In contrast, Venezuelan opposition leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Trump supporter María Corina Machado would probably be eager to collaborate with the US— but Trump immediately backhanded her, saying she lacked the “support or respect” to lead Venezuela. (Trump reportedly is bitter because she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize instead of giving it to him. No, really.)
Trump is an incompetent bungler as well as a raving fascist, so it’s no surprise that he has not prepared for a post-Maduro Venezuela. But the fact that he has not coordinated with big oil or with the Venezuelan opposition suggests that petroleum extraction is more a notional motive than a practical driver of events on the ground.
So many reasons suggests there really isn’t one
So, what’s left?
There’s reporting that Trump’s ethnic cleansing czar Stephen Miller likes the idea of going to war with Venezuela because it would allow him to invoke the Alien Enemies act and step up deportations. Rubio, who at least intermittently fantasizes himself in Reagan cosplay, warned Cuba after the Maduro kidnapping that its leaders might be next — suggesting an anticommunist motive.
Trump, for his part, held a gaggle on Air Force One on Sunday evening in which he threatened not only a second strike on Venezuela, but also a wide array of other countries.
On social media, Trump has endorsed (completely false) conspiracy theories accusing Venezuela of being involved in election fraud in the US in 2020 — an election Trump still claims he won, because he is an inveterate and compulsive liar. And of course he has claimed he is fighting for “peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela” even as he openly talks about establishing a puppet regime.
But all of these competing rationales tend to undermine one another. There were a range of motivations for the Iraq War in 2003. But the George W. Bush administration spent over a year making a specific case to the US public, Congress, and the world that the Iraq invasion was necessary because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that this argument was based on faulty intelligence and was generally nonsense. But at least everyone knew what the argument was.
Trump, by contrast, has made virtually no attempt to explain himself to the public or to anyone else. Democrats in Congress say he actively lied to them about US plans for Venezuela. Only about 25 percent of the US public supports a war with Venezuela — a number which is congruent with the number of people who likely would support absolutely anything Trump did, with or without explanation.
World reaction has ranged from tepid (Western Europe) to outraged (much of Latin America). This was certainly not a coalition effort, like Iraq, and no one but no one will come to the aid of the US should the situation in Venezuela deteriorate.
“The speed, the violence”
Trump’s refusal to try to get anyone on board is obviously an expression of contempt towards all people who are not his cronies. But it’s also an indication of Trump’s own fecklessness and confusion. He has not explained himself in part because he is not willing to do the work of understanding his or his country’s own motivations or interests. He’s going on impulse. And his impulses are for blowing things up.
Trump has long been praised by fools and opportunists as a non-interventionist, largely because he has long claimed, falsely, to have opposed the Iraq War. But even in his first term, it was clear he believes that war is a fun and exciting expression of power and masculinity (at least when it is waged against relatively weak foes). In his first 100 days in office, he used an enormous non-nuclear device — the “mother of all bombs” (MOAB) — in Afghanistan, then reacted with the same sort of gushing enthusiasm he showed after the Venezuela attack.
“We have the greatest military in the world, and they have done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and thatʼs what theyʼre doing, and frankly, thatʼs why theyʼve been so successful lately.”
In his second term, Trump has launched a constant series of military interventions. In addition to the murders in Venezuelan waters, he authorized strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer and threatened more intervention this week if Iran killed protestors. He’s also bombed Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.
These actions have all been framed — especially by Hegseth — as triumphal expressions of American awesomeness and virility. Addressing military officers in September, Hegseth boasted that “we don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He denounced “politically correct” approaches to war and advocated instead “maximum lethality.”
In short, Hegseth framed murdering people in defiance of the law as a moral and partisan goal.
Trump’s praise of “speed and violence” and Hegseth’s nattering about “maximum lethality” are of a piece with Marinetti’s fascist embrace of war as “the world’s only hygience” and with Hitler’s assertion that “mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.” Fascists don’t need a reason for this war or that war because they believe that war is a good in itself. Force is exciting and fun; using bombs and guns shows you’re strong. Trump’s a bully; he likes bullying.
Attacking Venezuela for oil is despicable and evil; murdering fisherman because you’re a racist who believes the lives of non-white people are worthless is horrific and disgusting. But launching an invasion because you like to watch the speed and the violence is in some respects even worse.
As political science professor Elizabeth Saunders said, “we have the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship” — and the dictator’s personal preference is to watch TV shows in which the US military blows things up at his whim. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, we’re about to find out.
That’s it for today
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Noah, brilliant analysis on the fascist psychology of “speed and violence” as the motive. But there’s actually a unifying strategic framework underneath the incoherence you’re describing.
I just published analysis showing Venezuela wasn’t improvisation, it’s the November 2025 National Security Strategy being executed exactly as written.
Every contradictory rationale you catalogue: drugs, oil, deportations, anticommunism; gets unified under this doctrine.
“So many reasons suggests there really isn’t one” is exactly right behaviorally. But strategically, the NSS provides the legal architecture that makes all those pretexts work simultaneously. The framework elevates narcoterrorism and migration to existential threats specifically to bypass congressional war powers. It reframes regime change as “law enforcement.” It claims Article II authority for resource seizure.
The incoherence isn’t a bug, it’s how moral licensing works. Pile up enough justifications and no single one has to be credible.
Violence for the sake of power and they’re operationalizing the NSS playbook that authorizes exactly this authoritarian playbook.
Venezuela proves the doctrine works: bomb a capital without congressional authorization, extract a head of state, announce “we’re going to run the country,” face zero institutional pushback. That’s the template for Cuba, Greenland, everywhere the NSS authorizes force.
Wannabe Fascists who document their imperial ambitions as official strategy are even more dangerous than those operating on impulse alone. Trump’s enjoying the violence. The NSS ensures he can scale it systematically across the hemisphere without oversight.
The “personalist dictatorship” foreign policy you’re describing has a published operations manual. That’s what makes it sustainable beyond Trump’s attention span.
—Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
Trump's claims that he is risking Americans lives for “peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela” remind me of the warning of Alexander Hamilton in the very first issue of The Federalist Papers. In Federalist No. 1 Hamilton highlighted the danger Trump poses:
"a dangerous ambition [even] more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants."