President Donald Trump seemed deranged enough when he responded online to Venezuela’s 3-2 victory over the United States in the World Baseball Classic on Tuesday.
“STATEHOOD!!!” he wrote.
He seemed even crazier when you remember that while fear-mongering his way to a second term, he repeated a groundless charge that Venezuela was emptying its prisons and psychiatric facilities into the United States.
Back in office, he demanded that Venezuela take back these supposed “worst of the worst.”
“We want Venezuela to immediately accept all of the prisoners, and people from mental institutions, which includes the Worst in the World Insane Asylums, that Venezuelan ‘Leadership’ has forced into the USA,” Trump posted on Sept. 20 of last year.
“GET THEM THE HELL OUT OF OUR COUNTRY, RIGHT NOW OR THE PRICE YOU PAY WILL BE INCALCULABLE!” the president continued.
It is worth noting that of the 240 Venezuelans the U.S. already had deported without due process to the horrific CECOT prison in El Salvador, only 36 had a criminal record. Nine, or just 4 percent of the supposed “worst of the worst,” had been charged with a violent crime.
However many of these purported monsters actually exist, statehood would make all of them American citizens, along with the roughly 28 million people who live there. That would include the ones in its prisons and psychiatric institutions. He would, in opposition to his earlier demands, be “MAKING THEM PART OF OUR COUNTRY.”
Other new U.S. citizens would include former dictator Nicholas Maduro, whom Trump deposed in January in what was not so much regime change as regime reshuffling. Maduro is currently at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, awaiting trial on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.
Trump has installed a Maduro henchwoman, Delcy Rodriguez, as Venezuela’s acting president. But if the country of more than 28 million ever did become our 51st state, even Trump could not just make her governor. She would have to run for office.
Her likely opponents would include María Corina Machado, who was barred by Maduro from running for Venezuelan president in 2024 for fear she would defeat him. Machado was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
That should have made her the perfect person to replace Maduro in actual regime change for the good, as opposed to the continuation of what Trump himself has claimed is essentially a criminal enterprise.
Trump made clear he still felt the Nobel Peace Prize should have been his for supposedly ending various wars. He was not mollified after Machado presented him with her prize during a White House visit in the aftermath of Maduro’s arrest. Machado had thought to have the medal mounted in a golden frame along with an appropriately sycophantic testament to Trump:
“To President Donald J. Trump, In Gratitude for Your Extraordinary Leadership in Promoting Peace through Strength, Advancing Diplomacy and Defending Liberty and Prosperity. Presented as a Personal Symbol of Gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan People in Recognition of President Trump’s Principled and Decisive Action to Secure a Free Venezuela.”
But where Machado had been an actual champion of Democracy, Rodriguez’s duties in the regime had included seeking ways around American sanctions on its huge oil reserves. That means she could be a force for “Prosperity,” which, with Trump, takes precedence over “Liberty.”
“Delcy Rodríguez, who is the President of Venezuela, is doing a great job, and working with U.S. Representatives very well,” Trump wrote in a March 4 Truth Social post.
He continued, “The Oil is beginning to flow, and the professionalism and dedication between both Countries is a very nice thing to see!”
Trump was so intoxicated by his success in Venezuela that he launched what he called “a little excursion” into Iran on Feb. 28, joining with the Israelis in killing the Supreme Leader of that regime at the very start. He cockily suggested on March 5 that he would overthrow the regime in Cuba “in a couple of weeks.”
The situation grew more complicated when the Iranians moved to make good on a long-standing threat to shut down the narrow Strait of Horumuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes.
The price of oil rose to more than $100 a barrel, with the cost at the pump increasing by as much as 35 cents a gallon. There was growing talk about the war being unnecessary. And there were ominous predictions about possible consequences for the November midterm elections.
But the oil was still flowing in Venezuela after an easy military victory, and Trump could continue embracing that as proof he is a winner.
His need to be on top is so fundamental and unceasing that when Venezuela unexpectedly beat the U.S. at the international baseball tournament, he reflexively suggested that he had something to do with the victory.
“Good things are happening to Venezuela lately!“ he posted. “I wonder what this magic is all about?”
He was implying that the magic had something to do with him. He then suggested that Venezuela, as a whole, belongs as #51 on the team he imagines to be his.
The chances of that happening are virtually non-existent, as when he spoke in the past of Canada and Greenland as candidates for statehood.
But, after all his fear mongering, to suggest the same for Venezuela indicates that, for him, reality skips forgetfully from whim to whim.
