It’s beyond embarrassing to have a president of the United States behave with less maturity than a three year old. But here we are, stuck with Toddler Trump in the Oval Office for the foreseeable future.
Trump loves to play with his military toys. He was positively gleeful after our competent armed forces abducted Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, last weekend. But like I said in my previous post, there’s plenty of reasons to believe that after this initial tactical success, in the long run Trump’s Venezuelan caper will go badly.
Well, also in the short run.
Because it’s increasingly clear that after the Trump administration gave up on its lie that the military buildup in the Caribbean was to stop Venezuelan cocaine from coming to the United States, and the following lie that the purpose was regime change by kidnapping Maduro and his wife, we now know that this wasn’t true either. In a New York Times opinion piece, Michelle Goldberg writes:
Despite early appearances, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela doesn’t seem to be a regime change operation. After all, America is leaving the regime, now headed by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in power. As of Monday, all of Venezuela’s ruling officials aside from Maduro appear to have remained in their posts, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and was known as one of Maduro’s most fearsome enforcers.
“That’s very odd, historically, to see something like this,” said Javier Corrales, a professor at Amherst and the author of “Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism.” “To see that you get rid of the leader, but the regime stays in place.”
But for Donald Trump, the preservation of something close to the status quo makes sense, given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation. Rather than the moralistic imperialism of George W. Bush, Trump’s foreign policy is imperialistic gangsterism. As one administration official put it to me, there’s “something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.
So the old regime in Venezuela is still in control of that country. Which means that Trump is living in a fantasy world when he said today that he is running Venezuela. As Democratic leaders in Congress are fond of saying, Trump can’t even run the United States well, so there’s no way he could manage Venezuela properly.
Trump just likes to pretend that he is presiding over a return of the Monroe Doctrine (where the United States does whatever it wants in the Western Hemisphere), or of his new favorite word, the Donroe Doctrine. Yeah, Trump is addicted to naming things after himself, another manifestation of his infantile personality. While I was exercising today, I watched CNN’s Jake Tapper interview Stephen Miller, whose wife, Katie, tweeted this on X:
She probably thought this was hilarious. The Danish Prime Minister, not so much. (Greenland is part of Denmark.)
Many people think that the Trump administration is just joking around when it says Greenland should be part of the United States. I think we should take this possibility seriously. In the CNN interview, Stephen Miller said:
What’s deeply worrisome is how this macho posturing by the Trump administration threatens the stability of the world order that has done a decent job after World War II of preventing more powerful countries from taking control of less powerful countries by force. That used to be just how things operated. But the United Nations and international law were put into place to prevent a new Hitler from doing what the old Hitler did: invade a sovereign nation.
That, of course, is just what Putin did when he invaded Ukraine. And it’s what China, by all accounts, is preparing to do with Taiwan. M. Gessen has written a provocative opinion piece in the New York Times, “Maduro’s Ouster Plays Right Into Putin’s Hands.” Excerpts:
In the initial rush of news on Saturday morning, many commentators speculated that the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was also a blow to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, since Venezuela and Russia are allies. To the contrary, it is a victory for Putin, because it is a blow — quite likely fatal — to the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II.
That order was never as robust as its champions made it out to be. Many of the multilateral institutions created to foster cooperation and enforce international law have been dysfunctional, often because they were sabotaged by their most powerful members. And yet, some mechanisms worked; some laws were enforced; some crimes were punished and many more were probably prevented; millions of people had their freedom and dignity affirmed; and a reasonable hope persisted that a law-based, humanistic world order would be built. No longer.
…Russia’s president has claimed that his invasion of Ukraine was a mission to liberate the people of that country. He has claimed to be defending Russia’s sovereignty, which Ukraine’s existence never threatened. Putin has even claimed that Ukraine has illegitimately appropriated infrastructure created by his nation (well, by the Soviet Union, which Putin conflates with Russia) — just as Trump falsely claimed that Maduro perpetrated the largest theft of American property in history by nationalizing the oil industry that U.S. companies had helped build.
…For years, Putin has been asserting a vision of a world divided by a few powerful men into spheres of influence. This, too, is the post-World War II order — the Cold War order, in which countries colonized by the Soviet Union were excluded from the liberal aspirations asserted by the West. It has long been clear that Trump instinctively shares this point of view: Carving up the world appears to be what he thinks political power is for. Whoever wrote the National Security Strategy that was made public in December codified this worldview as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States’ two-centuries-old assertion of power over the Western Hemisphere. During Saturday’s news conference, Trump appeared to have renamed the corollary the “Donroe Doctrine.”
…The Donroe Doctrine, it seems, may allow Trump to take Venezuela, Cuba — which he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have openly threatened — and any other part of the Americas Trump desires. (I am sure he will return before long to talk of making Canada the 51st state.)
If so, it will also allow Putin to take as much of Europe as he wants to bite off. Russia’s hybrid warfare in Europe — acts of both political and infrastructural sabotage, including suspected jamming of air-traffic-control frequencies at numerous European airports — has escalated since Trump returned to office. The Trump administration’s continued pressure on Ukraine has emboldened Putin. The invasion of Caracas, carried out in ways eerily similar to what Moscow had once planned for Kyiv, will embolden him further. A similar message has no doubt been received in Beijing: If Trump can take Venezuela and Putin can take Ukraine, surely President Xi Jinping of China can take Taiwan.
Trump may be laughable, but what he’s doing to the United States and the world is no joke. He isn’t smart enough to recognize that his so-called America First policy actually runs the very real risk of harming our country immeasurably. When might makes right, the values of democracy and human rights the United States was founded on and followed, albeit imperfectly, for most of our nation’s history may become a distant memory.
That scares me. As it should every American.
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