While the calendar may have changed over, and the politics may be clouded in uncertainty & lies, two things became clear over the weekend, One is that Mr. “I alone can fix it” Trump can’t easily fix the disaster he’s begun in Venezuela. The other is that neocon Marco Rubio has never really changed.
For those who tried to keep up with the shifting U.S. foreign policy over the weekend, here’s a rapid one paragraph summary. On Saturday Jan. 3, the Trump regime illegally & unwisely attacked & invaded Venezuela, killing at least 40 civilians, & kidnapping their president & his wife. Trump’s regime then dragged Maduro & his wife to the U.S., & tossed them in a jail in Brooklyn, while claiming that the United States is going to run Venezuela, and take their oil - but also claiming we weren’t running their nation, and threatening their new leader (who was Maduro’s Vice President) saying she better do what the Trump regime wants or else. All this while also threatening oil corporations that if they want compensation from the U.S. for assets the Venezuelan government took from them over the past 50 years, then those corporations had best do what Trump says - even though oil was under $60 a barrel as of Friday’s close of market, and more oil would just cut that price even further.
To everyone who said this weekend’s illegal actions by the Trump regime have echoes of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under George W. Bush, or 1990 in Panama when U.S. soldiers under George H.W. Bush captured Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, you’re not wrong - though you may be missing the thread that ties them all together.
The thread comes in a form of Republican that some people thought mistakenly was extinct, the long-derided neocon. However, unlike the dire wolves that weren’t really made de-extinct, neocons have never really disappeared from U.S. politics.
In fact, the last major politician to be considered the bearer of neocon ideas happens to be current Trump Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. And indeed, there are those in DC circles who made it clear Rubio would be a terrible Secretary of State because he’s still a neocon at heart.
For those unfamiliar, or who may have forgotten, neocons are Republicans who disdain any kind of communism or socialism, generally hate government programs for the poor, and most importantly, heavily favor extremely aggressive unilateral U.S. foreign policies. Two of the most notorious examples of failed neocon policy are the regime change disasters made in Iraq & Afghanistan, both of which Rubio generally supported. That Rubio has long been thirsting for regime change in Cuba is well-known, and after this weekend’s actions, Rubio made it clear Cuba may be another target for the Trump regime soon. Trump echoed Rubio on that in his official remarks this weekend.
Of course, there may be some of you reading this saying, “Wait - didn’t Trump say something about illegal drugs being the reason we were threatening Maduro?” Indeed, while Trump & his drunken stooge at the Pentagon, Pete Kegbreath Hegseth, have repeatedly claimed that “narco terrorists” were on the boats off the coast of Venezuela, transporting drugs to the U.S. that’s simply a lie, and anyone with access to the facts knows it. Even Trump’s own DEA admits the truth: Most illegal fentanyl in the U.S. today comes from Mexico, where it’s made with raw materials shipped in from China & India.
If the Trump regime actually cared about stopping the real fentanyl problem, they’d have simply taken over what the Biden-Harris administration had been doing, where Biden-era public health policies saved tens of thousands of lives. They could have even called it something like “Trump’s anti-drug policy” and claimed an instant success. Further, if the Trump regime actually cared about ideological and legal consistency, Trump would not have freed former Honduran President and convicted major drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez just last month, and then arrested Maduro on similar charges.
All that said, neocons have never cared about facts. They never cared there were no active weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in 2003 - and they don’t care about drugs from Venezuela now either. Trump admitted on Fox Saturday morning that this was about oil, repeating what he’d said just before Christmas.
2026 may be a brand new year, but Republicans - including Donald Trump - are simply dragging out their old, tired, blood-soaked playbook, because they have no new ideas. They couldn’t care less about solving the problems most Americans have now, and they don’t care how many bodies of Brown, Black, & poor people they have to stack up to chase after oil.
To neocons, if a new war distracts the public from the Trump regime missing Epstein files deadlines, or Jack Smith’s testimony confirming he had prove of Trump’s criminal actions in trying to steal the 2020 election, well - as neocons used to say with pride during the Iraq debacle, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” Just as long as it isn’t their kids in the omelet, they couldn’t care less about yours. Meanwhile, the trickle of a drug problem Trump is claiming to have fixed from Venezuela remains a flood coming from China & Mexico.
New year, same old Republican playbook.