New year, new illegal war
You can't just kidnap the president of a country to steal its oil - unless you're Donald Trump, and Congress is rolling over and playing dead.
Happy new year, readers, to the extent that the new year is a happy occasion at all so far. I spent my first New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro this year, where most of the city wears white and gathers for an incredible fireworks display on the beach at Copacabana, and the summer weather is so scorching and humid that even your glasses fog up and sweat.
It was surreal to watch Mamdani’s inauguration from here, which looked even more freezing compared to my current situation but still had me tearing up with hope and pride for the city1. And it was even more surreal to rub my eyes awake this morning to the news the U.S. had just kidnapped the president of Venezuela overnight—right next door to Brasil, where I still am for a few more days—for a bunch of made up, nonsensical reasons. (Plus the real but very bad reasons, which I’ll get to below.)
Indeed, U.S. forces dragged Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their beds in Caracas in the middle of the night and flew them out of the country in an extraordinary act of regime change. This was blatantly illegal: Trump had not only refused to run this by Congress, but he also didn’t even bother to tell them he was essentially declaring war on Venezuela without their authorization. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, though not a single person in this administration cares about how things are supposed to work.
And today, Pam Bondi announced that we’ve indicted the Maduros on a variety of word salad charges: “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States.”
Firstly, Pam, “machineguns” is two separate words, and you cannot indict a foreign head of state for having guns in his own country. That particular charge is so mindnumbingly stupid it makes me want to cry.
Secondly, how are you going to spend months blaming the entire U.S. fentanyl crisis on Venezuela—including bombing random fishing boats and labeling fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” to pre-justify your war— then drop a list of actual indictments against the country that doesn’t even include fentanyl at all, but instead mentions “cocaine importation conspiracy”? Venezuela does produce cocaine, but it mostly exports it to Europe, which is certainly not a reason for us to kidnap a president in the middle of the night and indict him in New York. Also, Trump definitely doesn’t give a shit about coke lords: He pardoned a different Latin American cocaine kingpin just a few weeks ago—former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández—who had smuggled 400 tons of narcotics into the U.S. and reportedly boasted at one meeting with drug dealers that “together they were going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” per U.S. prosecutors.
This brings us to the real reasons we are attacking Venezuela. One, which the administration has not even thinly veiled, is to steal their oil. Trump told Fox News today that we’re going to be “strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry going forward, after he posted a few weeks ago that the country had “stolen” our oil in the 1970s by nationalizing its own reserves that American oil companies had been exploiting. The U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,” he wrote on December 17. This is Iraq 2.0, although accusing a country of stealing its own oil and land from us is pretty unhinged, even by American imperialist standards.
Secondly, Stephen Miller openly wants to use a real war with Venezuela to justify fast-tracking all of his illegal, unconscionable deportations of Venezuelans to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador and other countries where they’re not even from. Expect him to soon start conflating all Latinos with “Venezuelans” as part of this plan.
Miller’s thirst for war, in particular, is ironic, given his tweet from just before the 2024 election claiming that Kamala Harris was a hawk who would start a bunch of unnecessary wars that would lead to WWIII.
The third reason we’re bombing Venezuela is that Trump is a cornered sewer rat whose power and popularity are tanking; the 2026 midterms are expected to go very poorly for him and perhaps end with a Democratic Congress that would impeach him; and starting wars is a common way for desperate authoritarians to stay in office beyond their terms. Outgoing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who did spend a lot of time with Trump before the two recently turned on each other, came out and said as much in her New York Times profile last week: “In my opinion,” Greene predicted, “we’re going to see more war. Because what do you do when you really lose power, when you become a lame duck? How do you cling to power? You go to war.”
Now, it is also true that Maduro was a horrible dictator responsible for much death and suffering in Venezuela—but the Trump administration did not kidnap Maduro with any kind of plan in place for a transition to peace and democracy in the region. Rather, this move is just going to generate mass chaos and violence and further empower the cartels. It normalizes large countries like Russia and China invading and pillaging smaller countries for their oil, sparking global instability. And it certainly lays bare our loss of representative democracy in the United States, as Congress just continues to roll over and play dead while the sundowning madman in the Oval Office runs roughshod over the planet.
Trump ran as the peace president, as hard as that may have been for any normal person to believe, and continues to bill himself that way. He was elected on a literal promise to end wars, not to start them. He nominated himself for the Nobel Peace Prize, and when they denied him that, FIFA stepped up and gave him a peace prize just to glaze his ass. But it hasn’t even been a full year into his administration, and Trump has already threatened to annex Greenland and Canada and bomb Iran, has fueled Russia’s bloody war on Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and has now literally started a war for oil in Venezuela. This, all while building himself a “drone-proof” ballroom with bulletproof glass that he claimed, rather ominously, that he has realized will be the site of the next inauguration.
I don’t know where the hell Congress is right now. I’m seeing Democratic senators posting threads on social media criticizing last night’s unauthorized coup, but I’m not seeing any plans or threats beyond strongly worded letters. Our New Year’s resolution as a country must be to elect a new group of people who are willing to impeach and remove this psychotic president and stand up to this entire reckless, incompetent administration. Anything else would be nothing short of a murder-suicide.
Especially Mandy Patinkin’s performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with students from Staten Island’s P.S. 22 chorus. My god!
Thank you for continuing to pull no punches. Shit is confusing out there. But also not at all confusing. Power grab. Global instability sure as fuck looks inevitable.