Venezuela is the end of Donald Trump

The toughest thing about writing about Donald Trump is trying to explain what is new. That’s because so much of what’s terrible about him is what has been terrible about the Republican Party for generations now.

Take the premise of a “war for oil that will pay for itself with said oil.”

We tried that! It was the greatest disaster of this century before COVID-19. And the instability it created, along with the general rot of lawless behavior of the United States in general after the 9/11 attacks, helped give America Trump.

That’s a big reason why, in general, no one wants this.

A war for oil that even worries Big Oil

So, now—as Donald Trump is building a secret police with $170 billion in taxpayer funding, covering up the ties of him and his “friends” to the largest child rape ring of the century, and uninsuring about 4 million, leaving some 5,000 Americans to die preventable deaths—Trump has led us into another war for oil.

He told us that. So this time, there are just as many lies but no pretensions.

Instead of building some international coalition and compelling Congress to debate and sign off on the war, Trump hasn’t even gotten the oil companies on board with waging a war for oil, Politico tells us.

“I don’t see anything that gives me the sense that this is a ripe opportunity,” a key quote reads.

In short, the regime expects oil companies to be part of the initial stages of the occupation, an occupation that Trump’s team appears to be running via Zoom and barely veiled threats.

Now, does that mean that Big Oil will let Trump eat shit and abandon all that crude?

Not likely, even though the oil is “heavy crude,” and apparently much more expensive to refine than our oil reserves. And more oil on the market would only sink the price, creating possible catastrophic effects for Trump allies from Chevron to Putin. Still, supplicating to irrationality has become a core component of the deal our elites have with Trump.

Marco Rubio—the primary producer of this TV show for Trump—wants to shut off Cuba’s oil supply and continue his regime change spree across the hemisphere.

Who needs more of a plan than that? And who’s really bothered that the arguments for this intervention are nonexistent? Or worse, the janky justification they offer invites countries to kidnap Trump because the 14th Amendment bars him from office, and his obvious corruption, including billions in bribes, makes his removal an emergency?

Maduro is guilty of many horrors, but the only one that seems to matter to Trump is that he wasn’t willing to beg or pay for a pardon.

Trump’s Declaration of Domination

All of this is to say that none of this insult to civilization has been thought out past the rubric of “How much will Donald Trump enjoy watching this on Fox News?”

There’s none of the pretensions of the war on Iraq or the Global War on Terror, and maybe that’s a good thing. Bush y Cheney are still responsible for more deaths in war than Trump (though the death count of Trump’s Covid malfeasance probably can’t be adequately calculated). So death to pretensions! Who needs them?

Except that those pretensions are a bit of the price our leaders pay for the enormous power we invest in them. They say, "I get it. My power comes from you, and you can then go for me." The refusal to even present a plan, or to pretend you owe the American people any honesty, reveals the whole of Trump's endgame.

Just as the American colonists declared their independence from a king who decided they existed primarily to be ruled almost 250 years ago, Trump is a wannabe monarch declaring his independence from any check on him by the American people through our Constitution and Courts. And he’s been enabled beyond comprehension by John Roberts and Republicans on our Supreme Court, who have deigned that a system of government designed to rein in our president should instead free him of the law.

Trump is a “madman able to plunge the country into war on a whim,” as Andy Craig deftly explained. And in that way, he’s the inevitable consequence of the failures of the American system, which have largely been fostered or exploited by the corporate right-wing of this country, organized through the Republican Party. And he’s also an uncanny manifestation of the “brutal world order” that fossil fuels make inescapable, as Rebecca Solnit wrote.

This is the end

So the rise of a Trump was, in retrospect, unavoidable, largely because the Republican Party has been after a Trump for generations.

But so is Trump's fall—at least into the grave.

I don’t offer the obvious conclusion that Trump seems to be on his way out as a reassurance to anyone. Instead, I hope to explain the urgency. His flailing is only feeding the concupiscence for power and money of the wannabes and oil-ligarchs around him. They all realize that any hope of popularity sustaining the regime is gone. Brute strength is all they have left. And without any need to heed the people, anything is possible.

Death seems to be bringing out the truest Trump we’ve seen, as his physical body fails around him. The man has a few core beliefs. These include pettiness, eugenics, and misogyny. Together, they all boil down to one belief: domination, the principled view that Donald Trump should rule forever at his own whim and then blonde people on TV should only say how great he is.

That’s the whole of the plan for Venezuela.

That’s the whole of the plan for America.

That’s what makes Trump different.

We still have a say

We need to stop his brutality there because we need to stop it everywhere. We need to show up to say, “No, not ever. Not in our names,” to tell our members of Congress that they must do the same.

We must do this knowing that the creep that made Trump possible will make it difficult for the powerful to see what is right in front of our faces. We must do it because what happens next to the people of Venezuela will be decided mainly by what we’re willing to put up with. And there will be better, safer issues that those in Congress would like to focus on, as they’re paralyzed by the sense that anything that gives oil to rich people must be too powerful to resist.

But no issue will make Donald Trump’s end more straightforward, not until that final glorious day, when we rid ourselves of him forever. He wants to do horrific things to prove we can’t stop him. We must make sure he knows that he’s wrong.

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