President Donald Trump should resist the temptation to begin running victory laps over his kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, murdering hundreds of alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, blockading oil tankers, theft of Venezuelan oil and annexing Venezuela to be ruled indefinitely by proconsuls Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. Not a crumb of congressional or constitutional authority justifies Mr. Trump’s serial bellicosities. The crown jewel of the Constitution entrusts the war power exclusively to Congress because of the propensity of the executive branch for unprovoked aggression to aggrandize power.
A reprise of Mr. Trump’s criminal aggression is imminent over Iran. He has bugled, also without congressional or constitutional authorization, that if even a single Iranian protester against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is killed, “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
President Trump’s swaggering hubris will prove his Waterloo. He is clueless as to how to rule Venezuela or Iran. They will prove trillion-dollar quagmires indistinguishable from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the military knows you cannot kill your way out of war — which is the only strategy known to Mr. Trump. Witness his recent pointless attacks against Syria for the killing of U.S. soldiers and an interpreter who Trump should never have stationed there in the first place. This is the fury of a blind cyclops that invites blowback like the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Trump’s Venezuelan lawless misadventure is fueled by a hope to distract attention from the politically unflattering Epstein files and to receive a juvenile adrenaline high by playing bully on an international stage. His professed reasons do not pass the laugh test.
Mr. Trump insists that Maduro’s kidnapping was strictly a law enforcement action to prosecute him for narco-terrorism in United States courts. But if that were the case, why has Mr. Trump appointed Hegseth and Rubio to govern Venezuela as they see fit until they happen upon a George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison in Caracas? Further, nobody believes that prosecuting or imprisoning Maduro will save a single American life from a drug overdose. Panamanian President Manuel Noriega was prosecuted and imprisoned by the United States for drug trafficking without making a dent in drug abuse deaths. Moreover, can we take Mr. Trump’s alleged aversion to drug traffickers seriously when he recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Henandez for smuggling 400 tons of cocaine into the United States and chortling, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses”?
Mr. Trump boasted that Venezuelan oil would make the U.S. occupation cost-free. The same thing was said about the U.S. occupation of Iraq after the 2003 invasion. We remain in Iraq more than two decades later and after squandering $3 trillion and counting.
But the high-water mark of Mr. Trump’s mendacity was his ponderous assertion that Maduro’s removal was necessary because his election was plagued by voter fraud and illegitimacy. When did Mr. Trump decide to play Don Quixote mounted on Rocinante to race around the world to rescue the damsel democracy from the clutches of despots? At least Maduro went through the pretense of an election, which is more than Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf statelets like Kuwait, Qatar or Bahrain do, all of which Trump enthusiastically embraces for their eye-popping sovereign wealth funds. Even the assassination of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not diminish Mr. Trump’s swooning over Saudi riches, which have been showered on his family. Finally, Mr. Trump’s indefinite duumvirate rulers of Venezuela have not attracted a single Venezuelan vote, the opposite of government by the consent of the governed.
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency was obliterated by the pointless Vietnam War. President George W. Bush’s presidency was upended by the pointless Iraq War. President Trump refused to learn from those examples. He will pay a steep price. Impeachment and removal from office for playing arsonist to the United States Constitution is inescapable.
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is the author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.