The FAFO Boys Are About to Find Out

The US is being run by a bunch of guys from the back of high school detention room

You have to admit, it was one of the weirdest news conferences ever.

It was not just that the president of the United States was announcing the illegal invasion of another country or the abduction of the guy who has been running the country for the past dozen years. Nor was it that he could barely read his prepared statement, slurred his words, and seemed ready to drift off to sleep when his aides spoke.

We’ve seen all that before. We have invaded countries on false pretenses. Hell, we have made violating international laws one of the hallmarks of our foreign policy throughout the past eight decades during which we had promoted ourselves as the champions of international law. We have snatched foreign leaders before. And we have certainly seen Trump act as though his brain were floating in a sea of oatmeal laced with Xanax.

But there were aspects to Saturday’s news conference that were so weird, off-putting and likely to have unpleasant unintended consequences that they are worth noting.

To begin with, the guys at the front of the room, Trump and those flanking him, seemed to have been cast straight out of an eighties movie about high-school fuck-ups. You had all the stock characters there. Hegseth—the wannabe jock who has no idea how dumb he really is. Rubio—the nerd that has gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd and keeps trying to show off how tough he wishes he were. John Ratcliffe—the extra who has no lines who is added to the gang to make it look gangier. Dan “Raisin’” Caine—the clean cut one who is headed to the military because he is at his best when he is being told what to do. Stephen Miller—the “quiet” one who always seems like he’d rather be back home in his basement pulling the legs off of insects. And Trump—The kid who seems bigger than the others because he has been held back seven times and is actually already in his mid-twenties. (The only kind of tests he can pass are cognitive tests which he boasts that he aces, even though each is being administered to determine whether or not he has any degenerative mental condition.)

Like high school kids, they play at what they think grown-ups who knew what they were doing would be like if they were in charge of the United States of America. They talk tough. They are more eager to display their manhood than any kind of competence. The vibe was clearest during the press conference when Hegseth framed the attack by saying that “Maduro f-ed around and he found out.” It was clear Trump liked this. They all got puffed up because Hegseth very nearly said a bad word. Rubio mimicked the formulation later but was a little to timid to even say “f-ed” because he was worried someone at home would wash his mouth out with soap. Still, it was apparent that they all wanted to appear like tough guys.

Of course, here’s the problem: They are the ones who are fucking around and we’re all about to find out…and pay…the price of their fuckery.

Because whereas as past U.S. governments have done things as unjustifiable and plain wrong as this whole crazy cooked up “war” with Venezuela, two things were true. One is they planned what they would do after their invasion was complete at least a little better than did these clowns who clearly were making it up as they went along. And the second is that even with that advance planning and even with competent-ish adults in charge, past such efforts at regime change and past oil wars have all turned out badly.

Indeed, lessons of foreign policy that are right up there with “never enter a land war in Asia” (R.I.P. Rob Reiner) are don’t try to do regime change, don’t enter oil wars, and don’t have your country run by a bunch of incompetent nitwits. Because war is about dealing with unintended consequences in the best of cases. And this, clearly, is not going to be one of those.

A word is in order here about Caine and the military. Caine was clearly the odd man out at yesterday’s event. He was buttoned down and appear to have led a complicated professional and at least initially successful mission. Many media reports since have focused on the mastery of the military in this regard. But as many moving parts as were involved in the undertaking, there were a few elements of it that hardly reflected well on Caine or his fellow top brass. Those are:

• The mission was illegal and should not have been undertaken

• The U.S. devoted disproportionately massive resources to achieve a very narrow goal—extricating Maduro and his wife

• There were high human costs that were ignored at the Trump presser—40 Venezuelans reportedly died during the so-called “law enforcement operation” raising the toll of this prolonged anti-Venezuela engagement to about 150 actual once-living human beings with families many or all of whom did not deserve to die.

• Caine is over-seeing the degrading of the U.S. military to becoming an adjunct law enforcement agency…a fact made clear when Trump went off on an unscripted mental walkabout describing how “effective” his (also illegal) deployment of the U.S. military to American cities have been.

• And finally, one well-coordinated mission does not a long-term plan make. And clearly, Caine must know that the demands on the military of a prolonged stay in Venezuela, “running the country” as Trump asserted the U.S. would do, and seizing oil assets (which Trump continues to erroneously assert were “stolen” from the U.S.) are going to be large, unpredictable, potentially dangerous and therefore the kind of thing that ought to have been thought out in a little more depth before this misadventure was undertaken.

This last point is one of the key takeaways from the event. When Trump glibly asserted that the U.S. would be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future, he clearly had no idea how that would happen. He asserted it was being worked on and then, fumbling for specifics about the “how” and the “who” of it, he suggested that the guys next to him and he would be the ones calling the shots. Colonialist and nutty as that all is, it would be (somewhat) less problematic if Trump actually knew what the shots that needed to be called were.

But he had no idea. In fact, his only idea was that we would run the place until there could be a smooth, secure transition…and that what he actually meant by that was that we would run it until we could take over Venezuela’s oil fields and starting pumping out some of that nasty dirty Venezuela crude. The whole “this was a law enforcement operation” nonsense went out the window with that as this operation was clearly just the opposite—a massive armed robbery on a scale seldom not seen in the world since Trump’s role model Putin began trying to seize Ukraine and Ukrainian assets by force. And Trump’s promise that we’d carve out a bit of what we stole and pass it along to the Venezuelans so that they were “taken care of” made the entire job seem even more like a mob operation than it had before.

Another problem with the picture was revealed in subsequent stories suggesting that the big, beautiful American oil companies Trump said would come in and handle the theft on behalf of the United States apparently are none too eager to get involved. Either that or they are feigning disinterest in order to get an even bigger slice of the pie. In either case, once again, it has become apparent that one of the most important aspects of this whole undertaking—the one likely to produce the most complications and potentially the most risk—has not been fully thought out.

Details, details.

Speaking of unintended consequences, in the course of Saturday, Trump and his sidekicks also threatened further military intervention against the president of Colombia, against Mexico and against Cuba. (Prior targets Panama and Greenland were not mentioned but they certainly must be seen to remain as targets of what Trump now proudly boasts of as the “Donroe Doctrine,” his formula for U.S. “domination” of the Americas.

In other words, what Trump and his team were suggesting is that we have entered a new phase in American foreign policy. Yes, we’ve done oil wars and illegal wars before. But this would be much, much stupider and much, much less constrained by common sense, Congressional oversight (what’s that again?), or any hint of respect for international law (wait, there’s something Trump respects even less than U.S. law, the Constitution or our institutions?) It could therefore get much bigger and messier before we are all done, especially if every move were as badly planned as this one has been.

Sidebar: If you thought attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a coup attempt (as it was), that ain’t nothing compared to going to war without Congressional oversight (mocking it during the news conference, saying Congress could not be trusted with the information…even as it had apparently been leaked to the NY Times, the Washington Post and spoonfed to Bari Weiss News) along with Congress ceding power to tax and spend to the White House. There has been, with the aide of the spineless, visionless leaders in out Congress, the effective erasure of an entire branch of the U.S. government. Article 1, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, our Constitution is being fed into a shredder as we speak.

While these guys may be the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, the bumbling, preening idiots from the back of a high school detention room, they are now in charge of the most powerful military on earth and they intend to use it as only idiots would—without a real plan, without having thought through the consequences of their actions, driven only by impulse, character flaws and greed. (And part of their approach, if you read the recent National Security Strategy, is to let other bully-states do the same so long as they don’t get in our way while we pillage our hemisphere.)

It is virtually certain that this Venezuela operation will turn into a big mess with a heaping side order of corruption. But it is also pretty clear it is one of those giant errors that can lead to further screw ups and even disasters.

In other words, the Fuck Around and Find Out (FAFO) Boys, have started to fuck around and they are about to find out what happens when venal boobs with no sense of history or responsibility launch into reckless follies like the one unfolding in Venezuela now.