So, the Maduro thing. The… Venezuela thing. The “Taylor Sheridan is already on the phone pitching the spinoff series about it” thing.
Let’s free ourselves here and empty the clip of things people are saying about this:
This was a kidnapping.
This was a law enforcement operation.
Trump did this while also pardoning the President of Honduras of a drug trafficking conviction.
Trump is doing this to distract from Epstein and/or healthcare premiums.
They want to also take out Colombia, Panama, and Greenland.
Marco Rubio is foaming at the mouth to overthrow and free Cuba, a goal that clearly would be the largest and most foundational victory of his life (like when John Boehner got the Pope to talk to Congress).
So here’s the thing: does the why matter more than the HOW with Maduro? Are those details really worth the endless columns of debate and rationalization? The question, to me, seems simple: are you okay with Donald Trump using executive power and elite military units to abduct foreign heads of state? Is that a thing he should be able to do?
We are in PEAK “Palpatine talking to the Neimodians” timeline. Oh, you don’t get that reference? What are you, cool and hot and reading this in between bench-press max-outs? Some of us dedicated our lives to truly important things, like every line of dialogue from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace written and directed by George Lucas.
(Also most of the original 151 Pokemon, but it’s been a minute and sometimes some of us have to babble out a Pokemon sounding name when our kid asks us which one is Vileplume. “That’s, uhh, Planteon?”)
In the aforementioned Phantom Menace, the titular menace (Palpatine/Sidious/The Emperor) tells the Neimodians to start invading Natalie Portman’s planet. They ask if it’s legal to do that, he tells them “I will make it legal.”
Now this isn’t to say that Donald Trump is Palpatine. For one, Donald Trump cannot do a cool “lightsaber-corkscrew” spin move across a room:
Yeah, you think Trump is sooooo evil? Have you ever seen him fly across a room and kill three Jedi? No? I didn’t think so, maybe it’s time to tone down your hateful rhetoric. Don’t make him do the spin!
Trump 2.0 does what he wants. He wants something, he tells people to do it, they do it, and unless someone can immediately and intractably stop them, the thing happens. And then a whole team of people “make it legal.” This ranges from Stephen Miller going on TV to do his character, “A Living 4Chan Thread” all the way to the WSJ or WaPo coming up with paragraphs full of ways that it could technically be legal. All the while, Trump gets what he wants.
So when we participate in this “oh well techically” over a moral question, we miss the part where we think and talk like regular human beings.
Is it good that the President can call escalate violence toward a sovereign nation, kill their citizens in the sea without cause or warrant or evidence, create a military blockade of the country, and then kill two dozens citizens of that country with a Zero Dark Thirty style raid before kidnapping the guy and his wife and bringing them to the same Brooklyn prison that Diddy is currently doing time in?
Actually… that’s too many details. Just pare it down to like how you’d explain it to your barber, or your dumb cousin, or your dumb cousin’s barber. Just because he’s dumb doesn’t mean he can’t pick a hell of a barber.
Should Donald Trump be able to, totally on his own, send the military to go snatch a world leader and bring them to America? And if the answer is yes, can other countries’ Presidents do that too?
I think you just sit with that, because if the answer “NO” doesn’t immediately smack you in the face, you might not be the barber in this situation.
-Greg
