President Trump also talked last night about Venezuela, a subject over which he hasn’t
been saying much in the last several months.
But this is what he said last night.
Maduro is an illegitimate ruler, a tyrant who brutalizes his people.
But Maduro’s grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken.
Here this evening is a very brave man who carries with him the hopes, dreams and aspirations
of all Venezuelans.
Joining us in the gallery is the true and legitimate president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.
And the president then pointed to Juan Guaidó, who was in the gallery and stood up and got
applause from both Democrats and — I mean, not only Republicans, but, from what I can
see, from most Democrats, as well.
That’s right.
There’s Nancy Pelosi on the podium right behind Trump, who, within minutes, would be
ripping up his speech, standing up and applauding.
This is why I started off my comments talking about the way that the Democrats use the same
playbook as the Republicans.
At the core level of, say, foreign policy, militarism and staging coups and economic
neoliberalism, there isn’t that much of a great difference, which is what I think
the Sanders threat brings to both parties, because the Democrats are in check.
I mean, I look at the irregularities, for example, in Iowa.
I’m looking at a president who has been impeached, and I look at the appointment of
a foreign leader by fiat, by tweet, and now by television, televised speech.
It’s harkening back to kind of a digital age Latin American dictatorship.
We’re watching what I would call the latinoamericanización of U.S. politics, when you have the division
between rich and poor being so stark.
And so, Guaidó’s being there is just their continued efforts to prop up this failed most
recent coup attempt, that’s been going on almost 20 years in Venezuela.
I’ve been on the show here with both of you and talked about Leopoldo López, who
is really the great eminence behind the throne of the Venezuelan right, of the extreme right,
because the Venezuelan opposition is vast.
It’s broad.
And the U.S. and Elliott Abrams, who I know from El Salvador and his support for mass
murderers of children in places like El Mozote, is supporting the most extreme elements.
And so, you have here the introduction of Guaidó to prop him up, but also, I think,
to play against Bernie Sanders and the socialist theme.
You heard Trump referring to socialism.
He repeated the term, just like he repeated the tropes of civilizational warfare, civilization.
He even said the word “barbarians.”
So you have terrorists, immigrants, criminals — all these codewords, all this red meat,
as Lee Fang said, being used for the base.
I mean, again, both Democrats and Republicans play to these themes in different ways, except
that, for example — I mean, they both draw from a guy named Samuel Huntington, who brought
us to the age of civilizational warfare as kind of the post-Cold War narrative of a United
States in decline.
Also, Trump’s mention of Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, with 59
countries recognizing him, obscures the fact that there’s over 100 countries that still
recognize the current government of Venezuela.
Yeah, it’s theater.
It’s all political theater at this point.
It’s a global political theater.
And it’s going to continue, because the United States still has, after 20 years, failed
to destabilize and remove the Venezuelan government.
And, of course, you also have the complicity of the corporate media, the mainstream media.
CNN, when Juan Guaidó’s wife came to Washington and had a meeting with Trump in the White
House, the lower third, the description on CNN, was “the first lady of Venezuela,”
Juan Guaidó’s wife.
It really is absurd.
I mean, I was on your show some years back when Leopoldo López, in 2014, tried to stage
a coup, and I brought up the fact that I had been — I received death threats, with a
gun included, from allies of Guaidó and Leopoldo López, his mentor.
And I got calls from a guy named Agent Mike Ranger, who sounded like Captain America,
curious about the death threat.
And yet, I asked him, “Well, where — how do you know about this, if I didn’t report
it to the authorities?”
He says, “I’m not at liberty to tell you, sir.”
So, these are really — I mean, it’s a joke at one level, but you’re dealing with
the extreme right, extremely violent.
And I encourage people to just google “Juan Guaidó” and “narco killers” or “narco
murderers,” and you’ll see pictures of Juan Guaidó at the Colombian-Venezuelan border
with people that the Treasury Department has identified as hardened mass-killing narcoterrorists.