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Tag: executive overreach

  • The fearless man without conscience: Trump’s malignant narcissism and the threat to democracy 

    The fearless man without conscience: Trump’s malignant narcissism and the threat to democracy 

    By Amal Zadok and Rev. Antonio Rossemberg, MD, psychiatrist.


    Donald Trump is not scared. Fear is not an emotion that resonates with him the way it does with most people. He embodies what psychologists describe as a malignant narcissist—a personality type that blends narcissism with antisocial traits, a lack of empathy, and a hunger for domination. People like him are largely incapable of feeling fear, remorse, or genuine empathy. That emotional vacuum makes them profoundly dangerous, especially when they ascend to positions of enormous political or social power. 

    A malignant narcissist does not experience fear as a natural warning signal or a moment of introspection. Instead, fear in others becomes a source of satisfaction—a sign that they are in control. His reactions, from defiant outbursts to self-aggrandizing rhetoric, often reveal a man who feels invincible rather than vulnerable. Setbacks, investigations, or criticism are not perceived as moral reckonings but as insults to be crushed or games to be won. This mindset explains why accountability rarely touches him in any meaningful way: he refuses to acknowledge fault because, to him, weakness is worse than wrongdoing. 

    When such a person occupies the presidency of the United States—the most powerful office on Earth—the consequences extend far beyond one individual’s pathology. A malignant narcissist in power sees the nation not as a collective trust but as an extension of the self. The institutions of democracy become tools to serve personal validation, and the truth itself becomes malleable. Loyalty is demanded, not earned. Those who flatter are embraced; those who dissent are derided or destroyed. 

    Trump’s appeal lies in his uncanny ability to mirror the resentments and frustrations of others while remaining utterly self-absorbed. His political genius, if it can be called that, is his instinct for manipulation—his capacity to turn fear outward rather than inward. He convinces followers that their enemies are his enemies, that their grievances justify his own impunity. In doing so, he transforms personal pathology into a political movement. 

    He is not scared because fear requires humility, and humility is foreign to his nature. What drives him is not courage, but the relentless need to dominate. That is why his power—unrestrained, unreflective, and unrepentant—is so deeply perilous. Now, in his second term, the malignant traits that once defined Trump’s personality have hardened into policy and institutional transformation. 

    His declaration—“No one can stop me; only my own morality can”—is not simply arrogance; it is a chilling admission of delusion. It reveals a man who sees himself as the arbiter of what is right and wrong, detached from external moral frameworks, institutions, or law. For Trump, morality is not universal; it is situational—a reflection of what benefits him in the moment. He invokes morality as a mask, framing his impulses as destiny. This is the purest expression of the narcissistic illusion: the belief that the self is infallible and that restraint is weakness. 

    In a functioning democracy, such pathology should meet a firm institutional response. Congress holds not only the power but the obligation to act as a check on executive overreach, using hearings, investigations, and impeachment when a president’s conduct threatens the constitutional order. Yet too many politicians retreat into rehearsed talking points, tribal loyalty, and short-term electoral calculus, choosing self-preservation over their oath to the Constitution. Their failure to confront this malignant narcissism does not make them neutral observers; it makes them enablers. 

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • When the Republic Wears a Mask: ICE, Trump, and the Constitution in the Crosshairs of Encroaching Power

    When the Republic Wears a Mask: ICE, Trump, and the Constitution in the Crosshairs of Encroaching Power

    James Madison warned that “power is of an encroaching nature, and…ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”  In Donald Trump’s hands, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the very embodiment of that encroaching power: an armed, masked, and increasingly unaccountable apparatus that kills a U.S. citizen in Minnesota, terrorizes communities, and dares the constitutional order to stop it.  An agency that claims the mantle of law has slid into something closer to a standing force of intimidation, operating in a gray zone between policing and political control that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin would have recognized as the threshold of tyranny.

    Madison, encroaching power, and the ICE state

    Madison’s core insight in Federalist No. 48 was brutally simple: “power is of an encroaching nature” and “mere parchment barriers” are not enough to stop a determined branch from slipping its leash.  He feared precisely what is visible today in immigration enforcement: a single executive apparatus accumulating practical control over lawmaking (through broad discretion), execution (through raids and detention), and adjudication (through executive‑run immigration courts).  This “tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands,” Madison wrote, is the very definition of tyranny, whether wielded by a monarch or an elected president.

    Under Trump, ICE has become such a concentration point. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations wing conducts raids, arrests, detention, and deportation. Policy memos from the White House and DHS effectively rewrite who is targeted and how aggressively, far beyond what most Americans imagined when Congress wrote the underlying statutes.  Madison would not be fooled by the bureaucratic language. He would see an executive machine steadily expanding its reach, using the gaps between law on paper and practice on the ground to enlarge its power.

    The Minnesota killing: when “enforcement” becomes lethal impunity

    The killing of 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis is not an aberration; it is a revelation.  Good, a U.S. citizen, mother of three and celebrated poet, was in her car when ICE agents confronted her on a residential street. Video shows an officer at her door while another steps in front of the vehicle and fires multiple rounds into the windshield at close range.  Federal officials rushed to frame her as a threat who tried to run over agents, yet witnesses’ footage shows an officer shooting almost immediately as the car inches forward. The city’s mayor called it “reckless use of force” and told ICE to “get out of our city.”

    Local leaders have emphasized that Good appears to have had no serious criminal record and was reportedly present as a legal observer monitoring ICE activity, while the Trump administration branded her a “domestic terrorist.”  This is the logic of encroaching power: those who watch the state become enemies of the state. A federal officer can shoot a citizen in the face on a city street, then retreat behind a wall of official narratives and procedural reviews.  Madison warned that when one branch operates with “overruling influence” and escapes effective checks, “dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community” follow.  Good’s death is one of those oppressions, and the “minor party” is anyone the executive chooses to target.

    The “law and order” defense — and why it fails

    Defenders of ICE under Trump insist that such force and sweeping tactics are the price of “law and order.” They argue that agents face real dangers, that criminals will exploit any restraint, and that masks, unmarked cars, and aggressive raids are necessary to protect officers and communities alike.  Madison and the founding generation would have recognized the danger in this argument: it turns necessity into a blank check.

    Madison’s warning that power is “of an encroaching nature” was directed precisely at governments that invoke safety to justify permanent expansion of force.  Hamilton cautioned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress.  Franklin, for his part, wrote that the “means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a line that lays bare what happens when law‑and‑order rhetoric licenses masked agents to kill a citizen like Good and terrorize entire neighborhoods.  The question is not whether enforcement is needed, but whether it remains constrained by law, transparency, and accountability; when it does not, it ceases to be “order” in any constitutional sense.

    Masks, unmarked cars, and the aesthetics of fear

    The methods ICE now routinely employs reveal how far the culture of the agency has drifted from ordinary law enforcement toward something darker.  Across the country, residents watch masked agents in plain clothes jump from unmarked vehicles, armed with rifles, surrounding people on sidewalks and in driveways. Even mayors describe these scenes as resembling “violent abduction,” not policing.  The Department of Homeland Security insists that masks are needed to protect agents from doxxing and threats, pointing to cases where officers’ families were harassed after photos circulated online.

    But civil‑rights advocates and local officials note that masked, anonymous armed men seizing people off the street “compound fear and chaos” and “evade accountability for agents’ actions.”  When the state sends masked figures in unmarked vehicles to carry out its will, it deliberately blurs the line between law and terror, between a warrant and a snatch‑and‑grab.  Madison’s insistence that power must be visibly separated, checked, and identifiable is not satisfied by a small “ICE” patch on a vest. A power that hides its face from the public it serves is already behaving as if it is above that public.

    “Law enforcement” without law

    Formally, ICE is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, charged with enforcing immigration and customs laws and “preserving national security and public safety.”  In practice, the Trump‑era posture has treated “law enforcement” as a talisman that justifies almost any method, while the rule of law—the predictable, proportionate, rights‑respecting application of statutes—often appears as an afterthought.  Raids at homes, hospitals, and schools, family separation as leverage, and lethal force against a nonviolent U.S. citizen all point to an institution where the executive’s will is the primary law.

    The Founders knew that “law enforcement” can become a mask for oppression. Hamilton warned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress.  Franklin cautioned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a sentence that reads today like a prophecy of post‑9/11 security agencies turned inward on vulnerable communities.  The question is not whether ICE fits the bureaucratic definition of “law enforcement,” but whether its conduct still reflects the deeper law of a constitutional republic.

    The Founders’ moral horizon: liberty, asylum, humanity

    For the founding generation, liberty was universal and inseparable from the dignity of the person. Franklin wrote that “equal liberty” is “the birthright of all men,” language that sits uneasily beside images of children taken from parents and locked in detention centers because those parents lacked the right papers.  Jefferson spoke of the United States as an “asylum” for the oppressed and warned that if the federal government claimed ungranted powers over aliens and others, Americans would end up “living under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority.”

    The killing of Renee Good and the masked‑raid culture around ICE mark a moral break with that vision.  A government that can shoot a citizen observer in the head, on disputed facts, and then march agents back into the streets wearing masks to “ensure their safety” while whole neighborhoods live in terror has ceased to see liberty as a birthright; it sees public fear as a tool.  Madison’s warning that “when the people fear the government, there is tyranny” is no longer a distant abstraction. It is a description of what residents of immigrant communities, and now even citizen observers like Good, experience when they see a DHS badge.

    The Madisonian response: draw the line

    Madison understood that “mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits” is never enough; it is the vigilance of citizens, legislators, and courts that prevents encroaching power from hardening into permanent despotism.  The ICE that kills a Minnesota mother, moves in masked formations through American cities, and claims the absolute mantle of “law enforcement” while operating in legal and moral gray zones is exactly the kind of institution that must be confronted in Madisonian terms.

    To “appeal to the standard” of the Constitution, as Hamilton urged, means demanding transparent investigations and prosecutions where warranted in the Good case, legislative restraints on raids and use of force, and judicial scrutiny of policies that turn communities into occupied zones.  It also means a civic refusal to accept masked, nameless agents as a normal feature of democratic life: insisting on clear identification, recorded operations, and public accountability whenever armed federal staff operate in local neighborhoods.  If Madison is right—and the history of republics suggests he is—then the line must be drawn now, before the encroaching power that killed Renee Nicole Good becomes a permanent, accepted feature of American government.

    Americans now face a test that previous generations knew only in theory: whether loyalty belongs to a leader and his armed agents, or to the Constitution and the republic it binds into being.  The blood spilled at Lexington and Concord, on the fields of Antietam and Normandy, in Selma and at Kent State, was not offered to sanctify a regime of masked men in unmarked vehicles, but to preserve a nation of laws where power answers to the people.  When ICE can kill a citizen like Renee Good on a quiet Midwestern street, when families live in terror of raids more reminiscent of juntas than of justice, the United States drifts toward a resemblance it has long condemned in others: the look and feel of the very dictatorships it claims to oppose.  The choice now is stark and inescapable: either citizens, churches, cities, states, and courts rise in open, principled defense of the constitutional order—demanding that this government once again fear its people, not the other way around—or the encroaching power Madison warned against will finish its work, and the republic so many men and women died to preserve will quietly become something else.

    References

    1.Ammo.com. (2024, April 19). Founding Fathers’ quotes on government, democracy, and power in the people. https://ammo.com/articles/founding-fathers-quotes-democracy-government-power-in-people

    2.Avalon Project. (1788). Federalist No. 48. Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed48.asp

    3.Bill Muehlenberg. (2021, November 29). The Founding Fathers on freedom. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/11/29/the-founding-fathers-on-freedom

    4.Bill of Rights Institute. (2024). Founders’ quotes. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/founders-quotes

    5.CBC News. (2026, January 9). The White House is defending fatal ICE shooting of Minneapolis woman. But what are the rules of engagement? https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ice-minneapolis-shooting-use-of-force-9.7038275

    6.Civil and Human Rights Coalition. (2025, February 17). The human costs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. https://civilrights.org/blog/the-human-costs-of-trumps-immigration-crackdown

    7.Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute. (2016). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/immigration_and_customs_enforcement_(ice)

    8.FEE. (2025, November 19). 17 Benjamin Franklin quotes on tyranny, liberty, and rights. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/17-benjamin-franklin-quotes-on-tyranny-liberty-and-rights

    9.Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (n.d.). Founding Fathers’ selected quotations key. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/Key%20to%20Founding%20Fathers%20Selected%20Quotations.pdf

    10.Hamilton, A. (2017). Alexander Hamilton quotes about tyranny. AZQuotes. https://www.azquotes.com/author/6160-Alexander_Hamilton/tag/tyranny

    11.Monticello. (n.d.). The question of immigration. Thomas Jefferson Foundation. https://www.monticello.org/the-art-of-citizenship/the-question-of-immigration

    12.National Constitution Center. (2016, March 15). James Madison: Birthday quotes from the most quotable Founding Father. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/james-madison-birthday-quotes-from-the-most-quotable-founding-father

    13.NPR. (2025, July 9). Masked immigration agents are spurring fear and confusion. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5440311/ice-raids-masked-agents

    14.Press-Pubs, University of Chicago. (n.d.). Jefferson, T. Resolutions relative to the Alien and Sedition Acts. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch8s41.html

    15.Teaching American History. (2024, July 24). Federalist 47, Federalist 48, and Federalist 51. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/federalist-47-federalist-48-and-federalist-51

    16.The Conversation. (2018). How the media dealt a major blow to Donald Trump’s family separations policy. https://theconversation.com/how-the-media-dealt-a-major-blow-to-donald-trumps-family-separations-policy-98669

    17.The New York Times. (2025, July 20). LA Mayor: Masked ICE agents created “reign of terror”. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/politics/ice-agents-masks.html

    18.The New York Times. (2025, August 5). Inside Trump’s new tactic to separate immigrant families. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/us/politics/trump-administration-family-separation.html

    19.United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2003– ). United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement

    20.Federal Law Enforcement Training & Research Center. (2014, November 25). What is ICE? https://www.federallawenforcement.org/ice/what-is-ice

    21.ABC News. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE agent in Minneapolis was a mother of 3, poet… https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/woman-killed-ice-agent-minneapolis-mother-3-poet-129008055

    22.BBC News. (2026, January 7). US immigration agent fatally shoots woman in Minneapolis. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jvnl4j1n4o

    23.BBC News. (2026, January 8). Renee Nicole Good: Who was the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1jepdjy256o

    24.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). Who was Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed in ICE Minneapolis shooting? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/who-is-renee-nicole-good-the-woman-killed-in-the-ice-minneapolis-shooting

    25.SupplySideLiberal. (2022). The Federalist Papers #48: Legislatures, too, can become tyrannical (James Madison). https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/2/6/the-federalist-papers-48-legislatures-too-can-become-tyrannicaljames-madison

    26.Critical Skills Blog. (2024, July 21). The Founding Fathers’ fears of tyranny: Insights from Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington. https://criticalskillsblog.com/2024/07/22/the-founding-fathers-fears-of-tyranny-insights-from-jefferson-madison-hamilton-and-washington

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    by Amal Zadok

    When a president says only his “own morality” limits his power and that he “does not need international law,” while a mother of three is shot through her windshield by an ICE officer on an American street, the mask is off. This is no longer a debate about policy; it is the birth of a regime that reserves law for the weak and bullets for anyone who get in the way. 

    A president who crowns himself

    Trump’s statement to The New York Times that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality” is the distilled creed of authoritarianism. In his own words, there is “one thing” that can stop him: not Congress, not courts, not treaties, but his “own mind,” followed by the contemptuous aside, “I don’t need international law.” 

    This is not some late-night tweet; it is a formal doctrine announced from the Oval Office. In that interview, he waves away the UN Charter, the ban on aggressive war, and decades of treaty obligations as optional restraints that apply only if he personally decides they should, implicitly trampling the Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and the core idea that even great powers are bound by law. 

    He prides himself on using military strikes, invasions, economic strangulation and political coercion as tools of personal will, not as acts accountable to any external standard. A president who claims that law is binding only when he feels like it has ceased to be a constitutional officer and has slipped into the role of a sovereign who believes that legality is a costume he can put on for international conferences and drop whenever he wants to unleash force.

    From “rules-based order” to rule by fear

    For years, Washington preached a “rules-based international order” to other states. Now Trump publicly shreds that script and replaces it with a gangster’s logic: power first, rules never. He openly treats treaties as disposable, walks away from arms-control agreements, and shrugs at the possible collapse of the last major nuclear restraints with a fatalistic “if it expires, it expires.” 

    The message radiates far beyond Washington. If the United States claims the right to strike where it wants, topple whom it chooses, and threaten nuclear and non‑nuclear states alike without even pretending to obey international law, why should Moscow feel bound in Ukraine or Beijing in Taiwan? The “order” that once at least pretended to restrain the strong becomes a stage on which the biggest actor improvises violence while lecturing others about norms. 

    Trump’s “own morality” is not a safeguard; it is a surrender of civilization to personality. It tells every future strongman—from Budapest to Brasília—that law is ornamental and that the only crime is losing. 

    The ICE bullet in Minneapolis

    While Trump claims he does not need international law abroad, his domestic security machine is being trained to treat American streets like occupied territory. In Minneapolis, 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, a mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE officer while sitting in her car on a cold Midwestern street, neighbors watching from their windows as sirens and shouts shattered the night. 

    She was not a cartel boss or a terrorist; she was a neighbor, a writer, a woman who had come out—according to local accounts—to care for those around her. The official story shifts like a propaganda broadcast. DHS officials insist she “failed to comply,” that she “attempted to run over” an officer. Local witnesses describe confusion and conflicting commands, with one officer telling her to drive away from a stuck ICE vehicle and another simultaneously trying to pull her from the car; body‑camera and bystander video show agents swarming the vehicle, one officer stepping into her path, firing at close range as she attempts to drive off, her car then crashing down the street as her life bleeds out on the asphalt. 

    Minneapolis city officials have said openly what federal spokespeople will not: that this was “a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.” The FBI has now taken over the investigation after the state’s own Bureau of Criminal Apprehension backed away, a sign of just how toxic and politically charged this killing has become, while community grief vigils name her not as a suspect but as a poet, a newcomer, a mother. 

    The same contempt for accountability that lets a president shrug off the UN Charter now underwrites a culture in which an ICE bullet can end a citizen’s life and the first instinct of power is to justify, not to repent. 

    The quiet architecture of a police state

    This is how police states are built in real time—not with a single spectacular coup, but through a series of “operations,” “raids,” and “emergency deployments” that normalize the presence of armed federal agents in daily life. In Minneapolis, thousands of federal officers were deployed in what DHS bragged was the “largest operation ever,” turning a U.S. city into a live‑fire training ground for an internal occupation. 

    The use of ICE, a civil immigration agency, like a paramilitary police force is not an accident. It is a deliberate fusion of domestic and foreign logics: the border mentality imported into the heart of the city, where neighbors blowing whistles to warn each other become suspect, where legal observers and bystanders are treated as obstacles, and where a parked car is one nervous trigger pull away from becoming a coffin. 

    Trump’s doctrine—that only his conscience limits his power—seeps down the chain of command. If the man at the top says law is malleable, if he publicly promises to back his officers no matter what, then every badge and gun on the street hears the same message: you are the law. This is exactly how Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo operated—not because every officer was a monster, but because the system told them that their violence was always already justified. 

    A monstrous hybrid of Nazism and Stalinism

    The horror of the current moment is not that America has become identical to Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union; it is that it is mutating into a hybrid that borrows the worst tools of both. From Nazism, Trump borrows the cult of the leader whose “moral sense” legitimatizes everything, the theater of strength, the glorification of “law and order” as a shield for state brutality. From Stalinism, he borrows the idea that internal enemies lurk everywhere, that entire communities (immigrants, protesters, “anarchists,” “terror sympathizers”) are fair game for sweeping repression. 

    When federal agents can snatch people off streets, deploy to cities over local opposition, and now kill a mother in her car under the banner of immigration enforcement, the line between democracy and dictatorship is not “eroding.” It is being redrawn in blood. When a president announces that courts, laws and treaties are lower‑tier obstacles compared to his “own mind,” he is not defending America from enemies; he is positioning himself as the only real branch of government that matters. 

    This is how hybrid tyrannies work. Elections still occur, some courts still function, newspapers still print—but the security services learn that their real loyalty is owed upward, not outward. The constitution becomes a script for public ceremonies, while the real constitution is whatever the leader and his loyalists can get away with. 

    The conscience that kills

    Trump insists he is “not looking to hurt people,” even as he lists lethal operations as achievements, even as his policies unleash missiles abroad and militarized raids at home. His “own morality” apparently allows for the bombing of foreign soil without authorization, the kidnapping or coercion of foreign leaders, the tearing up of refugee protections, and now a domestic climate in which federal officers gun down a woman in Minneapolis and are treated as heroes in waiting. 

    There is a cruel symmetry here. Abroad, he claims the right to ignore international law in the name of “national strength.” At home, his security forces act as if ordinary Americans are foreign subjects in a pacification campaign. The shared logic is simple: the people at the receiving end of American power—Venezuelan civilians, Iranian technicians, migrants at the border, a mother in a Minneapolis sedan—do not matter as rights‑bearing human beings. They matter only as problems for the leader’s will to solve. 

    When a man with this worldview sits in the Oval Office and tells a major newspaper that only his conscience can stop him, the world should stop pretending this is normal politics. This is not conservatism, populism, or even crude nationalism. It is the theology of the police state: one man’s inner voice elevated above constitutions, courts, treaties, and the screams from the street where Renee Nicole Good died. 

    An ultimatum to real patriots

    So the question is no longer what Trump will do next; the question is what Americans are going to do about an America that the Founders would not recognize. A republic whose president claims to stand above law and whose federal agents kill unarmed citizens in the name of “order” is not the republic Madison and Hamilton were arguing for; it is the nightmare they wrote the Constitution to prevent. 

    The Constitution does not ask “real patriots” to clap for strongmen; it demands that they use every peaceful tool it provides—speech, press, assembly, petitions, jury service, litigation, elections, impeachment, and relentless oversight—to drag power back under law. It calls legislators to defund and dismantle rogue operations, judges to enforce rights without fear, civil servants to refuse illegal orders, and ordinary citizens to organize, vote, strike, and resist until no man’s “own morality” can ever again stand in for the rule of law. If Americans will not use those tools now, when a mother lies dead in Minneapolis and a president boasts that only his conscience can stop him, then the Constitution will become nothing more than an antique in a glass case—and the hybrid monster of Nazism and Stalinism will finish the work it has already begun. 

    References 

    1.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump addresses Venezuela, Greenland and presidential power in wide‑ranging interview. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.htm

    2.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump said his global power was limited only by his ‘own morality’. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/briefing/trump-interview-oval-office-apple-ceo.html

    3.Bluewin. (2026, January 9). USA: Trump: Only my sense of morality can hold me back. https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/international/trump-only-my-sense-of-morality-can-hold-me-back-3041854.html

    4.Moneycontrol. (2026, January 8). ‘Only my morality can stop me’: Trump claims sweeping war powers, shrugs off international law. https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/only-my-morality-can-stop-me-trump-claims-sweeping-war-powers-says-he-doesn-t-need-internatio-article-12812335.html

    5.Financial Express. (2026, January 8). ‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says only his own morality limits his global power. https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/only-one-thing-can-stop-me-trump-says-he-dont-need-international-law-boasts-12812091/

    6.World Socialist Web Site. (2026, January 8). Declaring ‘I don’t need international law,’ Trump moves to assert unlimited warmaking powers. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/09/qyot-j09.html

    7.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). FBI takes over investigation into ICE agent killing of woman in Minneapolis. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/fbi-takes-over-investigation-into-ice-agent-killing-of-woman-in-minneapolis

    8.ABC News (Australia). (2026, January 7). What led to an ICE agent fatally shooting a public observer in Minneapolis? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-08/ice-shooting-minneapolis-minnesota-immigration-crackdown/106209128

    9.NBC News. (2026, January 7). Renee Nicole Good, woman shot by ICE officer, was out ‘caring for her neighbors’. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/renee-nicole-good-minneapolis-ice-shooting-victim-caring-neighbor-rcna252901

    10.Colorado Public Radio. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis originally from Colorado. https://www.cpr.org/2026/01/07/fatal-minneapolis-ice-shooting-colorado-woman/

    11.CNN. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who shot woman in Minneapolis was dragged by a car in 2025, video shows. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/ice-agent-minneapolis-shooting-car-dragged-invs

    12.NBC News. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who fatally shot Minnesota woman was dragged by a car during a prior enforcement stop. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-officer-fatally-shot-minnesota-woman-was-dragged-car-june-immigrat-rcna252992

    13.City of Minneapolis. (2026, January 6). Minneapolis responds to fatal shooting of woman by federal agent. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/news/2026/january/fatal-shooting-response/

    14.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 8). Woman killed by ICE agent was mother of 3, poet and new to Minneapolis. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/woman-killed-by-ice-agent-was-mother-of-3-poet-and-new-to-minneapolis

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Narco-Fable or Oil Colony? How Washington Turned Maduro into a Pretext to Seize Venezuela

    Narco-Fable or Oil Colony? How Washington Turned Maduro into a Pretext to Seize Venezuela

    by Amal Zadok

    The New York narco‑terror indictment against Nicolás Maduro is not about protecting Americans from cocaine; it is the legal cover for a U.S. bid to seize control of Venezuela’s oil and run the country as a protectorate. Trump has said it plainly: the United States will “run” Venezuela, U.S. corporations will pour in “billions” to rebuild its energy sector, and they will take the wealth “out of the ground” so the operation “costs us nothing.” This is not drug policy. It is looting dressed up as law.

    The official story is a familiar Washington thriller: a rogue “narco‑dictator” plotting with guerrillas to flood U.S. streets with cocaine, forcing a reluctant empire to act. Yet U.S. and UN drug‑trade data tell a very different story. Venezuela is, at most, a side corridor in the hemispheric cocaine economy, while the overwhelming flows of narcotics into the United States come through the Eastern Pacific, Central America, and Mexico. 

    Serious monitoring has long estimated that only around 5–10 percent of Colombian cocaine transits Venezuela in a given year, while roughly 90 percent of U.S.‑bound cocaine uses Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routes dominated by Mexico‑based cartels. Some analyses of documented maritime shipments show that in a recent year barely 8 percent of sea‑borne South American cocaine departed via Venezuela and the southern Caribbean, with the rest hugging Pacific and Central American routes north. DEA threat assessments accordingly focus on Mexican cartels and synthetic opioids, often relegating Venezuela to a marginal note, if they mention it at all. The data destroy the U.S. case: the “narco‑state” narrative is not a description of reality but the script for an intervention.

    If the real goal were saving American lives from drugs, the targets are obvious. The fentanyl that is killing tens of thousands of Americans is overwhelmingly produced by Mexican organizations using chemical precursors sourced from Asia, not air‑dropped over the Caribbean by Venezuelan generals. Cocaine destined for U.S. cities overwhelmingly travels through Pacific and Central American routes controlled by Mexico‑based cartels, not through a marginal Atlantic detour. Yet Washington chose to bomb Venezuela and abduct its head of state, not to blockade Mexican cartels or meaningfully disrupt precursor supply chains. That choice betrays the truth: this is not a war on drugs. It is a war on a government sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and a warning to any state that dares to challenge U.S. energy dominance.

    The indictment itself exposes the weakness of the narco‑fable. It relies heavily on cooperating witnesses, sensational claims about a “Cartel of the Suns,” and a few notorious cases, such as the conviction of the “narco‑nephews” related to Maduro’s wife, while glossing over the basic fact that Venezuela neither grows coca nor manufactures synthetic opioids. No serious analyst denies that Venezuelan officers and officials have dipped their hands into trafficking; corruption inside the state is real and corrosive. But scattered corruption does not a hemispheric hub make, and the attempt to inflate every crooked colonel into proof of a unified state conspiracy reveals more about prosecutors’ ambition than about the actual geography of the drug trade. The “narco‑state” label functions less as an empirical category and more as a magic word, unlocking sanctions, military deployments, and—now—regime change.

    The military operation against Maduro shows just how convenient that label is. U.S. forces and allied actors executed a near‑perfect decapitation strike: seize the president, fly him to New York, and leave the rest of the machinery standing. If Venezuela were truly an intolerable “narco‑dictatorship,” one would expect the supposed cartel‑state to be dismantled, the institutions “liberated” from their criminal capture, and the security forces re‑founded. Instead, the same authoritarian, corrupt structures remain in place—only now they operate under a new balance of power, with Washington openly boasting that it will oversee the country’s transition and economy. The dictatorship has not fallen; it has changed landlords.

    Corruption, far from being eradicated, is the lubricant of this new arrangement. The very fact that elements of the Venezuelan armed forces and political class could be bought or persuaded to hand over Maduro is evidence that the regime’s moral rot is intact. Washington did not come to cleanse that rot; it came to use it. A pliable officer corps, a bureaucracy trained in clientelism, and a security apparatus habituated to repression are not obstacles to a foreign power—they are assets. They allow an outside actor to decapitate a leader, slap the label “transition” on the operation, and continue business as usual with a few new faces at the top and new signatures at the oil ministry.

    Trump’s own words remove any remaining doubt about what “business as usual” means. He has bragged that the United States will “run” Venezuela until a satisfactory transition occurs, that U.S. oil majors will invest the “billions” needed to restore production, and that Venezuelan crude will pay for the intervention. Major outlets report officials discussing how American companies will help “restore” output and export Venezuelan oil to global markets, including to rivals like China. In the same breath, Trump has floated the idea that “the hemisphere is in play” and hinted that Washington is reclaiming “what was ours in the past.” This is not the language of partnership or sovereignty. It is the language of empire recovering a lost concession, with oil contracts in one hand and an indictment in the other.

    Inside the United States, the way this was done reveals a parallel slide toward authoritarianism. Trump acted without a formal declaration of war, without robust congressional debate, and with legal rationales that stretch the notion of self‑defense to the breaking point. In effect, one man, backed by the permanent national‑security apparatus, decided to overthrow a foreign government, occupy its territory in all but name, and hand its key industry to private corporations—all while presenting this as law enforcement. Washington condemns Maduro as a dictator even as it normalizes the presidential prerogative to wage undeclared wars of regime change. If dictatorship means unchecked executive power fused with militarism and economic plunder, the finger does not point only south.

    The media chorus has largely gone along, amplifying the narco‑fable and muting the resource grab. Major outlets have repeated, with minimal scrutiny, claims that Venezuela is a central cocaine menace, even when drug‑trade experts cited in the same stories note that the evidence does not support such a dramatic role. Critical voices and UN‑linked analyses showing Venezuela’s marginal place in the global cocaine map have been pushed to the margins, treated as technical quibbles rather than as the demolition charges they are under the official narrative. When the facts and the story diverge, the story wins—backed by bombs, not by data.

    Strip away the propaganda and what remains is brutal simplicity. A superpower has used exaggerated and selectively framed drug charges to remove a hostile leader, keep his authoritarian machinery, and seize practical control over a vast pool of oil. Maduro, an undeniably authoritarian and corrupt figure, has been transformed into the necessary demon for a larger project: the normalization of twenty‑first‑century colonialism under the banner of the “war on drugs” and “democratic transition.” The question is no longer whether Maduro deserved to face justice—Venezuelans themselves had long reasons to oppose him—but whether the United States has any right to turn a country into a protectorate because its president is unpopular in Washington and its oil fields are attractive to Chevron.

    A president who boasts that he will “run” Venezuela and reclaim “what was ours in the past” is announcing a doctrine of permanent devouring, one in which Latin America is reduced again to a buffet of oil, gas, minerals, and cheap labor for a power that has been quietly pushed out by the big‑league players in Europe and Asia and now turns back to its “backyard” in search of easy prey. As U.S. influence erodes in Brussels and Beijing, the temptation grows to reassert dominance where the costs seem lower and the resistance more fragmented: will it be Mexico, eternally vilified as a fentanyl factory; Colombia, treated as a forward operating base rather than a sovereign nation; Brazil, with its Amazon and pre‑salt oil; or lithium‑rich Bolivia, already punished once for daring to industrialize its own wealth? A president who bombs first and never bothers to ask Congress has sketched a roadmap in which borderlines are negotiable but corporate concessions are sacred, and at some point the question ceases to be whether one man in Caracas deserved to fall and becomes whether an entire region is prepared to live forever as a colony of a superpower that no longer even pretends to respect its own constitution when it goes to war.

    References

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    2.U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. (2024). National Drug Threat Assessment.

    3.Washington Office on Latin America. (2021). Beyond the narcostate narrative: What U.S. drug trade monitoring data says about Venezuela.

    4.USA Today. (2025, December 9). Trump says Venezuela traffics lethal drugs into US. Experts disagree.

    5.Al Jazeera. (2025, October 24). The US warships off Venezuela aren’t there to fight drugs.

    6.NBC News. (2026, January 3). Trump says U.S. will govern Venezuela until there’s a “proper transition”.

    7.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 3). Trump says US will “run” Venezuela after Nicolas Maduro seized.

    8.Vox. (2026, January 3). Trump says the US is going to “run” Venezuela. What does that mean?

    9.Reuters. (2026, January 3). Trump says US oil companies will spend billions to restore Venezuela’s crude output.

    10.The Hill. (2026, January 3). Trump says US will “run” Venezuela, control oil production.

    11.U.S. Department of Justice. (2025). Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 current and former Venezuelan officials charged with narco‑terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking, and other criminal offenses.

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    14.Al Jazeera. (2025, September 4). Is Venezuela the big cocaine menace Trump claims it to be?

    15.FAIR. (2025, November 18). Corporate media parrot dubious drug claims that justify war on Venezuela.

    16.Statista / IntelliNews. (2025, November 18). Few cocaine shipments head north from Venezuela.

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    18.Venezuelanalysis. (2025, September 1). Oil geopolitics disguised as “war on drugs”.

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    21.Al Jazeera. (2025, December 4). Meet the US’s drug‑running friends: A history of narcotics involvement.

    22.BBC / CNN and related outlets (2025–2026). Coverage of Trump’s capture announcement and regional strategy.

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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