Trump's words were worse than his deeds. Kidnapping the sovereign of another nation is of course illegal, but basically meaningless, because the Venezuelan government is still entirely intact and in charge of Venezuela. All that happens is now the Vice President is President. If Trump had wanted to pull a stupid stunt and take out Maduro for whatever personal reason that would be one thing, but what he said America was going to do moving forward from here is entirely another.
'We will run Venezuela.' How? With what army? You can't run Venezuela remotely with a Zoom link. No one is currently taking your orders. There are no police to enforce your decisions. If you want to run Venezuela, you would have to send in the army and occupy the country of 40 million, presumably all hostile guerrillas who will kill your soldiers at every given opportunity. Venezuela is a massive country, bigger than Texas. It's 50% larger than Ukraine, and we've already seen how difficult it is to occupy Ukraine. In order to police it all you'd need at least a million soldiers.
The current Vice President of Venezuela's father was tortured to death by CIA-affiliated thugs. She has nothing but disdain for America. You're not going to run the country through her. So what is Trump's plan? As usual I don't think Trump has a plan, he's relying on magical thinking:
1. Kidnap Maduro.
2. ???
3. Profit.
Remember when he said he would obliterate the Houthis? How did that work out? He's all talk.
The American people certainly aren't going to support sending a million ground troops to 'run Venezuela' when they've never done anything to us and we could just leave them alone, which has worked for the first 250 years of America's existence. Such a massive undertaking would require congressional approval and obviously the Democrats wouldn't give it. The New York Times has already condemned Trump for the much smaller crime of kidnapping Maduro.
But Trump goes on, his ambitions extending further and further into extradimensional space, with no attempt to explain how any of these would actually work -- 'We can do this to anyone.' So now he says all nations on Earth are subject to American approval. If we don't like your government we will replace it with a puppet to our liking. The American military doesn't even have the ability to occupy Venezuela, but now he's declared his intent to occupy the whole world. How will that work? Does he not think there will be any pushback to this new regime-change-world-order?
'Columbia should watch its ass.' 'We need to do something about Mexico.' 'I wouldn't feel safe if I were Cuba right now.' So that's a declaration of war on three more states -- when we still haven't actually beaten Venezuela, or achieved anything meaningful at all. This on top of his threats to Nigeria, Canada, Panama, Denmark, Yemen, Iran, Palestine, etc., etc. He hasn't succeeded in any of his threats and he just keeps issuing more. Blank checks of aggression towards virtually everyone on Earth. We don't have the military or economic force to cash any of these checks. With China curtailing rare earths, we can't even build any modern weapons anymore. All we've got is whatever we have in our stockpile, which isn't much, considering Biden shipped it all off to Ukraine. We couldn't even beat Afghanistan, who fought with Ak-47's and camels. What is the plan to take on the entire world?
America is $38 trillion in debt, and rising every day. 25% of our tax proceeds go towards servicing interest on the debt. We are already completely tapped out. There is no surplus that can be used towards endless foreign adventures. How are we going to fund a war with half the world? Go into more debt? Trump was elected because America was tired of hyperinflation. How would more debt not lead to hyperinflation, and thus the complete discrediting of the Republican party?
If you attempted to seize Venezuela as a profit-making endeavor, the expense would be upfront, but the profits from the oil would take decades to materialize. The decrepit infrastructure of Venezuela would take years and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild before you could get one cent of its oil. Plus it's easy to imagine that the natives would sabotage all attempts at rebuilding as resentment for being a conquered populace. Even if in the cosmic scale of time it would be profitable to annex Venezuela, the American voters will long before then vote out the war party for the upfront inflation costs that the plan requires.
Trump has already alienated most of his base and most of the country, which was firmly against more foreign wars. 63% of Americans opposed war with Venezuela. If he sticks to his dumb kidnapping stunt, fine, everyone will forget this happened by the midterms, but if he actually tries to follow through with anything he's said he will lose the midterms so badly that I could see him actually being impeached and convicted in the Senate, and then convicted in a court of law for his endless crimes and sent behind bars for the rest of his short lifespan. This is a more likely turn of events than 'We will run Venezuela.'
Why can't America return to its peaceful policy from 1782-1898, where we never went abroad in search of enemies? Was America not prosperous and happy during this period of time? Were we not completely secure from foreign invasion during this time? Was there anything actually wrong with life in America that needed fixing, that our lack of invading the outside world was causing? Trump ran on a promise of a return to that foreign policy, and now has become the most insane warmonger in American history -- issuing more threats to random innocent countries than all other presidents combined. I have to believe that at some point J.D. Vance will invoke the 25th amendment as Trump is clearly insane, at which point we can have an actual believer in peace in office. J.D. Vance was nominated by Trump to appease the Tucker Carlson wing of the party, who believes in no foreign intervention. He's a close friend of Tucker. He is the genuine article, unlike Trump who has been a liar and a charlatan his whole life. (Cheating on his wives, defrauding his business partners, and doing the opposite of his campaign promises.)
Perhaps when a few of these wars of choice go south, the cabinet will agree with J.D. that it's time to pull the plug on this obviously unhealthy in mind and body walking corpse. The 25th amendment was made for moments like these.
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