Trump's Donroe Doctrine Is Simple: Grievance and Grift
A brief primer on Trump's Venezuelan mendacity
While most of us are fiddling with silly things like trying to keep our sanity whilst avoiding bankruptcy or at least help a family member from doing so, Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is sitting in her dark Maga cave drooling over the latest casualty figures from the regime’s current headlines, which she, of course, masterminded.
The press, in case you haven’t noticed, has touted the regime’s recent Venezuelan excursion as yet another example of Trump machismo, despite all the obvious signs that his brain barely functions.
So where is all this stuff coming from? Is Trump the stable genius he says he is? Are we misinterpreting Trump’s babbling and bloated, discolored features?
No. I’ve been trying to bark it out into the wind for a year now: Susie Wiles is the mastermind behind the curtain.
For example, the article below wasn’t my first mention of her, but it was my first post dedicated to her:
Meet Stephen Miller's Boss: Susie Wiles
Two weeks ago, a remarkable thing happened in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the young family man sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador.
The Venezuelan fiasco has her interpretation of Maga all over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Oval Office or Situation Room meeting approving the kidnapping went something like this:
Trump: What do you think, Susie? Should Pete go with your plan?
Susie: Yes, you dipshit. Why the hell do you think I worked on it so hard?
It’s frustrating to watch the press fawn over Trump as if he’s still in charge, even when they cover events in a negative light.
Only a few hours left for this special:
You can be sure that, Trump being Trump, he still spews out orders, but anyone who’s watched him utter more than one sentence at a time during the last year knows he’s not capable of masterminding an Amazon return, much less a rather clever assault on a major industrialized nation.
The mastermind is Susie (this time with help from Marco Rubio and a few sycophantic generals and admirals). It’s why she’s not going anywhere. The gate to hell is always open, and she’s holding the admission tickets.
Susie has a lot of experience dealing with the most troublesome aspects of keeping Maga alive. Their current problem is a polling one, as the folks whose lineage can be traced to south of the Rio Grande grow restive.
But it’s okay. She’s done this before.
She won over Cubans a long time ago with a consistent, hardline approach toward the Cuban government as, first, Ron DeSantis’ main squeeze, and now Trump’s.1 Fun fact: She was campaign manager for both exemplars of official American hooliganism.
Another Fun fact: Trump was attracted to Wiles not for her wiles, but because she was Pat Summerall’s daughter.
As you know, Trump is a simpleton. Another likely conversation, this for Wiles’s interview to be Trump’s presidential campaign manager:
Trump: You’re Pat Summerall’s kid? An amazing broadcaster. He did the play-by-play on how I bankrupted the USFL almost all on my own!
Susie: You did a great job, sir.
Trump: You’re hired!
Barack Obama lost the Miami area Cuban vote for Democrats by trying to open diplomatic channels with Cuba. Wiles pounced and never looked back by helping Republicans shut that effort down. Boom! Florida now belongs to Republicans. The only way for Democrats to get it back is to nuke Havana. Conservative Florida Cubans won’t care if a few relatives get it on the nose if some commies get punched out, too.
An even more remarkable thing is being attempted now: The regime is trying to win the hearts and minds of Venezuelans, even in the face of refusing to give them asylum while saying in the same breath that the regime Venezuelan refugees are trying to escape is vile.
I know. This makes no sense to you. But you’re logical. Toss logic aside when thinking about Trump and company. Or his voters.
Trump was “elected” (there are legitimate questions about fraud, but these folks are looking at that better than I ever could) in no small part because folks from south of the border turned against the Biden administration. The reasons why have been peeled apart and reattached a million times, but nobody understands why better than Wiles.
As you also know, attacking Latin voters in a truly literal sense, by kidnapping and sometimes torturing and killing them, was among the first moves by the regime after seizing office. Unsurprisingly, views in opinion polls about the regime quickly sagged among Latino voters.
Wiles’ plan of attack to this problem was conceived soon after the regime entered the White House. While most of us were cheering the steady drop in poll numbers as midterms approach, Wiles and her strategists worked on projects to sabotage Democratic votes in any way possible, including changing how postage gets dated.2 But they’ve also been working on a plan to, at a minimum, stem the losses of conservative Latin voters.
Nothing works better than yelling out one word: “Squirrel! Communism!”
One more thing helps: a military buildup to remind conservative Latin voters that America is a muscular power ready to either bolster their favorite capitalist dictator or fight their least favorite socialist dictator:
Throw in some convenient references to God, homosexuality, and abortion, and you have a winning strategy.
Oh, one more thing: The mainstream press gushing about a “lightning strike” that captures Maduro. This excites young men of all nationalities who will now set their sights on the upcoming movie starring Jason Statham produced by a movie studio purchased by right-wing oligarchs.
Most of us would consider all this a strange approach toward winning elections, but that’s why most of us are on the outside looking in. The regime’s propagandists were already master manipulators before the right-wing extended Fox’s reach by swamping Spotify with illiterate bros like Joe Rogan and Maga nuts like Candace Owens while purchasing CBS, Sinclair Broadcasting, Twitter, TikTok, the Wall Street Journal, and other assorted media entities.
Their propaganda has even managed to seed the brains of a substantial number of Democratic voters, many of whom think the U.S. needs to fend off immigrants because they’re worried a pile of Mexicans will fill their apartment buildings and eat their children.
So, no, nothing makes sense. But we find ourselves parsing it all anyway.
After Maduro’s abduction
Trump’s knowledge of Venezuela is about as deep as my knowledge of Greenland’s nuclear submarine program. This leaves things to Marco Rubio, who has developed stoogery into such a fine art that he’ll receive a massive book advance on how you, too, can become a sycophant for autocrats after he finishes his shameful tour through MagaLand. It will sell five copies, but the oligarchs who are busy scooping up book publishers won’t care, and Rubio will use the book publicity to launch his fiftieth attempt to win a presidential election.
It seems safe to assume that Wiles worked with Rubio to plot a course for Venezuela’s future (since nobody else in the regime knows anything about the country), beginning with a rising politician in, of all places, Maduro’s administration, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.
If you’re not familiar yet with Maduro, I’ll keep it short: he’s a scummish dictator who, if only he had the gift of free market appreciation, would be on Trump’s short list of favored autocrats. But he’s on the wrong side of the ideological fence.
That side of the fence is a somewhat socialist (in name only) political force started by Hugo Chávez, a general who gained a substantial, loyal base, especially among Venezuela’s poorest citizens. Chávez nationalized the oil industry, which turned him into an archenemy of America. The myth proferred by oil companies is that the assets were seized without compensation, but Chávez offered money for the assets that the companies deemed insufficient, so they challenged him in international forums.
Murdoro was handpicked by Chávez, which means we need to do that thing about history again. I’ll keep it brief.
Who was Hugo Chávez, and why do I care?
You care because Chavez begat Maduro. Hugo Chávez won Venezuela’s 1998 election with revolutionary rhetoric that appealed to the country’s poorest people. He took office with a Trumpian flair by changing the words of his inauguration pledge:
“I swear before God and my people that upon this moribund constitution I will drive forth the necessary democratic transformations so that the new republic will have a Magna Carta befitting these new times.”3
Chávez fancied himself a modern-day Simón Bolívar, who was also a Venezuelan, by railing against the global economy and the hold organizations like the World Bank have over smaller countries through painful debt financing schemes disguised as foreign aid.
He began his first term on friendly enough terms with capitalism. Believing in a European-style capitalism, he arrived in New York City to much fanfare and even rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
But frequent conferences with oil company executives would sour anyone’s mood, and Chavez grew to loathe late-stage capitalism. He tried several domestic reform efforts, even at one time assigning 70,000 members of his armed forces to distribute free food and medicine, rebuild roads and bridges, and work on mosquito abatement.
He also became ruthless with dissent as he aged within his presidential offices.
This made him an easy target when he nationalized oil companies in 2007. As described by Clark Savage at Energy News Beat:4
The saga began in earnest in 2007, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez orchestrated a sweeping nationalization of the country’s oil sector. Focusing on the Orinoco Belt—one of the world’s largest reserves of heavy crude—Chávez’s government demanded that foreign oil companies relinquish majority control of their projects to the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). This move was part of Chávez’s broader “Bolivarian Revolution,” aimed at redistributing oil wealth and asserting sovereignty over natural resources.
On May 1, 2007—coinciding with International Workers’ Day—thousands of Venezuelan workers, backed by the government, took operational control of foreign-held oil fields. Companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, which had invested billions in upgrading the heavy oil into exportable products through joint ventures, were forced to renegotiate terms. Under the new deals, PDVSA would hold at least 60% stake in all projects.
Chávez had been building up to this for some time by extracting larger tax tolls from energy companies. When he tried to offer compensation to the oil companies for the oil company investments that helped turn Venezuela’s low-rent (by Saudi Arabian standards) oil into cleaner oil, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips said, “No,” while other firms, such as Chevron, reluctantly agreed.
Eventually, the dispute with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips went into international arbitration with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The ICSID awarded ConocoPhillips $8.7 billion.
ExxonMobil only received $1.6 billion, ten times less than they asked for, because even the ICSID knows they’re evil incarnate:
By assets, I am referring here to the equipment and other assets used to convert what the oil industry generally refers to as dirty oil into the kind of crude oil that Saudi Arabia sort of gets by simply drilling for it (I’m simplifying here).
Venezuela never paid these penalties, which is why you sometimes hear Trump blathering about “getting our money back” or however he phrases such things.
I’m not referring to oil when I say, “assets.” Only Donald Trump would say American companies can claim Venezuela’s oil assets belong to the United States.
Oh. Whoops.
Through strategic action, we can ensure that we have access to additional wealth and resources enabling a country to unleash that without having to spend American blood.
That’s Pete Hegseth using pidgin English-gibberish to talk up the benefits of the U.S. running Venezuela.5
But pay no mind to that. Venezuela is a big place. The U.S. is not going to send in an occupying army. It would be impossible to pacify a nation of that complexity. Imagine a nation of a thousand Fallujahs, and you can pretty much imagine what an occupation of Venezuela would look like.
The grifter in chief (or more accurately, in this case, his official representative, Susie Wiles) is just, for now, trying to get the money back to the oil companies that the ICSID awarded them.
And now you know why I hit you with a bit of history.
To finish that history off, I’ll point out that in Chávez’s waning years, he appointed Maduro to succeed him, even though Maduro was already showing signs of incompetence.
Elections were technically held, but by this time, Chávez had established a pattern of cheating and election fraud that would impress any Maga election insurrectionist.
Off to jail he goes
Fast forward to Saturday, January 3, 2026.
Unlike former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, Maduro is now in shackles in a New York jail, supposedly because he’s a president disguised as a drug dealer.
Hernández, who was convicted of shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine to America when he was president of Honduras, was also incarcerated not so long ago. But he was given a full pardon by Trump in thanks (maybe?) for his version of corrupt capitalism.6
In Trump’s defense, he says he didn’t know who Hernández was when he pardoned him:7
“Well, I don’t know him,” the president said, referring to Hernández. “And I know very little about him other than people said it was like an Obama/Biden-type set-up, where he was set up.”
The regime has officially decided that gross hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.
Venezuela is just far enough away that, as tantalizingly close as its oil is, it’s just too difficult to seize. It’s hard enough to extract and refine into usable stuff. So the best American oil companies can hope for is returning Venezuela to its rightful state of full compliance with whatever Trump demands.
Next on the agenda is finding a successor to Maduro, whose fate is grim, to deliver said compliance.
The choice is a surprising one, Delcy Rodríguez.
Rodríguez is a rising politician in Maduro’s administration as his vice president. She has lambasted the attack, but reports are indicating that Rubio and other brilliant Trump strategists have determined she might be a worthy successor anyway, as long as, and the Trump regime has been clear on this, she toes the line.
Toeing the line for Trump is, of course, always fraught with unexpected landmines. It’s hard to know if Rodríguez is intelligent enough to avoid those landmines by giving Rubio and Wiles the finger, but so far, she’s said Maduro is the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
This approach is likely to change as reality sets in, and she gets a taste for power, which to any politician, left or right, is as tasty as honey buns are to Maduro’s new neighbors at Metropolitan Detention Center.
The obvious choice for the U.S. to try to install into power, most Latin America observers reckoned, was Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. She’s the perfect complement to Maga. She’s long been a cheerleader for the Venezuelan wealth class.
She even dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump during her acceptance speech.
Ruh Ro, Charles. Did you just say she won the Nobel Prize?
Fraid so, friends.
So much for that idea. The PedoFührer would rather see Maduro’s vice president in power than someone who snatched the Nobel Peace Prize from his sweaty, tiny hands.
Machado, who recently called Trump a “champion of freedom,” is a hardcore conservative. She won the Nobel Peace Prize for, according to the Nobel Committee:8
“her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”
In 2023 she announced her candidacy for president in the 2024 presidential election. When she was blocked from running, she supported the opposition’s alternative candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia. The opposition mobilised widely and collected systematic documentation that it was the true winner of the election. The regime declared victory and tightened its grip on power.
Ms Machado is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize first and foremost for her efforts to advance democracy in Venezuela. But democracy is also in retreat internationally. Democracy – understood as the right to freely express one’s opinion, to cast one’s vote and to be represented in elective government – is the foundation of peace both within countries and between countries.
So not only did a fellow right-winger snatch the Nobel Peace Prize from Trump, who had to settle for the legendary FIFA Peace Prize9 invented for him, but she did it by (gulp) promoting democracy.
Egads, woman. Be gone!
Machado could arrive in Mar-a-Lago, crawl to the grifter’s bedroom with a tomato in her mouth while wearing masochist chains and leather, and he’d still kick her out. Don’t steal his Nobel Prize, FFS.
So, Maduro’s Vice President is Maga’s choice to succeed him. Somehow, the mass media has bought the explanation that Rodríguez was their choice all along.
This complicates my theory that Wiles runs everything. I’ll admit that. But Wiles makes the stupid error of feeding Trump information, partly because he usually just listens to whoever has spoken to him most recently.
One day, someone must have opened their yap about Machado’s peace prize, and all hell probably broke loose, with hamburger splatter on the wall and everything.
I can imagine Wiles in a folding chair in the hallway leading to the golden toilet at Mar-a-Lago, hoping like hell she can get the last word into the mad clown’s ravaged ear (still recovering from a staged assassination attempt) before he settles into the bed to tap nonsense into his phone at three am for the strange denizens of his True Sociopath social app.
The dissemination of information to Trump’s tiny, damaged brain works something like this:
Arrival —> process information
What grievances have been discovered?
React—> Post several three AM grievances
That’s it. Wiles doesn’t really care much for this level of detail within the complex menagerie of hate that governs Trump’s meandering neurons, as she made clear during her eleven or so interviews with Vanity Fair magazine (ten and a half too many).10
So the best approach is to simply be his constant companion, which is why she’s in all the photo ops, and hope she can sneak in the last word before the elderly version of the Loneliest Runner calls it a night.
So then, who is Delcy Rodríguez, and can I just not care, please?
Yes, you can not care. It’s not too important. Just know that she was one of the few members of the Maduro regime who developed a little street cred with free market warriors, so they quickly rallied around her when they realized Machado was on the outs. At least, that’s the explainer the always compliant mainstream media is selling.
Some mainstream press reports say she’s a pragmatic arbiter between the right and left factions in Venezuela and worldwide. If so, we might all get lucky. Maybe she’ll run the country well. ExxonMobil and Conoco will surely insist they finally get paid, and now they have American guns to back up their demands.
Rodríguez will almost certainly work out a new payment plan for our desperately impoverished oil companies, Trump will demand a peace prize for his fine work in Venezuela, and we can all go to sleep, cozy in the comfort that tomorrow will bring a new horror into our lives courtesy of the world’s lunatic in chief.
For more on the United States formal emergence as an Axis power, review these stories
Regular readers know I’ve discussed at length the emergence of the United States into a new global axis. Here are two stories that do so:
And Just Like That, the Price of Eggs Rose and Democracy Fell
To state what may be obvious to some of you, we are in the twilight of democracy. But it didn’t start with the price of eggs. It’s been a long oligarchical process that, believe it or not, is not only about the United States. The United States isn’t even at the forefront of it all.
The U.S. Regime Just Declared Itself an Axis Power
In December 2024, I discussed how the American presidential election began America’s transition into an Axis power for the 21st Century (see Notes). There, I argued that Russian and Chinese political pundits were eager for a Trump presidency so that a new world order could be established.
Notes
Can we expect more wag the dog moments from this regime? Probably. Stay tuned.
Thanks for reading! Here are some footnotes…
Footnotes
Contributors. “Chief of Staff to President of the United States.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., August 15, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susie_Wiles#Trump_and_DeSantis_campaigns_(2015%E2%80%932021).
Kassraie, Aaron. “USPS Postmark Rules Change: What You Need to Know.” AARP, December 31, 2025. https://www.aarp.org/government-elections/usps-postmark-changes/
Marcano, Christina; Tyszka, Alberto Barrera (2007). Hugo Chávez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela’s Controversial President. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-45666-7; p 127
Savage, Clark. “Venezuela Never Paid Back Debt Owed to ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.” Energy News Beat, December 26, 2025. https://energynewsbeat.co/venezuela-never-paid-back-debt-owed-to-exxonmobil-and-conocophillips/
News, NBC. “Live Updates: Maduro Arrives in New York after Capture; Trump Says U.S. To ‘Run’ Venezuela Temporarily.” NBC News, January 3, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/latin-america/live-blog/venezuela-explosions-trump-maduro-live-updates-rcna251053.
Rashbaum, William K, Maggie Haberman, Kenneth P Vogel, and Jonah E Bromwich. “Juan Orlando Hernández, Former President of Honduras, Is Freed from Prison after Trump Pardon.” The New York Times, December 2, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/hernandez-honduras-trump.html.
Benen, Steve. “Trump Stumbles into an Important Contradiction on Pardon for Drug Trafficker.” MS NOW, December 10, 2025. https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-stumbles-into-an-important-contradiction-on-pardon-for-drug-trafficker
Nobel. “Nobel Peace Prize 2025.” NobelPrize.org, 2018. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/.
McCoy, Max. “Think the FIFA ‘Peace Prize’ Was Laughably Absurd? It Was, but the Joke’s on Us. • Kansas Reflector.” Kansas Reflector, December 14, 2025. https://kansasreflector.com/2025/12/14/think-the-fifa-peace-prize-was-laughably-absurd-it-was-but-the-jokes-on-us/.
Whipple, Chris, and Christopher Anderson. “Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the ‘Junkyard Dogs’: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2).” Vanity Fair, December 16, 2025. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-susie-wiles-interview-exclusive-part-1;
I lasted less than 24 hours, (tried to take a Substack break)! Working on that first step!