The first part is one of my points. Trump keeps missing oportunities to justify his actions rationally, he simply ignored the best argument he has to mess with Venezuela. I understand that you and I might have different thresholds on this one. For me this is foreign affairs, for you is possibility of your country entering a war. What I say is that I wish all of you Americans always had this kind of scrupuluous...
Ok, now I get it. He could have focused on the elections and Maduro's illegitimacy, but that would be against the MAGA creed. Even though it might do some good. But, he's pretending to fight the drug war, for the sake of Americans, when I guess what he really wants is control of their oil?
I appreciate your saying that we look at this from different places.
I know they are not the same thing (kind of hard to miss that). The point I am saying that it is possible make is to focus on the end result. How many people are killed by the amount of fentanil that enter the US in one year? According to the
NIH, seems like around 75.000 thousand people. Now, if someone would explode a bomb in the US and kill 75.000 people, you would call that bomb a weapon of mass destruction. This is, politically speaking, a good enough rationale.
But, yes, I KNOW they are not the same thing, there are a lot of fine points and distinctions that you can make (specially if someone is advocating for the ones who traffic fentanyl, by the way). My point is that the political argument is at the very least defendable, but again Trump is incapable of doing it in minimaly coherent way.
I still disagree with you that fentanyl is in any way a weapon of mass destruction, though I won't spend a lot of time arguing the point, because I think you are making the intellectual argument, dispassionately. But if you drop a bomb, it kills indiscriminately. In the case of drugs, you only kill people who chose to take them. They are not completely passive victims. Now, in the early days, people were being killed because they didn't know what they were taking, and people who did know were unaware of how powerful it was. Now they know, and take it anyway. I am not blaming addicts. They have a disease.
You are right to say that Trump doesn't know how to make a coherent foreign policy argument out of this, whatever his ultimate objective is. I don't think in most cases that you can argue that the country, i.e., the leader of the government is responsible for the drug trade that comes out of it. But Trump makes no distinction. And he does make drugs his argument for all of this saber rattling towards Venezuela. And, as
@Federberg rightly points out, above, the fentanyl comes mainly from/through China and Mexico.
Army, navy, air force and the marines were created by god, neither were FBI and other agencies. What Trump stumbled upon is the discrepancy and anacronism between nation-states internal organization and the ever evolving geopolitical context. Nation-states adapt to that. International law has thousands of loopholes to explore. Trump, again, missed an oportunity to do exactly what he wanted in a more, let us say, elegant or politically defendable way.
I'm still working this one out. I'm sure you're right about International law, and the anachronism of the old nation-state boundaries. However, we have our own laws in this country about their use, and Trump is pushing hard against them.
We disagree on the echo chamber. Trump directs his words to his base, even the vocabulary he uses is suited to them (and only to them). He even doesn't seem to bother that this base is shrinking by the day. It would take an institutionalization level psychiatric pacient to believe otherwise. But, as I said, I think he will not end his term, and this could be a path to it (mental incapacity).
By the way, US efforts at regime change everywhere in the world rarely go well, regardless if they are justifiable or not.
I see your point now about Trump understanding he's in an echo chamber. As you said, he speaks only to his base, and thinks nothing of denigrating everyone else. And yes, that base is shrinking. It will be part of his undoing, at least in terms of popularity. It already is. And yes, people are beginning to question his mental stability, and by "beginning," I mean those not only who have always opposed him.
To you point about predicting that Trump won't leave office, an interesting thing happened yesterday. Charlie Kirk's wife, Ericka, who now leads his movement, Turning Points USA, has endorsed Vance for President in 2028. Even though Vance has yet to declare. And now, Marco Rubio has said that he won't run if Vance does. This is a huge early sign that the Republicans will coalesce around Vance. As Trump's poll numbers and grasp of reality slip, and Republicans are beginning to defy him, it will make it increasingly difficult for him to have the support to rewrite the Constitution. Which he would have to do to stand for a 3rd term. Or even declare Martial Law and refuse to leave office. Three years is a long time, but it's a solid sign that the Republicans/MAGA is readying itself for the post-Trump era.
