Intelligencer features writer Zack Cheney-Rice said the international community is increasingly viewing President Donald Trump as the world’s "most powerful thief," and they’re responding accordingly.
“It’s true that, in spite of the shocking developments of the past few weeks, there’s a creeping sense that we are witnessing a tale as old as time,” Cheney-Rice said of Trump’s announcement that he was using the U.S. military to steal Venezuela’s oil, and is even now trying to sell it off to leery oil CEOs for processing.
French president Emmanuel Macron recently accused the U.S. of turning away from the “international rules that it used to promote” and abandoning allies.
“Every day, people are wondering if Greenland will be invaded, or whether Canada will face the threat of becoming the 51st state,” Macron said. And when Trump suggested Mexico could be his next target, that nation’s leader Claudia Sheinbaum noticed and declared: “Intervention has never brought democracy, never generated well-being, nor lasting stability.”
“But there’s something going here on that supersedes any assertion of brute force or regional influence put forth when the U.S. was finding its footing as a global player. This isn’t the 19th century anymore; America is the world’s leading economic and military power,” Cheney-Rice said. “That its government is as disdainful of international sovereignty as it is of its own increasingly heavily policed residents makes it the world’s most powerful thief.”
This, said Cheney-Rice, has “become the defining feature of the current phase of American preeminence: robbery.”
“It is happening overseas, as Trump seeks to remake Venezuela into a U.S. vassal state, and at home, where he is stripping state governors of their authority and residents of their basic civil liberties and, as of January 7, their lives,” said Cheney-Rice. “Asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump replied, ‘My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.’”
And as White House advisor Stephen Miller told anchor Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning.”
And then there’s the scorn that Trump’s allies continue to heap on Minneapolis mom and ICE shooting victim Renee Good, which Cheney-Rice said can be seen “as an expression of the timeless authoritarian character of American policing.”
“State violence at home is justified at all costs, as are Trump’s decisions about which foreign nations to menace, and how,” said Cheney-Rice. “It’s not clear what the end result will be, but the effect is the firm establishment of a governing principle rooted in Trump’s declaration on Fox News soon after the raid: ‘Nobody can stop us.’”
Read the Intelligencer report at this link.
