If Americans truly want to confront authoritarianism, they have to stop treating it as a personality problem or a Trump problem.
I hear that many Americans are outraged about what's happening in Venezuela, but it's not really about Venezuela.
It is about Americans saying their president is behaving like an authoritarian - making declarations of war without congressional approval. But they are beginning to notice the exercise of power that has always been there, just usually hidden behind smoother language and better manners.
People say they are shocked by what their government has done. They say he crossed a line, he violated procedure. And they are right to be disturbed. But here is the problem. They are reacting to the style, not the substance. They are reacting to the clumsiness, not the crime.
You see, outrage is permitted when it’s symbolic, but discouraged when it threatens power. Insult Trump all you want, we don't care, but we will not encourage you to actually talk about Venezuela.
Nobody today should actually believe Nicolás Maduro is a dictator because there is extensive, on the record evidence that the United States has actively destabilized Venezuela for more than two decades, and that this destabilization was intentional. Calling Maduro a dictator is hypocrisy.
This is not speculation, not conspiracy, it's public record. And the press knows it, and still repeats the story.
The tools used have been political, economic, diplomatic, and informational rather than military, but their cumulative effect has been to narrow Venezuela’s sovereignty and make normal governance extremely difficult regardless of who holds office. Sanctions are usually an act of violence.
First, the US has directly intervened in Venezuela’s political process. After the failed 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, US agencies including National Endowment for Democracy and USAID dramatically expanded funding to opposition parties, media outlets, and political infrastructure. Chavez took back the oil expropriation contracts from the oligarchs.
These programs were not neutral civic education efforts. They supported electoral strategy, messaging, parallel vote counts, and international lobbying designed to delegitimize elected governments. Imagine Russia doing this in Canada or Mexico.
In 2019, the US went further by recognizing Juan Guaidó as president despite his never being elected to that role, seizing Venezuelan state assets abroad, and urging allies to reject Venezuela’s existing institutions outright.
That act alone shattered any claim of respect for Venezuelan self determination. So much for international law, so much for democracy.
Second, the US has used economic sanctions as a political weapon, with predictable social consequences. Sanctions escalated sharply after 2017 and targeted Venezuela’s oil sector, financial system, and access to global credit. These measures collapsed state revenue, restricted imports of food and medicine, accelerated inflation, and drove mass emigration.
Starve them, then blame them.
Multiple UN officials and economists have noted that these outcomes were foreseeable and not accidental.
When elections are held under conditions of engineered scarcity and economic crisis, the resulting dysfunction is then blamed on leadership rather than on the coercive environment that produced it and the media repeats it as though it’s an objective diagnosis.
Third, the US has conducted sustained narrative warfare around Venezuelan legitimacy. Elections are routinely declared illegitimate in advance, regardless of turnout, observation, or results, while opposition boycotts encouraged by foreign governments are later cited as proof that elections lacked credibility.
Media framing consistently isolates Nicolás Maduro from the context of sanctions, asset freezes, and diplomatic isolation, creating the illusion that Venezuela’s collapse is uniquely domestic. This framing would not be accepted if applied to countries aligned with US interests under similar pressures.
So, calling Maduro a dictator is hypocrisy.
When the US rejects elections it dislikes, recognizes unelected leaders, and punishes entire populations to force political outcomes, it forfeits the moral authority to declare another government illegitimate.
What is presented as a defense of democracy is, in practice, a long running campaign to control political outcomes while denying responsibility for the damage that campaign causes. Democracy is invoked as a slogan while policy serves investors, oil companies, and geopolitical dominance.
It's an invented reality and you are not supposed to see it.
But Trump is a clumsy motherfucker. Trump makes the quiet part loud.
The United States did not suddenly lose its democratic compass under Donald Trump. The systematic destabilization of Venezuela began long before him.
This started under Barack Obama. Venezuela, a poor country, was formally declared an extraordinary threat, a legal fiction that opened the door to sanctions.
Again, these are all facts that are on record and verifiable. So it's an insult to anyone's intelligence to pretend otherwise. It's outrageous.
Under both Obama and Joe Biden, financial isolation intensified, assets were frozen, oil revenues were strangled, and political legitimacy was deliberately undermined. Under Trump, the same policies continued, with added theatrics and less diplomatic camouflage. Different presidents, same machinery. Same interests.
What Trump changed just the other day was not policy but visibility.
His bluntness tore away the humanitarian language, the talk of norms and values, that usually disguises coercion. Suddenly Americans could see what had long been done quietly. The outrage they feel now is real, but it is misdirected if it stops with Trump.
The authoritarianism they are alarmed by did not begin with him. It has been operating politely, administratively, and with bipartisan approval for decades, especially beyond US borders. And it comes home eventually.
It already has. You've been lied to. You see it.
And here is the final insult. For years, Americans were fed a simplified story about Venezuela. Dictator. Socialist failure. Hopeless corruption. Almost every outlet, every expert panel, every talking head repeated it while omitting the role of sanctions, asset seizures, and overt interference. Propaganda by omission.
That was not an accident. It was narrative discipline. To be shown only part of the story while being asked to consent to the consequences is an insult to people’s intelligence and to their freedom.
If Americans truly want to confront authoritarianism, they have to stop treating it as a personality problem or a Trump problem. It is a structural feature of empire. Trump did not invent it. He just made it harder to pretend it was not there. The empire is the problem.
You want to fight for your freedom? You've got to think critically, connect the dots, follow the money, follow the power, and you've got to aim way higher than Trump.