Might is right is the philosophy behind the Trump administration’s decision to kidnap Nicolás Maduro.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speak with members of the National Guard during a visit to Union Station on August 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Al Drago-Pool / Getty Images)
Last Sunday, Stephen Miller, the chief wingman to the newly minted neo-imperialist Donald Trump, wrote an extraordinary post on X. For its brazen rewriting of history, it is worth reading in full:
None of this is true: The 18th and 19th century colonial projects were never about making the natives wealthy and successful‚ any more than slavery was about improving the condition of the slaves—a ludicrous and offensive position that Lost Cause advocates still argue. Colonialism was—and is—about the use of raw power to accumulate more power, more resources, more markets, more military bases, and more cheap and expendable labor. Miller’s “reverse colonization,” or—to use language not borrowed from Nazis such as Anders Breivik—a more liberal, race-neutral immigration system, never gave preferential treatment to new residents or naturalized citizens, but it did attract labor and talent and investments and dreamers from across the world.
Allowing more immigration was—and is—not about “self-punishment”; it’s about keeping countries economically dynamic. Immigrants—be they refugees, asylum seekers, or any other visa holders—start companies, provide needed medical and homecare skills, staff child care centers, and pick the crops that homegrown populations have long since decided they don’t want to pick. Take away immigration and remove immigrants, and you have a smaller, meaner, narrower, and poorer culture left behind.
Of course, the fact that Miller’s white-supremacist philosophy is based on lies and historically untenable claims should surprise no one. This is a political regime that, like all authoritarian regimes, thrives on misinformation and a Stalinesque rewriting of history to suit the needs of the moment. Witness the efforts by the White House this week around the fifth anniversary of the Trump-inspired insurrection to recast the murderous MAGA mob as peace-loving protesters attacked by the Capitol police at the behest of Nancy Pelosi. There is a Goebbels-like quality to their realization that if you simply repeat the Big Lie loudly and frequently enough, it will gain traction. They have embraced the Orwellian notion that if you use the levers of state power to maximize your propaganda, a shockingly large number of people will eventually accept that two-plus-two equals five.
For Lucan Way, a distinguished professor of democracy at the University of Toronto who has been writing on America’s slide into “competitive authoritarianism,” the GOP’s collaboration with Trump’s rewrite of January 6 is the clearest indication that the party as a whole has abandoned its commitment to democracy. “The GOP’s open embrace of authoritarianism is,” he said, “the most important fact of the American political system.”
Way believes that the United States has been functionally authoritarian since March, when Trump 2.0 began its onslaught against law firms that represented Democrats and advocacy organizations and against universities that the administration argued were too “woke” in their approach to academics. “In a democracy, we can oppose the government, and we don’t face a cost to our careers. In an authoritarian regime, you have to worry about contracts, about being investigated by the DOJ. That’s clearly the case in the US.”
This week, the fanaticism and authoritarianism of Miller, the fluffer-in-chief for Trump’s masturbatory fantasies of aggrandizement, has been on full display. In addition to embracing Breivik’s foul anti-immigration creed, he also espoused Hitler’s philosophy of international relations. “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in which he asserted that the United States would seize Greenland and its vast mineral resources, refusing to rule out the use of military force to accomplish that aim. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
In other words, we are big and have a military with almost unlimited capacity to inflict harm, so—be you allies like Denmark or longtime foes like Venezuela—bend to our will or expect to get the shit kicked out of you.
Might is right is the philosophy behind the Trump administration’s decision to kidnap the admittedly odious leader of Venezuela, to hold a gun to the head of the remaining leadership after that act of international piracy, and to promptly steal tens of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil—to be sold by the United States on the open market with the profits personally controlled by one Donald J. Trump. What is unfolding is no different from the Elizabethan era privateers who, with government support, would ransack ships on the high seas, steal their treasures, and head back to England to add to the riches of the country’s crown.
Pretty it up with statements about investment opportunities for hedge funds, oil companies, and other corporate raiders, and you’re still left with the taste of vinegar in your mouth. The raid into Venezuela was never about restoring democracy or protecting human rights or raising the quality of life for the tens of millions of Venezuelans who have languished under Maduro’s nutty dictatorship—it was always about the United States enriching itself on another country’s oil reserves. “This is not America First,” Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts noted. “This is Authoritarianism First.”
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And if Trump goes next into Colombia or Cuba or Panama or even Denmark, you can bet your bottom crypto dollar that it will also have zero to do with human rights and everything to do with accessing resources that America’s gold-and-baubles-obsessed modern-day Midas craves.
“They’re not pushing for democracy or economic development or peace,” said Antonia Juhasz, an investigative journalist who has written several books on the oil industry and the influence that that industry exerts over US politics. “It was all about getting Maduro out,” and then installing a deputy who will do the United States’ bidding when it comes to oil demands.
While the United States has fought many wars over oil, Juhasz told me that past administrations felt that they had to at least produce some sort of fictive justification under international law. “What makes it [the attack on Venezuela] different is the Trump administration is making no effort to abide by international law at all. This is a very public action; it’s not a secret mission. It’s the public removal of the president of another country without any feint toward legality.” And that opens the door to a 21st-century jungle in which the strongest simply consume the weak.
For Juhasz, what we are seeing is the consolidation of an informal alliance of authoritarians whose power is propped up by the vast amounts of money generated by the fossil fuel industry. “The Trump administration’s effort to control the Western Hemisphere and to do that through energy and to prop up fossil fuels further aligns Trump with his favorite authoritarians, Putin and Mohammed bin Salman. It divides up the world into spheres, which allows authoritarians to dominate their spheres of influence.”
This is what American authoritarianism looks and sounds like. It is an ugly beast from head to toe.
As I wrapped up this column, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot dead a peaceful protester as she was attempting to drive away after blocking a road to ICE vehicles. Witnesses say that when they tried to help her, armed ICE officers prevented them from reaching the scene. It is a tragedy that has been in the making for the past year. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, made a furious speech in response. “To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” Frey said. “People are being hurt, families are being ripped apart…and now, somebody is dead. That’s on you. And it’s also on you to leave. It’s on you to make sure further damage, further loss of life and limb is not done.” He denounced ICE’s claim that the agent fired in self-defense as “garbage,” as was Kristi Noem’s absurd attempted justification of the killing by labelling the victim a “domestic terrorist.”
I hope that Frey’s message is heard. I fear, instead, that the federal government is going to ramp up its military occupation of cities. In these darkest of times, people of good conscience in the United States must stand tall and resist this authoritarianism that seeks to wreck all that is good at home and to export its carnage around the earth.
Sasha AbramskySasha Abramsky is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. His latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order and will be released in January.