Trump's illegal war on Venezuela is a sneak attack on our freedom

Venezuela has become the Trump regime’s comfort atrocity. Any time Donald doesn’t like what’s on the TV, he blows up another boat filled with civilians. And it’s only a matter of time before it gets even worse. Possibly far worse. Possibly very fast.

We must always start with the premise that there is too much bad to keep track of. Steven Bannon described “flood the zone with shit” as a strategy, but it’s also just what you have to expect from anyone with the morality of and attention span of a four-year-old who just ate three mini-Snickers.

We want to focus on the Border Patrol kicking into daycares like the Gestapo. But Trump won’t let us. He’s too busy celebrating a prince who carved up a journalist. Then he’s snuggling up to Mamdani like the president of the United States has bought a VIP package with the incoming Mayor of New York that includes a meet-and-greet. Then he’s busy trying to hand Ukraine over to Putin, hoping that Europe won’t notice that he’s cosigned them to endless Russian aggression. Plus, all the golf and bribery.

Yet one constant of the second Trump regime that never gets enough attention is Venezuela and how Trump has used that country to justify some of the baldest atrocities in American history.

These crimes against decency include:

1. The murder of at least 80 civilians in the Caribbean for the “crime” of being brown on a boat.
2. The exile of hundreds of men to a lawless torture prison in El Salvador.
3. The invasion of an apartment building in Chicago under the pretense that the regime was seeking members of a Venezuelan gang, none of whom were detained in the operation.

The legal justifications for these actions range from non-existent to specious.

Those arguments have already been rejected, at least temporarily, by a Supreme Court majority dedicated to letting Trump skirt the surly bonds of law. The high court kicked a case allowing deportations of Venezuelans based on 1798’s Alien Enemies Act back to an appeals court, which ruled against the regime in September.

“There is no finding that this mass immigration was an armed, organized force or forces,” George W. Bush-appointed Judge Leslie Southwick noted in the ruling, which rejected the idea that America had been “invaded” by Venezuela.

The false premise of an invasion by Venezuela is dear to Stephen Miller and the authoritarians in the regime because wartime powers essentially allow fascist one-party rule, which is clearly Miller's (and thus Trump’s) goal. Of course, it makes no fucking sense that people who’ve fled a dictatorship are somehow invading forces of said dictatorship. Though logic may not contain the MAGA Supreme Court majority, which will likely rule on this overreach again before long.

But the lawlessness is the point. Trump is now escalating his calls for the prosecution and execution of Democrats who called on the military to uphold our centuries-old tradition of refusing unlawful orders. And the regime’s approach to Venezuela continues to be the purest expression of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.

“From Trump’s boat bombings to his deportations to his demands for corrupt prosecutions, a through line links all these examples,” Greg Sargent wrote. “In every conceivable way, Donald Trump demands fealty to himself—and to his whims, wholly untethered to law—over fealty to federal officials’ oaths of office.”

We know now that military lawyers told the regime that their boat strikes are not lawful, and that advice was promptly ignored. And the weakness of their falacious legal arguments has only escalated the regime’s murder spree in the region.

That’s why we’re hearing a “new phase” of drums of war pounding for direct conflict with Venezuela that will activate the general lawlessness that has come to accompany the president’s war powers—the only question seems to be whether it will look more like our disastrous intervention in Libya or our disastrous intervention in Iraq.

Now, let’s stop here and say by definition that what Trump is doing here is anti-Constitutional. It embodies all the kingly bullshit our Constitution was designed to prevent.

It’s even beyond what George W. Bush did to lie to America into war against Iraq. The lies here are beyond the realm of parody, with the regime pretending that this has to do with Venezuelan drug trafficking to America, which simply does not exist in any way like they've described it. Or we’re supposed to buy the mocking insult that these maniacs who despise democracy in America give a shit about spreading it abroad.

Ok, that feels familiar. But at least the Iraq war was debated and approved by our legislature. That doesn’t excuse that horror or any of the horrors that came out of the mush of brains trying to process the horrors of 9/11. Still, at least it didn’t signify an aggressive attempt to avoid or end American democracy along with it.

Of course, the GOP Congress has happily surrendered its war powers to the president, like many Congresses before it. The closest we’ve gotten to a debate on this new war of choice was in the Senate, where two Republicans joined all the Democrats to check Trump’s power to murder civilians on boats.

But that was before Trump’s iron control of the House cracked, and the Senate unanimously sent the bill to free the Epstein Files to Trump’s desk.

We must recognize that after November’s elections, everything is changing. Republican lawmakers see their near future, and it’s bleak. Many of them know they’ll be following Marjorie Taylor Green out of the Capitol, whether they like it or not.

The pall that fell across America—where our elites seemed cheered to condemn us to forever rule by this ridiculous regime, intent on making sure China and Russia thrive as America descends into a robotic future of acquiescence to tech elites who want to build data centers across our foreheads—is lifting.

We can and must do what Zohran Mamdani did in the Oval Office on Friday.

Trump is vulnerable in many ways, and he’s definitely vulnerable on this lust to start a war of choice that may please some wild-eyed donors in South Florida but literally no one else.

“I think a lot of people, including myself, were attracted to the president because of his reticence to get us involved in foreign war,” Senator Rand Paul said on Sunday.

“I think by doing this, they are pretending as if we are at war,” he added. “They’re pretending as if they’ve gotten some imprimatur to do what they want. When you have war, the rules of engagement are lessened.”

He retreated into typical pseudo-libertarian talk about ending the drug war, which is good. But it misses the emergency we face with this regime intent on seizing every lever of dictatorship at home and abroad. A regime that will only become more desperate as walls close in.

But, as always, we must remember that walls rarely close in on their own. We must demand that the Republicans in Congress do what they don’t want to do most: their job. We must demand that the president’s war of choice in Venezuela be fully debated in both houses of Congress before it’s too late.

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