‘Blind Into Caracas.’
Less than 24 hours in, members of the Trump team are celebrating victory. None of them seem to have wondered what happens a day, a month, a decade from now.
From today’s press conference, after the US raid in Venezuela. At center, Marco Rubio, pretending that this was just a normal law-enforcement action. At left, the omnipresent Stephen Miller. At right, the person who has assumed one-man authority to disrupt the world economy with tariffs, launch lethal assaults on other nations, and declare a “boots on the ground” military occupation. Today, as shown, he struggled to maintain attention when anyone was speaking other than himself. (Photo Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)
Here are ten quick reactions to the most disturbing presidential press conference I have seen in my life.
1. Trump himself looked and sounded very bad. He slurred and slumped more than usual. His eyes fluttered many times toward seeming shut. He had trouble working his way through big words in the written script. His off-script riffs were from a very small span of his standard repertoire. (“We’re a respected country again, like never before,” etc.) Yes, he had probably been up all night. But even for him, he looked bad.
When answering one of the many policy questions that Trump shunted to him, Marco Rubio found himself saying, “It’s a country run by incompetent, senile men.” He was talking about Cuba. But even as the words came from his mouth, with Trump standing with drooping eyes behind him (as shown above), you could see Rubio wishing he had phrased the point a different way.
2. Trump made the case for his own impeachment. Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and others tried to dance around what had happened by saying that the Maduro capture and relocation from Venezuela was a routine law-enforcement exercise. Nothing to see here! We’re just executing another drug-crime arrest warrant, though with unusual skill from the American forces.
Trump was having none of this pussyfooting. Perhaps without realizing he was doing so, he flatly and 100% contradicted what others at the microphone were claiming.
“We are going to run the country,” he said of Venezuela, with “we” meaning the United States. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition… We’re going to stay and run it, essentially, until a proper transition can take place.” That is, until we decide to leave.
In the meantime, Trump said, he was “not afraid of boots on the ground.”
Good God.
This is an overthrow of a foreign government. It’s an act of war. It is an open-ended declaration of foreign occupation. And as all at the microphone either proudly declared and reluctantly admitted, it was pulled off without consultation with anyone outside their little circle.
That’s what’s impeachable. If Trump understood what he was saying, he was violating all concepts of checks-and-balances. If he didn’t understand, he is incapacitated.
It’s bad enough for Trump to disrupt the entire world trading system, at his whim, with one-man decisions to raise and lower tariffs. (As the Supreme Court might eventually get around to recognizing.) What he announced today is one man (plus his enablers) violating the Constitution of 1787, the War Powers Act of 1973, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, all of which require a president to involve the Congress in war-and-peace decisions.
Yes, since the 1970s Congress has ceded too much territory to presidents in this area. But what Trump announced was not ceding territory. It was declaring, as Nero might have put it if he spoke French, l’etat, c’est moi.
Actual impeachment will go nowhere, in a quisling-run GOP Congress. But recognition that this is flat impeachable needs to become part of standard press and political discussion of what has just occurred.
3. Special horseshit award for Marco Rubio. He claimed that the Trump team couldn’t let anyone in Congress know about the Maduro mission ahead of time, for fear of leaks. And that this caution extended even to the “Gang of Eight” in Congress. These are the select, bipartisan assemblage of leaders who are supposed to be briefed on the most sensitive security matters—and who (in contrast to the Trump team) have had over the decades zero cases of leaking sensitive information before military operations.
Rubio knows full well that the most grievous leaks in the Trump era have come either from Trump himself or from Pete Hegseth. (Including the pathetically incompetent WhatsApp Signal group chat.) To be clear, Rubio knows that what he was saying today was false—his claim that elite Congressional intelligence committees cannot keep secrets. But he said it anyway, because it is what Trump wanted to hear. This is what we call lying in normal life.
4. Remember when this was about drugs? Hah hah hah! The only time Trump seemed animated during these presentations was when he talked about how much oil money Venezuela had “stolen” from Americans, and how great the new Venezuelan oil riches would be.
One example of many. “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We’re going to get reimbursed for all of that. We’re going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend. So it’s going to be, it’s going to be very important.”
In the annals of presidential rhetoric about foreign commitments, it’s not quite like “arsenal of democracy” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
5. Remember when Trump was all about ‘America First’ and staying out of other people’s battles? Hah hah hah! Anyone who thought that Trump would keep the US out of foreign complications, for God’s sake think again.
For the many, many people in the press who wrote that Trump’s “America First” doctrine would free the country from foreign entanglements, let’s see those “I was wrong” columns.
6. The White House press corps did a good job of asking follow-up questions. Since I don’t think I’ve ever typed that sentence before in my life, I’ll type it out now.
You could see at the end of the initial presentations—by Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, the JCS chairman (Gen. Dan Caine) whom Trump insists on calling “Razin’ Caine”—that the White House team wanted to move Trump away from the mic. But he kept coming back for his lounge-show act, and kept digging himself in deeper and deeper with “off-message” comments. Especially, as he blew away the smoke-screen Rubio had tried to create, that this was just a normal law-enforcement exercise.
A reporter asked who would take over in Venezuela, and got Trump to say, “I mean, there is nobody to take over.” Another reporter asked about “boots on the ground” and whether the US would have an ongoing military presence in Venezuela. This person got Trump to say, “We’re going to have presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.” There were lots of other good questions. And lots of other revealing, discouraging answers. More of this from the press corps, please.
7. Apparently no one in the US government has asked, What happens the next day? There are some wars that countries rush into because they must, without extensive “day after” planning. For the US, that could mean Fort Sumter in 1861, or Pearl Harbor in 1941. For Ukraine, it was the battle for its survival, starting in 2022. In such cases, countries could start worrying about the day after, once they knew that “after” would actually come.
Other “wars of choice” depend fundamentally on assessing what will happen the day after the fighting stops. In the year before the ruinous US invasion of Iraq, I published many magazine articles, and later an entire book, (called Blind Into Baghdad, thus the title of this post) on the foreseeable disaster of trying to run Iraq after removing Saddam Hussein. There is no evidence that anyone on the Trump team has thought about what will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year, in the glow of their “success” today.
It was barely one month after the start of the catastrophic Iraq invasion that George W. Bush had his “Mission Accomplished!” premature victory celebration aboard an aircraft carrier. That was the tone of, especially, Pete Hegseth’s preening this morning. By all accounts, the branches of military and civilian organizations that cooperated in their exercise did a phenomenal job. But we’re not even 24 hours into this campaign. Decades later, we’re still dealing with the aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq.
8. ‘Monroe Doctrine’ meets ‘Donroe Doctrine’ meets ‘China’s core interests.’
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Breaking the News to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.