Let’s finally call out Trump policies for what they are.
I have seen what unbridled executive power can do when it is dressed up as law, and it scares me witless.
In Vietnam, it came wrapped in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a scrap of gossamer sold as sober authority and treated in practice as a license for escalation without end. It converted delusion into casus belli, dogma into devastation.
Years later, the War on Terror borrowed its own thin reed of justification from the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, a document stretched far beyond its text to sanction wars Congress never debated and never meaningfully supervised.
Each time, we told ourselves the excess was temporary. Each time, we insisted the law still mattered.
The U.S. takeover of Venezuela proves we were whistling past the graveyard.
What makes the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife so jarring is not only its audacity but its legal ambiguity. U.S. forces stormed a sovereign country, killed scores of people, and spirited a sitting head of state into a Brooklyn jail. The operation sits at the uneasy intersection of asserted domestic authority and manifest international illegality.
As New York Times reporter Charlie Savage has explained, the United States may believe it acted lawfully. Much of the world almost certainly does not.
Under international law, the case is straightforward. The United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force inside another sovereign state absent that state’s consent, a valid claim of self-defense, or authorization from the U.N. Security Council. None applied in Venezuela. The operation was not defensive. It was not sanctioned multilaterally. It was a bully’s mission tarted up as law enforcement and executed with overwhelming military force. By the standards of international law, it was almost certainly illegal.
Domestic law is murkier, and it is in this ambiguity that the Trump administration now operates.
Federal agencies such as the FBI and DEA possess statutory authority to arrest individuals charged with violating U.S. law, authority that does not explicitly stop at the nation’s borders. Long-standing interpretations also permit the U.S. military to assist civilian law enforcement. Taking the narrow view, the administration argues that Venezuela was not a war but an arrest, an extraordinary one, but still an arrest.
This framing immediately collides with a constitutional contradiction.
The same U.N. Charter that bars the invasion of Venezuela is not merely international guidance; it is a ratified treaty. Under the Constitution, treaties are the “supreme law of the land.” So the question arises: does a president have the authority to ignore them?
The modern answer traces back through a long effort by successive presidents to shed post-Vietnam restraints on executive power.
In 1973, Congress attempted to reassert its authority through the War Powers Resolution, requiring the chief executive to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. forces into hostilities and mandating withdrawal within 60 days absent authorization.
On paper, it was a line in the sand. In practice, presidents learned to step around it.
Ronald Reagan’s 1983 intervention in Grenada was justified as a rescue mission and completed before Congress could meaningfully object. The War Powers Resolution was not repealed; it was outrun.
In 1989, George H. W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to seize Manuel Noriega, a sitting head of state under U.S. indictment for alleged drug trafficking. The international response was unequivocal: the U.N. General Assembly declared the invasion unlawful, and a majority of the Security Council voted to censure the United States, blocked only by an American veto. Yet politically, little else happened. Noriega was replaced, tried, and convicted. U.S. troops remained. Panama vanished as a test of presidential authority.
After 9/11, Congress passed the AUMF, which George W. Bush used to justify wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That authorization, elastic as it was, at least bore congressional consent.
What followed ruptured even that restraint. Bill Clinton’s Kosovo air war and Barack Obama’s Libya intervention proceeded without proper Congresssional authorization, defended by increasingly creative theories about what did not count as “hostilities.”
Among these precedents, Panama matters most. It is the closest analogue to Caracas—not because it was unique, but because it hardened improvisation into doctrine.
The legal justification for Noriega’s seizure came not from Congress or the courts, but from an internal Justice Department memorandum authored by Bill Barr, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Barr argued that the president possessed inherent authority to dispatch law-enforcement forces abroad to seize fugitives and, more controversially, that treaty obligations could be overridden as a matter of domestic constitutional law.
The theory was controversial then and remains so today. But implementation matters. The memo created a durable internal logic: international law may bind the United States in theory while leaving the president unconstrained in practice.
Charlie Savage suggests that this same logic underpins the Maduro seizure. It was not debated in Congress. It was not tested in court. It arrived pre-packaged from history.
Even the bloodshed is absorbed into this framework.
Internationally, the eighty or more “hostile” casualties caused by the U.S. action compound its illegality. Under domestic law, they are justified through doctrines of unit self-defense and “protective powers,” the president’s asserted authority to use force to protect federal agents even when the mission itself rests on contested legal ground.
U.S. courts are unlikely to intervene. American jurisprudence holds that the manner of a defendant’s capture, even if unlawful abroad, does not defeat jurisdiction. Presence matters. Process does not.
Up to this point, the administration can plausibly, if controversially, claim precedent. But that claim rests on a single, fragile assumption: that the operation ends with seizure and arrest.
This is where the logic breaks down.
Trump’s public statements about “running” post-Maduro Venezuela, coveting its oil reserves, and threatening the acting government, transform the operation’s character. What had been framed as arrest becomes coercive regime control. Article II’s doctrine of executive power does not authorize the seizure of foreign assets, the governance of another state, or economic exploitation by force. Those powers belong to Congress, or to regimes that no longer pretend to constitutional restraint.
What ultimately matters is the word, “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, hostilities are defined not by formal declarations but by purpose and effect: whether U.S. forces are used in a sustained way to shape political or economic outcomes through force. When force is used to occupy, coerce, or control, the line is crossed. Congress must be engaged.
Seen in this light, Venezuela had long been a blinking red light. For months, the United States massed overwhelming force in the Caribbean. Civilians accused of being narco-couriers were summarily executed, over 115 of them, including two slaughtered after shipwreck. This was not deterrence. It was terror, designed to frighten a foreign leader into abandoning office.
When intimidation failed, Trump escalated. He sought no congressional authorization. He articulated no lawful international authority. U.S. forces crossed into Venezuela and seized Maduro and his wife under the thinnest possible legal pretext.
For all practical purposes, it was a rendition—the kidnapping of a foreign leader. Such action, particularly for purposes of political coercion, has a name.
It is terrorism.
And alas, within Trump’s world, it is no aberration. Witness the threats he’s now leveling at Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and even Denmark’s territory in Greenland. None can be framed as law enforcement. None can be justified in terms of defending Americans against any immediate threat. All are designed to cow and extort. All would require sustained force, congressional authorization, and constitutional accountability.
And what of his immigration policies? The objective has never been law enforcement in the ordinary sense. It has been intimidation. Masked agents. Anonymous raids. Sudden disappearances. Transfers to known hellholes, whether foreign prisons or domestic sites deliberately chosen for their brutality. The point is not adjudication. It is spectacle, terror so visible, so arbitrary, that others will discipline themselves in advance.
Venezuela is that logic exported abroad.
And make no mistake: the damage spreads outward. If a U.S. president can seize a foreign leader by force, ignore treaties, and dare Congress or the courts to respond after the fact, then the architecture of restraint collapses everywhere. Vladimir Putin needs no lectures about Ukraine. Xi Jinping needs no sermons about Taiwan. The precedent has been handed to them, fully briefed.
Trump’s defenders reach for fig leaves: Article II, inherent authority, narcotics, gangs. But this was a war of choice. Venezuela posed no imminent threat. Indictments do not empower armies. And no reading of the AUMF can be bent to cover regime change in Caracas.
The New York Times editorial board put it plainly: without congressional approval, Trump’s actions violate U.S. law. They also violate international law, which exists precisely to restrain powerful states from doing exactly this.
The Constitution was written to prevent this concentration of power. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that military necessity allows a president to act as lawmaker. When a president acts without, and against Congress, his power is at its “lowest ebb.”
Regime change by force sits squarely there.
I watched this pattern unfold in Vietnam. Each excess was justified as temporary. Each exception became precedent. By the time the truth emerged, the damage to lives, to institutions, to America’s standing, was irreversible.
That is why Venezuela weighs so heavily. It’s not because Maduro is sympathetic—he isn’t. It’s because the method used against him is the method of terror states everywhere.
Threaten. Inflict violence. Seize hostages. Declare it lawful after the fact.
The Constitution still answers clearly. Wars are not presidential monopolies. Regime change is not an executive hobby. And terror, no matter how wrapped in flags or legalisms, is not strength.
It is the confession of power that no longer knows how to govern without fear.