America Is a Rogue State (#113)

In this issue: we should not sane-wash what Trump did in Venezuela, Democratic leaders fail once again to meet the moment, Europe needs to understand the dangers it faces, and Cory Doctorow outlines one action that would effectively hit back against Trump and his tech-bro supporters.

Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.

Leading Off

Few takes in the history of punditry have aged as poorly as this one.

That’s just world-class analysis right there. It is remarkable what one may begin to believe in order to justify hating Hillary Rodham Clinton. Yet Maureen Dowd remains a New York Times columnist to this day.

At some point, shouldn’t we hold people who are this wrong accountable in some way besides letting them continue to share opinions in the limited space offered by the nation’s (sadly, alas) newspaper of record?

Item 1

• The Word Is Kidnapping (Corbin Trent, America’s Undoing, Link to Article)
• The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, Link to Article)
• You Don’t Get to Break the Constitution Just Because the Bastard Had It Coming (JoJofromJerz, Are you f'ng kidding me?, Link to Article)
• Venezuela Is Not a Distraction. It’s the Project 2025 Plan. (Andra Watkins, For Such a Time As This, Link to Article)

We always need to notice when and how legacy media members and Republicans try to sane-wash the Trump regime’s latest anti-Constitutional atrocity.

Because here we go again with our nation’s invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president.

To be clear, Nicolás Maduro is a horrible person. He violently suppressed dissent, vanished people, stole elections, and looted the wealth of his country.

But none of that transforms an act of war into a law enforcement operation. It also does not transform a kidnapping into, as the New York Times and other legacy media outlets headlined, a “a capture” of President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

As Corbin Trent observes:

I’ve read the coverage from the Times, the Post, NPR, NBC, CNN. Every single outlet uses the word “capture.” Every single one frames this as Trump says versus Venezuela says, as if there’s some legitimate debate about whether bombing a country and taking its president constitutes an act of war.

There isn’t a debate. There’s international law, which we are violating. There’s the UN Charter, which we are violating. There’s our own Constitution, which requires Congress to declare war, which they did not do.

The same media that has spent years documenting Trump’s lies, his manipulation of the system, his contempt for legal constraints—that media is now treating his claim of legal authority as a serious proposition to be evaluated rather than an obvious pretext to be exposed.

Al Jazeera, at least, quotes the UN special rapporteur calling this an “illegal aggression” and an “illegal abduction.” That’s not both-sides journalism. That’s stating facts.

It sure is. And it isn’t even a close call.

How many lies does the Trump regime have to tell before legacy media reporters and editors stop being stenographers? Oh, that’s right:

Donald Trump may not care about international law or the United States Constitution. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may hope that these actions in Venezuela create a domino effect that helps him reach his ultimate goal: regime change in Cuba.

But international law still exists. The Constitution still exists.

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Yale Law School Professor Oona Hathaway about the legal issues surrounding the U.S. invasion and kidnapping. Hathaway, who is the president-elect of the American Society of International Law, critiques the Trump regime’s explanations for its actions.

It is telling that, in that Fox interview, he [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] was very dismissive of any suggestion that Congress should somehow have been involved in this. And, of course, it’s important to remember that it’s not just international law that’s an issue here; it’s also U.S. domestic law and particularly constitutional law that requires the President to go to Congress to seek authorization before using force against another country. [At the press conference, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, said that this was “not the kind of mission you can do congressional notification on,” characterizing it as “largely a law-enforcement” operation.] And part of what’s troubling here is not just that the President has used force in clear violation of domestic law and international law but that it’s clear he couldn’t care less about the fact that he’s breaking these rules. We’re talking not just about the U.N. charter but about the U.S. Constitution.

And that just suggests there may be no limits, that he’s just going to do what he thinks is warranted based on his own kind of reasoning, as opposed to any kind of constraints or legal limits or having to seek advice or consent from the international community or the U.S. Congress. That, I think, is what’s so scary about this.

We should listen when one of the nation’s international law experts calls a regime action “scary.”

Of course, this fits a pattern. The Trump regime has been ignoring legal limits since the president’s return to office. Trump is acting as if no limits apply, because neither the Supreme Court nor Congress seems intent on enforcing many checks and balances.

JoJoFromJerz explains why the failures of the other branches to respond forcefully to these anti-Constitutional actions are so dangerous for our democracy.

You don’t get to suspend the Constitution because the target makes you feel morally satisfied. You don’t get to shrug at the law because the headline scratches an itch. The moment we decide outcomes matter more than process, we’ve already handed the keys to the next bastard — and we won’t get to pretend we didn’t know better when he uses them on us.

Power that answers only to appetite doesn’t stay pointed at villains. It slips the leash, gets sloppy, and starts groping for whatever justification won’t fight back.

This is the trap. This is how it always works. You cheer the shortcut because it feels good, because the man on the receiving end is awful, because accountability is overdue and rage is easy. And then you wake up to discover you’ve normalized the exact behavior you said justified intervention in the first place. You didn’t defeat a tyrant. You validated the method. You blessed the move. You taught the lesson.

Unchecked power doesn’t become virtuous because it hits someone who deserves punishment. It just becomes portable. And the man currently wielding it — corrupt to his marrow, contemptuous of law, allergic to restraint — is not some temporary vessel.

He’s the demo model — left running long enough to see what breaks when nobody pulls the plug.

And that is why we need our elected leaders to take a stronger stand against Trump, Rubio, and this entire regime.

Sigh.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have once again not met the moment. Their statements are full of Congressional speak rather than getting to the point. Asking for briefings, pivoting to affordability, and hoping Republicans “put a break on this” is not enough. Jeffries even uses “America First” in a positive way in his initial statement: “Donald Trump has the constitutional responsibility to follow the law and protect democratic norms in the United States. That is what putting America First requires.”

Actually, it’s pretty clear at this point that “America First” does not require following the Constitution, the law, or democratic norms. It is malfeasance for a leading Democrat to imply otherwise.

And none of this should come as a surprise, because, as Andra Watkins reminds us, MAGA mentioned Venezuela in Project 2025. As she writes:

The regime isn’t trying to distract for Epstein/Jack Smith/bruised hands/public sleeping and slurring/corruption/White House destruction/lawsuits or any other litany of abominations. IT IS CARRYING OUT ITS PROJECT 2025 PLAN.

Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation President and Opus-Dei-adjacent Christian Nationalist Catholic extremist, mentioned Venezuela in his introduction to Project 2025.

Project 2025, page 15
“The Soviet empire was a social and economic failure. North Korea, despite the opulence of its tyrants, is one of the poorest nations in the world. Cuba is so corrupt that its people regularly risk their lives to escape to Florida on rafts. Venezuela was once the richest nation in South America; today, a decade after a Marxist dictator took over, 94 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty.” (emphasis added)

Venezuela was crucial enough to these White Christian Nationalists and their fossil fuel backers that they mentioned it IN THE INTRODUCTION to their Christo-fascist manifesto.

What the president did is unconstitutional and illegal. It was premeditated. It is one of the illegal orders about which a group of Democratic elected officials warned us. We don’t need hearings to understand these facts.

Social media posts are not enough of a response. Vague statements of concern on the Sunday news programs are not enough of a response. Pivots to affordability are not enough of a response.

Democrats need to start aggressively using the limited tools at their disposal to throw sand in the gears of this autocracy. Especially in the Senate, there are tools the minority party can use to make things difficult and get the majority party’s attention.

An impeachment vote speaks to history. It lets the American people know that there are differences between the parties.

We may not be able to get a conviction on an impeachment vote. Still, we can make Republicans pay the cost by using every tool possible to obstruct deliberations in the Senate and, to a lesser extent, the House. No more unanimous consent requests and constant quorum calls until the Trump regime starts following the law.

These are high crimes and misdemeanors. Let’s act like it, even if the Republicans insist on supporting their cult leader.

Item #2

• The Threat from America (Carole Cadwalladr, How to Survive the Broligarchy, Link to Article)
• Trump Says the U.S. Will “Run” Venezuela (Olga Lautman, Unmasking Russia, Link to Article)

How will the rest of the world react to what the Trump regime has done in Venezuela? Will world leaders sit back and let the United States establish that it can cross countries, kill civilians, and kidnap leaders based on a criminal indictment from a politicized Department of Justice?

They shouldn’t. As Carole Cadwalladr explains, the United States is now a rogue state. It is vital that European and Western leaders acknowledge and adjust to this new reality.

How Europe and “the west” responds to Trump now and the actions that governments take downstream from that is going to set the path for 2026. Because Trump isn’t just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in.

Key to all of this is understanding that US companies are explicitly going to be used to enforce US national security interests. And that includes the US technology companies that are at the heart of our national infrastructure and embedded into our everyday lives.

The attack on Venezuela couldn’t be a clearer example of “when someone tells you who they are, believe them”. Trump has set out America’s new place in the world, in the startling new US National Security Strategy document. It’s only the third day of January, but Trump has made it absolutely clear that this new world order is already under way.

Trump is acting without guardrails, and he has great abilities to make life difficult for his critics—and not just in the United States.

For example, will Trump insist that technology companies turn off its critics’ access to their products? The ability exists. We saw John Deere brick tractors stolen from Ukraine. But we have also seen members of the International Criminal Court lose access to their technology software and the global financial system as part of sanctions leveled by the U.S. in retaliation to the indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

We have entered uncharted waters. Trump has demonstrated the end of the post-World War II international system through this attack on Venezuela. The ramifications are stark, and the rest of the world should start preparing to defend themselves. As Unmasking Russia’s Olga Lautman details:

Europe should be paying close attention, because once a U.S. president openly claims the right to seize countries and announce occupation missions in broad daylight, the postwar order stops being theoretical and becomes conditional. Scenarios once dismissed as unthinkable by Europeans, including Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, should move from fringe rhetoric to contingency planning, not because they are inevitable, but because the logic driving them has already been normalized at the highest level of power.

What we are witnessing is a pattern of escalating instability unfolding within a rapidly shifting world order where lawlessness is increasingly normalized rather than restrained. If there are more questions than answers, it is because the situation is so insane, unprecedented, and reckless that events are now outpacing any coherent framework for accountability or control. Lawlessness of this scale never remains confined to foreign policy, and in the U.S., it is already turning inward. Left unchecked, Trump will continue to escalate abroad and at home until there are no meaningful limits left on executive power.

Democrats should be making this case loudly. The danger is real, so it should not be difficult to create conflict for the legacy media and social media to cover.

It would also be great if some Republican elected officials would show some courage by warning Trump that any military action against Greenland—still a NATO ally as a autonomous territory of Denmark—would lead to his removal from office.

Trump crossed some new lines this past weekend. None of this is normal, and Democrats and European countries need to stop acting like norms have any control of the situation. They need to defend themselves.

What’s intriguing is that Trump has actually given the rest of the world a way to give the people who funded Trump’s reelection—the tech broligarchs—a kick in their financial shins.

Item #3

• The Post-America Internet (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, Link to Article)

Science fiction author, internet activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow has been fighting against the enshittification of the internet for decades. It’s been a largely losing battle.

But now there is an opportunity to fight back.

Doctorow has described how United State Trade Representatives, starting with the Clinton Administration, have forced the rest of the world to agree to anticircumvention laws that make it a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service unless the manufacturer approves of the modification.

This is why, for example, you can’t use generic ink in HP printers. HP created a digital lock on the printer to check for the use of its certified ink. It is not hard for tech-saavy people to create bypasses for these locks, but doing so would violate these anticircumvention laws. That is one of the reasons HP can sell ink for more than $10,000 a gallon while treating their customers horribly.

Now, why would the rest of the world agree to laws that protect American technology companies this way? Because of free trade. United States Trade Representatives have made clear that a requirement of a free-trade agreement with the U.S. is the inclusion of an anticircumvention law. It is that or tariffs.

But Donald Trump, in his wisdom, has opened the door towards a global reform with his trade wars. If tariffs can go up on his whim, then free trade is no longer guaranteed. The deal no longer exists.

So, Doctorow suggests that an opportunity has presented itself for a nation, or nations, to hit the tech broligarchs in the wallet. This action also has the benefit of helping users have the ability to control their tech products and get more security for their data. He explains:

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.

Think of John Deere tractors: when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, swapping in new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But the tractor won't recognize that new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends a couple hundred bucks on a service callout from an official John Deere tractor repair rep, whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console, to initialize the part and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit.

Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anticircumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables the parts-pairing check in this American product.

So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.

30 percent! That's such a profitable business that Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

Apple, of course, doesn’t just extract a 30 percent cut from its app store. It also can restrict the apps that appear in it—as it in October when it kicked the ICE Block app out of its app store at the Trump regime’s demand.

There is an opportunity here for some country. If you haven’t, I encourage you to read the rest of Doctorow’s speech for more details.

It is a way to hit back. Trump always seems to escape the unintended consequences of his decisions. But the tech broligarchs who have been funding him may find themselves finding out that the world does not need to accept our authoritarian madness.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“Brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.”—Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

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Craig Cheslog (@craigcheslog.com)

GenXer against fascism. Talking politics, women’s soccer, WNBA, Manchester United men and women, USWNT, USMNT, Green Bay Packers, Boston Celtics, Chicago Cubs, and Taylor Swift. (he/him/his) My newsletter: https://thelongtwilightstruggle.com/.

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