Donald Trump’s assault on the world — not to mention democracy, diplomacy, basic human decency and the rule of law — may look like an incoherent series of vindictive episodes aimed at “flooding the zone with s**t,” as the now-clichéd expression holds. Bewildering and overwhelming the opposition is certainly among the goals, but it’s important to grasp the method behind the madness.
Masked goons stage a military-style attack on a Chicago apartment building. The president and his “secretary of war” deliver unhinged macho-snowflake monologues urging senior military officers to wage war on civilians in American cities. Federal employees are fired en masse, and then begrudgingly rehired piecemeal under court order. Punitive tariffs are imposed on longtime allies, seemingly for whimsical or inscrutable reasons. Public-sector language is purged of all references to genuine history and science, in a campaign George Orwell would have found crude and obvious. Foreign policy becomes an instrument of naked personal despotism, with favors bestowed on those who burnish the leader’s vanity, and yanked away from those who decline to do so.
Viewed through the distortion lens of Trumpism, those things no longer appear as disconnected or nonsensical but as parts of a grand plan, squares stitched into the great MAGA quilt of meaning. In fact, if we take a closer look at Trump’s phony war with Venezuela, which seems to defy any rational explanation (and isn’t exactly a war with Venezuela; we’ll get to that), it turns out to embody all the elements of a much larger full-spectrum war against reality.
That larger war is breathtaking in its scale and ambition but also severely limited in scope, since a central tenet of the MAGA agenda is to pick easy targets and avoid overt military conflict with actual adversaries. It’s a campaign, albeit a frequently erratic and incompetent one, to push that agenda as far as it will go in every possible direction and, along the way, to establish Trump as a world-historical figure, a latter-day Caesar or Charlemagne or Lenin. (It was grimly amusing to learn that Trump had never heard of William the Conqueror; by his own account, he told King Charles, “That’s the coolest name I’ve ever heard.”)
It that sounds preposterous and doomed to fail, well, sure. That doesn’t mean it won’t change the world in unpredictable ways for years to come, beyond the lifespan of anyone reading this today. It’s conventional to observe that Trump’s promise to make America great again has always implied an impossible return to an imaginary past that never existed: bits of the 1950s, the 1890s and the antebellum South, all stirred into Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercials. Trump’s global vision, such as it is, embodies similar elements of pseudo-historical fantasy — the Cold War era without the Cold War, the age of imperialism without the responsibility of managing an empire or the rising threat of revolution, the glory days of industrial capitalism without actual industry or an organized working class — further distorted by 2025-style techno-libertarian greed and Trump’s bottomless need for ego gratification.
This is a campaign, albeit an erratic and incompetent one, to push the MAGA agenda as far as it will go in every possible direction and, along the way, to establish Trump as a world-historical figure, a latter-day Caesar or Charlemagne or Lenin.
This war on the world has both fictional goals and real ones, and the fact that those are incompatible is, once again, not a fundamental problem for Trump’s courtiers or adherents. There’s no hypothetical version of global equilibrium in which the United States is simultaneously the dominant superpower and also an isolationist fortress-state with zero immigration. I would guess that Trump loves the sound of that but doesn’t follow the logic too far, while the people who intend to outlast him just “yes queen” along and roll their eyes. Their goal is more doable: leveraging American power to ensure the continued dominance of the billionaire elite into the indefinite future, or at least as long as our planet remains habitable. (They’re aware that it probably shouldn’t be advertised that way.)
The administration’s piecemeal campaign to divide and conquer Latin America illustrates all these themes at once, including the likely outer limits of Trumpian power as it collides with 21st-century political reality. There is no obvious connection, for the mainstream media and nearly all North American media consumers, between the aforementioned military strikes on Venezuelan “narco-terrorists,” the extortionate tariffs imposed on Brazil over its prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and the proposed $20 billion bailout of Argentina’s right-wing regime.
But all three of these interventions involve the same deadly trifecta: Trump’s personal grudges, the global dreams of far-right conspiracy theorists, and the investment portfolios of Big Tech oligarchs and hedge-fund billionaires. That’s pretty obvious when it comes to South America’s two largest countries, Brazil and Argentina, which have recently, and respectively, become the targets of Mafia-style intimidation and bribery tactics. It isn’t working too well in either case, and the Trump regime risks looking enfeebled on the global stage rather than manly and muscular.
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It was no surprise that Trump and his fellow travelers were eager to aid Bolsonaro, the Trump-style ex-president who tried to stage a Trump-style coup almost exactly two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. They were outraged that they couldn’t prevent Brazilian authorities from successfully prosecuting Bolsonaro on charges that may send him to prison, and will probably banish him from politics for life. (His criminal case remains on appeal.)
No doubt the unsettling parallel cut too close to the bone in MAGA-world. But if Trump or Marco Rubio or Stephen Miller actually believed that Brazil’s populist left-wing president, universally known as Lula — who defeated Bolsonaro in the 2022 election — would capitulate before inflated tariffs, meaningless sanctions and a lot of empty words, they were high on their own supply. Standing up to the North American colossus and its despised leader was, of course, a massive boost for Lula’s domestic popularity and, if anything, sealed Bolsonaro’s fate. So maybe that was all long-game political theater for Steve Bannon and other right-wing deep thinkers, or maybe it was just dumb.
As for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s genius plan to rescue the crumbling regime of Javier Milei, Argentina’s Trump-superfan president, that might be even dumber. As in Brazil, it’s a nakedly political effort to fling a life preserver to an endangered right-wing ally. Milei is a libertarian true believer whose reckless budget-slashing has driven Argentina into a deep economic crisis. He now faces legislative elections he’s likely to lose, but Bessent has declared his “unconditional support” and promised a “loan” of $20 billion that will never be repaid — that’s your tax dollars and mine, to be clear — on top of the $20 billion Milei already borrowed from the IMF, which will also never be repaid.
Who thinks this is a good idea? Basically no one. Republican members of Congress hate it; they signed up for “America First,” not shipping bucketloads of free money to s**thole countries thousands of miles away. Soybean farmers in the Midwest really hate it, because Trump’s trade war has cratered their massive exports to China and Argentine soybeans have filled the gap. Financial experts almost unanimously agree that the bailout is too late to save Milei, and not nearly enough. In the judicious language of the Economist, house organ of global capitalism, Argentina’s government is “burning through foreign reserves” in an effort to stave off financial collapse, and even after the bailout “still probably lacks the dollars to cover next year’s imports and loan repayments.”
Seriously, why the hell is this administration determined to flush billions down Argentina’s toilet — or, to phrase that more elegantly, cui bono? As Rohit Chopra, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explains in a Foreign Policy op-ed, the U.S. bailout will do nothing for ordinary people in Argentina, but will “bestow big benefits on financial investors” who bet big on Milei’s government and, until now, looked like big losers. Those investors, as it happens, reportedly include Elon Musk, who was “especially bullish” on Milei’s DOGE-style spending cuts. Bailout money is likely to be invested in “market-moving purchases that push up the value of assets and local currency,” and hedge funds and vulture capitalists “will see a windfall.”
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That brings us all the way back around to Trump’s semi-declared war with Venezuela, or at least with drug cartels that, according to Pete Hegseth and other profoundly unreliable narrators, are unofficial arms of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s corrupt regime. Venezuela is an economic basket case with a smaller population than Texas and virtually no functioning civil society. Even former leftist allies like Lula are no longer eager to defend Maduro, who blatantly rigged the last presidential election (and perhaps the one before that). So you might imagine that even in the demon-haunted MAGA imagination, there’s no possible way to turn Venezuela into a military threat to the U.S. But you would be wrong.
Media coverage of the U.S. military attacks that have killed 21 alleged “narco-terrorists” has mostly focused on technical questions: Were the boats really carrying drugs? Could they have reached North America? Exactly how illegal is it to kill civilians in international waters based on secret intelligence? (Answer: Very much so.)
You might imagine that even in the demon-haunted MAGA imagination, there’s no possible way to turn a fatally weakened country like Venezuela into a military threat to the U.S. But you would be wrong.
Independent journalist Jonathan Larsen, a former MSNBC producer and occasional Salon contributor, has outdone the entire industry in connecting the dots behind the Trump administration’s Venezuela complex — and it’s a deeper, weirder dive than you could possibly imagine.
Larsen’s Substack report is worth reading in full, not least because he captures in rigorous detail the blend of incompetence, ideology, gullibility and outright insanity that fuels foreign policy in the second Trump regime. On one hand, Venezuela makes a perfect target, one that America’s oligarchs and oil companies have lusted after for decades: It might be the most vulnerable nation in South America, and it also sits atop the largest untapped petroleum reserves in the Western Hemisphere.
On the other hand — and it’s more like the many tentacles of Cthulhu than a hand — Larsen reports that the supposed intelligence about the Tren de Aragua criminal gang’s links to Maduro, and its alleged widespread infiltration of the U.S., appears to come from a single dubious source. And that guy, a shadowy Venezuelan-Israeli fixer whose business involves getting rich Venezuelans out of the country, is in cahoots with a former CIA official who’s been pushing delirious conspiracy theories about Venezuela for years, including — wait for it! — the one about Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic being “tendrils of the Maduro regime” and stealing the 2020 election from Trump, with help from China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Serbia and whoever else. I’m sure George Clooney, George Soros, antifa and the “trans agenda” are implicated somehow.
Yeah, that’s really where we’ve landed! Trump’s second term is like a nightmarish video game where bad things keep happening but we end up right back where we started, in a universe of unlimited greed, unhealed narcissistic injury and “alternative facts” in place of objective reality. The president of the United States is waging a fake war against imaginary enemies in revenge for something that didn’t happen. Casualties are extensive, and may include the last vestiges of this nation’s dignity and self-respect.
