Venezuela And The Superman Doctrine
How to deal with dictators
The United States has invaded a sovereign nation, abducted its leader, and seized control of its government. Of course, Venezuela’s now former President Nicolás Maduro is a corrupt dictator who’s at least as bad as Donald Trump. The Venezuelan people are objectively better off without him.
During one of his regular appearances on Fox News, Democratic Senator and MAGA apologist John Fetterman ascribed wholly noble motivations to the Trump administration’s regime-change agenda.
“America is a force of good, order, and democracy,” Fetterman rambled on Monday’s Fox & Friends. “And we are promoting these kinds of values. We are the good guys.”
Just as people who are truly “kinky” don’t go around shouting that they’re “kinky,” the genuine “good guys” don’t feel it necessary to declare themselves the “good guys,” as if they’re calling moral shotgun. Meanwhile, Trump has stated pretty clearly that he’s the “baddie.”
“The oil companies are going to go in,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “and we’re taking back what they stole. They took our oil.” He reiterated his driving motivation at another press conference: “We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”
Trump isn’t interested in freedom and democracy, which is already evident from how he governs the U.S. He’s interested in oil. Trump is behaving more like a pirate than a president — plundering another country’s national resources through military force without any consideration for the Venezuelan people — at least 80 of whom died. He’s snubbing the country’s opposition leader and instead installing his own goons as if Venezuela was now a mob front.
“The United States of America is running Venezuela,” the ghoulish Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper on Monday. “ ... by definition we are in charge because we have the U.S. military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions ... for them to do commerce, they need our permission.”
Miller would’ve twirled his mustache if he were capable of growing hair on his face: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Miller’s “bwah-ha-ha” rhetoric next to Fetterman’s “rah-rah” cheerleading makes the senator look even goofier than usual.
Actual “good guys” across the globe are likely disgusted by Trump’s coup, and they’re watching in horror as Trump threatens a second strike against Venezuela, along with potential invasions of Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Iran, and Greenland, which would constitute an attack on both Denmark and the entire European Union.
So, once again, Trump and his personal Legion of Doom have cast themselves as Superman villains. (Watch below.)
In James Gunn’s Superman movie from last year, Boravian President Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Burić) invades the neighboring nation of Jarhanpur. He has his reasons, but they’re all obvious BS. He just wants the land, which he’ll divvy up with his silent partner and billionaire backer Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump demanded a $1 billion kickback from oil companies in broad daylight. They are set to receive their return on the investment.
Superman (David Corenswet) stops Ghurkos’s invasion and tells him to leave Jarhanpur alone. If he doesn’t, they’ll have a more “serious” discussion. We could use Superman right now.
Still, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) grills Superman in a private interview about his actions. She points out that he’d inserted himself into a tense geopolitical conflict and sided with Jarhanpur over Boravia, a U.S. ally. Superman responds with more moral clarity than many Democratic leaders: “First of all, whether or not Jarhanpur is an imperfect country does not give another nation the right to invade it.”
Superman dismisses as absurd any suggestion that the Boravian government was “freeing the Jarhanpurians from a tyrannical regime.” He tells Lois, “You know that’s very silly,” and I wish more Democrats would tell journalists this when they uncritically repeat a bad-faith MAGA talking point.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked Sen. Chris Murphy if it was “fair to say, there’s some benefit in [Maduro] not being in power?” After all, people are celebrating in the streets like the end of Return of the Jedi. (Watch below.)
Murphy reminded Bash that the U.S. had only removed Maduro. They didn’t even topple a statue. Regime-change wars operate under the principle of “you break it, you’ve bought it,” but the Trump administration is taking the “smash and grab” approach.
Superman and Lois’s interview escalates into an outright argument when he accuses her of dishonesty “because you know as well as I do that the Boravian government is not well-intentioned.”
“I think that’s almost certainly the case,” Lois replies, “but do I know that? No, I don’t.”
This is reasonable, fair-minded journalism but it also benefits the villains, who eagerly exploit any benefit of the doubt. Many Democrats have taken Lois’s original position: We don’t know for a fact that Trump’s latest illegal actions will prove disastrous. Let’s try to remain objective and not immediately side against him. “Everything Trump touches must be bad according to the base,” one anonymous (and cowardly) House Democrat told Axios. Yes, everything Trump touches is bad, but that’s not according to the “base.” It’s basic physics.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a lengthy statement on Sunday that “Maduro is a criminal and authoritarian dictator who has oppressed the people of Venezuela for years. He is not the legitimate head of government. Undoubtedly, the rule of law and democracy have broken down in Venezuela and the people of that country deserve better.” He then argued process points — as if Trump’s coup would’ve been more tolerable if he’d gone through proper channels and used the correct fork.
Like every supervillain in recorded history, Trump is quick to betray his temporary allies. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has praised Trump publicly, but he still won’t support her as the logical replacement for Maduro. Reportedly, his reasons are as petty as we’ve come to expect.
“If [Machado] had turned [the Nobel Peace Prize] down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” according to a source close to the White House.
Machado has somewhat pathetically offered to “share” her Nobel Prize with Trump or even give it to him outright. Extorting the peace prize through violent coercion is probably not what the Nobel Committee wants to reward. Regardless, Trump wants that Nobel Peace Prize, dammit, and he won’t stop invading nations and setting up pocket dictatorships until he has one. Unlike even Lex Luthor, Trump is irredeemable.
Democrats are as useless as tits on a bull and it’s astonishing that a group of people so obsessed with doing what polls well can’t see that Trump’s Hitler-esque foreign policy is not just unpopular now but will only get more unpopular when the sheer incompetence of his meth-addled cronies makes a total has of it. This will only be a treasury-wasting mess that will leave Venezuela worse off and flood more refugees into its neighbors and the U.S., less oil will make it to the market, and our alliances will be strained when we may need them soon more than ever. But imbeciles like Fetterman think this will win him the working class (sorry hoodie, they’re not buying what you’re selling, go buy another Harvard degree) and the limp responses from Dem leadership are reminding voters to just not vote if they hate Republicans and get nothing but mush from Democrats.
And each day this demented child rapist remains in power, weakening us with every move, we get farther from any possible recovery. Great job, America, we are worse than any banana republic which at least could remove a bad leader.
The only way this stops is if Americans decide that they're tired of having the unreconstructed party having unitary control of its government. It was important for them to stop the Black lady so that they'd be free to torment people they don't like (such as Black people, trans people, and women who don't want to be under the thumb of abusive chuds.)
NATO isn't going to do a single thing if/when the pricktator attacks Greenland. Or Mexico.