Trump's phony war on Venezuela -- and his larger war on reality [View all]

Trump’s phony war on Venezuela — and his larger war on reality
Why is Trump attacking Venezuela? All the usual reasons: Wounded pride, limitless greed and conspiracy theories

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published October 5, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Donald Trump’s assault on the world — not to mention democracy, diplomacy, basic human decency and the rule of law — may look like an incoherent series of vindictive episodes aimed at “flooding the zone with s**t,” as the now-clichéd expression holds. Bewildering and overwhelming the opposition is certainly among the goals, but it’s important to grasp the method behind the madness.

Masked goons stage a military-style attack on a Chicago apartment building. The president and his “secretary of war” deliver unhinged macho-snowflake monologues urging senior military officers to wage war on civilians in American cities. Federal employees are fired en masse, and then begrudgingly rehired piecemeal under court order. Punitive tariffs are imposed on longtime allies, seemingly for whimsical or inscrutable reasons. Public-sector language is purged of all references to genuine history and science, in a campaign George Orwell would have found crude and obvious. Foreign policy becomes an instrument of naked personal despotism, with favors bestowed on those who burnish the leader’s vanity, and yanked away from those who decline to do so.

Viewed through the distortion lens of Trumpism, those things no longer appear as disconnected or nonsensical but as parts of a grand plan, squares stitched into the great MAGA quilt of meaning. In fact, if we take a closer look at Trump’s phony war with Venezuela, which seems to defy any rational explanation (and isn’t exactly a war with Venezuela; we’ll get to that), it turns out to embody all the elements of a much larger full-spectrum war against reality.

....(snip)....

This war on the world has both fictional goals and real ones, and the fact that those are incompatible is, once again, not a fundamental problem for Trump’s courtiers or adherents. There’s no hypothetical version of global equilibrium in which the United States is simultaneously the dominant superpower and also an isolationist fortress-state with zero immigration. I would guess that Trump loves the sound of that but doesn’t follow the logic too far, while the people who intend to outlast him just “yes queen” along and roll their eyes. Their goal is more doable: leveraging American power to ensure the continued dominance of the billionaire elite for at least as long as our planet remains habitable. (They’re aware that it probably shouldn’t be advertised that way.) ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/05/trumps-phony-war-on-venezuela-and-his-larger-war-on-reality/