Venezuela: Our criminal president’s latest crime scene

There could be a universe adjacent to this one where it might be appropriate, on this deep, dark day in American history, to make obligatory clucking noises about Nicolás Maduro, the now-forcibly-deposed president of Venezuela. But you know what? Forget it. You won’t get that here.

Maduro was bad news, I suppose, but almost certainly wouldn’t have ranked among the world’s top five most disagreeable despots. Far more to the point, Maduro and his actual or alleged misdeeds are almost entirely irrelevant right now. Any effort to “well, actually” the shameful, shocking and blatantly illegal actions of the U.S. government this weekend should choke on the big lump of obvious hypocrisy caught in its throat.

It’s no good pondering whether what just happened in Venezuela was a “war crime” or mumbling about how perhaps Congress should have been notified. There has to be an actual war before you can have war crimes, brothers and sisters. These were just straight-up crimes, committed by a criminal president and a criminal regime, and the entire world knows it. Whatever Maduro may or may not have done has now disappeared into the background noise of bad historical pretexts, along with Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine was being run by Nazis.

If someone tries to tell you with a straight face — someone like a mainstream media commentator or a constitutionally supine Democratic member of Congress, just for instance — that Maduro was an illegitimate, anti-democratic and corrupt leader posing as a populist, who had sabotaged and divided a previously affluent country, please tell that person to sit quietly with those words and their conscience for a few moments and then speak them again, slowly and carefully.

The unprovoked American invasion of Venezuela, the apparent decapitation of its government and the abduction or kidnapping (or “arrest,” if we must) of Maduro and his wife are signs of both the Trump regime’s strength and its fatal weakness. That isn’t a contradiction, exactly. It’s more like an existential dilemma, both for our bewildered and benighted country and for the world.

On one hand, Donald Trump is tangibly losing popular support, physical strength and cognitive capacity. His administration and his political movement are almost literally bleeding out, plagued by infighting and faced with likely defeat in the upcoming midterm elections. This reckless violation of international law — specifically, if anyone actually cares, a violation of Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, which states the basic principle that nation-states must respect each other’s sovereignty — is an act of political desperation, like a drunken gambler going all-in on a bad hand at 3 a.m.

But this could not have happened at all if Trump and his minions had not entirely captured the machineries of state in the United States: The American coup presaged the Venezuelan coup, and the second is a late-stage byproduct of the first. There’s no telling how bad the blowback will be from either or both, but let me make a bold prediction: Really bad, and it will take decades to unfold.

How did we get here? Well, as New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada recently observed, that question is willfully stupid. We know how we got here: Because every political institution in the United States has failed, and our society has, by and large, sailed right through that failure and pretended not to notice. The executive branch is managed by an army of vicious zealots and toadies, led by Stephen Miller, Russ Vought and Marco Rubio. The nonpartisan administrative state — LOL, those were the days, right? — has been crushed, hollowed out or sucked up into Elon Musk’s vacuum of brotastic incompetence. Smug, dim, smirking Mike Johnson and his tenuous Republican majority have essentially closed down Congress, while the useless Democrats wring their hands in useless dismay. The Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority, high on its own supply of recycled Federalist Society brain-farts, has thrown out 230 years of jurisprudence and declared that, heck, the president is kind of a king after all.

It is both nauseating and deeply upsetting to hear an American president — whose supporters apparently believed that he was against ill-considered foreign interventions — announce that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela into the indefinite future while U.S. oil companies eagerly plunder that nation’s petroleum reserves. It’s a bit like waking up after falling off the wagon, and trying to remember what happened: Haven’t we heard something like that before? Do I recall correctly that maybe it didn’t go that well?

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So, yeah, it’s entirely legit to be shocked and dismayed about this act of criminal desperation, which has further humiliated and debased the United States in the eyes of the world. As other observers have noted, Putin and Xi Jinping are enjoying this and taking notes. But here’s the thing, Mr. President: Despite what you think, they’re not laughing with you. 

But maybe we can skip the part where we pretend to be surprised that America has been revealed as a brain-damaged rogue state, hypnotized by its own reflection, consumed by its internal contradictions and surrendering once again to its worst impulses. Or the part where we emerge from our cocoons and ask each other, in mock-amazement, whether this is really who we are. If we haven’t figured that out by now, we never will.