Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:56 on 14 December 2025

Yes, I know that Trump is not exactly doing too hot in the polls right now. Political strategist Rick Wilson is positively giddy about it.

I have argued recently that a blue wave or two is likely to be significantly less consequential, in the long run, than many people think. Now I wish to argue that the hypothetical blue wave might not happen at all.

The reason is simple: war. Americans are, on the whole, an astonishingly ignorant people when it comes to foreign policy. This ignorance is no accident; Establishment politics has carefully tended and nurtured it for many decades. All the better to help prevent democratic accountability from interfering with military adventurism. It is one of the natural consequences of being a superpower, and a key reason why superpower status is a threat to free society.

Any administration that starts a war historically gets an incredible amount of deferential treatment from the mainstream media, the purported opposition party (both parties are united in their support for empire), and the populace as a whole. Do not think for a minute that this cannot apply to a war against Venezuela.

Maybe it won’t. We’re not that far past getting burned by the consequences of past deferential treatment for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe this one will come too soon on the heels of the earlier ones.

But don’t be too sure about that. It is at least as plausible that Trump will succeed in selling his Venezuela war. The authoritarian regime that runs Venezuela is not precisely the sort of government to inspire sympathy. Advocates of war will be able to paint opponents of war as Maduro allies or sympathizers, a characterization made all the easier by the shameful reality that it is not very hard to find American leftists that are allies or sympathizers of the Maduro regime. The Establishment media, already in many cases cravenly capitulating to Trump, could very easily once more assume its historic role as propagandists for the ruling class’ latest war of choice.

If this happens, Trump could easily prevail in the next few electoral cycles. I am quite sure, in fact, that this is a huge part of why Trump seems eager for a war with Venezuela. I will give the man credit for one thing: he knows advanced state of moral decline of the nation he leads better than virtually anyone else in the halls of power, and he has used this knowledge to become what is already one of the most successful, effective, and consequential presidents in U.S. history.

Yes, successful and effective. He has made more change, more quickly, than any president since FDR and quite possibly any since Lincoln. It is now part of established political precedent that U.S. presidents may incite coups to attempt to stay in power, can lie about just about anything, can make law and policy by fiat with little or no input from Congress, engage in crass nepotism, receive bribes, and cannot and should not be held accountable under the law.

To assume that a war in Venezuela will fail to keep Trump in power is to assume a moral and informed American public that, by and large, simply does not exist. See Rule No. 3.