The story the American media is missing about Venezuela right now is not really about Venezuela. It is not about the country’s strongman president Nicolás Maduro, electoral legitimacy, corruption or even oil — at least not in the way Donald Trump pretends it to be. It is about something far more unsettling. The world’s most powerful country is openly asserting the right to invade, occupy and “run” any nation it chooses, and by failing to connect the dots for the American people, the media is helping to normalize Trump’s expansionist project.
What we are watching is not simply another foreign policy crisis; it is the construction of a permission structure for imperialism, built by stenography and deference. Mainstream media coverage of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, has not merely failed to interrogate the Pentagon’s actions, it has actively laundered them, presenting an act of war as a technocratic maneuver, a coup as a “capture” and an invasion as an “operation.” Americans have seen this pattern before, and the consequences were catastrophic.
