The Gangsters of Manifest Destiny

American Exceptionalism Gone Wild

Donald Trump has finally done it. Earned the respect of The New York Times and other powerful organs of our state controlled media. CNN unquestioningly parrots the line that “the U.S. runs Venezuela.” So, let’s get this straight- we abducted the leader of another sovereign nation, bombed them, but it wasn’t an act of war. It was justified.

Don’t suggest that this is something new. Sure, Trumpenstein’s bombastic theatrical personality makes it seem that way. But this goes back to at least 1953, when the CIA ousted Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. True, they didn’t literally kidnap him and his wife, but the leader of another sovereign nation was removed from power. By our leaders, none of whom were Iranian. The next year, Jacobo Arbenz was forced to flee from his position as leader of Guatemala, with a little help from the CIA. In 1960, the CIA made possible pan-Africanist Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. The Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo was the next assassination victim of our government, in 1961. On November 1, 1963, the CIA engineered the murder of South Vietnam leader Ngo Diem, an act which outraged and deeply disturbed President John F. Kennedy, only three weeks before he met his fate in Dallas. Chile’s Salvador Allende fell to the CIA in 1973. Now, that’s a track record.

Of course, Americans found out during the 1975 Church Committee hearings in the Senate, that the CIA had comically tried to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro repeatedly during the early 1960s. Acting like Control agents from the TV show Get Smart, they were stupendously unsuccessful. Well, nobody’s perfect. In 1989, George H.W. Bush’s military invaded Panama, for the purpose of overthrowing one time U.S. asset Manuel Noriega, wanted for racketeering and drug trafficking. Any Venezuelans reading this may notice a familiar theme. The Pentagon estimated that 516 Panamanians, including over 200 civilians, were killed during the ludicrously named Operation Just Cause. This was the start of all those Orwellian names our government continues to glorify its murders and occupations with. Noriega was shockingly convicted in one of our illustrious courts of justice, and would serve thirty years in prison. It pays to not to hang out with the wrong crowd. Like the U.S. government.

A few years earlier, in 1986, Ronald Reagan had launched air strikes on Libya, in order to kill that country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi. As I have noted, Gaddafi was known as Qaddafi, or sometimes Kaddafy, at the time. For unclear reasons, these spellings of his name have been flushed down the memory hole. At any rate, the air strikes failed to hit Gaddafi/Qaddafi, although they did kill forty other Libyans, including Qaddafi’s three year old daughter. Well, she was probably a budding terrorist anyhow. I mean, what else could Qaddafi’s daughter grow up to be? In 2011, “liberal” President Barack Obama finished what Reagan started, as Qaddafi was killed by U.S. forces. The lovely former antiwar activist Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, memorably declared, “We came. We saw. He died,” in a celebratory outburst. By this point, U.S. leaders were not only acknowledging assassinating others, but bragging about it. Obama would joke, “I’m really good at killing people.” Give the man his due- he certainly was.

Also in 1986, Ronald Reagan authorized the abduction of Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, who had long been close allies with the United States. Although Marcos would later absurdly be charged with “racketeering,” the real reason for what Marcos himself described as a kidnapping was the fact that he won the election, while under the watchful eye of Jimmy Carter and other international “experts” in vote fraud (except here in the U.S.A., where it cannot be detected). It seemed that our leaders wanted Cory Aquino, his opponent, in power. So like they had done countless times before, the U.S. simply installed Aquino as president. Marcos died in 1989, before what would have been a rubber stamp conviction in our courts of justice. Amazingly, his widow Imelda, who had been ridiculed in our state controlled press for allegedly having an estimated one trillion pairs of shoes, was exonerated on charges of raiding the Philippines treasury.

In 2003, the sons of one time CIA favorite Saddam Hussein were killed by U.S. forces, while deposing him from power in Iraq. Again, the U.S. captured Saddam and brought him back to the greatest, freest country the world has ever known. To no one’s surprise, he was found guilty of killing 148 Shiite Muslims and sentenced to death. In America, we take the deaths of some Muslims very seriously. But not most, considering how many Muslims we’ve killed ourselves. In December, 2006, Saddam was hanged. According to our mainstream media, the people danced in the streets of Iraq. That’s what the media always says after we overthrow, kidnap, and/or murder the head of another sovereign nation. In 2011, an “elite” team of SEALS (are there any non-elite SEALS?) killed another former CIA asset, Osama Bin Laden, in Pakistan. They claimed his body was thrown in the ocean because of a nonexistent Muslim “tradition.” But Bin Laden wasn’t responsible for 9/11. His assassins were.

So when we look at the abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife the other day, it was really business as usual for a government that has been operating under the notion that it represents “exceptionalism” since at least 1898. What makes this particular case a bit different is the emphasis on portraying Maduro as not only a “dictator” (everyone we overthrow is a “dictator”), but as the king of the new and impossibly horrible “narco-terrorists.” Now, Trump wouldn’t be Trumpenstein if he hadn’t pardoned former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez less than a month ago. Hernandez was convicted in a revered New York courtroom of importing more than 400 tons of cocaine (and weapons) into the United States. Trumpenstein explained that Hernandez’s arrest had been a “setup” by the Biden administration: “If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.” Some drug dealers are more equal than others.

So that’s where the Trumpenstein Projects stands at this moment. In tatters. Anyone who truly believed in his 2016 rhetoric has long fled the MAGA world. Dan Bongino, the stereotypical bully who announced that Jeffrey Epstein had killed himself, while “serving” as Kash Patel’s right-hand man at the FBI, has quit in disgrace and is already back at his podcast. His first act upon resuming his position of very modified hangout was to viciously attack former Rep. Matt Gaetz. He called him a “dick” repeatedly. That must have made Trumpenstein smile. Despite mostly negative comments in response on X, he is continuing to spread the lie that Gaetz was involved with underage girls, when in fact that lurid charge was concocted by a political opponent who was attempting to extort money from Gaetz’s wealthy father. But Gaetz is a critic of Israel, unlike Bongino. Recall that Bongino was asked what one issue was “near and dear to your heart,” and declared “defense of Israel.” So did Glenn Beck.

Perhaps most disappointing of all was the statement released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Now, regular readers know that I’ve been a bit smitten with the lovely Tulsi for some time now. I supported her presidential candidacy and went to a local rally, where I gave her a copy of Survival of the Richest. Tulsi has consistently argued against “regime change,” and senseless U.S. interventionism. She had specifically warned that military action in Venezuela would be a “disaster.” But now she declared, presumably with a straight face, “Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve." Funny, I don’t recall candidate Trump promising to topple the leader of Venezuela. How many MAGA faithful voted for him to annex Greenland, as he is now once again threatening to do? Meanwhile, here the infrastructure crumbles and we still have no industry.

Trump, envigored by this roided out interventionism, has seized at least one Russian oil tanker. There have been rumblings about Columbia, and Cuba. Fidel Castro is dead, although he did outlive all those who kept trying to kill him. But evidently, this new bizarro MAGA feels that America is justified in taking any and every sovereign country they desire. Why exactly does the oil in Venezuela belong to us? Well, actually the oil companies. And Trumpenstein has assured the public that whatever cost the poor, struggling oil companies incur in stealing it from Venezuela, will be covered by the always reliable American taxpayer. I guess you could say that expresses a criminally narcissistic example of “America First.” Trump has also announced that he wants a $1.5 trillion defense budget this year. His record one trillion from last year just doesn’t cut it. Early in 2025, when things seemed a lot more hopeful, Trump gave the green light for DOGE to audit the Pentagon. He’s come a long way, baby.

Our military hasn’t had the slightest bit of ethics, or the most basic moral code, since at least the War Between the States. When we “thank them for your service,” we’re thanking them for the plunder of every southern home they encountered during Lincoln’s war. We’re thanking them for raping every female that moved, a practice which became such an epidemic during the “good” WWII that special brothels were set up to accommodate the uncontrollable lust of the rosy cheeked youngsters of the “Greatest Generation.” These brave souls collected skulls of dead Japanese and sent them home as trophies to loved ones. FDR was said to be especially proud of one he received, and displayed it in the Oval Office. Nothing quite says Christianity like that. By the time of the Gulf “War,” our best and brightest could bulldoze and bury alive Iraqis who were attempting to surrender, and the public still saluted them. That’s part of the problem; the public always honors war “heroes,” but never crusaders for peace.

By 1995, we had learned that as many as two million civilians were killed during the senseless Vietnam War. Remember, Americans didn’t bat an eye at the 39,000 children alone that were killed during the pointless, sadistic bombing of Dresden. The court historians downplay this carnage, which was a war crime if ever there was one, and estimate an impossibly low 25,000 deaths total. As readers of my books know, the court historians lie about everything, and they are lying here. Then Bradley Manning was given an absurd draconian sentence of 35 years in prison, for leaking the videotapes (through Julian Assange) that showed just some of the diabolical actions of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a shockingly just move, Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence on his way out of office. Seymour Hersh claimed at the time that he’d seen videotapes of U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi boys in front of their screaming mothers. That tape has never been released, for obvious reasons.

I listed a bunch of largely unrecognized crimes perpetrated by American military forces on Native Americans, Mexican civilians during the Mexican-American War, and civilians in countries like Haiti and the Philippines during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, in my book American Memory Hole: How the Court Historians Promote Disinformation. They have to be read to be believed. It’s no wonder that the fully tenured court historians simply ignore them. Thus, the reason behind the book title. When Trump called out the “senseless wars,” as well as the madness of keeping U.S. troops in over 150 countries all around the world, it resonated with many of us. But that rhetoric has been sent down the memory hole itself. The “Peace President” has become the most aggressive imperialist since Teddy Roosevelt. He seems to want to establish a meaner and harsher empire. From the garish gold in the White House to putting his name on the Kennedy Center, he’s more like Emperor Trumpenstein.

The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war. Congress, representing the weakest of the three branches of government, has refused to follow its obligation since WWII. The Senate has shown a bit of backbone here, with the Democrats (and five Republicans) voting on a War Powers resolution to limit what Trump can do in Venezuela. Trump will undoubtedly veto it. Congress loves war as much as the people who keep voting them back in office do. Trump may lose some of his base who believed in his quasi-isolationist talk, but he’ll gain some “normies” by intervening in another nation’s affairs. That’s what our “bipartisan” foreign policy is. But since the 1980s, it’s revolved entirely around the interests of Israel, not America. Maduro had a close relationship with Iran, and was vocally anti-Zionist. Maduro, in fact, claims Jewish ancestry. Well, why not? If the president of Mexico can be from the non-Irish clan, why not the deposed president of Venezuela?

When your military has a history of horribly mistreating its own citizens (during the Civil War), and raping, robbing, and plundering civilians in sovereign nations all over the world, then kidnapping one individual, whether he is an elected official or a dictator, is child’s play. If we ever had moral authority, we certainly lost it by 1865. Our leaders have decided that it is imperative to kill or rape those who “hate us for our freedom.” The American people never hold them accountable, and can’t stop thanking them for their “service” and giving them medals. We all should shed a tear for what might have been with a true America First policy. Cry over no arrests, and the Swamp teeming with new villains. Cry over the entrenched uniparty, and the impossibility of any real alternative movement. Cry over Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Jr., the only remnants of what could have been. The Trumpenstein Project looks to be ending with a bang. But who knows? There could be other curve balls in the script.