On the night of Jan. 3, in the wee hours of the hazy days between New Year’s Day and the Epiphany, Trump’s government went and forced a coup on Venezuela. The operation, at least as Trump kept repeating it the day afterwards, was bloodless, and no American fatalities occurred. According to Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, around 100 Venezuelans died. There were no mentions of these possible casualties in Trump’s communication, except to bombastically and effusively state that the military operation wherein President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were effectively kidnapped, extrajudicially arrested and summarily sent to New York to await judgment for trumped-up charges regarding narcoterrorism, is that it “was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history. And if you think about it, we’ve done some other good ones, like the attack on Soleimani, the attack on al-Baghdadi and the obliteration and decimation of the Iran [sic] nuclear sites just recently in an operation known as Midnight Hammer, all perfectly executed and done.” Shortly afterwards, Trump states that it will be him who will be running Venezuela. 

It will not surprise the reader, or even anyone who has known me for just five minutes, that the notion of Trump running not just one, but both of my countries of nationality, seems as hopeful to me as looking at species extinction numbers since the 1800s. I did not like Maduro, by any means: he was a chauvinistic, irresponsible leader who couldn’t consolidate power to save his life following his takeover from Hugo Chavez after the latter died in 2013. He was the subject of mockery and disgust for many of my early political formulations, and, to an extent, how he presented himself deserved both my ire and my bitterness. Following Chavez’s death, Maduro kept repeating that the former president had come to him as a bird and approved of his appointment as de facto president by tweeting him a pretty song in a Latin American Catholic version of the Mandate of Heaven. He continuously repressed oppositional forces from both the left and the right, disregarding and then replacing or exiling the members of various governmental structures of Venezuela, such as the National Assembly and the Supreme Court. His political tirades, which in the days following his kidnapping have gone viral, were sometimes rather politically illuminating (not that he would ever put those brief moments of brilliance into practice), but often devolved into misogyny, homophobia and paternalistic classism. He brutally repressed student protests against his election in 2014 to the extent that more than 5,000 were injured and 43 were killed. He is, simply put, the reason why my family had to leave the country, as universities were no longer operational for extended periods of time in the Venezuelan capital, and thus my sister (the first of us to go) came to the U.S. to study. I have no love for Maduro, and yet I still have enough of a moral center to say that I do not want this for him. I wanted to have a Venezuela where, perhaps, fair elections or grassroots revolutions occur, and someone else can take charge. I did not want a Venezuela that has been effectively occupied and colonized by the United States. 

Truth is, Trump does not care for Venezuelans. In fact, he speaks about them in his very first press conference following the infiltration of Caracas, demonstrating that he thinks of them as little more than political tools. When it comes to his presentation of Venezuelans, he just couldn’t help himself from switching blindly between bragging about how he was doing Venezuelans a favor and consistently presenting Venezuelans in the U.S. as asylum-seeking vermin who will rape and pillage all in sight. The Venezuelan diaspora, most of whom have celebrated the forced ousting of Maduro and many of whom have defended Trump’s xenophobic statements and actions as the anti-immigration sentiment has risen, believe that the man cares about them and thus has liberated the Venezuelan land from violent repression for a sheer love of democracy.  

The fact is, Trump has liberated Venezuela for the sheer love of money, specifically oil money. When asked about what, exactly, the United States running Venezuela signifies, Trump stated that “We’re gonna have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil …  we’re gonna be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela.” Of course, before it starts to sound like Trump is not going to siphon all the wealth of Venezuela’s soil and sell it to the highest bidder, leaving the people of Venezuela in a similarly precarious position, he continued by saying that, “it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.” More than even his frequent ideological cudgels of the tenuous reigns of violence of the relatively fictional Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles, Trump kept mentioning how, in the running of the new Venezuelan territory, he was consulting, primarily, the CEOs of oil companies. In the press conference, Trump stated, “[The United States will] run it properly, we’ll run it professionally. We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going and invest billions and billions of dollars, and take out money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are gonna be the people of Venezuela, and also, I can’t stress this strongly enough, the people that got thrown out of Venezuela that are now in the United States.” The exploitation of Venezuelan soil is not a feature; it is the entire purpose of Trump’s coup d’etat. 

Trump’s selection of leadership within Venezuelan soil is, similarly, proof of his priorities. Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president of Venezuela, whom Trump personally endorsed in that very first press conference, had been vice-president since 2018, elected during one of the many elections that Maduro won with the presence of electoral irregularities. In the eyes of the oppositional forces against Maduro, her governmental presence is as illegitimate as Maduro’s presidency. While I do not like Maria Corina Machado—the primary leader of the opposition and one of the most meaningless winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, as she won it by achieving less than nothing while repeatedly conceding and pandering to the Trump presidency—a clean break from the Maduro presidency would have seen her, or someone from her camp, installed as interim president. Instead, Trump presented Rodríguez as the only option, not even talking to Machado until Jan. 15. This is, most likely, because Rodríguez is only slightly less excited to suck dry the Venezuelan soil for the profit of foreign corporations than the United States. She does not say this to the Venezuelan public, maintaining the anti-imperialist rhetoric and support for Maduro, all the while amiably calling Trump to strategize how to best sell her country down the river. Everyone who was previously in control in Maduro’s government, sans Maduro himself, is still in power and everything is expected to run exactly as it had before, with the only brief exception being that now Venezuela’s economy will not be subject to one hyper-corrupt, selfish, inefficient government, but two. If Trump truly cared about Venezuela outside of its oil, he would perhaps hold a new set of elections, but why would he risk a self-made puppet government just waiting to be exploited? Add to it an additional military presence from the U.S. government, as the War Powers Resolution, attempting to prevent Trump from mobilizing military forces within Venezuela, was summarily blocked on Wednesday night, and the country is a powder keg just awaiting further destabilization in the form of infighting and corporate buy-ins.

Venezuela is just one of multiple territories that Trump has shown interest in colonizing, as seen by the increased pressure on the Danish government to give up Iceland and the brand-new military presence and evacuation of nationals in Iran, but it is the first one, and the fact that Trump has given up the game already, where the pretense of justice and democracy fell a few hours after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, is indicative of how the United States will manage the countries it feels entitled to from now on. All profitable land belongs to the U.S. All those who are in the way will be quickly taken care of. All those who live in those lands are insignificant in the wake of American interests. 

There is little hope in being Venezuelan: nothing happens, and yet everything does. For most of my life, I’ve long believed that nothing will ever get better when it comes to my home country. And yet, there has never been a time when I have felt such paralyzing fear as I do right now. Delcy Rodríguez does not care for Venezuelans; she only cares for consolidating power for herself and her cronies. Maria Corina Machado does not care for Venezuelans; she only cares for her endless addiction to losing and her Cold War-era policies. But if there is a person who has demonstrated, time and time again, that he believes Venezuelans are subhuman and, if anything, they are only on the way to the exploitation of Venezuelan oil and his xenophobic immigration policies, it is Donald Trump, and he is now the one who is in control of the future of Venezuela.