A Republican political strategist on Sunday flagged the "historical irony" behind President Donald Trump's latest move in Venezuela.
Mike Madrid, co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, wrote in a new Substack essay that Trump's decision to arrest Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife on narco-terrorism and gun charges early Saturday morning was reminiscent of the CIA-backed operations America has undertaken in South America to install America-friendly dictators. What makes Trump's move against Maduro so remarkable is that he decided to tell the truth about America's ambitions in the region.
"We always maintained the fiction that we were defending democracy, protecting American citizens, or preventing communist infiltration," Mardrid wrote. "We lied to ourselves as much as to the world about our motivations. Trump’s innovation is brutal honesty about American entitlement."
"What a moment for Trump to finally be honest," he continued.
The move also revealed a profound irony, Madrid argued.
"The historical irony cuts deep," he wrote. "The term 'banana republic' was coined to describe small, politically unstable nations economically dependent on exporting a single resource and dominated by foreign companies and corrupt elites."
"Now we’ve become what we created," he continued. "Not a banana republic in the economic sense, of course. We remain the world’s largest economy but in the philosophical sense. We’ve abandoned any pretense that international law, democratic norms, or even basic respect for national sovereignty constrains American power."