Trump’s Venezuela invasion has exposed one of his biggest lies.

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There was a time, not long ago, when people would claim with a straight face that Donald Trump was a populist who prioritized the interests of working-class Americans and avoided stupid foreign wars. “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” then-Sen. J.D. Vance crowed in 2023. As Trump assembled his second-term national security team in 2024, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, claimed to be “amazed by the Trump Cabinet” and the president’s rejection of “warmongers.” A mere two months ago, one of those Cabinet officials, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, told a conference in Bahrain that Trump had ended the “counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation building” that has defined U.S. foreign policy for decades.

The president’s brazenly illegal military assault on Caracas last week would embarrass these people, were they capable of embarrassment. Trump did not govern as a populist during his first term; his second has been an unabashed celebration of crass imperialism and the superrich.

And the superrich are thrilled. Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman croons that Trump’s war in Venezuela “will lower oil prices, which is good for America.” The Jeff Bezos editorial board hailed the invasion as a happy confluence of “justice” and technical prowess. Elon Musk is patching things up with the president, proclaiming the war “a win for the world and a clear message to evil dictators everywhere.” Nor are Republicans the only enthusiasts. Democratic Party fundraiser Charles Myers is organizing a post-Maduro field trip to Venezuela with about 20 hedge funders and asset managers to scout investment opportunities in “oil and gas,” as well as “construction” and “tourism.”

The story of American capital profiteering on American war is as old as America itself, and Trump openly claims to have invaded Venezuela for its oil. But in this particular case, the Wall Street opportunists have their work cut out for them. On Saturday, Politico reported that Trump offered U.S. oil executives “reimbursement” for oil assets that were nationalized by the Venezuelan government decades ago—but only on the condition that they actually take control of the country’s oil fields. Ten days after making the offer, the president doesn’t have any takers. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is outdated, and it will require tremendous investment to meaningfully expand production, something oil companies are reluctant to do when large profits are readily available from high prices and low corporate investment. We are thus presented with the bizarre spectacle of an American president waging an imperialist war on behalf of American executives who are reluctant to claim the spoils. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is telling reporters that Cuba may be next in line for American-imposed regime change, as the wife of Trump’s racism czar Stephen Miller points to Greenland.

Embarrassing as these developments are for the right-wing populists who supported Trump in 2024, I have always harbored some sympathy for their political plight. Conservative populists are generally right about war (bad) and poverty (wrong), and they claim to recognize warmongering and elite favor trading as unpleasant features of Republican politics. At the same time, I have maintained contempt for the belief that Trump might deliver the U.S. from those evils. His first term was defined by a massive tax cut for the rich, a bank deregulation bill that delivered a rash of bank failures, the destruction of a standing diplomatic treaty with Iran, and sustained, vocal support for the violent and corrupt governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. All of these agenda items could have been implemented by a President Mitt Romney, had an election or two gone a little differently. The populist fantasy this time around was that Vance and a few other Trump insiders who had built careers on populist branding might persuade Trump to turn away from the Republican old guard.

A year into his second term, Trump has once again cut taxes for the rich, in addition to doubling health insurance premiums for 20 million families and declaring the national affordability crisis a “hoax.” His invasion of Venezuela suggests a return not only to the half-baked adventurism of George W. Bush in Iraq but to various coups attempted and consummated by Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.

Trump’s Venezuela Invasion Has Exposed One of His Biggest Lies

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Trump Just Betrayed His Most Die-Hard Supporters. They’re Cheering Him On Anyway.

So Trump’s populist pitch to voters once again turned out to be a fraud. But the populist energy that fueled his reelection isn’t going away, even if the air is coming out of the Epstein jet’s tires. Trump was propelled into office by the two defining events of the 21st century: Bush the Younger’s disaster in Iraq and the financial crisis of 2008, both of which provided the country with ample evidence of elite incompetence and self-dealing. But the Democratic Party’s leadership has remained too entwined with the same interests and ideologues to establish itself as an enduring alternative to the elite predation that has been so obvious under Republican leadership. Barack Obama captured Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 but remained at war in Afghanistan for the remainder of his presidency. Joe Biden followed through on Trump’s first-term Middle East program all the way to a genocide in Gaza, and one of Biden’s last actions in office was to offer a $25 million reward for information leading to Nicolás Maduro’s “arrest”—the same word members of the Trump administration use to describe their operation in Venezuela.

Trump’s presidency is in trouble. Every Epstein file dump reveals his long friendship with the sex trafficker to be worse than we knew, and he is still illegally withholding tens of thousands of Epstein files from public scrutiny—not the action of a man comfortable with the contents. Prices remain high, unemployment is rising, and the economy has been stuck in a hiring freeze for just about the entirety of Trump’s presidency. Democratic Party leadership clearly hopes it can ride all of this ineptitude to victory in 2026 and 2028 without promising much more than a return to normality. And Trump’s failures mean that Democrats will, indeed, have the wind at their backs. But the party has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory before. The safe bet is to break with the corrupt and violent tradition Trump so unmistakably embodies.

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