Yes, I am one more voice expressing dismay and disappointment over Trump’s violent kidnapping of Maduro and his wife. Let us be clear: Maduro is a bad man. A recent headline described him as a “leftish dictator.” There is nothing leftish about him. He is simply an ordinary dictator, like every other dictator. Under his rule, the once-prosperous nation of Venezuela has become a decaying wreck of a country. Its people deserve better.
But let there be no confusion: there is no good guy in this event. Trump and his minions are not the virtuous rescuers of the Venezuelan people.
Trump does sometimes tell the truth, and he has truthfully said that his intention is to seize the oil and mineral assets of Venezuela as an imperial power declaring authority over the entire Western Hemisphere. If there were any doubt, he has now declared the “Donroe Doctrine.” I suspect he has only the vaguest idea of what that means and has merely been told it is related to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which warned European colonial powers to keep their hands off the newly independent states of the Western Hemisphere.
He may not understand it, but Stephen Miller and others who form the intellectual foundation of this administration do. I suspect their vision of a twenty-first-century American Western Hemisphere empire is modeled on ancient Rome. That empire asserted dominion over many semi-independent states by threatening—and when necessary using—military power whenever one of them fell out of line.
This is not the ancient Mediterranean world, and Trump is no Caesar Augustus. What this administration has done is morally indefensible. It continues to corrupt and betray our democratic heritage and the values we hold dear as a free people who desire that others may enjoy the freedoms we do. Trump has attempted to rule by fear, intimidation, and misdirection for the benefit of his own wealth and the wealth of other very rich people willing to support him.
Particularly disappointing is the complicit culpability of Congress and of a voting public that chose to believe those who worked in their best interests were their enemies, and those who held ordinary people in contempt were their friends. As I have written before, this was no accident, and we cannot excuse the electorate as merely naïve or gullible. They have been subjected to decades of talk radio inciting them to live in a world of fear and suspicion. In the name of hyper-patriotism, talk radio hosts have deliberately undermined all that is truly patriotic. Whether they understood the consequences of their actions is beside the point. They bear a tremendous burden of accountability for our current political, social, and economic condition.
This brings me back to Venezuela, along with renewed threats against Colombia, Cuba, and even Greenland. Responsible news sources and hundreds of writers have expressed dismay and outrage over what Trump has done. My contribution is only one small voice, and if you are reading this, I encourage you to raise your own small voice and make it heard as loudly as you can.
That is how we will save our democracy, make life better for our people, and begin the hard work of restoring our global reputation.