Stripping away everything of value

On Venezuela and Trump's gangster capitalism

Luke O'Neil

05 Jan 2026 • 17 min read

All of this and I still have to go to the dentist today? What's next? What is, in fact, next.

On Saturday after the news of our despicable attack against Venezuela broke I published a piece by Alex Rikleen, a candidate for Senate in Massachusetts hoping to unseat Ed Markey, about Congress' failure to use the power given to them by the Constitution.

"It is, of course, unconstitutional for the Trump administration to attack countries without Congressional approval. But laws are not self-enforcing," he wrote.

"When Congress neglected to do its duty – declining to begin impeachment proceedings after the first unconstitutional act of war – it was an implicit invitation to the Trump administration. The Trump administration accepted..."

Read it here or down below.

Also today another killer piece by Zack Budryk on Venezuela and the gangster capitalism of the Trump administration. Budryk most recently wrote for Hell World about the latest Knives Out film.

Who’s being naive, Kay?

by Zack Budryk

Mickey Spillane (not the author, there are just finite Irish names) was a kind of guy who holds mythic status among a lot of old men who grew up in midcentury New York–in this case, pre-gentrification Hell’s Kitchen. He’s remembered as one of those gangsters of the old school, a gentleman, impeccably dressed and groomed, faithful to his wife and community, at Mass every Sunday, doling out the turkeys on Christmas and Thanksgiving. The old men say, like they do about most of these guys, that violence was a last resort for Mickey Spillane. He extorted money from people, of course, that’s mostly what being a gangster is, but usually not by beating them up or putting a gun to their heads. Instead he would simply have his guys put them in a car and then call their relatives demanding they pay up to get them released.

One of the guys Spillane scooped up was the father of a local kid named Jimmy Coonan, who never forgot the insult. Years later, in the late 1970s, Coonan was running with his own crew, the Westies, notorious for their chaotic violence. They were particularly infamous for their practice of dismembering bodies with carving knives and scattering them around city-owned waste treatment plants. After a few years of on-and-off war, Spillane decided he had a chance a lot of men in his line of work don’t get and voluntarily moved with his family to Queens, ceding the neighborhood to the Westies. He reaped the whirlwind anyway, and was shot dead out front of his apartment in 1977. Even if you think of yourself as a gentleman gangster, “gangster” is going to end up the operative word. The Westies themselves burned bright and fast like that kind of gangster usually does, their escalating violence and instability leading them to collapse in a storm of mutual betrayals. Coonan is now 79 and about halfway through a 75-year prison sentence. The neighborhood itself has been gentrified in a manner extreme even for midtown Manhattan, its name the only real vestige of the kind of place it used to be.

The value Donald Trump places on the gangster ethos is not novel territory. He came of age in New York during perhaps the American Mafia’s most lucrative post-Prohibition period, learned at the knee of lawyer Roy Cohn while he also represented the kingpins of the Genovese family, and almost certainly relied on relationships with the Mob to build in the city of the 1970s. More broadly, of course, he shares their obsession with loyalty, or more accurately disloyalty, their conviction that you’re entitled to whatever you can take by force, and as his hapless replacement-Cohn Michael Cohen once testified, a way of directing you to do immoral or illegal things that relies heavily on the intimation of what you already know he wants.

The Trump administration’s drumbeat for war with Venezuela, culminating in the bombing of Caracas and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, has followed this same mindset. Some of his underlings, like shvitzing adventurist Marco Rubio, still mumble about dictators (Donald Trump hates those!) who refuse to honor election results (he hates that even more!) or drug trafficking. Trump, however, has gone characteristically off-script, explicitly saying the nation “stole our oil” in Saturday remarks. In the months leading up to the strikes, he seemingly heard of Venezuela’s 1976 nationalization of its petroleum assets for the first time, and in one of those feats of American solipsism that reminds us that he is the perfected embodiment of this country’s id, proclaimed Venezuelan oil was “stolen” from the US.

Although for years Trump has benefited from laughable claims to anti-war bonafides, he and American imperialism are a natural fit. It’s just a broader, deadlier form of racketeering, after all. After participating in American excursions in the Philippines, China and Mexico, the penitent Marine Corps general Smedley Butler said on a popular lecture tour in 1933 that he had been “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism” in his past life. Our Cold War foreign policy de-emphasized thuggery and plunder as a stated goal even as it became more central to the project, up to the point of directly enlisting Chicago Outfit figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli in efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Both men would themselves end up assassinated, and to this day we don’t know for sure whether it was at the hands of fellow Mafiosi or US intelligence. You take your chances in both worlds.

The neoconservative movement in particular sought to make the ancient human desire to overpower other human beings and take their shit something both intellectual and altruistic. As we geared up to invade Iraq for reasons ultimately no more complex than “because we want to and we can,” Christian men with pleasant accents assured us this was in fact a noble extension of freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. When military occupation and American viceroys failed to create a Peoria in the Levant, those same men sadly clucked at the Iraqis’ ingratitude, and possible lack of genetic fitness for democracy. (In a bit of “you have to laugh” irony, people like Trump are seemingly the only ones who still believe this justification was sincere, hence his repeated emphasis on our failure then to “take the oil” and assurances that we’ll make no such mistakes on his watch.) In the latter days of the Bush administration, which coincidentally dovetailed with the latter days of HBO’s The Sopranos, the American foreign policy intelligentsia started to become a little enamored with the gangster of it all, embracing the swaggering local sheikhs who were seemingly ushering in something like a meaningful peace at gunpoint. One of these men, Sheik Sattar abu Risha, was explicitly compared to Tony Soprano.

Another elephant in the room, of course, is the extent to which the ruthless, civilian-and-US-citizen-killing drone policy of Barack Obama sketched a road map for the Trump administration’s tactics, including the repeated, murderous strikes on Venezuelan boats that Trump’s giggling apparatchiks turned into social media content. The two approaches to war seem as different as night and day–or Mickey Spillane and Jimmy Coonan, for that matter– Obama the urbane Harvard scholar and his crew of educated warriors versus Trump’s sadistic, chortling oafs and their Franklin the Turtle memes. But much like with Spillane and Coonan, while the style may be different, at the end of the day it all flows from the principle that if you’re bigger and stronger, you get to take whatever you want.

There’s no telling what the next months and years hold for the people of Venezuela, beyond the promise of more general havoc–the US government certainly doesn’t particularly care, despite the president’s vow to run it as a vassal state. In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell, the cabinet’s most vocal dove until of course he wasn’t, warned the Bush administration “You break it, you bought it.” Rubio, his 2025 equivalent, has no such concerns, suggesting over the weekend that the US may target the Cuban government next, finishing the work of Giancana and Roselli. Meanwhile Trump himself has rediscovered his briefly dormant preoccupation with seizing Greenland from Denmark. When you’re pulling heists, you don’t have to think about what happens to the storefront. You need that time to plan the next score.

Gangster movies have a by-now familiar structure; the first act is all about the good old days, the benefits of “the life,” the introduction of a guy like Mickey Spillane while some Tony Bennett plays. The second Trump administration is not the gangsters of that first act–they are the final hour of Casino, carried by a momentum that leaves them little time to do anything but kill more people at an increased pitch while stripping away everything of value. If Iraq is any indication, they have no meaningful legal consequences to worry about. But this time next year, the affordability crisis they were elected to address and have wholly ignored may have flipped the balance of power in Congress, meaning annoying stuff like subpoenas. You can ignore those, perhaps, like most everything you don’t want to do, but it will at least somewhat complicate the non-stop party of stealing whatever you want and killing whoever tries to stop you. Either way, Trump will now probably never get that Nobel Peace Prize he covets. But he’s getting something better: whatever he can grab.

As is the case with so many Trump depredations, maybe the removal of the pretense is a silver lining. Maybe the least we deserve as a nation is to see these things laid bare by men who understand their essence, to have the security blanket of false ideals stripped away. In his inaugural address the day before we struck Caracas, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke of “those fluent in the good grammar of civility [who] have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty.” That mask is well and truly off. Perhaps that can, in its twisted way, guide us to a world where the agenda itself is gone too.

Zack Budryk is a DC-area journalist and writer. His reporting and commentary have appeared in The Hill, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue and The Nation and his fiction has been published in Rock and a Hard Place Magazine.

Read more on Smedley Butler in Hell World here.

I AM AS SICK OF ASKING AS YOU ARE OF BEING ASKED BUT NEVERTHELESS...

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Thanks as always to Dan Ozzi for the shout out for We Had It Coming for the You Should Probably Read More pod alongside some other great titles. Be sure to read Dan's Zero Cred newsletter if you don't already.

Well I just got back from the dentist as I mentioned above and it was all pretty standard except at one point the hygienist told me I have such a curious tongue which was a new to me phrase I thought sounded delightful albeit a touch horny and then she asked if I liked to be in charge and I thought lady you can't be saying that kind of shit to a guy laying there minding his own business.

Turns out she just meant that people whose tongues sniff around like a dog at all the action going on inside of the mouth – during a cleaning for example – tend to be the kind that need to be in control of everything. So now I know that about myself and all of us.

Then I went next door to Super Cuts and had my hair cut by a lady who I can only describe as single mother Masshole Alia Shawkat and so there were a lot of confused feelings going on there too.

After that I dropped off some stuff at the food bank and the gal who took them said is this anonymous and I said what and she said do you want recognition and I thought generally speaking yes of course who doesn't but after a second I told her no thank you not for this.

Thus concludes stories about my errands for the day.

Here's a piece about going to the dentist from the book that I really liked and I hope you will too.

Congress gave Trump a free pass for bombing Iran – his attack on Venezuela is the logical consequence

by Alex Rikleen

As a teacher, part of my job was responding when a student answered a phone call in class. Not only was that behavior disruptive, but, if unaddressed, it invited worse disruptions in the future. How could I ask Jimmy to stop talking in class if I wouldn’t even stop David from taking a phone call? And what would David feel empowered to try next time?

As a teacher, managing classroom behavior is part of the job.

As a member of Congress, managing presidential behavior is part of the job.

And we’re dealing with the consequences of Congress letting President Trump answer the phone in class.

Congress made no effort to discipline Trump after his unconstitutional bombing of Iran over the summer. With that precedent set, Saturday morning’s attack on Venezuelan territory and capture of its head of state is entirely predictable.

There is an urge in American discourse to take a defeatist approach toward some of Trump’s actions, preemptively giving up with a meek “well what could have been done about it?” But, to put on my history teacher hat for a moment, the Constitution provides a clear answer.

Most Americans know that the US government is constructed of “three co-equal branches,” which limit each other through a system of “checks and balances.” However, those phrases have become such common tropes that it’s easy to lose sight of their meaning and purpose. While it may sound flippant to say that “managing presidential behavior” is a core job of Congress, it is literally what our framers had in mind.

In high school history classes, we usually simplify the complex system of checks and balances to focus on how the branches of government interact with one another. The three branches each have affirmative powers (the things they do), and restrictive powers (the way they limit each other).

The framers assumed that both the legislators and the executive branch would want to claim as much power as possible for themselves, so they wrote the Constitution to give each branch powers that could limit the other in cases of overreach. James Madison, a key author of the Constitution and our country’s fourth president, described the need for checks and balances and how they would work by saying, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The founders believed that checks and balances were critical to keeping the government functioning.

Managing executive behavior through the threat of impeachment is one of Congress’ main restrictive powers. Elbridge Gerry – a Massachusetts governor who was also a vice president, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and delegate to the Constitutional Convention – said that presidents “ought to be kept in fear” of impeachment to decrease the risk of abuse of power. And as Founding Father Alexander Hamilton explained, the threshold for impeachment is not a specific legal standard, but rather “misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

When Trump ordered an attack on Iran in June, it was an obvious abuse of power on the gravest of all topics: war. The official House Democrats social media accounts called the attack “unconstitutional” – and rightly so. Only Congress has the authority to declare war. Our founders were clear about what to do in the case of such grievous executive overreach. But instead of doing their own jobs, most Democrats joined all Republicans in preventing the possibility of impeachment. When Texas Democrat Al Green took advantage of a rarely-used maneuver to force an impeachment vote after the Iran attack, 128 House Democrats and all Republicans voted against proceeding on the measure.

We are now dealing with the consequences of that failure of Congress to do its Constitutional duty and enforce the restriction of the President’s power.

Just like with a misbehaving student, the result of trying to ignore Trump’s abuses is entirely predictable.

A few months after the Iran strike, the Trump administration began agitating for war in Venezuela. In early September, it began a bombing campaign targeting boats in the Caribbean Sea, and then it expanded that campaign into the Pacific Ocean in late October. These bombings are probably illegal – even the senior military lawyer overseeing the strikes said so.

Last week, we learned about another escalation. According to reporting by CNN, the United States bombed a “port facility” along the “Venezuelan coast”. This is the first report of an attack inside Venezuelan territory. This should have elicited immediate repudiation from Congress, including renewed calls for impeachment. Instead, few members of Congress made public comments on the revelation at all.

Then, early Saturday morning, the Trump administration launched a full-scale attack inside Venezuela. They struck at least four different regions of the country. Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, were captured and removed from the country. This act of war was conducted without congressional approval.

It is, of course, unconstitutional for the Trump administration to attack countries without Congressional approval. But laws are not self-enforcing. When Congress neglected to do its duty – declining to begin impeachment proceedings after the first unconstitutional act of war – it was an implicit invitation to the Trump administration. The Trump administration accepted the invitation.

There is no reason to believe it will stop here. Friday morning, roughly 24 hours before the attack on Venezuela, Trump was issuing 3:00 AM threats on Truth Social to re-engage with Iran.

Congress must learn from this summer’s abdication of responsibility. It must do its duty, and begin an impeachment investigation in response to the administration’s attacks in Iran and Venezuela. A failure to do so only reinforces the anti-constitutional message that President Trump no longer requires Congressional authorization for war.

Alex Rikleen is a former high school history teacher running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.

It was DCB Day yesterday. David Berman would have been 59 were he still with us. I will never pass up an opportunity to share this one from the best songs series because it's one of my favorite things I've ever run here.

Here's a bit of what I wrote.

David Berman was a poet which sounds weird to say because we don’t really have poets anymore. Whenever I think about him a couple lines come to mind from the poem Imagining Defeat in his book Actual Air that went like this:

I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn't matter.

I used that line as the epigraph to one of my books.

That’s not really anything.

I would have read Actual Air in 2000 or so when I was just breaching into all of this just after college which is around the most devastating time you can read a devastating collection of poems. It’s like how they say drugs and alcohol are particularly bad for young brains because they aren’t fully developed yet and it works sometimes like that with poetry too. Poetry much like drugs and alcohol is a delivery system for either despair or exultation or both at once and if you’re too young you don’t know what to do with either of those things.

I have somehow lost another old friend. The fifth one in about a year now as I was just saying the other day. I can't really take it anymore man. It's too much. This one fucked me up pretty good all day yesterday. And now in order to go about the rest of my week I am going to do what we all have to do every second of the day which is convince ourselves that death is not real.

Rest easy Joe. You suffered more than anyone deserves to. I wish you got to see the Patriots go on one more Super Bowl run. You left Boston a better place than it was when you started.

Further reading on Venezuela from Jonathan Katz:

That speech mostly took place in the realm of total fiction. Trump repeated his lies that Venezuela in general and Maduro in particular are among the world’s principal drug traffickers (not even close), that each alleged drug boat whose occupants Trump’s lieutenants have illegally murdered at sea saved “25,000 American lives,” and that Maduro had effectively staged an invasion of the U.S. with inhabitants of his prisons and “insane asylums,” in the form of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. (Trump’s own intelligence agencies dispute his assertion that Maduro runs the gang.) He and his aides claimed to be reasserting allegedly dormant (when?) American power — with an eye toward China, Iran, and perhaps Russia — joyfully repeating the moniker “Don-roe Doctrine.” He also flung his own imperial boomerang, rhetorically tying in his ongoing domestic campaign of secret police violence and slow-motion ethnic cleansing against the nonwhite residents of American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — a campaign his lawyers have tried to justify using his war powers, which may now get a boost.

And from Spencer Ackerman:

This is a fluid situation of destabilization and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But it is anything but "unprecedented," a word I heard the Trump team and CNN pundits use repeatedly. The War on Terror is not the only history guiding this criminal act—Greg Grandin and others can articulate the history of U.S. imperialism in Latin and South America—but its fingerprints are undeniable. Trump and Rubio, as they have for months, kept calling socialist Venezuela a "terrorist" state, recognizing the habituation of American political culture to defer to operations draped in the costume of counterterrorism. Caine, briefing the press on the operational elements of the kidnapping, referred to the experience of U.S. capture operations in the War on Terror in preparing the Delta Force and FBI team that seized Maduro. Trump repeatedly promised that the occupation of Venezuela would pay for itself via oil revenue. That was exactly what the Bush administration said about Iraq.

And Hamilton Nolan:

What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today. Not in the sense of being charming rogues or alluring antiheroes. We are the bad guys. Americans, as a people, are extremely allergic to the belief that our nation is a malign force in the world. It goes against our national mythology, it goes against our national education, it goes against the natural human impulse to imagine ourselves as good people. Additionally, under our current regime, it goes against a deliberate program of quasi-religious nationalist propaganda now being rolled out as fast as possible through every channel of the government’s power. Even the most credible news outlets in America can rarely bring themselves to portray us in the cold, accurate light that our conduct deserves. And the number of credible news outlets is shrinking as they are systematically being taken over by regime allies in order to broaden the larger propaganda campaign we are all living through.