MAGA Downs Bush Light

Bah gawd! That’s James Monroe’s music!!

Recall the National Security Strategy memo the Trump administration distributed digitally last month? The one that reoriented Uncle Sam’s sights southward, away from the conflagrant foibles of Europe to lands more proximate to our shores?

Me neither. There was the usual amount of legacy-paper editorial boards rubbing their chins over its dismissal of the sluggard Continent. Other than a few grey-whiskered policy boffins jittering over their Starbucks at the American Enterprise Institute, it made little a bump.

Turns out we were to take President Trump both literally and seriously. Eye-watering doggerel about “no competing powers physically dominant in our [h]emisphere” wasn’t bravado. It was a conscious statement with material effect. Namely, dispatching Delta commandos to black bag a socialist dictator in the dead of the night.

Finally: a white paper with real action! What new wonk wonder is on deck? The Tax Foundation printing its umpteenth study on the benefits of reducing marginal capital gains rates, concurring with Mayor Mamdani whisked away from Gracie Mansion and force-read Milton Friedman tracts? Print, then proceed—every “West Wing” binger’s wet dream.

President Trump siccing our huzzars to pinch Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro out of his gilded canopy bed, clad in velveteen undercrackers, was an epochal shift, according to holders of international relations degrees from mid-tier universities, igniting a novel dispensation, a rescrambling of foreign power-competition, and a spanking new world order, in which America cracks an iodized whip over its longitudinal realm.

Or it could be a one-off cuff spree goaded on by Maduro mocking the President’s signature shuffle. NB to world leaders: do not, under any circumstance, imitate Trump’s YMCA jig. MDC, Brooklyn only has so many cells.

The high-level-causal-game-theory-prisoner’s-dilemma-war-game hypotheticals are best left to the rumpled-belly “analysts” who line their Boeing-funded think tank corner offices with first-edition Kissingers and the perfunctory Russia Leaves the War. And for the question of whether the administration’s inbreaking op was legal? Better bandied about on summit stage by bald men in JCPenney suits at a 3-star hotel that serves burnt coffee between sessions.

As with anything this President does, the reaction constitutes a clinic in itself. Trump just swatted an irritant that presidents, from R to D, agreed was deserving of deposition. Right on cue, Democrats, who, up until a few months ago, declared Maduro a tinpot kleptocrat needing an arsenic cocktail, cried foul. But they bleat fury any time the orange oligarch belches Diet Coke vapor.

Bill Kristol, the former neocon adventurist turned turquoise partisan, is forswearing earthly pleasure to a degree that makes a fakir look like Dionysus. The erstwhile Iraq War champion is abstaining from greasily rubbing his palms and licking his chops over Maduro’s booking. Award Billy the gold for Olympic-level self control!

Never-Trumpers can’t help but Never-Trump, even if they’ve long supported Lady Liberty as global constable. But what of the flipside? The rah-rah MAGA simps who’ve spent the past decade decrying “forever wars”? Surely they’re incensed by the President’s wanton waste of our military to nab one baddie on a planet full of despots. Right? Right!?

Wrong. The anti-globalist grandee himself, Alex Jones, gushed over Trump’s southron snatching. “Thomas Jefferson would’ve gone to war with Venezuela!” he assured his skeptical audience. T.J. would have also mingled fluoride in his well water.

Jones’s epigone, the mayo-supremist goblin Nick Fuentes, also endorsed the Caracas corvusing despite his screeching nativism. “TAKE THE OIL” he instructed the President. Is he afraid “da Joooos” will get to it first?

Granted, Alex and Nick are two peas in a demented pod. But what of the slightly less zany, but just as click-craven, MAGAfluencers? The incessant tweeters who insisted Kamala Harris would needlessly spill pools of American blood in far-off deserts? Maybe a misgiving or word of caution from their well-followed accounts?

Nowise on crossing Dear Leader! The usual barking cadre of Trumpy viralists kicked their heels, spun their skirts, and punched their pom poms like The Weekly Standard staff on “Mission Accomplished” day. The Twitter pelf proved all too sweet.

Meanwhile, President Trump divulged to The New York Times that we—meaning Washington bureaucrats funded by Joe Taxpayer—will be overseeing Venezuela indefinitely. Nation-building, we hardly knew ye. Nor is our throwback president finished. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is threatening to tickle Raúl Castro’s catastrophe. No oil to be had on the tiny isle, but I’m sure we’ll be keeping the Chevy Bel Airs.

In defining the de rigueur ideology of “post-liberalism,” of which MAGA is a thick strain, Ross Douthat wrote that it often “veers among crankery, half-baked programs, and personalist cults.” The only ingredient he missed is grifters.

The America-Firsters immolated whatever smidgen of principle they had, not for Wales, but Elonbucks.