Reprinted from The Realist Review:
At this Saturday morning’s rambling, incoherent press conference announcing the invasion and take over of Venezuela, President Trump made a Freudian slip when, as he was about to hand the mic over to his brain-dead secretary of war, he said the operation related to, among other things, “an attack on sovereignty.”
Right on the money, Mr. President.
Venezuela has long been an odd fixation for Trump and his gang, going back to his first term, when he allowed the ransacking of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington by neocon-backed far-right Venezuelan emigres with ties to the odious Juan Guaidó, a good friend of the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Rubio and his fellow neocons have been calling for regime change in Caracas for years. The embassy seizure was made even more appalling by the spectacle of US State Department Diplomatic Security, US Secret Service, and DC Metropolitan police officers aiding and abetting in the crime by refusing to step in and prevent serial assaults committed by the pro-Guaidó emigres on unarmed American antiwar protesters (a similar incident occurred in May 2017 when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s armed thugs pummeled protesters in Washington DC’s Sheridan Circle in broad daylight).
So last night’s coup has been a long time coming. In April 2019, Congressman Mike Walz (who would become Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, now serving as UN Ambassador), and Florida (of course) Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio introduced the so-called Venezuelan Contracting Restriction Act, a sanctions bill on doing business with Venezuela. As a leaked State Department “fact sheet” dated April 24, 2019 noted,
The U.S. government has made over 150 designations of individuals and entities in Venezuela since 2017 via Executive Orders (E.O.) and the Kingpin Act. This includes 10 sets of designations in 2019 alone of multiple individuals, entities, and listings of properties.
The political philosopher Paul Grenier has aptly described Trump’s foreign policy as akin to a mafioso operation, in which the US president has adopted “the rhetorical style of a mob boss: ‘Do exactly as I say; that way I won’t have to kill you all.’ Some negotiating style!”
Grenier goes on to note that:
Forty years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly concluded that state making may often have much in common with organized crime.1 This was particularly true when states first manufacture a ‘threat’ and then ‘protect’ their charges from this self-same manufactured threat. Doesn’t this exactly describe the political arrangement we currently have – indeed, that we have long been stuck with – and by no means only with respect to Iran?
On November 25, 2025, we called for Trump to do the honorable thing and step aside. In light of the unconstitutional and illegal invasion-cum-abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to face what are likely to be wholly fabricated charges in US federal court, we renew that call and republish the editorial below.
In 1946, just after the Democrats were clobbered in the midterms, the most influential columnist of the day, Walter Lippmann, set out the reasons he believed Harry Truman ought to do the honorable thing and return to Independence, Missouri.
How are the affairs of the country to be conducted by a President who is not performing and gives no evidence of ability to perform the functions of commander in chief?
It is a poor conception of the public service which makes it a moral duty for a man to cling to an office, or to be a prisoner in it, if he cannot exercise its functions.
The right to resign is one of the cherished privileges of a free man; the willingness to resign, when principle and public interest are served, is always present in the public-spirited and the self-respecting.
They look upon resigning not as cowardice and quitting and a personal disaster, but as the ultimate guaranty of their useful influence and of their personal dignity.”
The last US president to voluntarily leave office was, of course, Richard M. Nixon, who parted ways with the White House on August 9, 1974. He was the first in our nation’s history to do so. The most recent Democratic occupant, Joseph R. Biden, probably should have done so for his complicity in the Israeli genocide, as well as for reasons of health. In 2006, the godfather of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr., suggested that George W. Bush should have resigned over Iraq. Editorial boards and columnists too numerous to count called for the resignation of Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky matter. Lyndon B. Johnson did not resign over Vietnam, quite – but, like Biden, did the second best thing and declined to run for re-election.
Sometimes presidents are called on to resign for reasons of policy, at other times, for reasons of personal conduct.
Today we have, in Donald J. Trump, a president who has provided us with plenty of reasons from both categories. In a normal country with a functioning constitutional system, his two illegal wars – against alleged drug-runners in the Caribbean and their sponsors in Venezuela, and against Iran on behalf of a genocidal government in Israel – his servility toward Netanyahu (in August, Trump referred to the Israeli mass-murderer as a “hero”), the Gulf State tyrants (one of which gifted him a luxury airliner), and his hosting at the White House a ‘former’ member of Al Qaeda now masquerading as the president of Syria, would be enough to merit removal.
Trump’s tally on the ‘personal conduct’ side of the ledger – particularly his egregious personal attacks on Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and on the brutally murdered film director Rob Reiner – speaks for itself.
It is time for him to go.
James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review. He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
