Trump hallucinated U.S. control of Venezuela and apparently we're just not going to worry about that?

There's really nothing like war coverage to demonstrate the raw ridiculousness and dull-mindedness of most of the nation's journalists and pundits. Especially prominent, though, is the lengths to which analysts will go to invent strategic thinking where none was present, to write up every public figure's last burp as if it were entirely honest and credible, and to present farcical strings of what ifs that would turn idiocy or criminality into quadruple-backflip moves of historic genius.

We saw it in the Iraq War run-up, and we're seeing it again now—except this time with an even duller press corps, more overtly corrupt company ownership, and a White House team that has all the strategic thinking of a dozen bats that flew down your chimney and are now confused about what to do next.

It is now very safe to say there was no "plan" to speak of. The White House wanted to use the military for doing some boom-booms, so it happened; we know from the wild inconsistencies in public statements by administration officials that nobody had a damn clue what the next move would be, not before and not after.

Possibly the most alarming thing we know for certain is that Donald Trump stood up in front of the cameras and largely hallucinated his own theories of what was going on. That seems bad, right?

Trump is publicly hallucinating as he describes his own supposed actions. We see that, right?

In his public announcement of the strike, Trump seems to hallucinated or confabulated a scenario in which the United States, and specifically Secretaries Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, were now going to "run" Venezuela.

He was quite clear about that, in fact, and seems even to have put it in his own written remarks.

Except that's very obviously not what happened next, nobody else in the administration appears to think it was supposed to, there was no accompanying military move to seize control of the country, no mechanism was announced by which Rubio and Hegseth would be running Venezuela by remote control, and instead Trump's bizarre statement led to the now-familiar mad scramble by aides to re-interpret an obviously hallucinatory statement by Trump as somehow Not That.

Speaking to the press, Rubio was the one who had to do the biggest backflips. What Trump meant by "run the country" was certainly not that, unless maybe he might mean it later, but for now "run the country" means using "the leverage of the quarantine" to pressure the country into doing Trump's will at gunpoint. Nor does there appear to be an "interim" government, as Trump seemed to hallucinate. Maduro's vice president was swiftly sworn in as his replacement, and there's been no muttering so far to suggest the Trump Team objects to that outcome.

Trump's chosen U.N. ambassador rejected Trump's premise even more explicitly: "We are not occupying a country. This was a law enforcement operation."

That's not what the boss said, or even close to it. President Angry Grandpa stood in front of cameras and hallucinated a reality in which this wasn't a law enforcement operation, this was a takeover of the Venezuelan government—and his associates are now frantically engaged in pretending he didn't say that. (Notably, Trump's language appeared to mimic government proclamations at the outset of the Iraq war, a war in which a president did announce the full takeover of a foreign nation and a new "interim" government. Did he not understand the differences?)

This isn't a minor point. If the supposed commander of the nation's military does not have the mental wherewithal to describe the actions he himself is supposedly taking, that is yet another national crisis.

And it is a crisis that the Washington press corps not only continues to ignore, but one it is complicit in attempting to cover up. He is a dementia sufferer living inside inventions of his own mind—and that is the good interpretation.

I'm not sure how we get out of this mess with a national press corps that sees this as Normal President Shit, instead of the hallucinations of a dementia-addled old man barely able to stay awake while rubber-stamping new international crimes.

There was no broader plan here, so can we please stop pretending there was.

That much is self-evident. If there was a plan for what would happen after Maduro's "arrest," then at least one of these circus clowns would have piped up with it.

Instead, the only plan appears to be a mafioso-styled threat that the remaining members of the Venezuelan regime had better do whatever the boss man says, or maybe something's gonna happen to 'em.

President Donald J. Trump issued a threat against Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, saying that, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” adding that he would not stand for Rodríguez’s “defiant rejection” of military intervention by the United States.

So far, in fact, that appears to be the sum total of the "plan." An incoherent Trump believes Venezuela's oil belongs to the United States, because reasons, and as he is a mob-adjacent world criminal who now has control over the nation's military, the "plan" is that from here on in he'll be issuing edicts that whoever happens to be running Venezuela will either follow or be killed for not following.

Which brings us back to the incoherence of White House explanations for the "law enforcement" operation that has supposedly put Venezuela under the full control of Marco Rubio and/or Pete Hegseth: If the sum total of the plan is to "run" Venezuela by threatening to bomb the nation until the government complies, then it is plainly illegal. Not just a little illegal, but illegitimate on the order of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, an act that all but requires massive international sanctions and the international indictments of administration figures.

Importantly, Trump himself continues to insist that his main focus is on capturing Venezuelan oil for American oil companies. This, too, is hallucinatory. Venezuela indeed has enormous oil reserves, but the vast majority of that oil is of a grade so expensive to refine that it's not, in the current oil glut, profitable to extract. There have no doubt been countless occasions on which people surrounding Trump have explained that to him; not once has he appeared to absorb it.

Now, none of this is to say that Trump's band of impulse-driven lunatics won't come up with a plan, as they scramble to once again justify an act that appears to have been motivated primarily by the desire to be seen as strongmen despite being led by one of the whiniest, wimpiest, thin-skinned perpetual crybabies the nation has ever produced.

We'll get to that ... later. For now I think it's important to recognize that there's no double-secret genius strategy behind these acts, just like there is no actual strategy behind Trump's tariff-o-rama, the deployment of military troops to American cities, or the sudden insistence that Canada and Greenland ought to be U.S. owned and Trump branded. The impetus for all these acts is the compulsion towards Stupid Authoritarian Thuggery that defines Trump's allies and voters alike: an urge to commit public acts of sabotage and violence just for the thrill of doing it.

But it's not Trump that's sabotaging the nation. Trump couldn't sabotage a goldfish bowl without help. The U.S. is plunging into a new era of isolation and criminality because that is what his allied Republican lawmakers and donors both want to see happen.

Look, if you wanted to argue to me that the whole of the Republican Party was at this point just an extravagant cover for the world's best-connected group of rapists and sex traffickers, I'm not going to make fun of you for that theory. Not anymore. It makes a lot more logical sense than the "Donald Trump is in his right mind and only wants what's good for the nation" hokum that Washington Post editors are trying to sell us.