Trump kidnaps Venezuelan president—and seems to have no plan at all for what comes next

With Donald Trump's military kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—another of those phrases that would have gotten you tossed into a padded room, had you muttered it back in the 90's—we are now all left wondering what the hell happens next. At this point we'd even settle for an explanation of what Trump and his assemblage of murder-promoting bumblers think will happen next, because even if it's batshit insane at least it would show that somebody, somewhere, put a minute of thought into it.

Unfortunately, we're not even getting that much. Trump's first press conference on the kidnapping was so hazy on what Team Trump expects to happen next that it seems we're going to be better off assuming that no, nobody thought of a damn thing.

“We are going to run the country,” Trump said of Venezuela. He said he did not want the Maduro regime to continue with another leader.

Trump indicated that cabinet members Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio would be running the country in the interim (???) but gave no explanation of why he thought the Venezuelan government would accept that or why he thought such a thing could be implemented without a military invasion of the country.

Indeed, Trump near-immediately appeared to reverse his own statement, suggesting that the Maduro regime would in fact continue ... under its vice president?

Trump’s suggestion that Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would help the United States run the country was stunning because it came just as Venezuelan state television was playing a clip of her denouncing the U.S. military operation. [...]

But Trump just told reporters that Marco Rubio had spoken with her with a different result. “She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said.

That would suggest that Trump and Rubio consider Rodriguez a willing patsy or ally? Shortly after that, however, Rodriguez took to international television to condemn the U.S. attack in blistering terms, to demand the release of Maduro, and to call for national unity against the U.S.

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, speakinging in an address to the the nation, said Washington “launched an unprecedented military aggression” that “constitutes a terrible stain on the development of bilateral relations.” She said that with the invasion, “the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective: regime change in Venezuela. This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral, and natural resources. This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it.”

In short, we have no idea why Trump believes he now "runs" Venezuela, we have no idea who Trump believes will enforce this edict inside Venezuela, the vice president he singled out as his patsy is condemning him on world television, and the man himself is once again clearly showing himself to be severely impaired and operating inside a cloud of delusions.

“We are going to run the country right,″ Trump said as he turned to oil. “It’s going to make a lot of money.” Then he added, about past Venezuelan governments, “they stole our oil.”

In the meantime, American oil companies already working in Venezuela appear to have been caught completely off guard and are now scrambling to protect or extract their employees.

So what the hell's going on?

If we're to set aside "unprecedented incompetence mixed with delusional hubris" as the explanation for Trump's apparent belief that we now "run" Venezuela despite having no actual presence inside the country, there are only a handful of scenarios in which this would be the case.

The most obvious among them: Was Maduro sold out by persons on his own staff? A secret arrangement in which members of Maduro's government allowed him to be spirited away to stand trial for crimes in exchange for the U.S. administration looking the other way as their own crimes continued would hardly be unprecedented in the long history of U.S. military interventions in the Americas. And Trump's press conference was far more peppered with references to Venezuela's oil than to supposed drug smuggling, the prior justification for military intervention.

So yes, the theory that Maduro was sold out by underlings in exchange for a new understanding with the Trump administration, one in which Venezuela's government-backed crimes could continue apace in exchange for contracts assuring U.S. control of their oil fields—that's a compelling explanation for why Trump, Rubio, and Secretary Drinks-a-lot might presume that they can overthrow and "run" a foreign nation without setting down a single military camp from which to do it.

But the most dangerous part of that theory is that it doesn't have to be true: It's going to become the default presumption of many, many Maduro loyalists. Speculation as to who might be working with the U.S. will immediately escalate into witch hunts, and anyone who loyalists so much as suspect might be working with the Trump Team will undoubtably now face faction-premised violence.

There isn't likely to be any Venezuelan leader willing to be seen as a patsy for the Trump regime—and that's why Venezuelan vice president Rodriguez speaking out so forcefully isn't just unsurprising, but absolutely necessary if the country is to avoid mass violence in the coming weeks.

What do Trump, Rubio, and the rest of the Trump cabinet believe they have up their sleeve to compel compliance inside a Venezuelan government—any Venezuelan government—in the face of such a threat? Nobody the f--k knows. It's a complete mystery. If any of them spent more than one beer's worth of time thinking about it, they're not telling us. Or, for that matter, Congress.

One of the most compelling reasons to expect the Trump administration has absolutely no viable plans for what happens next is that it was the Trump administration itself that determined that ousting Maduro was unviable and would lead to "chaos for a sustained period of time with no possibility of ending it."

Or, at least, that was the determination of secret war games examining that question during the first Trump administration. The second administration's approach instead appears to be "YOLO."

The aesthetics of fascism: Ostentatious yet pathetic

Another bit of evidence that Trump and his team never took the possible ramifications of unsanctioned military kidnapping seriously is the crudeness of the operation. Not of the military aspects: As far as we know, those went off exactly as planned.

But from Mar-a-Lago, the "operation" was an almost comically patchwork affair. From what we can determine from Trump-posted photographs, Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, Stephen Miller and others monitored the developing military operation from a room inside Trump's members-only club, with the "situation room" consisting of a set of black convention center drapes, some folding tables, and gold-painted dining room chairs brought in to seat everybody.

The drapes appear to be affixed to the rafters, not to pipes, but yes. Yes, that turns out to be exactly what happened.

The official administration photography appears to be mimicking the aesthetics of a famous set of pictures from the Obama administration's operation to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

But the Trump administration is a fascist government, and fascism is and will always be a movement of angry dullards who shun expertise in favor of swagger. Even when attempting to project invincibility, such as movement cannot help but look like bungling amateurs because they are bungling amateurs.

The fascist version of the U.S. president's situation room is a draped-off area of a private club room. And while the famous Biden administration pictures these new photos recall show a table of grim faces watching a bloody military operation unfold, its fascist counterpart is a big screen on which the team can monitor ... X.com.

Yes, that picture is real. Yes, the administration sent it out ... themselves.

So no, we have yet to see any evidence that the Trump administration's military operation to capture the Venezuelan president and his wife was planned out using any strategic framework more complex than the usual shitposting. Whatever expertise the military operation itself may or may not have shown, the rest of it appears to be a hack job from top to bottom.

The plain truth of all of this is that the sitting president is an inept bungler operating in a delusional space. That much is obvious just from the man's insistence that the raid was to gain control of the oil that Venezuela "stole" from us, the oil under Venezuela's own lands, the oil that this decaying old man considers to be as much his birthright as anything else.

If you can guess where all of this is going, you're a prophet. Personally, I can't see any scenario that gets this collection of balloon-headed monsters to their supposed planned end point, and I don't think any of them gave any thought to the plan because Trump has surrounded himself with human failures who concern themselves only with remaining in his good graces through elaborate and now often-murderous sucking up.

The stakes keep ratcheting up with each new illegal act by Trump and his team. Congress, in the meantime, seems to have disbanded itself entirely.

UPDATE: Speculation that Maduro's capture was done with assistance from inside Venezuela continues to grow, with Reuters reporting claims that "members of the Venezuelan military cooperated with the United States to secure" him. Again, whether that is or isn't true may be of less immediate importance than whether Maduro loyalists believe it to be true.