The Venezuelan opposition is playing a game they think they understand. They believe they’re using Trump to liberate their country. They don’t realize Trump is using them to launch an undeclared hemispheric war that could destabilize the global order—and they’re helping him do it.
Let me be clear: The Maduro regime is evil. Maria Corina Machado is brave. The Venezuelan people deserve freedom. I have friends in this opposition. I want them to win.
What they are building towards is a constitutional catastrophe wrapped in justified grievance.
At least 43 people killed in undisclosed strikes. No Congressional authorization. No transparency about who’s being killed or on what evidence. Families insisting victims were innocent fishermen. The world’s largest aircraft carrier deployed. CIA authorized for covert operations. Lindsay Graham predicting land strikes. And Trump explicitly bypassing Congress: “We may go to the Senate and tell them about it, but I can’t imagine they’d have any problem with it.”
This isn’t foreign policy. It’s imperial presidency expansion using Venezuelan suffering as cover.
, defending Machado’s dedication of her Nobel Prize to Trump, writes: “Dissidents don’t have the luxury of ideological purity. They have to navigate cold realities of power.”Fine. Let’s talk about cold realities.
At least 43 people are dead in strikes with no evidence they were who the administration claims. Ecuador released one survivor “for lack of evidence.” Colombia says the U.S. killed their fishermen. But we’re supposed to trust Trump—the man who posts AI images of himself dumping sewage on American protesters—with unilateral war-making power because this particular target happens to deserve it?
Ten thousand troops, heavy bombers, amphibious landing ships—this isn’t counter-narcotics operations. This is regime-change infrastructure. And it’s being deployed by an administration actively dismantling constitutional constraints at home while launching undeclared wars abroad.
The power to make war rests with Congress. Not as procedural nicety. As fundamental constraint on executive power designed specifically to prevent this exact scenario: a president launching wars because he can, bypassing authorization because Congress won’t stop him, killing people without evidence because “national security” justifies anything.
Rand Paul calls it “extrajudicial killing.” He’s right. And the Venezuelan opposition is providing democratic legitimacy to it.
Here’s what “getting real” actually means: The Venezuelan opposition is so desperate for Trump’s help that they’re not seeing what they’re helping Trump establish. That presidents can launch wars unilaterally. That evidence isn’t required for killing people. That constitutional constraints can be bypassed when targets are unsympathetic. That “commander in chief” means “do whatever you want.”
These precedents don’t stop with Venezuela. They affect every future president, every future war, every future target. They accelerate the imperial presidency that makes genuine democratic governance—anywhere—impossible.
Epshtein writes that it’s “easy to moralize from behind the safety of our keyboards.”
You know who doesn’t have that safety? Americans who might be drafted into hemispheric war they never authorized. Colombian fishermen being blown up in strikes with no evidence. Constitutional constraints on executive power that are being systematically destroyed while dissidents cheer because the current target happens to be their enemy.
Liberation struggles aligned with imperial power don’t produce liberation. They produce occupation, chaos, and the conditions that make democracy impossible. Ask Iraq. Ask Libya. Ask anyone who thought American military intervention would solve their dictatorship problem.
Maduro deserves to fall. But not like this. Not through undeclared war launched by an administration attempting authoritarian consolidation at home. Not through extrajudicial killings without evidence. Not by sacrificing constitutional constraints that prevent autocracy.
The Venezuelan opposition thinks they’re being pragmatic. They’re actually enabling the imperial presidency that threatens democracy everywhere—including in the Venezuela they’re trying to liberate.
What time is it? It’s the hour when justified grievances become weapons for unjustifiable power. When dissidents enable the authoritarianism they fight. When liberation struggles become imperial adventures that make liberation impossible.
Some things cost too much. Even freedom bought at the price of constitutional collapse isn’t freedom. It’s the prelude to deeper tyranny.
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10/26/25: One day, in my medical office building, I saw a man in his sixties bent over like a pretzel. That was his condition, to spend the rest of his life as if he were an upside-down "U." His wife saw me and engaged me in conversation. She related that her husband has prostate cancer and the MD treated him with surgical removal of the major source of male hormone feeding the cancer-his testicles. His bizarre body configuration was the result of severe osteoporosis that followed his surgical castration. Due to his bent body, he was continually short of breath. His life was living hell. The Holy Grail of medicine: Primum Non Nocere or First (above all) Do No Harm had been violated. What I was witness to was horrendous collateral damage.
Every day we hear more of Trump's outbursts, his rage exploded into impulse action, without oversight by Congress. All are characterized by significant degrees of uncertainty. Were only the bad guys killed or was there collateral damage an innocent lives lost or maimed? Could these strikes against "evil" been conducted with more precision, deliberation, and consensus by Congress? Could the issue of crime in our cities or illegal immigration be conducted with more accuracy, with a focus on immigration policies, budget expenditures for vetting of those wish to enter the US, and fast-tracking those seeking legitimate asylum? Of course. And, I bet that anyone of us could have done a far, far better job than those appointed by both Democratic and Republican Parties. So much of our government has been run by those of mediocre work ethic and lack of doing the job right.
What we are seeing every day, and now in the Caribbean, is Trump's modus operandi. Don't be surprised when he does the same in Greenland. Trump mimics Putin in just about every way.
He does whatever he wants, without the oversight that has never before been so flagrantly violated in over 236 years. Trump's tirades are that of a spoiled brat, but his toys are real guns, real planes and bombs. We have a madman in charge. What he has done is off-the-rails. It is the razing of the White House East Wing, the helter-skelter of ICE raids, the invasion by the National Guard and/or Marines into America's cities and force used against peaceful protesters, and his petty but vindictive lawsuits against anyone that has criticized him. Now he has manifested escalation of his psychopathy with raids on boats sailing the Caribbean. Trump has defiled due process, spent hundreds of millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars, murdered or severely damaged the lives of innocents, and has the balls to nominate himself for the Peace prize. This is the grand tosser we have as POTUS. This is the man, and his gang, that is castrating America- all will suffer. A nation divided cannot stand. He, Trump, is fulfilling DOGE's mandate: DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment). Destroy America. Trump is not for Americans or America; he is Putin's comrade.
These are the Constitutional precepts openly violated, with a complicit Republican Party and an enabling SCOTUS. Shame on them, ALL. Imagine, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul are now speaking out against Trump.
✱ The rights of the people are openly declared (not granted but affirmed) in the founding documents of our nation. These rights were not understood as given, and therefore retractable, by the government at its discretion; they were understood, rather, as entitlements originating in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
✱ A government’s wish to rule in secret on its own initiative and authority is perfectly understandable; this is a merely human weakness. Of course, government officials would like to keep some information secret for reasons of national security, as well as for many other reasons that may readily be imagined. It is nevertheless true that a government’s wish to govern in secret is the same as the wish to govern tyrannically
✱ Perhaps it is always the tendency of those in power to wish to rule autocratically, and this is what our founders feared and provided against. Aside from any issue of faith or theory, there is a practical reason for ascribing human rights to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Rights that originate beyond and above governmental power cannot justly be abridged or revoked by a government.
✱ Governments, the Declaration says, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” If the governed accept or allow a government that is arbitrary, self-authorized, and self-justified, then, whatever may be the fate of national security, mere citizens will no longer be secure in their rights.
✱ We may say then that national security has been our concern from the beginning, and that from the beginning the designated purpose of the nation was to secure the rights to which its citizens individually were entitled by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
✱ The two kinds of security were understood as one. If the security of the nation ceases to imply the security of all its inhabitants in their God-given rights, then, according to the Declaration of Independence, that nation’s government will have delegitimized itself and should be replaced.
That is not the wild idea of somebody in the current crop of left-wingers or right-wingers, but merely what the Declaration says, and we have been living with it unobjectingly for going on 236 years.
Trump, his Cabinet, and the Republican Congress should be replaced. What we have is a bastard King, a being that is far from a hero or peacemaker.
If you Google "lyrics to Marat by Judy Collins" you will see the similarity to our current ship of state. There is no doubt, no hesitation, that our Ship is sailing in a Shit Storm. All Americans that care about their homeland, their children, the legacy they are leaving, must
WAKE UP.
✱
All of the text preceded by the asterisk, is of the prophetic writing from my now favorite person on the planet, Wendell Berry. The text is excerpted from A Way of Ignorance, published in 2005–20 years ago. Berry, age 91, lives in Port Royal, Kentucky. He is a present-day Socrates. I suggest start with a Berry work published in 1972 called "A Continuous Harmony." It is a gem. Find it here: https://tinyurl.com/4mv69mw4 on Amazon, or here: https://tinyurl.com/cdk7e2z7 at Thrift Books (cheaper than Amazon).
This is the Monroe doctrine writ large. The US has a very long history of interfering (with extreme prejudice) against South American countries they decide the don’t like dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, Bay of Pigs, Allende overthrow et al.