AMERICA FIRST?

Some quick thoughts on Trump's military intervention in Venezuela.

The brazen hubris of Trump announcing that this unconstitutional invasion is about extracting Venezuela’s oil for Western plunder and installing a U.S.-approved stooge in Caracas is not a conspiracy. It is unfolding in real time, with a devil-may care openness discussed in press conferences. Trump declares himself the architect of Middle East “peace” and insists that under his leadership America is once again the greatest country on earth—by what metric, exactly? America First was never patriotism; it was nationalism rebranded as loyalty to a despotic project that despises the people it claims to defend.

The crisis Trump campaigned on was fentanyl, not cocaine, which largely flows to Europe anyway from Venezuela. The true architects of the opioid epidemic remain beyond scrutiny, insulated by capital and political convenience, while Latin America continues to exist as a testing ground for one of the longest-running projects of U.S. imperial domination. Will Venezuela become another Libya? Will the language of “migrant caravans” quietly disappear as displacement accelerates and responsibility becomes impossible to deny?

I don’t know what comes next. But I fear of how this will end. Violence will be renamed order. Plunder will be recoded as stability. The people fleeing the wreckage will be erased from the story once their suffering implicates U.S. power. This is not a crisis of leadership but of empire itself—late, decaying, and fully aware of what it is doing. And it is being driven by a January 6th president who has already shown that law, truth, and democracy are expendable when empire demands obedience.

What say you all?