America's first coward/POTUS Donald “We do not want to be the World’s Police Force“ Trump, took out another regional country’s illiberal, already voted out leader (kind of like…Trump, you know, a criminal mob boss type?) in the easiest incursion he could accomplish among many possibilities:

I mean, did Trump capture Putin?

No.

Kim Jong Un?

No.

Yeah uh, so?

So what did this accomplish? Not stability. Not democracy. Our own first criminal is not placing in office the elected officials Maduro refused to allow to replace him.

Trump’s maintaining the current criminal regime, just led now by the former VP of Maduro. Will this create loyalist undergrounds, empower criminal militias, plant seeds for years of instability and resistance?

Or something? Something not good? Trump seldom thinks things out, works them out in advance, so, sure, who knows. And that’s the issue here.

We’ve seen this movie. You don’t just “grab” a foreign leader and walk away clean. You plant the seeds for years of blowback: underground loyalists, narco-insurgencies, splintered militias, an entire generation raised on chants of, in this case, “Gringos did this to us!”

That’s not stability. That’s a slow-burn war we’ll pretend to be surprised by later.

We’re repeating our mistakes of the past in Trump’s 18th century paradigms. He’s so far out of touch with modern times, it’s still amazing how he’s in office at all to begin with. But that’s who we allowed purchase in our once (sort of still) democracy.

Envisioning a protracted low-level insurgency or cycle of armed resistance months or years after a forcible removal of Maduro is a reasonable scenario. It’s supported by:

• political science on legitimacy and insurgency

• historical patterns from other interventions

• the specific fractured nature of Venezuelan society and armed groups

• the role of grievance narratives

It is not a certainty…but it is far from fringe speculation.

There IS an option, however.

Remove Donald Trump… immediately and start bringing to justice the people who enabled this disaster (Thanks Republicans in Congress (and on SCOTUS)).

SO FAR in only ONE YEAR? ONE! So many, many other things have been going wrong with this guy.

Let’s not allow him purchase for the next, or the next, or the next, over the next…three years, or more.

Now this… jzmurdock.blogspot.com/…