Trump’s Up To Something in Venezuela

Twenty-seven dead. No trials. No evidence. No consequences. Just Trump's manifest destiny and a Venezuelan opposition leader promising to hand over the world's largest oil reserves to America

Trump said he wanted Greenland and wouldn’t rule out taking it by force. He said Canada should become the 51st state. He declared the Panama Canal should be “taken back.” In his second inaugural address, he invoked “manifest destiny,” announcing that the United States would “consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.”

Then in September, the U.S. military began blowing up boats in the Caribbean, killing 27 people across five strikes. Trump claimed they were drug traffickers. He provided no evidence. Congress was denied unedited video. The administration couldn’t answer basic questions about legal authority. At least one boat had turned around and was heading away when it was destroyed. Some of the dead were fishermen. Two were citizens of Trinidad and Tobago.

No trials. No due process. No proof. Just executions in international waters, justified by claims the administration refuses to substantiate.

This is how democracies die—not with dramatic coups, but with the steady erosion of constraints on executive power, the normalization of extrajudicial killing, the substitution of evidence with assertion, truth with narrative. And it raises a question that should terrify anyone paying attention: if this is how America now conducts itself in the Caribbean, what’s to stop Trump from turning the world’s most powerful military into an instrument of global terror in pursuit of resources he’s decided America deserves?

Consider what we actually know versus what we’re being told. Trump claims the 27 people killed in boat strikes were members of Tren de Aragua trafficking drugs to America. But InSight Crime, which spent two years studying the gang, found “no direct participation in the transnational drug trade.” The gang’s actual business is human smuggling and extortion, not maritime drug trafficking. Even the U.S. Treasury Department’s designation of Tren de Aragua lists human smuggling and extortion as primary activities, barely mentioning drugs.

The drug narrative collapses further when you examine facts. Fentanyl, which actually kills Americans by the thousands, comes from Mexico using Chinese precursor chemicals. It crosses at legal ports of entry. The State Department’s 2025 report doesn’t mention Venezuela in connection with fentanyl. Cocaine? Ninety percent arrives via Colombia and Mexico. Venezuela handles maybe ten percent of cocaine transit, mostly heading to Europe and Caribbean islands, not American shores.

So Trump is killing people based on claims that contradict his own government’s intelligence assessments, targeting a gang that doesn’t do what he says it does, in waters near a country that isn’t a primary drug source. And when Congress asks for evidence—unedited video, intelligence justifications, legal authority—the administration refuses to provide it.

This is the pattern. Assert something. Act on the assertion. Refuse to provide evidence. Move to the next assertion before anyone can properly examine the first. It’s how authoritarian regimes operate, not democracies. And it’s not new for Trump—it’s his entire operational method.

Remember when Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020? The administration claimed an “imminent” threat justified the strike. When pressed for evidence of imminence, officials couldn’t provide it. Defense Secretary Mark Esper admitted he hadn’t seen specific evidence of imminent attacks on four U.S. embassies, contradicting Trump’s own claims. The justification kept shifting—from imminent threat to deterrence to retaliation for past actions.

The pattern was identical: extrajudicial killing of a foreign official, claims of justification, refusal to provide evidence, shifting rationales when questioned. Soleimani was unquestionably involved in activities harmful to U.S. interests, but that’s not the same as imminent threat justifying assassination. The distinction matters because it’s the difference between law and lawlessness, between justified self-defense and executive murder.

Now we’re seeing the same pattern in the Caribbean. Boats destroyed. People killed. Claims about drug trafficking and terrorist affiliations. No evidence provided. No trials. No due process. Just Trump posting videos of explosions on social media while calling the dead “narcoterrorists.”

Human Rights Watch has called these strikes extrajudicial killings. “U.S. officials cannot summarily kill people they accuse of smuggling drugs,” said Sarah Yager, the organization’s Washington director. But that’s precisely what’s happening. Trump has declared the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, essentially claiming he can kill anyone he designates as connected to drug trafficking without arrest, trial, or evidence.

This is how you build the infrastructure for state terror. You establish precedents where the executive can kill people based on secret intelligence, refuse oversight, ignore international law, and face no consequences. You normalize extrajudicial execution. You train your military and public to accept that some people—brown people, foreign people, people accused of crimes—can simply be eliminated without the inconvenience of proof or process.

And it’s happening in service of what increasingly looks like a resource grab. Because there’s another explanation for these boat strikes that makes considerably more sense than drug interdiction: they’re creating conditions for regime change in Venezuela, which sits atop 303 billion barrels of oil, the world’s largest proven reserves.

In February 2025, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado—who just won the Nobel Peace Prize—sat down with Donald Trump Jr. and made him an offer. Help overthrow Maduro, she said, and “we’re going to kick the government out of the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all our industry.” Venezuela would become “the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.”

“Forget about Saudi Arabia,” she told Trump’s son. “We have more oil, I mean, infinite potential.”

Two months after Trump invoked manifest destiny in his inaugural address, one month after Machado promised to privatize Venezuela’s oil, the boat strikes began. Since then, Trump has deployed eight warships, F-35 fighter jets, a nuclear submarine, and 6,500 troops to the Caribbean. B-52 bombers have flown near Venezuela’s coast. Trump confirmed he authorized CIA covert operations inside Venezuela. There’s a $50 million bounty on Maduro.

You don’t need that level of military force to stop fishing boats. You need it to threaten a government. And you use boat strikes not because they’re effective drug interdiction—they’re not—but because they establish a narrative (Venezuela is a narco-state) and demonstrate American willingness to use lethal force with impunity.

This might be Trump’s plan for Venezuela: create chaos through military strikes justified by unsubstantiated drug claims, build toward regime change, install a puppet government that privatizes the oil industry, hand control to American corporations. It solves his economic catastrophe—he’s wrecked the economy with tariffs and desperately needs revenue. It addresses China’s growing influence in Latin America. It gives him something to claim as victory.

And it requires no truth, no evidence, no due process. Just the willingness to kill people based on assertions, refuse oversight, ignore international law, and normalize state violence.

The precedents Trump has established—both with Soleimani and now in the Caribbean—are terrifying not just for what they allow him to do, but for what they allow any future president to do. If Trump can kill 27 people without providing evidence, without congressional approval, without facing consequences, what’s to stop the next president from doing the same? What’s to stop America from becoming exactly what it has historically fought against—a state that uses military force to seize resources, eliminates people without due process, and operates on power rather than law?

This is how global terror works. It’s not always dramatic attacks on civilians—though American drone strikes have killed thousands of civilians over two decades. It’s the systematic use of violence without accountability. It’s killing people based on secret intelligence that’s never scrutinized. It’s the constant threat of annihilation hovering over anyone the powerful decide is an enemy. It’s the denial of basic legal protections—the right to know charges against you, to face your accusers, to have evidence examined, to mount a defense.

When America does this—when it kills people without trial, refuses to provide evidence, ignores international law, and faces no consequences—it becomes the thing it claims to oppose. The fishermen of Trinidad and Tobago now fear going to sea because American military assets might decide their boats look suspicious and blow them up without warning. Venezuelan coastal communities live under threat of sudden death from the sky based on intelligence they’ll never see, accusations they can’t contest, in a “war” they never declared.

This is terror. State-sponsored, technologically advanced, legally rationalized terror. And it’s being normalized in real time.

Trump’s pattern of operating without truth or evidence isn’t a quirk—it’s a strategy. If you never provide evidence, evidence can never be disproven. If you refuse oversight, no one can establish you violated rules. If you move fast enough from one crisis to the next, each individual violation blurs into the general chaos. And if you face no consequences, you learn the crucial lesson: you can do anything.

Soleimani established Trump would assassinate foreign officials without providing evidence of imminent threat. The boat strikes establish he’ll kill dozens of people without proof they’re criminals, let alone imminent threats. What comes next? If this is indeed Trump’s plan for Venezuela—regime change in service of oil acquisition—how many people will die in its execution? How will the violence be justified? What evidence will be provided? What oversight will be permitted?

Based on the pattern, the answers are: as many as necessary, with whatever claims sound plausible, none, and none.

Trump has already demonstrated contempt for basic democratic norms domestically. He’s weaponized federal agencies against political opponents, threatened to withhold disaster relief from states that didn’t vote for him, violated the emoluments clause brazenly, pardoned war criminals and political allies. Each violation was met with hand-wringing, then everyone moved on. He learned he can act without constraint.

Now he’s applying that same approach to foreign policy, but with lethal force. And the implications are staggering. Because if America—the most powerful military in human history—operates on this basis, what hope exists for a rules-based international order? What prevents other nations from adopting the same approach? What protects any of us from states that decide law and evidence are inconvenient obstacles to desired outcomes?

China is watching. Russia is watching. Every authoritarian regime is watching and learning. When America kills people without due process and faces no consequences, when it invades waters and airspace claiming secret intelligence justifies it, when it pursues regime change for resource acquisition while wrapping it in the language of security, it provides a template. It says: this is how power actually works in the 21st century. Law is for the weak. Evidence is optional. Truth is whatever the powerful say it is.

And vulnerable populations everywhere pay the price. The fishermen whose boats might look suspicious. The civilians near targets the powerful decide need eliminating. The people living above resources someone else wants. They exist at the mercy of governments willing to kill based on assertions rather than evidence, on suspicion rather than proof, on convenience rather than law.

Trump’s territorial ambitions—Greenland, Panama Canal, Canada, now potentially Venezuela—combined with his demonstrated willingness to use lethal force without evidence or due process, create a genuinely dangerous situation. Not just for Venezuelans or Caribbean fishing communities, but for everyone who lives in a world where the most powerful military operates on Trump’s logic: I want it, I have the guns, I’ll claim whatever justification is convenient, therefore it’s mine.

This is how America becomes a source of global terror rather than stability. Not through dramatic transformation, but through the steady accumulation of precedents where extrajudicial killing is normalized, evidence becomes optional, oversight is refused, and violence serves acquisition rather than genuine security.

The 27 people killed in Caribbean waters died without trial, without due process, based on claims the administration won’t substantiate. Their deaths establish a precedent: America can kill you anywhere, anytime, based on secret intelligence and shifting justifications. Lenore Burnley, mother of one victim, said her son wasn’t involved in drugs. But it doesn’t matter. Trump called him a narcoterrorist, posted video of his death on social media, and moved on. No investigation. No accountability. Just another day in manifest destiny’s resurrection.

If this is Trump’s Venezuela—if the boat strikes are creating conditions for regime change in service of oil acquisition—then we’re watching something genuinely horrifying unfold. Not just the violation of one country’s sovereignty, but the transformation of American power from something operating (however imperfectly) within legal constraints into something operating purely on assertion and force.

The question isn’t just whether Trump can get away with seizing Venezuela’s oil. It’s whether America can survive becoming the kind of country that does such things. Whether we can maintain any pretense of operating on law rather than power, evidence rather than assertion, truth rather than convenient narrative.

Because once you establish that the executive can kill anyone, anywhere, without evidence or due process, based on claims of secret intelligence and national security—once you normalize that, make it routine, strip away the constraints and oversight—you’ve built the architecture for unlimited state violence. You’ve created the conditions where America doesn’t fight terror, it becomes terror.

And the rest of the world has no choice but to prepare accordingly. To build defenses against a superpower that operates on Trump’s logic. To form alliances that can resist American force. To develop weapons that can deter American aggression. To create a world where no one trusts American claims, American intentions, American power.

This is the legacy Trump is building. Not American greatness, but American isolation. Not security through strength, but vulnerability through lawlessness. Not a world that looks to America as a model, but a world that fears America as a threat.

Twenty-seven people are dead in Caribbean waters. Trump provided no evidence they deserved execution. Congress was denied information. The administration refused oversight. The strikes continue. The military buildup intensifies. And somewhere, Trump is looking at Venezuela’s 303 billion barrels of oil, listening to Machado’s offer to privatize it for American companies, and calculating whether he can take it.

Based on everything we know about how Trump operates—the lies, the refusal of evidence, the contempt for due process, the pattern of extrajudicial killing, the demonstrated territorial ambitions—the answer is probably yes, he thinks he can. And based on the precedents he’s established and the lack of consequences he’s faced, he might be right.

The question is whether anyone will stop him before America completes its transformation from democratic superpower to global terror. Before the exception becomes the rule. Before we normalize what should horrify us.

Before we accept that this—extrajudicial killing in service of resource acquisition, wrapped in lies and justified by secret intelligence—is simply what America does now.

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