I wanted to offer some comments on Donald Trump’s military action yesterday in Venezuela, where he bombed the capitol and sent in a team of special forces to kidnap Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife—who was also a top regime official.
This war is lawless and unconstitutional, and it’s just an unprincipled grab for power and money.
Now, I want to begin by acknowledging the Maduro is a bad guy, and there are a lot of us who—well, let’s say we don’t wish him any good. He was a dictator who refused to acknowledge the results of multiple elections. His regime shot protesters, they tortured dissidents, they arrested opposition leaders—and they engaged in truly spectacular corruption, where leaders amassed billion-dollar fortunes while the people starved. Keep that last part in mind because it’s going to be important later.
Now, I’m starting with this, not just as a kind of throat-clearing, but because it sets a context for what Trump is doing here.
Because what he is doing here, first of all, is that he is not getting rid of the Maduro regime and supporting its pro-democracy opposition. He is not trying to turn Venezuela back into a country with free elections and the rule of law. It’s the opposite.
This whole operation was sprung on everyone as a surprise, so we’ve had to wait 24 hours for the news to catch up and for us to get independent reports about what’s going on. And the reports are that Trump has pointedly refused to support Venezuela’s exiled opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who recently received the Nobel Peace Prize. And some people are speculating, which I think is reasonable, that he won’t support her because she won the Nobel Peace Prize. He wanted it for himself, and he’s jealous and petty.
The other big reporting on this is that Trump decided on this operation after back-channel negotiations with Maduro’s vice-president, who Trump is now backing as the new leader of the regime. And this is why it’s important to remember that Maduro’s regime is a brutal dictatorship. And notice, I didn’t say it was a brutal dictatorship. It is a brutal dictatorship, because it didn’t go away. We didn’t topple it. We just chose a new leader for it.
This isn’t some George W. Bush-era starry eyed war for democracy. This is an old-fashioned US-backed coup, in which we took out one troublesome dictator and replaced him with another dictator more friendly to our interests.
And what are our interests? Here’s the key passage from a New York Times story on this.
Weeks earlier, US officials had already settled on an acceptable candidate to replace Mr. Maduro, at least for the time being: Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who had impressed Trump officials with her management of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry.
The people involved in the discussions said intermediaries persuaded the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments in the country.
This is very much just a war for oil. It’s a gangster policy. You know, my son fed me the comparison for this. He pointed out: This is literally the plot of The Godfather. For those who don’t remember: A mobster comes to Don Corleone and asks for his protection to deal drugs, and Corleone refuses. So the mobster tries to have the Godfather assassinated because he thinks his son will take over and be more cooperative. And that’s basically what we just did in Venezuela. We took out the top mob boss so we could deal with a more cooperative mob boss.
He’s not against the mob, he just wants a piece of the action.
This is Donald Trump’s outlook on the world. There are no principles, no rules, just a ruthless scramble for power and resources, which are up for grabs to be seized by whoever is strongest. It’s “might makes right.” And already, we have some of Trump’s supporters, kind of high on this temporary triumph, saying that Greenland is next.
That’s the biggest danger here. This is Trump endorsing this same view of the world as the big dictators in Russia and China, who think neighboring countries are theirs to grab, and they can arrest or assassinate leaders of other countries if they don’t cooperate. This is a green light for what Russia is doing in Ukraine and what it wants to do to the rest of Europe. It’s a green light for China to seize Taiwan. And it’s a green light for petty tyrants everywhere around the world.
You know, we have a prevailing system that we’ve been trying to enforce, where you don’t just have this war of all against all, where there are rules and legitimacy, and it’s not just a mad scramble for power. And that has led to a long, unprecedented era of peace, after the slaughter of two world wars. Donald Trump is trying to undo that, and it could lead us back into a world with a lot more war and chaos.
That’s a big leap to make. And this leads us to the most immediate problem with this military action, which is that Trump ordered this without even consulting Congress. He did it without getting permission from the representative of the American people. This is not optional, and it’s not ambiguous. The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war. The president can ask them to do it, as previous presidents have done. They have gone to Congress to get a declaration of war or an authorization for military force. But Trump didn’t even bother.
There’s a good reason why the Constitution gave this power to Congress. Because when the president comes to Congress, we can debate all of these questions: Why are we going to war? What comes next? What precedent will it set for future war and peace? And Congress may not always get it right, but at least we have a chance to ask the questions.
This is what Congress is for. But Donald Trump has a policy of ignoring Congress and treating it as a doormat and a rubber stamp for whatever he wants to do. And the Republicans in Congress—especially our fifth district incumbent, John McGuire—are letting him do it. They are making themselves irrelevant.
So this is a war that just replaces one dictator with another, does it as a grab for money and resources, and completely violates the Constitution and the limits on the president’s power. And it shows how Congress has been refusing to assert its own power under the Constitution.
One last observation. I noted earlier that one of the big evils of the Maduro regime is that its leaders raked off billions of dollars while the people starved. Well, that’s also a system Donald Trump has been emulating, where he’s spending—I think it’s about half a billion dollars now—to build himself a gilded ballroom. And he’s added something like billion dollars a month to his personal fortune since getting back into office. And he has an assembly line for selling pardons to white-collar crooks.
We’re getting the same system Maduro controlled in Venezuela, where the big guys with friends in the regime rake in the money, while the average person pays higher prices and has fewer opportunities.
You know, Nicolas Maduro’s regime came into power because they had a charismatic populist strongman, a guy named Hugo Chavez, who came in promising that he was on the side of the people and he was going to take power so he could make everything better for them. What they got instead was the top leaders enriching themselves, while the average person was literally starving. And when Chavez died, that system was taken over by Maduro, and now that Maduro is out, Donald Trump is making sure the same system just passes along to somebody else.
There’s a lesson here for us. It’s about about the need for us to reassert the power of Congress and rein in an out-of-control president before we end up in more pointless adventures like this raid in Venezuela—and before we end up being like Venezuela ourselves.
Restoring the power of Congress is why I’m running, and that’s what I’m asking you to vote for.
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