Image by The Now Times.
I’ve been thinking in recent days about Venezuela and the United States because of current events but also because of an event that occurred in Venezuela’s capital twenty-three years and six months ago.
Trump Attacking Venezuela
The current events in question should occasion no surprise. I am referring of course to the Trump regime’s clear threat to launch an imperialist regime change war on the oil-rich nation of Venezuela – a war whose likely prelude has included Trump killing more than 40 Venezuelans falsely accused of being fentanyl-shipping narcotraffickers in the Caribbean. The Trump assault seems almost certain to involve an assault on Venezuelan land as the US “Department of War” major assets, including its largest aircraft carrier (the USS Gerald Ford) off the Latin American nation’s coast. It is probable that Herr Trump is going to bomb Venezuela and perhaps even invade it, demanding the end of that nation’s avowedly socialist Nicholas Maduro regime and its replacement by a more US friendly government.
What’s likely coming is at least the fourth US-backed attempt at the overthrow of a Venezuelan president in this century – this time with a full-on US military attack
The also left-led nation of Colombia is also at risk of a Trump regime assault.
The charge of narco-trafficking is cover for the real motive behind Trump’s threats to Venezuela: control of the nation’s globally unmatched oil resources. There’s no fentanyl or cocaine coming into the US from Venezuela, which is why the Trump regime has presented no hint of a wisp of a hint of a scient of an iota of evidence that these or other drugs have been present on the Venezuelan commuter and fishing boats they’ve blown up.
Equally preposterous is the Trump regime’s claim of concern for Venezuelan democracy. As Greg Palast notes:
“Trump and our National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, have said that Maduro must go because he has threatened democracy in Venezuela and is trafficking fentanyl into the US. Think about it. If Trump wants to save democracy, why attack Venezuela, not the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi or the Emirates? Let’s not forget that Arabian Peninsula ‘royals’ are merely dictators in bathrobes. Why Venezuela and not the Arabian Peninsula potentates? Let me count the ways: Qatar has bought $2 billion of Trump crypto coins that will go into Trump family pockets. And there’s that little gift from Qatar of a 747 jet for The Donald, not the US government. And there’s the $2 billion in easy squeezy from the Saudis for Jared Kushner.”
What’s likely coming is the fourth US-backed attempt at the overthrow of a Venezuelan president in this century – this time with a full-on US military attack.
Two Days in Caracas, 2002
The past event I’m thinking about will probably surprise readers: the mass outpouring in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas that restored presidential power to Maduro’s charismatic left nationalist predecessor and “self-proclaimed socialist” Hugo Chavez 47 hours after he had been removed from power in the first US-backed coup attempt of the century
During the two-day period Chavez was removed with US-backing, Pedro Carmona, president of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fedecámaras), was declared the interim president of Venezuela. The Venezuelan National Assembly and the Supreme Court were dissolved and the country’s 1999 Constitution was declared void.
But “on April 11, 2002,” Dan Beeton noted on CounterPunch three and a half years ago:
“Venezuela’s democratically elected government, headed by Hugo Chávez Frías, was ousted in a military coup d’etat. Then, dramatically, two days later, the coup was overturned by a mass mobilization of Venezuelans. They demanded the restoration of democracy and the return of a government that appeared to be making good on its commitment to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth to benefit the country’s most marginalized sectors.”
Here is Palast’s account:
“…in March 2002…I was tipped off that Chávez would be overthrown in a military coup. Indeed, in April of that year, he was kidnapped by renegade officers who had the fantasy, shared by the US State Department, that the public hated Chavez and would celebrate his overthrow. But it turned into another Bay of Pigs after tens of thousands of angry Venezuelans surrounded Miraflores Palace while the coup leaders ‘inaugurated’ Exxon Oil’s lawyer as ‘president.’ George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Venezuela attended this wacky inauguration of the faux president…. But then the plotters, with Exxon’s man and the US ambassador, fled the Presidential Palace after the coup leaders, fearing for their lives, returned Chávez, by helicopter, safely to his Oval Office. I met days later with Chávez, who told my BBC audience that while he was in the helicopter, he clutched his rosary because he expected to be pushed out into the sea. Instead, he was returned safely by the frightened coup leaders back to his office. Chávez then chose to let his kidnappers escape without punishment.”
Obvious Differences
What’s the point of mentioning the events that took place in Caracas between April 11 and April 13, 2002? Simply this: we need a mass mobilization in the US capital right now to overcome an authoritarian coup (being undertaken by the US regime currently menacing the Maduro government) inside the US itself – the rolling Trump fascist coup.
I am aware that there are many big differences between what happened in Venezuela in 2002 and what’s going on the US today.
We have not had a military coup in the US.
No presidential administration in US history has made serious and avowedly socialist promises to redistribute US wealth downward to its most marginalized people.
The United States, which aided and abetted the short-lived Venezuelan 2002 coup and subsequently went on to “support coups, and other sorts of undemocratic political transitions, in Haiti (2004), Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Brazil (2016), and Bolivia (2019)” (Beeton), is still the world’s leading imperialist superpower (and was more powerful in 2002 than it is today). Venezuela, by contrast, is a poor if oil-rich nation in the world capitalist periphery directly under the menacing regional power of Washington, which imposes Venezuela’s impoverishment with a vicious economic embargo.
The fascist regime currently in power in the United States under Trump, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and John Roberts and their many Congressional, partisan, and corporate-oligarchic allies and enablers has far more domestic political support than the 47-day Carmona government did.
The Trump47 regime has so far been in power for 9 and a half months, this following a previous full (4-year) Trump45 regime (2017-2021). The Carmona government was in power for 47 hours.
Given these and other sharp differences what real and imagined parallels could possibly exist between Venezuela 23 and half years ago and the US today?
Two in particular:
· One, we are in the middle of a coup right now*, here in the United States*.
· Two, we need to flood our capital city with masses of people who refuse to leave until the currently reigning US coup regime us removed from power.
+1. The Trump Coup: “an Authoritarian Takeover of the United States Government”
A Self-Coup
We are mired in a rolling coup in the United States today – a fascist coup that I have been documenting on the Paul Street Report and elsewhere (CounterPunch, ZNet, and Common Dreams) for most of this year. It’s not a military coup, like what the US and the Venezuelan right-wing tried to pull off in Caracas on April 11, 2002, of course. Instead, it’s what researchers of regime change calls a “self-coup,” nicely defined as follows this morning by Google AI:
“A self-coup, or autocoup, is when a sitting head of government illegally seizes power or extends their own control, having come to power through legal means. This is different from a traditional coup d’état, which is an overthrow by an outside group, as the leader works from within the government to dismantle or neutralize other branches, suspend the constitution, and assume dictatorial powers.
Characteristics of a self-coup.
Perpetrator: The current, legitimate head of state or government, not an outside faction.
Motivation: To stay in power beyond a legal term, expand executive power, or prevent a successor from taking office.
Methods: The leader uses their existing authority to illegally:
· Dissolve the legislature or suspend its powers.
· Undermine or suspend the judiciary.
· Annul the constitution.
· Declare a state of emergency and assume extraordinary powers.”
Google AI’s efficient survey and synthesis fits what the Trump47 regime is doing.
Trump and his minions are already talking about extending his office beyond his constitutionally limited two terms. They are quite serious about this and are taking multiple steps to make it so regardless of mass majority anti-Trump public opinion.
On January 6, 2021, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump attempted a self-coup, one he hoped would be backed by the military to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
The Supreme Court: “A Blunt Instrument of Fascist Power”
During his first administration. Trump and his Republifascist allies in the absurdly mal-apportioned and right-tilted US Senate created a fascist Supreme Court that permitted him to run again in 2024 despite the US Constitution’s explicit banning from public office of former insurrectionists. In its “Reichstag Fire ruling of July 1, 2024 (Trump v. the United States), that same high Court further and critically negated constitutional checks and balances by absurdly granting Trump forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he has committed or will commit in the name of his official presidential duties. The Supreme Court, “a blunt instrument of fascist power” (Bob Avakian) has essentially placed Trump47 beyond the rule of law – critical backdrop for his brazen serial defiance of one law, constitutional principle, and judicial order after another.
“King Trunp”
After winning the 2024 election with the help of racist voter suppression, Trump on his first day back in power pardoned more than 1500 January 6 coup putschists and signed an executive order that purported to end the explicit Constitutional right of birthright citizenship.
Trump47 has brazenly violated Article I of the US Constitution in numerous ways including the impoundment and rescission of Congressionally allocated funds and the enactment of absurd tariffs.
Trump47 and his Republifascist party have thoroughly neutered the US Congress, turning both of its bodies into ludicrous lapdogs for his every deranged whim while enacting policy unilaterally through executive orders.
The high fascist Court and the Congress have done nothing or next to nothing to block the tangerine-tinted tyrant’s relentless destruction of the rule of law as Trump47 has mocked due process, free speech, and states’ right while firing vast swaths of the federal workforce, illegitimately deploying the military on U.S. soil, at least momentarily dissolving Congress, and disappearing immigrants and other brown-skinned people into brutal concentration camps.
Article I (codifying the powers of Congress) and Article III (codifying the powers of the judiciary) and hence the Constitution itself have been turned into pale paper tigers under “King Trump,” who says quite openly that being president means “I can do whatever I want.” L’ Etat, c’est moi.
Extrajudicial Executions
Herr Trump is now massacring Venezuelan and Colombian mariners with brazen impunity, claiming to justify these sadistic and extrajudicial executions by the evidence-free claim that his victims are “enemy combatant” “narco-traffickers” seeking to poison US residents at the command of Venezuela’s Maduro regime.
Trump feels no need to seek a constitutionally required Congressional declaration of war for these actions or for his coming bombardment and perhaps invasion of Venezuela. There’s no relevant Congressional oversight regarding Trump’s coming attacks on Venezuela – and also perhaps on Colombia and even Cuba – because Trump’s pathetic puppy atop the US House, “speaker” Mike Johnson, has essentially suspended the US House. As US Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) recently observed on cable news:
“The response [from the White House to the US House Armed Services Committee] is basically ‘go to Hell, I’m the president, I can do whatever I want to do.’ And that’s what I want people to understand. In all these stories taken together, you showed the demolition of the White House, gosh the tariffs, the way he’s used the Justice Department, the way he’s used the FCC to go after media he doesn’t like, it’s all part of one thing: Donald Trump wants the power to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to do it, without any transparency and any accountability. This is an authoritarian takeover of the United States government. And now we’re taking it the most extreme level possible: the president, as you just said, you just played it, he can kill who he wants to kill whenever he wants to kill them and he doesn’t have to explain it to anybody, okay? That is his position. And regardless of how you feel about Venezuela or Colombia or cocaine or fentanyl or drugs or anything, you shouldn’t support the president of the United States saying ‘screw you, I’m president, I can kill who I want to kill and you all just have to live with it’…The president is just exercising the most extreme power possible with no accountability…. we are losing our constitutional republic. And meanwhile, the House of Representatives, [Republifascist House Speaker and Trump toady] Mike Johnson has effectively dissolved the United States House of Representatives…. We need to have hearings on this, ok? The House Armed Services Committee needs to exercise oversight. And there are many [House] Republicans who agree with that. But we’re not in session. So we can’t do it, we’re not going to do it. So the president just gets to do what he wants. Look, the whole Nazi Germany analogies are troubling but, you know, that was one of the steps, the parliament, the Reichstag was pushed out of existence and didn’t have any oversight…That’s what the president is saying: ‘what are your talking about? I did it, leave me alone.’ ’…This is an authoritarian takeover of the government…the president is ignoring the law and turning us into a monarchy instead of a constitutional republic.”
Martial Law Looms
Any hour or day now, experts expect the fascist Supreme Court to summarily sign off on the Trump regime’s arch-authoritarian argument (in Trump v. Illinois) that the judicial branch has no standing whatsoever to rule against his determination to unleash the military on majority-nonwhite Democratic Party-run US cities in brazen defiance of federal law (including the Posse Comitatus Act and US Code 10 Section 12406) and the US Constitution’s 10th Amendment. If he doesn’t get what he wants from the Trump Court on this matter, he will likely and absurdly invoke the Insurrection Act – something that the high Court will likely enable. It seems possible if not probable that the 2026 US mid-term and 2028 general elections will, if they are held, take place in the shadow of occupying federal troops occupations in US cities unless the Trump regime is removed through a mass popular uprising this and next year.
Advance Capitulation? “The Fascists Are Telling Us to Our Face They Will Steal the Next Election”
Fascists as entrenched in power as the Trump coup regime and party are now – atop all three branches of the government and across half the nation’s state government with support (both active and passive) from the corporate and financial oligarchy – do not let their power slip away because of mere elections. Reflecting on Trump’s recent claim that the supposed (mythical) Democratic Party “steal” of the 2020 election must not “happen again,” the Refuse Fascism leader Sunsara Taylor recently spoke a basic and harsh truth: “If your plan for defeating fascism relies on winning elections that Trump is already moving to steal, you are capitulating in advance… you are giving him the future.”
Read that last line again: if you are hanging your hopes for the defeat of the Trump regime on electoral politics, you are advance-surrendering coming history to the RepubliNazis. No matter how well-intentioned, pushing the 2026 and 2028 elections at this point is complicity with fascism. The Trump regime is telling us to our face that it will steal the next election. A recent Revcom article details 4 ways in which the Trump party is working to do this: (i) extreme racist gerrymandering; (ii) packing the federal government with [2020] election deniers; (iii) an executive order to promote voter suppression; (iv) state-level vote rigging (beyond and alongside gerrymandering). As the article explains:
“Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, argued that what’s needed is ‘building up the kind of massive wave necessary to overcome the voter suppression and any other shenanigans they [the fascists] pull next year’….This is a profound and extremely dangerous underestimation of what we are facing. Not only does this not confront the rapid consolidation of all-out fascism, the mass deportations and terror being inflicted on millions throughout society, the evisceration of the rule of law, and destruction of public health. But this ignores all the ways that Trump and the MAGA fascist regime are already working overtime, and from many different angles, to rig and steal the next election. They are on an existential mission to remake society on a fascist foundation and they think only they have a right to rule. …Trump and the fascists are already telling you they will not respect elections they lose. Trump said recently, ‘We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again,’ and that ‘everybody is working on it,’ including FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In other words, he is making sure that this time when he moves to overturn an election he lost, he will win! Leading MAGA fascist Steve Bannon said in a recent interview, ‘Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that…. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.’…Trump has repeatedly threatened to jail Democratic politicians, accusing them of being ‘insurrectionists.’ His regime has launched “investigations” into Democratic fundraising platforms and major donors. And what kind of ‘free and fair election’ can go on when large sections of the traditionally Democratic base are afraid to go out into public spaces because they are terrorized by the ICE gestapo, backed by the National Guard, in an increasing number of cities?”
Along with all this, again, there is the distinct possibility that the 2026 mid-terms will take place in the vote-suppressing shadow of occupying military forces in the nation’s majority-nonwhite Democratic Party-run cities…
“The Enemy Within”
A month or so ago, Herr Trump brought 800-plus US admirals and generals to Quantico, Virginia to tell them that the country’s real adversaries are internal – the “radical left enemy within” – and that US cities need to become the “training grounds” for the military’s imperial war fighting powers.
Trump’s speech was preceded by a deranged oration in which his openly Christian white nationalist neo-Confederate “Secretary of War” Pete “I’ll Stop Drinking if You Put me Atop the Pentagon” Hegseth implored the brass to ignore supposedly obsolete Geneva Convention rules of engagement –- a fitting prelude to the summary mass executions of Latin Americans on the high seas that Hegseth has since ordered at the behest of his orange-faced master.
The debased former Fatherland News talk show host Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate because certain US Republican Senators feared physical violence from Trump enforcers. He was nominated because he promises to do what Trump45’s Department of Defense chiefs wouldn’t: deploy the military to kill US citizens on US soil. He is trying to purge Black soldiers from the military because the Trump regime calculates that Black military personnel are less reliable when it comes to waging war on “the [very disproportionately nonwhite] enemy within.”
The other day in Japan, Herr Trump told sailors and officers aboard the USS George Washington that he needs to send “more than the National Guard,” meaning active-duty military troops, into the nation’s cities.
Reporters who ask difficult questions about Trump and his sick fascist puppy Hegseth are doing and planning are no longer permitted in the Pentagon.
Trump’s notorious post of an AI video showing him dumping shit on No Kings Day protesters from a US bomber called “King Trump” is much more than juvenile online bombast. Like his recent insane destruction of the White House’s East Wing it is yet another signal that there are no limits to his authoritarian depravity.
Meanwhile, the Trump fascist regime has cowed “the enemy within,” meaning anyone who opposes or criticizes him, in numerous ways, including a recent presidential “national security” memo (NSPM-7) that makes Americans targets of investigation for advancing any of a vast swath of liberal and leftist beliefs, all held to be part of a radical terrorist conspiracy.
+2. Calling Masses to the Nation’s Capital
We now need masses of Americans, ultimately millions, to flood Washington DC — the actual seat of US power – to demand (for starters) the removal of the Trump fascist coup regime before it it’s too late and it cements authoritarian/dictatorial rule for the indefinite future. History is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious.
Among the many instances where multitudes have arisen to force the removal of authoritarian regimes or block bids for authoritarian rule, we can include what the masses did in Caracas in April of 2002, what masses did in Manila (leading to the forced resignation of the Marcos dictatorship) in 1986, the Eastern German and Eastern European uprisings (leading to removal of corrupt state-capitalist and fake socialist dictatorships) of 1989, the Arab Spring of 2010-11 (leading to regime changes in Egypt and Tunisia), the mass Puerto Rican protests and strikes that led to the resignation of the noxious authoritarian governor Ricardo Rossello in 2018-2019, the mass anti-martial law protests in Seoul, South Korea (leading to the removal of an authoritarian president) last winter, and the Nepalese “Gen Z rebellion” (forcing the resignation of an authoritarian prime minster) this summer and fall.
It’s time for US Americans to follow these examples, before its’ too late – before the Trump regime consolidates, cements, and normalizes 21st Century Amerikaner fascism. Please answer this Call for a mass sustained resistance movement in DC starting November 5.
It is common in some “learned” circles to say that “American exceptionalism” prevents the United States from hosting the kinds of sustained mass uprisings that have forced the removal of authoritarian rulers in other nations.
Well, guess what? “American exceptionalism” was supposed to prevent the rise of a fascist regime (“It Can’t Happen Here”) in the US and here we are, facing not just the threat but the actual existence of a fascist regime atop the world’s most powerful and dangerous nation – an existential menace not only to US Americans but to all humanity and prospects for a decent much less liberated human future.
If the right and its ruling class allies can blow up supposed “American exceptionalism” to advance fascism, we the people can blow it up to fight fascism and save the future.
It’s time for the nauseating wannabe strongman-for-life Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump to join the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos (removed thanks to sustained mass demonstrations and strikes in 1986), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (removed following mass demonstrations and strikes), Puerto Rico’s Rossello (removed after sustained mass demonstrations and strikes in 2019), Nepal’s KP Sharma Oli (removed from power after sustained mass demonstrations and strikes last month), and many other disgraced authoritarian rulers who have been driven from power by popular resistance.
The urgency of this task is without historical parallel thanks to the fascist, pandemicist, and eco-cidal content of Trump’s authoritarian regime and the historically unmatched power and reach of the American Empire in a world on the brink of terminal climate crisis and new zoonotic outbreaks and on a planet chock full of ever more lethal and advanced nuclear weapons. That lethal power and reach (far beyond the power, reach, and menace of the German Third Reich in 1939) amidst ecological crisis and resurgent nuclear proliferation is why Noam Chomsky accurately described Trump and not Hitler as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” nearly six years ago. The arch-criminal Amerikaner regime that Trump stands atop must go now if homo sapiens and other species are going to have any chance of avoiding true catastrophe in the very near future.
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