Trump's phony war on Venezuela -- and his larger war on reality

[marmar]

Trump’s phony war on Venezuela — and his larger war on reality
Why is Trump attacking Venezuela? All the usual reasons: Wounded pride, limitless greed and conspiracy theories

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published October 5, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.

....(snip)....

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 for at least as long as our planet remains habitable. (They’re aware that it probably shouldn’t be advertised that way.) ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/05/trumps-phony-war-on-venezuela-and-his-larger-war-on-reality/

[UpInArms]

1. From your link

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: Donald 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 with 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 muscular and manly.

I am so sick of MAGAts and their stupid ways

[Walleye]

2. I don't think there are any normal. Republicans left in office. They're all drunk on power.

One day, they will wake up and say my God we had a president who was basing policy on Fox News and truth, social clips. He declared war on Portland and he’s never walked the street there, insane.