How Trump Turned a Foreign Country Into a Piggybank
And how Marco Rubio used Trump to hurt Cuba.
Before we start: I’m doing an AMA on the subreddit, r/thebulwark, starting tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, in case you’re interested.
Also, I guess we have to update the Nazi stuff daily now? Yesterday the White House X account posted this:
You’re probably thinking, That’s a weird formulation. What’s that all about?
It’s about this: There is a novel called Which Way Western Man. It was written in 1978 by a neo-Nazi named William Gayley Simpson. From Wikipedia: The novel “claims there is a Jewish plot against White people, calls for violence against Jews, and says that Adolf Hitler was right.”
But sure. This White House is super-duper double concerned about antisemitism. That’s why it’s trying to dominate American universities. Very much looking forward to Republican Jewish types losing their minds about how the actual White House is doing antisemitic neo-Nazi memes. Though maybe that’s not as important as what some undergrad at Oberlin said at an anti-Israel protest last year.
1. Lies We Tell Ourselves
Great news! Yesterday President Trump spoke to the current unelected dictator in charge of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez.1
You may recall that Rodríguez is a socialist revolutionary who was Nicolás Maduro’s partner in crime. Having just installed her as Madam Presidenté, Trump called her “a terrific person” and said that his partnership with Venezuela “will be a spectacular one.”
I know what you’re thinking: How is this possible? What about freedom for the Venezuelan people? What about the evils of socialism? What is Trump’s angle?
Well, there are two answers to that.
The first is Trump’s personal angle. This week the U.S. government made its first sale of Venezuelan oil and pocketed $500 million. Would you like to know where that money is being held?
Why Qatar?
For starters, because government accounts in Qatar are controlled by the executive branch and not Congress. Trump is continuing to create his own funding stream for the government2 that can operate independently of congressional approval or oversight. He is severing the linkage between the legislature and the purse and attempting to concentrate access to capital in the hands of the executive.
You know, like a king.
Another reason is that he’s trying to place these moneys beyond the reach of creditors. Venezuela owes tens of billions of dollars to various companies and countries. Trump’s position is that, since he has a navy, none of those creditors can make claims on the money he is now extracting from Venezuela. It belongs to him.
Trump said this explicitly last week when the CEO of ConocoPhillips, Ryan Lance, said that since his company was the largest non-sovereign credit holder in Venezuela, it hoped to recoup some of its claims.
Trump responded, “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past because that was their fault.”
So Trump is putting his America’s money in Qatar, where courts can’t touch it. Kind of like a drug dealer stashing his funds in the Caymans.
Which brings us to the second payoff. Nicolás Maduro had close ties to Cuba dating back to his early entry into revolutionary politics. He remained tied to the Cuban regime the entire time. So close that his personal bodyguards were provided by the Cuban government.3
Maduro was seen as more loyal to Havana than anyone else in Hugo Chávez’s inner circle, which was a big part of why Chávez—also a Castro/Cuba guy—chose him as successor.
Delcy Rodríguez is no fool. She understands that America’s invasion was driven by Marco Rubio and that Rubio cares, above all, about Cuba. She surely sees that ties to Havana are now a liability. And after the invasion and kidnapping of Maduro, she sees that the support Cuba provided was worthless.
And so she understands that she can buy off the two stakeholders in the U.S. government pretty easily. By cutting ties to Cuba, she gives Rubio what he wants; and by giving away Venezuelan oil, she gives Trump what he wants. With her two masters sated, she is well positioned to retain power. Because she’s useful to them.
It is not an accident, by the way, that Trump spoke with and endorsed Rodríguez yesterday before his meeting with María Corina Machado today. The people pushing democratic claims on power can suck it. That’s not what this adventure was about.
I’m almost impressed by Rubio’s long game. He figured out that he could hurt the Cuban regime by promising Trump Venezuelan oil money, if only the president would use the U.S. military to swap out one dictator for another.
Like Bibi Netanyahu using Trump to further his interests in Iran, or Peter Thiel using Trump to get Greenland.
I wonder what the America First crowd thinks about all this?
2. Isolationism vs. Domination
Stuart Stevens’s It Was All a Lie is one of the key texts of our time. If you haven’t read it, you should. Like, right now. Stuart describes in agonizing detail what it was like to discover that very few Republicans (or conservatives) actually believed any of the stuff they said was foundational.
At some point soon, MAGA will discover that “America First” isolationism was a lie, too. The majority of Republicans are not isolationists. What they want, in all things, is domination.
They want agents of the state to dominate citizens they do not like; which is why a majority of Republicans strongly approves of how ICE is conducting itself this month.
They want the American military to dominate; which is why a majority of Republicans approved of the invasion of Venezuela.
They want a strongman, which is why a majority of Republicans thinks the president should not consult Congress before taking military action against other countries.
There is no Republican/conservative support for America First isolationism any more than there was Republican/conservative support for limited government, fiscal responsibility, the free market, democracy, the rule of law, or the culture of life.
There is only the war against the other.
I wonder what the handful of MAGAs who are genuinely isolationist will do when they learn this lesson.
Give me your prediction on that question in the comments.
3. Dystopia
Remember when conservatives were worried about a superstate constantly monitoring and interfering in people’s lives and threatening their freedom?
Then conservatives went and built that superstate. And now they forking love it.
Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based. . . .
The tool receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) among a range of other sources, according to the material. . . .
“Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” a user guide for ELITE obtained by 404 Media says. The tool aims to be nearly all encompassing when it comes to finding ICE targets, from identifying subjects in the first place, to building a list of people, to supervisors approving selections for officers to ultimately go into the field and apprehend. . . .
One feature of ELITE is the “Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab,” according to the user guide. This lets ICE see people it may potentially want to detain on a map interface, based on various criteria such as “Bios & IDs,” “Location,” “Operations,” and “Criminality.” An ICE officer can then select people one by one, or draw a shape on the map to see people in that selected area.
ELITE has already been used by ICE to target specific areas, according to sworn testimony from an ICE official in Oregon. In October, immigration officers waited in three unmarked SUVs outside an apartment complex in Woodburn. They went on to bust a driver’s window and pull a 45-year-old woman from a van, used ICE’s facial recognition app Mobile Fortify on her, and agents had the goal of making eight arrests per team per day, Oregon Live reported. Lawyers representing the woman say authorities arrested her and more than 30 other people in a “dragnet.”
“One of our apps, it’s called ELITE. And so it tells you how many people are living in this area and what’s the likelihood of them actually being there,” a deportation officer with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Unit, identified in court records as JB, testified about the raid in early December. 404 Media purchased a transcript of JB’s testimony from the court. “It’s basically a map of the United States. It’s kind of like Google Maps.”
“It pulls from all kinds of sources,” JB continued. “It’s a newer app that was actually given to us in ICE.” JB said ELITE is what ICE sometimes uses to track the apparent density of people at a particular location to target. “You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than [...] like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent [...] you’re not going to go there.” For that raid in Woodburn, JB suggested the immigration officers used ELITE to generate leads. Additionally, in a text thread of immigration officers, someone described the area as “target rich,” which JB explained meant the officials had run multiple license plates in that area and found vehicles registered to people “who had either a criminal or immigration nexus.”
Or is Donald Trump the current unelected dictator in charge of Venezuela? I suppose it depends on who you ask.
Which is what he’s also doing with tariff money.
As was much of his intelligence. Oops.
Shortly after the election in 2016 I asked my dad to give it to me straight and tell me exactly what Trump was going to do.
He said, well for starters, he will personally steal a billion dollars from the US Government for himself and his family. I scoffed and said come on dad that will never happen.
He was obviously right, but off by a few billion.
We are the greatest mark Trump has ever had.
Prediction of what they will do when they learn the truth? Same thing most of the Republicans that believed all that other crap about the Republicans pre-Maga. Not a F-ing thing except somehow blame ____________ (you choose. Dems, Gays, Blacks, Jews, Hollywood, Coastal Elites, Wokism).