Technically, the United States won’t turn 250 until July 4. But Donald Trump dictated this weekend that before the dawn’s early light of only the third day of America’s Semiquincentennial was soon enough for the bombs to begin bursting in air.
At 1 a.m. Saturday, guided by a luminous full moon, a U.S. air armada of more than 150 planes roared over the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and far-flung military bases across the South American nation, waking up a metropolis of three million people with massive explosions.
An 80-year-old woman, Rosa González, was killed when a U.S. bomb slammed into her three-story apartment complex in a coastal neighborhood near the Caracas airport, according to the New York Times. The dead-of-night strike wounded several of her neighbors, tore a massive hole in the side of the apartment building, and even riddled with shrapnel a family’s portrait of Simón Bolívar, the leader who liberated Venezuela from colonialism — for a time, anyway — in 1820.
González was one of about 80 people, both security forces and civilians, killed Saturday in the first U.S. land strike in what by Trump’s own admission is “a war” — America’s latest and maybe its strangest yet. With more than 100 civilian sailors blown up in a running series of U.S. drone attacks on boats off South America, which the Trump regime claims, without offering proof, are smuggling drugs, American imperialism is growing more deadly by the day.
It’s hard here not to echo a notorious quote from Philadelphia sports history: For who? For what?
Trump’s splendid little war in Venezuela comes drenched in so many lies, buried under layers of justifications that change almost hourly, and so far outside the boundaries of both U.S. and international law that it makes George W. Bush’s dishonest and disastrous misadventure in Iraq feel like Gettysburg by comparison.
That Venezuela’s former ruthless strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife are currently sitting in Brooklyn’s federal lockup, captured by Delta Force soldiers amid the bombing and facing a U.S. indictment that asserts they were also drug lords, is pretty much the only certainty in a military crusade with a future rife with unknown unknowns.
In a stunning news conference at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida — where just 59 hours earlier, guests dined from a caviar bar as the president auctioned off a painting for $2.75 million — Trump told the world that the United States now “runs” Venezuela, despite no American personnel being posted inside the country, twice the size of California. And he made it clear that the blood of González and the others was spilled for oil, as POTUS 47 talked at length about U.S. hegemony over 17% of the world’s known oil reserves, but made no mention of restoring democracy in Venezuela.
None of this stopped a parade of retired generals from flooding cable TV news networks — even the alleged liberal one, MS Now — to talk about the tactical success in seizing Maduro and pummeling Venezuela’s defenses with no U.S. deaths, even as the bigger strategy remains a black hole. That level of commentary, backdropped by images of cheering Maduro-hating refugees in Miami and elsewhere, belied the fact that invading Venezuela was wildly unpopular with the American people.
Just last month, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 63% of U.S. voters opposed “U.S. military action inside Venezuela,” while just 25% supported such a move. Polling questions explicitly about removing Maduro have seen similar results. This matters a lot, but then other U.S. wars that history remembers as pretty terrible polled well at first. The much bigger problem with invading Venezuela is that it’s illegal. Incredibly illegal.
To be sure, the imperial U.S. presidency has been simmering since 1945, but Trump has utterly abandoned one of the most cherished principles of America’s founders — that the power to declare war rests with Congress. Not only did the Trump regime not seek approval on Capitol Hill — where its beyond-flimsy casus belli could have been debated in front of the American people — but the president didn’t even deem it necessary to inform key congressional leaders.
The attack was also a blatant international law violation of the charter of the United Nations — the organization that the U.S. spearheaded in 1945 to prevent future wars and unwind colonialism — which aimed to end unprovoked aggression. Geoffrey Robertson, who once led a U.N. war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, told the Guardian that the Trump regime “has committed the crime of aggression, which the court at Nuremberg described as the supreme crime — it’s the worst crime of all.”
To repeat: For who? For what? Is Trump eager for a bombastic military op to distract voters’ attention from the ongoing cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the explosive testimony of prosecutor Jack Smith about the president’s complicity in an attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and skyrocketing prices for healthcare and at the grocery store? Is this the big payback to Big Oil CEOs who responded to Trump’s demand for $1 billion in campaign cash? Is he satisfying the vain psychoses of Silicon Valley billionaires who want a warm tropical paradise for high-tech “networked cities” outside any laws? Is this all just a narcissistic power trip?
Yes.
Yes, this lethal disaster is a perfect storm of all of those things. But we can’t allow the blather of talking-head ex-generals or the cowardly passivity of the supposed opposition Democrats to blind us to the harsh reality of what just happened here. I didn’t think it could get worse than the utterly unwarranted 2003 Iraq War that inspired me to become an opinion journalist, but this is arguably worse, more akin to Vladimir Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine. On the 250th anniversary of America’s founding as a grand experiment in democracy, we are now a rogue state, a global pariah.
“We Are The Bad Guys,” the brilliant independent journalist Hamilton Nolan headlined his essay on Saturday, writing with painful accuracy that “the United States government under Donald Trump is the most dangerous force on earth, and a serious potential threat to every other nation, and the leading cause of geopolitical instability.”
I noted above that this Venezuelan operation is largely shrouded in uncertainty and ambiguity, yet we need to acknowledge two bitter truths that can no longer be denied in the rocket’s red glare over Caracas.
First, Donald Trump is a dictator now. To be sure, this has seemed an aspiration from the moment he stepped onto the Trump Tower escalator over a decade ago, with very mixed results, but now it’s a reality. The strike on Venezuela was a dictate, nothing more. There was zero effort to rally the American people behind him, zero effort to seek congressional input, and zero concern over the illegality of this operation, let alone its rank immorality. And if there is no meaningful opposition to his murders in Latin America, he will only consolidate his tyrannical power.
Second, the world is a much more dangerous place right now than we want to admit. As a boomer born in the aftermath of World War II, I’ve always worried that I’d live to see World War III — and I still do. But now I’m equally worried that there won’t be a global conflagration, but just a silent abandonment of the dream of a planet governed by the rule of law, with peace as its No. 1 priority.
The real significance of what just happened in Latin America is that the world — and the disappearing liberty of its denizens — is getting carved up by amoral strongmen into “spheres of influence,” just as in Trump’s beloved Gilded Age of the 19th century. After Saturday, what is to stop China from seizing control of Taiwan, or Russia from looking beyond Ukraine to wider territorial ambition in Europe, or the Trump regime from seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal?
Absolutely nothing. Except us.
A dictatorial United States isn’t preordained, nor is a world where smaller nations are swallowed up by a real axis of evil. After all, 2025 ended on a surprisingly hopeful note of resistance, led by everyday folks from Minneapolis to New Orleans with their whistles and their gumption to get in the face of masked, armed goon squads.
Let’s turn those flares of hope into a raging fire of opposition. If you’re mad today, show it in the streets, then call your member of Congress and let them know that a sternly worded letter won’t cut it. Trump’s illegal war demands nothing less than his impeachment, if not now, then after November, after the righteous flood.
Let’s send a 250th birthday card to the diminished but still-beating heart of the true America and sign it with two words: No kings.
