The President of the United States launched a military operation against the capital of Venezuela to extract its dictator on Jan. 3. This escalation comes off the heals of using the military to sink what he calls drug boats. This latest action did not wash with the protestors who showed up at the Miller-Maple protest site on Jan.4.
“Morbidly, I wasn’t surprised because there’s been signaling that this unconstitutional war, that is solely for oil, was one of the high priorities of the fascist regime that we find ourselves under control of. So yeah, that tracks. Horrible things are happening – that’s where we’re at – it fucking blows,” Jarred Guerrero-Salinas, an air force veteran, said. “I’m having a real difficult time personally through all of this, but especially over the holidays, it was really, really dark for me. Now it’s radical acceptance. We can’t fucking just cry over it, we got to find out what to do. I’m plugging myself into the community, I’m coming out on to the street, talking to strangers I don’t know, but they’re holding signs that indicate to me that they haven’t lost their ability to critically think.”
The dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, has led a horrendously mismanaged regime since inheriting it from the much more charismatic Hugo Chavez. Trump has presented no evidence in accusing Maduro a drug trafficker. In fact, experts point out that most drug production doesn’t come from Venezuela and most of the drugs passed through Venezuela are destined for Europe. Cocaine production is mostly confined to Colombia, Peru and Colombia. Fentanyl, the most deadly narcotic, is mostly made in Mexico from precursor elements made largely in China.
The Democratic Party is widely favored to win the House of Representatives next November, and the Senate is also very much in play. It is possible that Trump is attempting a rally-around-the-flag moment—a political phenomenon where a sudden war causes the citizens to suddenly support the current administration to help get the country through a prolonged moment of danger—but whether or not that works is yet to be seen.
Hava Levitt-Phillips said that the attack on Caracas “seemed to be expected given the way that Trump et al are making their decisions and pursuing personal gain and rapacious greed for power and control, for themselves, and their rich friends. I mean it’s horrifying and I’m super pissed.” When asked how the news had changed her motivations on protesting, Levitt-Phillips said it made her “much more motivated to continue protesting.”
Pro-Trump protestors or counter-protestors could not be found on January 4. It was for that reason that Current Magazine sent a series of questions to the Republican Party of Washtenaw County, to get a conservative perspective.
The response from the Washtenaw GOP party chairman, Jason Rogers, was just two sentences: “My policy is to not respond to fake news requests anymore. Your questions bely your intentions.”
It is also important to remember when this operation has happened. The president started his second term with 52% approval. It is now touching the upper thirties. Trump also has only partially complied with a law passed by Congress forcing him to release all of the Epstein files. Trump has always admitted being a friend with the notorious, dead sex offender, but has always denied knowing about his behavior to underage girls. His version of events has changed over time, and Tod Tharp noticed.
“This is a big distraction….,” Tharp said. He was standing at the corner of Miller and Jackson Avenue holding a sign saying “Not Distracted, Release The Files” on Monday. “They’re slow walking the release of that information because [they] don’t want to, because they know he’s in it. All we have to do is listen to the survivors, to the women who have now grown up and were children. It’s just a distraction.”
Multiple political commentators have also suggested that it might be simply an increasingly desperate attempt to distract people. As the longtime Democratic commentator James Carville put it: “What’s his objective? Why’s he doing this? You know what his objective is: it’s Jeffrey Epstein!”
“I think it is dual-distraction, but also, why wouldn’t they enrich themselves? That is what Trump has done consistently throughout the one year of his [second] presidency,” Guerrero-Salinas said of the timing. “That’s the point. The cruelty is the point with ICE. The control is also the point. The war is a distraction that is the point, but also to make themselves richer and their oil buddies richer. That is also the reason. They’re just flooding the zone and its distracting people from this, that, and the other thing. But the data center is still happening. I’m still in that fight. I’m tracking fights against ICE, the administration, and I’m constantly trying to contact my representatives and work with other organizers, to find a way to get more of the layman citizen the gumption, the ability and the modicum of hope that if they call their senator or representative, that they will fucking listen. The more they do that, the more it is going to become evident that they don’t work for the American people … Who the fuck knows?”
Maduro pled not guilty when he was arraigned at a New York City courtroom on Monday. Venezuela has one of the largest proven deposits of oil. Trump has turbo charged fossil fuel protection and taken glee in his destruction of all environmental sustainability efforts. And after the operation ended, Trump was vague in saying that the United States will “run” Venezuela despite the fact that they are a fully sovereign foreign nation. The special forces that captured Maduro after a brief gunfight and spectacular air raid only captured Maduro and his wife. As of publication there are no American boots on the ground in Venezuela and the police state that Maduro ran is still intact and in an entrenched position.
Maduro rigged last year’s presidential election first by banning his opponent, Maria Machado, and then changing the results to keep the winner out. Macahdo has done a lot to butter up Trump publicly, even dedicating her Nobel Prize win to Trump. Trump has wanted a Nobel Prize since Obama received one. Many Venezuelans celebrated Maduro’s ouster on social media, but it is important to remember that Venezuelan society is extremely polarized. Because of the economic collapse, 7,900,000 Venezuelans have fled the country according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Trump poured cold water on the idea that she should now run the country. But taking it over would require American boots on the ground. Trump appeared to think, at the press conference following the attack and capture of Maduro, that the regime that Maduro left behind will simply do what the White House tells it to.
That brings up another point. Twenty-three years ago, another Republican president launched a war against a dictator who had done horrible things to his people. Maduro is very much a Saddam Hussein character in it is indisputable that he is a dictator who has killed scores of people. But the last time America tried to engage in nation building it ended in a catastrophe, a de facto civil war that America still hasn’t fully disentangled itself from, that led to ISIS forming.
Donald Trump’s rise in 2015 was as an anti-war candidate. He was the first major Republican to critique the neoconservative world view that used to dominate Republican circles and that George W. Bush had been the poster boy for. Will the MAGA base change and stay united in the wake of this operation and stay with him, or will it fall apart? Pollsters are hard at work trying to see how the Make America Great Again base feels about the situation as it unfolds. And at least in parts of the country, protestors will continue to oppose the Administration as we barrel towards the Midterm elections.
As Sarah Longwell, the former Republican Party political operative and publisher of The Bulwark put it, “This is everything that Trump has run against the whole time… This is Bushism with less of a plan. It is the Iraq and Afghanistan thing with less of a plan.”
Drew Saunders is a freelance business and environmental journalist who grew up just outside of Ann Arbor. He covers local business developments, embraces his foodie side with reviews restaurants, obsesses over Michigan's environmental state, loves movies, and feels spoiled by the music he gets to review for Ann Arbor!
