{"id":386507,"date":"2026-01-04T01:49:30","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T01:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/386507\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T01:49:30","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T01:49:30","slug":"blind-into-caracas-by-james-fallows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/386507\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Blind Into Caracas\u2019 – by James Fallows"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>From today\u2019s press conference, after the US raid in Venezuela. At center, Marco Rubio, pretending that this was just a normal law-enforcement action. At left, the omnipresent Stephen Miller. At right, the person who has assumed one-man authority to disrupt the world economy with tariffs, launch lethal assaults on other nations, and declare a \u201cboots on the ground\u201d military occupation. Today, as shown, he struggled to maintain attention when anyone was speaking except himself. (Photo Joe Raedle\/Getty Images.)<\/p>\n

Here are ten quick reactions to the most disturbing presidential press conference I have seen in my life.<\/p>\n

1. Trump himself looked and sounded very bad. He slurred and slumped more than usual. His eyes fluttered many times toward seeming shut. He had trouble working his way through big words in the written script. His off-script riffs were from a very small span of his standard repertoire. (\u201cWe\u2019re a respected country again, like never before,\u201d etc.) Yes, he had probably been up all night. But even for him, he looked bad.<\/p>\n

When answering one of the many policy questions that Trump shunted to him, Marco Rubio found himself saying, \u201cIt\u2019s a country run by incompetent, senile men.\u201d He was talking about Cuba. But even as the words came from his mouth, with Trump standing with drooping eyes behind him (as shown above), you could see Rubio wishing he had phrased the point a different way.<\/p>\n

2. Trump made the case for his own impeachment. Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and others tried to dance around what had happened by saying that the Maduro capture and relocation from Venezuela was a routine law-enforcement exercise. Nothing to see here! We\u2019re just executing another drug-crime arrest warrant, though with unusual skill from the American forces.<\/p>\n

Trump was having none of this pussyfooting. Perhaps without realizing he was doing so, he flatly and 100% contradicted what others at the microphone were claiming.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are going to run the country,\u201d he said of Venezuela, with \u201cwe\u201d meaning the United States. \u201cWe are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition\u2026 We\u2019re going to stay and run it, essentially, until a proper transition can take place.\u201d That is, until we decide otherwise. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, Trump said, he was \u201cnot afraid of boots on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good God.<\/p>\n

This is an overthrow of a foreign government. It\u2019s an act of war. It is an open-ended declaration of foreign occupation. And as all at the microphone either proudly declared and reluctantly admitted, it was pulled off without consultation with anyone outside their little circle. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s what\u2019s impeachable. If Trump understood what he was saying, he was violating all concepts of checks-and-balances. If he didn\u2019t understand, he is incapacitated.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s bad enough for Trump to disrupt the entire world trading system, at his whim, with one-man decisions to raise and lower tariffs. (As the Supreme Court might eventually get around to recognizing.) What he announced today is one man (plus his enablers) violating the Constitution of 1787, the War Powers Act of 1973, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, all of which require a president to involve the Congress in war-and-peace decisions. <\/p>\n

Yes, since the 1970s Congress has ceded too much territory to presidents in this area. But what Trump announced was not ceding territory. It was declaring, as Nero might have put it if he spoke French, l\u2019etat, c\u2019est moi.<\/p>\n

Actual impeachment will go nowhere, in a quisling-run GOP Congress. But recognition that this is flat impeachable needs to become part of standard press and political discussion of what has just occurred.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

3. Special horseshit award for Marco Rubio. He claimed that the Trump team couldn\u2019t let anyone in Congress know about the Maduro mission ahead of time, for fear of leaks. And that this caution extended even to the \u201cGang of Eight\u201d in Congress. These are the select, bipartisan assemblage of leaders who are supposed to be briefed on the most sensitive security matters\u2014and who (in contrast to the Trump team) have had over the decades zero cases of leaking sensitive information before military operations. <\/p>\n

Rubio knows full well that the most grievous leaks in the Trump era have come either from Trump himself or from Pete Hegseth. (Including the pathetically incompetent WhatsApp Signal group chat.) To be clear, Rubio knows that what he was saying today was false\u2014his claim that elite Congressional intelligence committees cannot keep secrets. But he said it anyway, because it is what Trump wanted to hear. This is what we call lying in normal life.<\/p>\n

4. Remember when this was about drugs? Hah hah hah! The only time Trump seemed animated during these presentations was when he talked about how much oil money Venezuela had \u201cstolen\u201d from Americans, and how great the new Venezuelan oil riches would be. <\/p>\n

One example of many. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We\u2019re going to get reimbursed for all of that. We\u2019re going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend. So it\u2019s going to be, it\u2019s going to be very important.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the annals of presidential rhetoric about foreign commitments, it\u2019s not quite like \u201carsenal of democracy\u201d or \u201cMr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.\u201d <\/p>\n

5. Remember when Trump was all about \u2018America First\u2019 and staying out of other people\u2019s battles? Hah hah hah! Anyone who thought that Trump would keep the US out of foreign complications, for God\u2019s sake think again.<\/p>\n

For the many, many people in the press who wrote that Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d doctrine would free the country from foreign entanglements, let\u2019s see those \u201cI was wrong\u201d columns.<\/p>\n

6. The White House press corps did a good job of asking follow-up questions. Since I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever typed that sentence before in my life, I\u2019ll type it out now.<\/p>\n

You could see at the end of the initial presentations\u2014by Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, the JCS chairman (Gen. Dan Caine) whom Trump insists on calling \u201cRazin\u2019 Caine\u201d\u2014that the White House team wanted to move Trump away from the mic. But he kept coming back for his lounge-show act, and kept digging himself in deeper and deeper with \u201coff-message\u201d comments. Especially, as he blew away the smoke-screen Rubio had tried to create, that this was just a normal law-enforcement exercise. <\/p>\n

A reporter asked who would take over in Venezuela, and got Trump to say, \u201cI mean, there is nobody to take over.\u201d Another reporter asked about \u201cboots on the ground\u201d and whether the US would have an ongoing military presence in Venezuela. This person got Trump to say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.\u201d There were lots of other good questions. And lots of other revealing, discouraging answers. More of this from the press corps, please.<\/p>\n

7. Apparently no one in the US government has asked, What happens the next day? There are some wars that countries rush into because they must, without extensive \u201cday after\u201d planning. For the US, that could mean Fort Sumter in 1861, or Pearl Harbor in 1941. For Ukraine, it was the battle for its survival, starting in 2022. In such cases, countries could start worrying about the day after, once they knew that \u201cafter\u201d would actually come.<\/p>\n

Other \u201cwars of choice\u201d depend fundamentally on assessing what will happen the day after the fighting stops. In the year before the catastrophic US invasion of Iraq, I published many <\/a>magazine articles<\/a>, and later an entire book<\/a>, (called Blind Into Baghdad, thus the title of this post) on the foreseeable disaster of trying to run Iraq after removing Saddam Hussein. There is no evidence that anyone on the Trump team has thought about what will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year, in the glow of their \u201csuccess\u201d today.<\/p>\n

It was barely one month after the start of the catastrophic Iraq invasion that George W. Bush had his \u201cMission Accomplished!\u201d premature victory celebration aboard an aircraft carrier. That was the tone of, especially, Pete Hegseth\u2019s preening this morning. By all accounts, the branches of military and civilian organizations that cooperated in their exercise did a phenomenal job. But we\u2019re not even 24 hours into this campaign. Decades later, we\u2019re still dealing with the aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq. <\/p>\n

8. \u2018Monroe Doctrine\u2019 meets \u2018Donroe Doctrine\u2019 meets \u2018China\u2019s core interests.\u2019 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From today\u2019s press conference, after the US raid in Venezuela. At center, Marco Rubio, pretending that this was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":["post-386507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}