People who don’t like Donald Trump are kinda gun-shy talking about turning points. Turning points of course can mean very many things. But as I watched first the videos of the murder of Renee Nicole Good and even more the official reactions to it I’ve started to think that we’re in the process of seeing one. I don’t mean Donald Trump is doomed politically, though perhaps he is. I mean a turning point in the public perception of ICE (and the Border Patrol) and their newly hyper-militarized role in American cities beginning last summer.

What we see in the videos of Good’s shooting is some mix of a moment of confusion or perhaps minor panic on the part of Good as the driver. And we see this ICE agent draw his weapon in a fairly calm and methodical way and fatally shoot Good in the face.

I remember not so many months ago wondering if I was pushing the envelope a bit by writing that the Justice Department was being run out of the Trump White House. Since those quaint times, evidence has continued to amass that that is exactly how things are being run, but both the White House and Justice Department preferred to maintain the fiction that they were separate entities. Until today.

Here’s what Vice President JD Vance announced midday in a White House press appearance (emphasis mine):

Kate and Josh discuss Venezuela and Tim Walz dropping his reelection bid.

Not long after I first moved to Washington, D.C. more than 25 years ago, I was at a foreign policy event and my friend, who was the moderator, talked about “high trust” versus “high fear” international orders. The concept is simple: trust and fear each build on themselves and tend to create their own equilibria. A high-trust environment encourages trustworthy and predictable behavior. A high-fear environment makes trust foolish and dangerous. It makes rapid resorts to violence and force logical and common. What is most important about this observation is the way each environment is self-perpetuating, how each creates a logic which participants are foolish not to follow, even if they wish they were in a different international order altogether.

I’ve been watching the various debates about what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela, and may possibly do in Greenland, Cuba or other Latin American states. Most of them, as I’ve noted, seem wildly overdetermined. You have different factions pushing for various military adventures, often for different reasons. If they can pique Trump’s interest, there’s a good chance the adventure will happen. What the reason is depends on which faction you decide was most important. Whatever you find out from that analysis is probably an illusion. There’s a more general pattern that helps understand this current moment, one that has little to do with formal ideology and quite a lot to do with his business practices before he entered politics.

The new year dawned with a shock. After months of saber-rattling against Venezuela and illegal attacks on alleged drug-running boats throughout the Caribbean, the U.S. military swept into Caracas on Jan. 3 and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. 

As TPM’s David Kurtz put it, by ordering the stunning strike, “President Trump is claiming and exercising an unbridled form of executive power not heretofore seen in the United States, unconstrained by a pliable GOP-controlled Congress that has abdicated its constitutional powers.” David has been chronicling Trump’s trampling of the rule of law in his flagship Morning Memo newsletter, and on Thursday Jan. 29, you can hear him break it all down live with an A-list lineup of panelists.

On Saturday, a friend and I were comparing notes on the events following the U.S. raid on Venezuela. Setting apart all the questions about just what the White House is trying to accomplish in Venezuela, my most basic takeaway from the events of the last week is this: as President Trump’s popularity and power erode domestically he will respond with more aggressive assertions of power in those areas where his executive and prerogative authorities remain unbounded, where his domestic popularity matters the least. (This applies most obviously, though not only, to his military powers overseas.) Anything else wouldn’t be consistent with Trump’s character, which is inflexible and unchanging, though perhaps hardening with the progress of advanced age. The current situation between the U.S. and Venezuela shows how jagged, unstable and uneven this may become.

Let me reiterate a general point I’ve made in other posts. I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezueala for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with Maduro. That combination of factors created a lot of forward momentum within the U.S. government with nothing pushing back in the opposite direction. That gets you to today. My point is that it’s a mistake to think there’s a “real” reason mixed in with other subterfuges and rationales, or that it’s important to find out which one the “real” reason is. It’s not that linear or logical.

Let me share a few thoughts about the U.S. action overnight in Venezuela. I say “action” because it’s not clear to me that the U.S. itself (as in the people calling the shots in Washington) know what this was, or have decided. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the news of some major U.S. attack. That only registered a few WTFs in my mind. Then I woke up again at maybe 4 a.m. and saw at the least the claim that U.S. forces had captured and exfiltrated Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Then my WTFs escalated to 11.

Let me take an initial crack at assessing what the United States has done in Venezuela with the proviso that time can easily prove such analyses mistaken. Donald Trump’s claimed takeover of Venezuela has been compared to what the American invasion aimed to do in Iraq in 2003, but I’d go back instead to the American intervention in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and its conquest and takeover of Cuba and the Philippines, about which I wrote in Folly of Empire. 

• As you’ve no doubt seen by now, Trump held a press conference during which he stated that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela through a “a group.” He also talked a lot about oil.
  
• Trump was asked about additional military involvement in the country to facilitate this plan to “run” it. “No, if Maduro’s vice president — if the vice president does what we want, we won’t have to do that,” he said. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has today been publicly reaffirming that Maduro remains president and demanding the U.S. release him.
  
• Congress was not notified in advance of the strike, members have said and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed. “This was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on,” Rubio said during Saturday’s press conference.