Donald Trump likes to boast that he’s ended eight wars. (He didn’t.) Now he has started one.

After months of saber rattling and bombing small boats at sea, Trump ordered American troops to invade Venezuela and seize its president, Nicolás Maduro, bringing him and his wife to the U.S. to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.

There’s no question that Maduro is a bad actor. He ignored election results, violently suppressed opposition, and drove the economy into the ground, all the while personally enriching himself. He has also engaged in crackdowns against the LGBTQ+ community, in an apparent attempt to curry favor with evangelical Venezuelans.

That said, Maduro is not the only authoritarian in the world. International law prevents one country from invading another unless it’s in self-defense. Trump’s argument that drugs flowing from Venezuela are an act of aggression is a stretch, to say the least.

For all Trump’s bluster about drugs, his own actions undercut the argument. Just last month, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Trump projected his own grievances onto Hernández, claiming that he was unfairly treated by the Biden administration.

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There are two things that animate Trump: power and money. And that seems to be what is happening with Venezuela. At a press conference announcing the invasion, Trump talked about Venezuela’s rich oil reserves–the largest in the world–and the profit that can be derived from them.

“Let’s start making money for the country,” Trump said.

The invasion also sends a message not only to the rest of the world but to Congress. Under the Constitution, Congress is required to pass a resolution clearing the way for such aggression. The Trump administration purposefully kept members of Congress in the dark–or actively lied to them. Democrats responded to the attack with their usual fecklessness. House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries said that “the House and Senate must be briefed immediately.” But on what consequences Trump will suffer–silence.

Trump seems to think that getting rid of Maduro is the hard part. It is not. The hard part is going to be controlling what happens in Venezuela next. Maduro’s core supporters remain in place. There’s no reason to think Venezuelans will welcome Americans invading their country. But Trump thinks that Americans can “run” Venezuela, as if it was just another corporate takeover.

“This is ludicrous,” said Sen, Jack Reed said. “No serious plan has been presented for how such an extraordinary undertaking would work or what it will cost the American people. History offers no shortage of warnings about the costs – human, strategic, and moral – of assuming we can govern another nation by force.”

When he was campaigning for his second term as president, Trump said “I don’t have wars.” He derided overseas interventions. His “America First” rhetoric made him beloved by his followers.

Once again, Trump voters were fooled and all of us suffer. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the erstwhile Trump darling, wrote on X. “Boy were we wrong.”

No kidding.

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