This may be the day that Donald Trump’s MAGA support blew up in a plume of Venezuelan smoke.
He has prevaricated over the Epstein files, posed as a peacemaker, and partied with billionaire friends—abandoning the MAGA voters who swept him back into the Oval Office.
Now, when he needs it the most, Trump risks losing the support that handed him the power to “make America great again.”
To bomb a South American country and make off with its leader has little to do with North America First.
And it will have disturbing repercussions that will extend way beyond our shores.
But here at home, Trump has shown a perilous disregard for his own base.
His argument that he is going to war with a country because it sends fentanyl into the U.S. holds little water. It’s a dribble of drugs compared to other countries.
There are few documented smuggling routes from Venezuela to the U.S., especially compared to those from Mexico. Is Trump going to target Mexico City next?
The biggest fentanyl producer is China. Are we going to war with Beijing?
The world suddenly feels much less secure when its most powerful nation strikes a much smaller one with no cogent explanation and precious little debate.
Those who say the attack is a power grab for Venezuela’s oil should ask George W. Bush how that worked out in Iraq.
Explaining away the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facility in June, Trump could at least claim to be saving the country from a potential Doomsday attack from a regime that positioned itself as an enemy of the West.
But that didn’t play well with his MAGA base at the time. Marjorie Taylor Greene revealed her growing split with the president by criticizing the attack. “Six months in, Steve, and here we are turning back on the campaign promises, and we bombed Iran on behalf of Israel,” she told Steve Bannon on his War Room show. She wasn’t alone.
Trump loyalists, disillusioned by betrayals over Epstein and issues like giving visas to foreign students, are deserting the president in droves.
This may be the final straw.
As a young war correspondent, I traveled often on a road called the “Highway to Hell” from the bombed-out Kuwait capital to the Iraqi border as Saddam Hussein’s troops beat a hasty retreat from the Western Alliance in 1991.
A gaggle of kids would run alongside my car, begging for candy or spare army food supplies. I noticed after a while that the smallest of the children would be bullied out of the sweets by the larger boys. One day, I stopped and gave him $20 and some treats, out of sight of the other kids.
I drove on, feeling good about myself. It was only later that I heard that a boy had been beaten and killed in a village on the route I traveled most days.
I could never know for sure, but I am convinced my misplaced act of kindness may well have cost that boy his life.
It was a heartbreaking lesson that meddling in affairs—and especially in foreign affairs—when you don’t understand them, can have terrible consequences.
Trump has yet to learn that lesson. As his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair recently, Trump has an alcoholic’s mentality—he thinks he can do anything he wants.
His remarkable return to power in the 2024 election was based primarily on his appeal to a MAGA base swept along by boasts that he would focus on domestic policies and not get waylaid by long, costly foreign wars.
We finally extricated ourselves from Afghanistan and Iraq at enormous cost in lives and money, and now we find ourselves in another war with another country that, I suggest, most MAGA supporters care little about. Most probably couldn’t pin it on a map.
The president is 79. He is increasingly behaving like an old man who won’t be told. One sign of latent dementia is flashes of irrational anger, even against people and things they love.
There is no question that Trump loves America.
No doubt, too, he believes that he is doing the right thing. And his Cabinet of cronies is not going to tell him any different.
But Trump is no longer putting MAGA first.
And MAGA will turn. Mark my words.
