The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration’s message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week under what legal authority the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, as President Donald J. Trump vowed to do, Rubio served up a lot of words but ultimately fell back on the idea that the U.S. has economic leverage over Venezuela because it can seize sanctioned oil tankers. Seizing ships will give the U.S. power to force the Venezuelan government to do as the U.S. wants, Rubio suggested. This is a very different message than Trump delivered yesterday when he claimed that the people standing behind him on the stage—including Rubio—would be running Venezuela.

When Stephanopoulos asked Rubio if he was, indeed, running Venezuela, Rubio again suggested that the U.S. was only pressuring the Venezuelan government by seizing sanctioned oil tankers, and said he was involved in those policies. When Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press also asked if Rubio was running Venezuela, Rubio seemed frustrated that “People [are] fixating on that. Here’s the bottom line on it is we expect to see changes in Venezuela.” Historian Kevin Kruse commented: “Yeah, people are fixating on a Cabinet Secretary being given a sovereign country to run because the president waged war without congressional approval and kidnapped the old leader. Weird that they’d get hung up on that.”

When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn’t need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn’t need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela’s oil fields and run the country.

Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80.

Rubio highlighted again that the Trump administration wants to control the Western Hemisphere, and he went on to threaten Cuba. Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles articulated the extraordinary smallness of the Trump administration’s vision when he wrote: “We must also marvel at the titanic idiocy of our new ‘Donroe Doctrine’ for it turns America from a global power into a regional one by choice. I still can’t really believe they are going through with this for it is so batsh*t f-ing crazy, and does so much lasting harm to our interests.”

Shortly after Trump told reporters yesterday that Venezuela’s former vice president, now president, Delcy Rodríguez is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez demanded Maduro’s return and said Venezuela would “never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.” Indeed, U.S. extraction of Maduro and threats to “run” Venezuela are more likely to boost the Maduro government than weaken it.

In a phone call today with Michael Scherer of The Atlantic, Trump threatened Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Tonight on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that the U.S., not Rodríguez, is in charge of Venezuela.

Trump also told Scherer that he does indeed intend to continue to assert U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere, telling Scherer that “we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.” Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), meaning it is already part of U.S. national defense.

Although he ran for office on the idea of getting the U.S. out of the business of foreign intervention, Trump embraced the idea of regime change in Venezuela, telling Scherer: “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.” He continued: “Rebuilding is not a bad thing in Venezuela’s case. The country’s gone to hell. It’s a failed country. It’s a totally failed country. It’s a country that’s a disaster in every way.”

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris noted that military intervention in Venezuela is even more unpopular with the American people “than Trump’s tariffs and health care cuts.” In September, only 16% of Americans wanted a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% against it. A December poll showed that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power.” Only 33% approved. Even support for strikes against the small boats in the Caribbean could not get majority support: 53% opposed them while only 42% approved.

“By the time American forces touched Venezuelan soil early Saturday morning,” Morris writes, “Trump had already lost the public.”

But officials in the administration no longer appear to care what the American people want, instead simply gathering power into their own hands for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, trusting that Republican politicians will go along and the American people will not object enough to force the issue. The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress’s resolve, and so far, it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning.

Morris notes that a December CBS poll showed that 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, correctly believed a president must get approval from Congress before taking military action against Venezuela. The president did not get that approval. By law, the president must inform the Gang of Eight before engaging in military strikes, but if an emergency situation prevents that notification, then the president must inform the Gang of Eight within 48 hours. The Gang of Eight is made up of the top leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as the top leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) who as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House minority leader and fellow Gang of Eight member Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had been briefed on the strikes. Himes said: “I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I’ve had zero outreach, and no Democrat that I’m aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we’re now in a world where the legal obligation to keep the Congress informed only applies to your party, which is really something.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—also a member of the Gang of Eight—told reporters that he hadn’t been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. “They’ve kept everyone in the total dark,” he said.

Nonetheless, Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump’s Venezuelan adventure would not go well: “We’re in the euphoria period of…acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro and Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we’re in that euphoria phase. And what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it’s an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it…. [L]et’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) was more direct: “The U.S. attack on Venezuela is illegal,” he posted. “Congress never authorized this use of military force. I will vote to stop it. This is insane. Health care costs and food prices are surging. Trump’s response is we’re going to run another country. Batsh*t crazy.”

2025 was a turning point in human history. Do you remember when I used to teach you this? That it would be? And now here we are. We will live in its aftermath. In 2026, the world will destabilize now very, very fast.

The world broke in 2025. And it will never be the same again. Let us trace some of the ways. Here, we’ll discuss things in the way that I once tried to teach you: the great macro trends shaping our world.

After the disastrous re-election in America, all the following things happened rapidly. The world fractured geopolitically, economically, and financially. Growth, already anemic, turned stagflationary. The world’s fight against climate change came to an end. Democracy went into shock globally. To the point that America now has the kind of fascist collapse in which it’s abducting foreign heads of state for lebensraum, which harks back to the Nazi justification for war and plunder, too.

I could go on, but I want you to understand the point.

The trajectory of human civilization has now been altered irrevocably. A great age of progress has now come to a screeching, crashing end. This is a statistical fact, in all the ways above. No more wasting time nitpicking with me. Understand me, this time.

Now. The old trajectory of human civilization looked something like this. Progress was being made, if in patches, at greater and greater cost, sacrifice, and price. Still, the old macro trends—the pre-2025 ones—allowed for a multiplicity of futures. Some were better, some were pretty good, and some were bad.

But now things have changed, and they have changed radically, dramatically, and permanently. The shape of our macro trends does not allow for a multiplicity of futures. It points to only one.

The future now looks like this. It is the worst case scenario.

Fascists and authoritarians vie for the resources of a dying planet.

This is where we are now. I tire of having to soften the blow for those weak of intellect and spirit.

Let me say it again so that you understand it well. Fascists are now vying for control over the resources of a dying planet. This is where our civilization is now. It is a bleak place to be. And yet it will define this decade, and perhaps much more.

Let me shade that picture in for you.

The USA is now trying to attain control of the America. China, of Asia. And Russia, of Europe.

These are three failed states. They resemble each other in eerie ways. Neither has any real safety nets, no functioning social contract, and no source of growth left. Their people are baffled, bewildered, miserable, and angry. There appears to be no future. Systems have failed catastrophically. And therefore, they are now contesting control of resources. That contest will only grow more and more severe.

Each of these failed states is now trying to construct its own “sphere,” which is just a modern word for empire, really.

And so in the future we are now heading into, all the poisons of history combine into one.

Fascism and authoritarianism. Serfdom and servitude. War and violence. Empire and imperial ambition and hubris.

Each of these failed states, trying to construct its own “sphere,” or empire, will necessarily lead to conflict. Let us hope that it doesn’t erupt into World War, though of course, that’s looking more likely by the day. The point is how all these macro trends intersect now, and become a kind of widening gyre, a vicious circle, a black hole.

Conflict eats up the energy, money, and time of a society or a civilization. When we are investing in conflict, of course, we are not investing in the things, really, of progress. And in that sense, the future is now a foregone conclusion, which is that investment in the goods that we need most as a civilization to stay one will continue to decline, now at an accelerating rate.

Let me put that to you more formally. In 2025, we lost all hope of having what are known as “global public goods.” These are basic foundations like peace, stability, growth, cooperation, law, order, justice, at a global level. Global public goods are now in severe decline. And with them comes an end to progress for our civilization.

They are what make a civilization one.

As progress becomes regress, so, too, the clock rewinds, and all the old poisons of history are forced down the throat of time. This is the moment we find ourselves at.

The question isn’t, for example, will the future be more democratic, more peaceful, more just, more civilized, but how much less it will be. Catastrophically, over the next few years, or just ruinously slow? Will the implosion be fast and sharp, or slow, bumpy, and juddering?

What does a civilization without global public goods look like? Invert them, and you will see the pattern of the future we now face. Peace becomes conflict. Stability, geopolitically, financially, economically, becomes instability. Growth becomes stagnation and then depression. Cooperation becomes isolationism and imperialism. Order becomes disorder, chaos, and ultimately, a Darwinian contest of survival of the most violent, brutish, and stupid.

So. Here is what we face. Three failing mega-states vie for empires, to control what’s left on a dying planet. A vicious cycle that accelerates rates of collapse and implosion.

The other future, of course, looked like this. We cooperated as a world to create a future, a genuine one, where we reimagined growth, reinvented our social contracts, and continued the trajectory of progress. We educated every child on the planet, invested in science, literature, art, and therefore, carried ourselves to new heights. Living standards soared, instead of stagnated and fell.

Let us take America as an example of all the above. What does its future look like? Americans now face technofeudalism domestically. They are essentially people held in perpetual debt servitude to a class of barons and lords who control technological and financial capital. And of course, in a society like that, living standards plummet, because life is worth nothing to begin with. As a result, such a society becomes hostile to the world around it, seeking conquest, as its own people have been bled dry. Hence, the impetus for war and empire. Shall Canada be the 51st State? How about Greenland? How many wars will Trump start in 2026, to divert from an economy that’s not just “unaffordable,” but now feudal-serf?

We had another future.

But that was before. Just as I warned you, 2025 was a turning point in human history. And it went as wrong a way as it could have gone.

We have no other future now. Because the following dynamics are all but certain. We will face severe climate change, meaning, accelerating feedbacks, taking us to catastrophic levels. As neo-empires vie for conquest of a dying planet’s resources, growth will shrink and decline. Democracy will continue its freefall, as America, Russia, and China all turn the world increasingly against it. Geopolitical instability will accelerate. Economies will sunder. And our civilization’s finances, already parlous, will soon enough reach breaking point. That will include you, by the way,

In all this, perhaps you see abstraction. But I see a terrible wave of suffering. And my heart is broken for it. I was one of those who believed in the other future. The good and noble and beautiful one.

And for many years, I tried to teach and warn you, as best I could. I failed. We failed. You can judge for yourself if you failed. The point is not recrimination. It is simply to hold ourselves to account, faithfully, in what we have been, will be, and can be.

Those of us who believed in the other future—I think that we are all suffering terribly these days. We aren’t allowed to talk about it much. Hey, which celebrity has a new underwear line? Wow! I wonder how many of us there are left now. Brave in intellect and true in spirit. Who value civilization. And how many have already have grown enfeebled enough in mind and spirit to accept the poison as good enough.

Have we already surrendered?

Here is what I think.

We are committing suicide as a civilization. Perhaps that is why my heart is broken. I understand Cicero now, watching Rome fall. I understand Brecht, watching the Nazis march. Or perhaps my heart is this broken now simply because it was foolish to have believe in something better than all this at all.

Hey, let’s just ask ChatGPT about it! Why bother thinking at all, if you are just to be a serf, on a dying planet of fascist empires battling for the last drops of oil, the last rocks to crack open, in the last slivers of mud, on the desolate ruins of what once was?

You want to know what all this means for money, and I’ll teach you about that too. The financial consequences of this hypertransformation from a multiplicity of futures to the worst case scenario will leave many, many people impoverished, of course, and Americans are already feeling the beginnings of all that, much to their shock. But I want to go much deeper than money now.

The hard part, I suspect, for intelligent and thoughtful people, is what is left of us in the soul. How do make our peace? With what is left of the world and its future now? Can we? Should we? Shall we just give up, like so many around us appear to have done?

Shall we shrug, watch the fascists march, the planet die, and history rewind right back to serfdom, and warm ourselves in the narcotic glow of what dregs of life the techno-barons and the authoritarians and the warmongers have left to us?

And is that, too, what I mean when I say: we’re committing suicide as a civilization?

Or does this moment demand better, especially from us, especially now?

There I am at the cafe, every day, brooding. Over all this. Haunted by it. It never leaves me. Over the cat and mouse game that so many of you played with me over the years. I struggled to convey to you the gravity of what you would face. Forgive me. I have only little things, called words.

Now you must not fail yourself, my friends.

All that I ever have been trying to give is courage, strength, and wisdom. Take it from me. Plant its seeds in the soil. Soon the earth will shake. Can you feel it trembling already?

By Neil MacFarquhar
Jan. 5, 2026
Updated 5:53 p.m. ET

Moscow’s mixed reaction to the U.S. intervention in Venezuela has stirred memories of a barter reportedly offered by Russia seven years ago, during another moment of heightened tension between Washington and Caracas.

At the time, Russia signaled that it was willing to allow the United States to act as it pleased in Venezuela, in exchange for Washington giving the Kremlin a free hand in Ukraine, according to Congressional testimony from Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration.

The Russians “were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine,” Ms. Hill told a Congressional hearing in October 2019, more than two years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The proposals were informal, through commentators and newspaper articles, she said, but the gist was that if the United States wanted the freedom to maintain a sphere of influence over neighboring countries, then it ought to agree to Russia doing the same.

“You want us out of your backyard,” said Ms. Hill in summarizing the Russian position. “We, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine.”

Ms. Hill said that she went to Moscow in person to reject the idea. The proposal came amid tensions between Caracas and Washington that prompted Moscow to deploy 100 military personnel and new weapons to shore up the rule of President Nicolás Maduro.

Mr. Maduro’s removal marks the latest blow to a regime supported by Moscow, with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria toppled a little over a year ago.

Officially, the Russian foreign ministry condemned the move as a violation of international law. But the main Russian priority is the war in Ukraine, where the Trump administration is trying to negotiate peace. The Kremlin is trying to strike a difficult balance, neither making any major concessions on Ukraine nor alienating the White House.

Some senior Russian officials and commentators have expressed satisfaction that the United States seemed to be ditching international law in exchange for a policy of “might makes right,” an attitude hearkening back to an imperial era, more than a century ago, that both President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have looked on fondly.

“The law of the strongest is clearly stronger than ordinary justice,” Dmitri Medvedev, the formerly liberal president of Russia turned war hawk wrote on social media, while adding in an interview with the official Tass news agency that Washington now has “no grounds, even formally, to reproach our country.”

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.

Five years ago, on January 6, 2021, more than 2,000 rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the process of counting the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president of the United States. They tried to hunt down House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and chanted their intention to “Hang Mike Pence,” the vice president. They fantasized that they were following in the footsteps of the American Founders, about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6 she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

In fact, it was not 1776 but 1861, the year insurrectionists who had tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule tried to break the U.S. The rioters wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy—our right to determine our own destiny—in order to keep Donald J. Trump in the White House, making sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.

Since the 1980s, Republicans pushed the idea that a popular government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the nation’s social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from greedy minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.

After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the motor voter law, enabling people to register to vote at motor vehicle departments, Republicans increasingly insisted Democrats were cheating the system by relying on the votes of noncitizens, although there was never any evidence for this charge.

As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars and cheating to win elections became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land.

The idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew, along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating. In 2016, Trump insisted that his female Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Other Republican leaders who had initially shunned him began to support him when it became clear that he could mobilize a new crop of disaffected voters who could put Republicans into office.

And they continued to support him, claiming initially that he could be kept in check by establishment Republicans like his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who moved from leading the Republican National Committee to the White House for the first six months of Trump’s first term. In his first months in office, Trump delivered the tax cut Republican leaders wanted, as well as the appointment of one out of every four federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices, who would protect the Republican project in the courts.

But the idea that Trump could be kept in check fell apart in September 2019, when it appeared he was trying to rig the 2020 election. A whistleblower revealed that Trump had called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Until Zelensky did so, Trump said, the administration would not release the money Congress had appropriated to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia, which had invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The attempt to withhold congressionally appropriated funds in order to tilt an election was a glaring violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act codifying the executive branch’s duty to execute the laws Congress passed. In the congressional investigation that followed, witnesses revealed that Trump’s cronies were running a secret scheme in Ukraine to undermine official U.S. policy and benefit Trump’s allies.

Republicans in 1974 had turned against President Richard Nixon for far less, but although Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said not a single Republican senator believed Trump, they stood behind him nonetheless. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues: “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

But once acquitted, Trump cut loose from any oversight. He sought revenge and insisted that “[w]hen somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total.” “The federal government has absolute power,” he said, and he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to.

As early as 2019, Trump had “joked” about staying in power regardless of the 2020 election results, and on October 31, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon told a private audience that Trump was going to declare that he had won the 2020 election no matter what. Trump knew that Democratic mail-in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on Election Day, creating a “red mirage” that would be overtaken later by Democratic votes.

“Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, by calling the election early and saying that the later votes were somehow illegitimate. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again…. He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election.”

Early returns on Election Night 2020, November 3, showed Trump ahead. But, more quickly than anyone expected, Democratic votes turned the key state of Arizona blue, and the Fox News Channel called the race for Biden. Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about 2:30 the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop.”

But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.

Trump insisted a Democrat could not have won honestly. Over the next few months, his campaign demanded recounts, all of which confirmed that Biden won. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits over the 2020 election, most dismissed for lack of evidence.

As legal challenges failed, Trump pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” to win the state of Georgia. Trump’s allies plotted for Trump supporters in seven battleground states to meet secretly and submit false slates of electors for Trump. Two slates would enable Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count the electors from the now-contested states, so that either Trump would be elected outright, or Pence could say there was no clear winner and send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican delegations than Democratic ones, Trump would be president.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s evangelical chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote on November 24, 2020, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni.

Determined to retain control of the government, certain congressional Republicans went along with the charade that the election had been stolen. Trump allies in the House began to echo Trump’s accusations and to say they would question the counts from certain states. Such challenges required a paired vote with a senator, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who saw himself as a top 2024 presidential contender, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who didn’t want to be undercut, led 11 other senators in a revolt to challenge the ballots.

For weeks, Trump had urged his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., for a “Stop the Steal” rally arranged for January 6, the day Congress would count the certified electoral ballots. Speaking at the Ellipse near the White House that morning, Trump and his surrogates told the crowd that they had won the election, and Trump warned: “We are going to have to fight much harder.”

Trump claimed that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country and told the crowd: “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.” “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

And, knowing they were armed, he told them to march to the Capitol.

As Trump’s supporters attacked, lawmakers from their hiding spots begged the president to call off his supporters, but he did nothing for more than three hours. After 5:40, when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump issued a video statement.

“I know you’re hurt,” he said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now…. We love you. You’re very special.” He tweeted: “Remember this day forever!”

When the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for a second time on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection, only 10 Republicans voted in favor, while 197 voted no (4 did not vote). In the Senate trial, 7 Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, while 43 continued to back Trump.

In a speech after his vote to acquit, McConnell said, “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” but said he must answer for his actions in court. “Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

In November 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump for four felonies associated with his attempt to retain power illegally.

Trump fought back, arguing that he had presidential immunity for his actions. Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide the case immediately, but it waited until the last possible moment, on July 1, 2024, to decide Donald J. Trump v. United States, finding that presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. Trump himself had appointed three of the justices in the majority.

A second grand jury returned a new indictment stripped of the actions now immune, but by then it was too late: Trump was reelected president, and the Department of Justice has an understanding that it will not indict or prosecute a sitting president. And so, five years after the events of January 6, 2021, we are learning what it means to have a president who has demonstrated his determination to overthrow our democracy and who does not have to answer to the law.

Although he was elected with less than 50% of the votes cast, Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” As soon as he took office in January 2025, the president and his henchmen flouted the 1974 Impoundment Control Act again, seizing Congress’s right to control the nation’s finances. Trump used emergency powers to ignore the Constitution and deployed troops in Democratic-led cities. When Congress required the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, the administration largely ignored the law. Today, more than two weeks after the deadline, it had released less than 1% of the files. Ignoring the rights afforded to individuals by the Constitution, Trump is seizing people off the streets and prosecuting his perceived enemies.

Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil, and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s. Today, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “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,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination. It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just a select few.

In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican president Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln asked Americans to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion,” and to resolve that “these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Good to see you, Bernie.

“They say that when you win the presidency you lose the midterm,” President Donald J. Trump said today to House Republicans. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy. They don’t. They have a horrible policy. They do stick together. They’re violent, they’re vicious, you know. They’re vicious people.”

“They had the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator. Nobody is worse than Obama. And the people that surrounded Biden.”

And there you have it: in a rambling speech in which he jumped from topic to topic, danced, and appeared to mimic someone doing something either stupid or obscene, Trump explained the ideology behind his actions. He and MAGA Republicans have absorbed the last 40 years of Republican rhetoric to believe that Democratic policies are “horrible” and that only Republicans “have the right policy.” If that’s the case, why should Republicans even have to “run against these people?” Why even have elections? When voters choose Democrats, there’s something wrong with them, so why let them have a say? Their choice is bad by definition. Anything that they do, or have done, must be erased.

That is the ideology behind MAGA, amped up by the racism and sexism that identifies MAGA’s opponents as women, Black Americans, and people of color. In their telling, the world Americans constructed after World War II—and particularly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting—has destroyed the liberty of wealthy men to act without restraint. Free them, the logic goes, and they will Make America Great Again.

As tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He continued: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

“Because there are no truly free places left in our world,” he wrote, Thiel called for escaping into cyberspace, outer space, or seasteading.

While tech leaders are focusing on escaping established governments, Trump’s solution to an expanded democracy appears to be to silence the voters and lawmakers who support the “liberal consensus”—the once-bipartisan idea that the government should enable individuals to reach their greatest potential by protecting them from corporate power, poverty, lack of access to modern infrastructure, and discrimination—and to erase the policies of that consensus.

Nowhere does Trump’s conviction that he, and he alone, has the right to run the United States show more clearly than in the White House’s rewriting of the history of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters determined to overthrow the free and fair election of Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes in 2020, replacing him with Trump by virtue of their belief that no Democrat could be fairly elected.

But the official White House website reversed that reality today, claiming that the insurrectionists who beat and wounded at least 140 police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence were “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The real villains, the White House wrote in bold type, were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.”

In reality, modern Republican policies have rarely served everyday people, while the policies enacted by Democratic president Joe Biden demonstrably did. Biden rejected the ideology that called for cutting taxes, regulations, and social services in the name of liberty. Instead, he urged Congress to invest in public infrastructure, creating jobs, and he shored up the social safety net.

As Biden prepared to leave office in January 2025, Trump claimed that the U.S. was in freefall, “a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” But Peter Baker reported in the New York Times that the opposite was true: Biden and his administration were leaving behind a country that was in the best shape it had been since at least 2000.

There were no U.S. troops fighting in foreign wars, murders had plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses had dropped sharply, undocumented immigration was below where it was when Trump left office in 2021, stocks had just had their best two years since the last century. The economy was growing, real wages were rising, inflation had fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment was at near-historic lows, and energy production was at historic highs. The economy had added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.

Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”

Once in office, Trump set about dismantling the policies that had achieved those results. And now, after destabilizing the country at home, he is working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since World War II. In addition to an illegal attack on Venezuela to extract Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Trump is threatening Colombian president Gustavo Petro, saying “Cuba is ready to fall,” and warning Mexico to “get their act together.”

Although his sights are primarily on countries in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has also warned that if Iran starts “killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.”

Trump has also threatened Greenland, which is a self-governing island that is part of Denmark, an ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As NATO allies, Greenland and the U.S. have cooperated on defense for decades, so Trump’s declaration that the U.S. needs Greenland for national defense makes no sense.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement Sunday: “The Kingdom of Denmark—and thus Greenland—is part of NATO and is therefore covered by the alliance’s security guarantee. We already have a defense agreement between the Kingdom and the United States today, which gives the United States wide access to Greenland. I would therefore strongly urge the United States to stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people who have said very clearly that they are not for sale,” she said.

On Monday, Fredriksen said: “If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops. That is, including our NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.” Today, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Denmark issued a statement of support for Greenland, Denmark, and NATO.

In Venezuela, the U.S. took Maduro and Flores but rather than supporting the actual winner of the 2024 presidential election, Edmundo González, or opposition leader María Corina Machado, the administration left the Maduro government in place, led by former vice president Delcy Rodríguez.

María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post today that in the hours since Maduro’s removal, the Venezuelan government has cracked down on those showing support for the U.S. operation. It detained at least 14 journalists, sent armed gangs into the capital, restricted protests, and arrested citizens who appeared to be “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America.”

Machado said the government’s actions are “really alarming.”

Trump claims that the U.S. is “running” Venezuela, and he has dropped the pretense that he is concerned about drug traffickers or Maduro’s seizure of the presidency. Instead, he has made it clear that what he really wants is for the Venezuelan government to give him access to the country’s oil. In much the same way as he claims Democrats were responsible for January 6 because they honored the will of the voters and refused to give him the second term he wanted, Trump maintains that Venezuelans “stole” the American oil that sits under their own land.

Trump’s plan to tear up the rules-based international order and replace it with U.S. control over the Western Hemisphere will cost the world dearly, but using the U.S. military to threaten other countries and seize control of their resources does create big winners:

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “I am pleased to announce that the interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States! I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

food for thought...