US President Donald Trump’s critics are outraged by his kidnapping of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, but so far Operation Seriously, Stop Talking About Epstein is going absolutely brilliantly. First, it pushes Trump’s allegedly long and close relationship with a paedophile sex trafficker off the news cycle for another few weeks. Second, if Trump’s plan to “run” Venezuela goes the way of other US interventions, it may eventually create a flood of refugees heading north, providing priceless scaremongering for Maga before the 2028 election.
Third, and most important, it gives tired, hard-working US families worth only a few hundred million an opportunity to close the inequality gap with the tech oligarchs, the top 10 of whom, the Guardian reports, increased their personal wealth by $500bn (R8.17-trillion) last year. Through blood, sweat and toil, mostly of South Americans, many of these families will now have the opportunity to bring tried-and-tested US business practices to the region, such as sidling up to countries and murmuring, “That’s a nice little natural resource you got there. It’d sure be a pity if something were to happen to it.” Of course, many remain stunned by the weekend’s events, which is natural when rational people are confronted by weapons-grade hypocrisy, such as the realisation that US courts will prosecute Venezuelan presidents but not US ones, or that Trump arrested Maduro on dodgy drug charges in the same year he gave full pardons to Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road drug bazaar, as well as former Honduran president Juan Hernández, implicated in importing more than 400 tonnes of cocaine to the US.
Russia, on the other hand, saw the US’ hypocrisy as a challenge to outdo it, fretting that “a large-scale military strike and the forced removal of the legitimate head of state constitute a flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter and the norms of international law”, before launching a strike on a hospital in Kyiv on Sunday night. Satire writes itself these days. (More seriously, though, Russia also warned that it wouldn’t tolerate any “provocations” against Russian assets, which I suppose means we should stop saying nasty things about Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK.) Here at home reactions were no less bizarre, as senior South African diplomat Clayson Monyela agreed with a panicked tweet suggesting South Africa should restart its nuclear programme to protect us from US aggression, replying, “I find no fault in your proposal.” Look, I understand that some of us have difficult bosses, but surely Monyela could just have taken it up with HR rather than trying to get Cyril Ramaphosa kidnapped and flown blindfolded to New York?
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Still, perhaps the chaos is understandable. The most heavily armed country in history is on the march, led by a crumbling reality TV star whose paymasters have decided to dispense with the velvet glove that has for the past few decades contained the iron fist. It would be worrisome enough if it were all rhetoric. But as the smoke cleared in Caracas and a hopped-up Trump gushed over the idea of the US striking other countries, saying that “we can do it again” since “nobody can stop us”, it was particularly chilling because for the first time in years he was telling God’s honest truth.
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