Trump Needs an Enemy to Justify His Power Grab; Enter Venezuela

Every autocrat needs an enemy who threatens the country—preferably from both sides of the border. Such an enemy can serve as the reason to suspend the rule of law and boost executive power.

For Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s been the Kurds. For India’s Narendra Modi, it’s been the Muslims. For Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was first the Chechens, then Alexei Navalny and his followers, and now the Ukrainians.

President Donald Trump has built his political career—and, frankly, his entire personality—on the identification of enemies. His presidential run back in 2016 required belittling his rivals in those early Republican primaries (quite literally in the case of Marco Rubio). Later, he widened his scope to include everyone who attempted to thwart his ambitions, like the FBI’s James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. These days, everything that goes wrong in the United States he blames on former president Joe Biden (who had the temerity to beat him in the 2020 presidential election) and the “radical left” (which is basically anyone more liberal than Stephen Miller).

But such “enemies” are small fry, given Trump’s desire for ever greater power. To justify his attacks on Democratic-controlled cities, which is really an effort to suppress all resistance to his policies and his consolidation of presidential authority, he needs a more fearsome monster. To find such a bogeyman, he has dug deep into the American psyche and the playbooks of the autocratic leaders he admires.

Has the United States replaced democracy promotion with a new, Trumpian form of carnage that it is exporting to the rest of the world, beginning with Venezuela?

On the road to finding the right monster and making America “great again”—a hero’s quest if there ever was one—Trump must first depict the United States as a fallen giant. During his first inaugural address, he declared that “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” According to Trump’s self-centered timeline, the carnage stopped during the four years of his first presidency and resumed once again when Biden took over. Carnage, for Trump, is really just a codeword for race—the fall in status of white people who have lost jobs, skin privilege, and pride of place in the history books. “Carnage” is what Black and brown people have perpetrated by asserting themselves and taking political power, most often in cities.

It’s no surprise, then, that Trump has characterized American cities as “dangerous” and, in the case of Chicago, a “war zone.” In his recent address to a stony-faced group of US military leaders, he said that cities are “very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” He proposed that the military use American cities as a “training ground” to root out the “enemy within.”

Trump often refers to this “enemy within” as “violent radical left terrorism,” as in the White House’s recent statement on the deployment of the National Guard to Portland. But that doesn’t quite cover, for Trump, the clear and present dangers of drugs and gangs, which are central to justifying his tariff and immigration policies. For that, the president needs to pump up the carnage.

And that’s where Venezuela comes in.

A State of War

The United States is an economically powerful country with relatively low levels of crime. It does not resemble a tropical kleptocracy (not yet). Yet, Trump has gone to great lengths to make it seem that Americans face the same kind of violence that plagued the Philippines during the tenure of Rodrigo Duterte and El Salvador under the current reign of Nayib Bukele. Both autocrats undermined the rule of law to fight drug lords and organized crime. Duterte engaged in myriad extrajudicial killings that have now landed him in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. Bukele has imprisoned more than 1% of the population, many of them innocent of any crimes, and has effectively declared himself president for life.

For Trump, who thinks of himself as a white savior (el salvador blanco), the key to Salvadorizing America is to depict a country rapidly going to the dogs, which necessitates sending US troops into American cities and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into every corner of society. Despite Trump’s claims, the US crime rate was close to a 50-year low in 2022, halfway through the Biden administration. In 2024, the rates for murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery all fell, according to the FBI.

Then Trump discovered Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that he could use to demonize immigrants, blame for US drug abuse, and tie to criminal activity in cities. The gang has served as the perfect pretext to remove the Temporary Protected Status of Venezuelans as well as round them up and deport them.

And now the administration is playing up the threat of groups like Tren de Aragua to attack boats near Venezuela’s coast and declare a war against drug cartels. Some voices within the administration are even pushing for a US operation to dislodge Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

Has the United States replaced democracy promotion with a new, Trumpian form of carnage that it is exporting to the rest of the world, beginning with Venezuela?

The Purported Threat

Tren de Aragua began in a Venezuela prison about a decade ago. It quickly spread to other parts of Venezuela before branching out to the rest of Latin American and eventually to the United States. It has allegedly carried out hits, kidnapped people, and engaged in extensive drug trafficking. It has been linked to an assault on two New York policemen.

It sounds like a formidable organization, and Trump has done much to build up its reputation by branding it “terrorist” and putting it at the same level as the Islamic State.

In fact, Tren de Aragua is a decentralized organization that doesn’t pose a national security threat to any country much less the United States. Its links to the Venezuelan government are tenuous. Few if any of the roughly 250 Venezuelans deported earlier this year to a prison in El Salvador had any connections to the gang. Most were arrested on the basis of “gang” tattoos when Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos as identifying markers.

Trump’s war on drugs and full-court press on deportations, on the other hand, depend on this idea of Venezuela as a full-blown threat.

The Trump administration’s order terminating Temporary Protected Status for approximately 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States makes multiple mentions of Tren de Aragua. This week the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s move. The vast majority of Venezuelans left the country to escape gangs, economic chaos and corruption, or the government’s campaign to destroy the political opposition (which has included 19 cases of incommunicado detention). And now Trump is sending them back to lives of great uncertainty.

According to one poll, nearly half of Venezuelan supporters of Donald Trump, who were key in delivering Miami-Dade county to him in the last election, are having buyer’s remorse.

It’s one thing to break US laws in going after immigrants. Now the Trump administration is breaking international laws and engaging in extrajudicial murder in its imagined pursuit of Tren de Aragua overseas.

On September 2, US Special Operations forces attacked a boat near the Venezuelan coast that the administration alleges was a drug-running operation. It claimed to have killed 11 Tren de Aragua gang members. But it hasn’t provided any proof… of anything. The administration has released videos of the attacks without identifying the people it killed, offering any evidence that there were any drugs on board, or demonstrating that the boats had any links to Tren de Aragua.

Meanwhile, despite a war of words with Colombian leader Gustavo Petro over the latter’s pushback against Trump’s aggressive moves in the region, the United States recently teamed up with Colombia (and the UK) to arrest the alleged head of Tren de Aragua’s armed wing in the Colombian city of Valledupar. This police work received considerably less attention in the press—and from the US government itself—than Trump’s clearly illegal attacks on Venezuelan boats.

Regime Change?

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an autocrat in his own right, has predictably denounced US actions and called up reserves to prepare to defend the country against a potential attack. Less predictably, after the sinking of that first boat, he sent a letter to the Trump administration arguing that he wasn’t involved in narco-trafficking and offering to meet with the administration’s envoy Richard Grenell. The administration ignored the letter and continued its attacks, though Grenell maintained contacts with Venezuela in order to swing a deal to avoid war and facilitate US access to Venezuelan oil. This week, Trump instructed Grenell to stop this diplomatic outreach.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been building up the US military presence in the region. It sent advanced F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico. It beefed up its naval flotilla with eight warships, some Navy P-8 surveillance planes, and an attack submarine. There are nearly 7,000 US troops now deployed to the region.

This is considerably more firepower than a drug interdiction operation requires. But it’s not enough for a full-scale invasion of Venezuela.

This in-between approach may well reflect the conflict within the Trump administration between gung-ho regime-changers like Rubio and anti-interventionists like Grenell. The regime-changers, which include Stephen Miller and the head of the CIA John Ratcliffe, count on the support of Venezuelan opposition leaders like María Corina Machado, who had failed to pry Maduro from office in what was clearly a rigged presidential election last year. With many opposition figures now in jail or in exile, she views the US military as a Hail Mary pass.

Other Venezuelans are much more cautious. “You kill Maduro,” one businessman there confided, “you turn Venezuela into Haiti.” After all, the weak opposition would have a hard time holding the country together amid a scramble for power and oil.

Longtime international affairs expert Leon Hadar points out that such carnage would not just be a problem for Venezuela. “Venezuela has already produced over 7 million refugees and migrants,” he writes. “A state collapse scenario could easily double that number. Colombia, Brazil, and other neighbors are already overwhelmed. Where do Trump and his advisors think these people will go?”

Given that Trump doesn’t make plans and instead improvises like a bombastic actor, his administration has probably not yet decided how to pursue regime change in Venezuela. The president likes to pit rival factions within his administration to see what the internal carnage will produce. As the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall concludes, “Today, full-scale military intervention in Venezuela remains unlikely. More probable is an intensified pressure campaign of destabilisation, sanctions, maritime strikes, and air and commando raids.”

The reality of Venezuela—the government, the gangs, the immigrants—poses no threat to the United States. The country sends a small percent of drugs here—most fentanyl comes from Mexico, most cocaine from Colombia—while the vast majority of Venezuelans in the United States are law-abiding citizens. Maduro’s military couldn’t do much against US forces, and so far Venezuela has not struck back against what has been a clear violation of its sovereignty.

Trump’s war on drugs and full-court press on deportations, on the other hand, depend on this idea of Venezuela as a full-blown threat. Venezuela presents Trump with carte blanche to deploy the US military in America’s backyard and in America’s own cities.

Really, it’s no surprise that Trump wants such a white card. He’s been playing such trump cards all his life.