What’s One More War?

By the time everyone emerges from their Halloween hangovers, we may be at war. If you asked, “Which one?” excellent question, give yourself a hand. In addition to the wars on the existence of transgender Americans, the war on prices (tariffs), the war on affordable health care, the war on not starving to death (illegally suspended Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program disbursements), the war on anyone dark-skinned enough to be presumptively migrant, and the wars on the cities of Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and Washington, DC, the United States may be on the verge of attacking Venezuela. 

This will be a different kind of war for the second Trump administration. It doesn’t involve potentially starting WWIII by bombing Iran and then forgetting about it within 72 hours, and it’s not a war on Americans themselves, which means we can start with bombing, instead of slowly working our way up to it after a series of violent escalations.

Usually when a state invades another state, it is preceded by some form of Clausewitzean reasoning about how the action will secure an existing national interest unavailable by other means. Blessedly, America has long evolved past that sort of thing. If our history in Central and South America, the Gulf of Tonkin, whatever Grenada was, or Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons Of Mass Destruction-Related Program Activities” have not disabused you of the expectation that there must be a reason, let the reign of chaos in your mind begin today.

The reasons can and will be anything we want them to be, because, mercifully, we are beginning with bullshit instead of lazily devolving to it. The officially stated reason for attacking Venezuela is “drugs,” the target of America’s longest running and least successful endless war. Deposing Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro also appears on the wish list, as Republicans have long made his removal a goal on par with repealing and replacing Obamacare. At this point, Republicans hate Nicholas Maduro because Republicans hate Nicholas Maduro. It is just something they inherit, and bleatings about his toleration or encouragement of the Tren de Aragua gang should be dismissed as the thing they will say until the 2026 excuse calendars are out. 

Here, let our experiences with both MS-13 and the crooked president of El Salvador be our guide. A few hundred gang members in our nation of 330 million — probably a third to a half of whom are harmless, larping personality challenged teens — do not amount to a casus belli with another nation or amount to a coming crisis. If our relationship with Nayib Bukele and his relationship with MS-13 are any indication, the CIA goons handling the payroll for Operation Keep Tripping On Your Dick in Venezuela are probably currently underwriting a significant portion of the Tren de Aragua payroll.

If there is any sustaining reason why we will be turning our guided munitions toward Venezuelan land and away from loudly and proudly murdering a series of Central American fishermen until they are too much paste for forensic second guessing, it’s because most Americans hate everything Trump is doing, and he is out of excuses. Tackling “illegals” was going to be his magic solution for employment, college affordability, the housing crisis and inflation. Instead, he’s even polling negatively on immigration, and it’s his best issue.

For a man who never met a norm he couldn’t replace with a crime, Trump is fleeing toward the last Beltway truism left — that there is nothing a war can’t fix, and there’s no failure that a war can’t refuse to explain away for reasons of national security. It is the purest math, an answer for everything so true that it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force it to add up. As with so many of our institutions he has put to the test, it’s never failed until now. 

Breaking the law to starve children is broadly considered evil. Congress eliminating itself as a branch of government isn’t popular, and doing it to preserve the president from accountability for the fact that he is probably a pedophile is self-evidently vile. Raising the price of everything to extort bribes for your family engenders well-deserved loathing. Here history again serves as our guide: shipping members of the armed forces around the nation and abroad to intimidate, harass and kill while making the paychecks a “we’ll see” proposition is politically suicidal. 

Having ticked “coup” off the bucket list in January 2021 and again in February of this year, Trump has arrived at his last norm. It took a man this singularly disgusting and morally poisonous to permanently decouple public relations murder from an automatic probationary period of Beltway consensus. As with all treasures of his dynasty, the automatic and assumed value of a president’s optional war will in the end be bankrupted. It is a proposition equally heartening and terrifying to know that this ever more Ponzied presidency owes too much not to spend every bullet, too. 

After we liberate Caracas to the ground, nuclear testing resumes.