What Trump did next.

The Trump administration’s decision to depose and remove Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela has absolutely nothing to do with him being a drug trafficker, even though Trump claims that it is. After all, Trump recently pardoned another Latin-American president convicted for almost the same thing; (the Honduran president Hernández).

Even though Maduro has indeed behaved like an evil dictator it’s clear from Trump’s past behaviour and rhetoric that these are just excuses.

What the administration really wants is an abundant source of oil, preferably extracted with cheap local labour. Venezuela has world’s largest oil reserves. In two years, the United States could, in theory, make a fortune selling oil around the world, as the Gulf States do. But only in theory because the world’s supply of oil is consistently exceeding demand and there’s a glut of it in storage. This is partly because of the drive to reduce dependency on fossil fuels due to the climate crisis, which Trump and his followers insist does not exist. Still, the US government could certainly use a cheap source of oil to fuel its own tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers and so on, which has its own implications.

Trump has stated that the people of Venezuela will be far better off with America running their country than under Maduro, but this is just propaganda. Trump doesn’t care about ordinary people, he doesn’t seem to care much about his own people, millions of whom are suffering in the cost-of-living crisis that he said he would end.

Venezuela could just as easily go in a worse direction with wealthy criminal gangs fighting on the streets and making the country ungovernable.

Then there’s the new precedent which Trump has set; that if a powerful country does not like or agree with the political direction another country has taken - even if that direction was as a result of a free and fair election - that powerful country is somehow justified to move in and take it over. This of course is exactly what Putin thinks and why he has designs not just on Ukraine but much of Eastern Europe.

The Trump administration will have its work cut out controlling Venezuela and maybe that is just as well; it may be that while they are engulfed in this, they’re unlikely also to invade Columbia, Greenland or Panama but then Trump will do next whatever he thinks will make him look big and impressive because unfortunately, this and almost everything else he’s done is symptomatic of the actions of a malignant narcissist.