He Can Command Troops. He Cannot Command Cheers.

The Trump regime’s lawless grab for power is colliding with global backlash, domestic repression, and a world that’s quietly refusing to play along.

Good morning. The Trump regime appears to have decided law, consent, and reality itself are optional, and is now acting accordingly. Let’s start with the headline that sounds like satire but unfortunately is not: Donald Trump spent the weekend flirting with the idea that he is the “acting president of Venezuela.” This came via a Truth Social post styled to look like a Wikipedia page, because if you’re going to announce imperial authority, why not do it with clip art. Officially, Trump has no title in Venezuela. Practically, he keeps saying things like “we’re in charge,” which is a phrase that tends to age poorly when spoken out loud on Air Force One.

After the U.S. abducted Nicolás Maduro and hauled him into custody, Venezuela’s existing power structure was largely left intact. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president and oil minister, was sworn in as interim president, a move the Trump administration is quietly tolerating while loudly insisting that Washington still calls the shots. Trump has demanded Rodríguez cut ties with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, give U.S. companies preferential access to oil, and behave, or else. Elections are promised eventually, in the same way Trump promises infrastructure: always future tense, never scheduled.

Why Venezuela? Why now? Because beneath the bluster is panic. As analysts at UNFTR have been laying out, Trump’s tariff tantrums, dollar weaponization, and outright seizure of a foreign government may be less about oil than about petrodollars, the fragile system that props up U.S. financial dominance. Trump has turned the United States into such an unreliable, belligerent trade partner that major economies are accelerating plans to bypass the dollar entirely. BRICS is building alternative settlement systems. New trade blocs are forming without the US, and the dollar is sliding. Next year, the Treasury needs to refinance roughly $9 trillion in debt. As US legitimacy evaporates, force is the fallback, and the spectacle we see is the natural result.

To Greenland, Iran, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Minneapolis. When you think about it, the self-declared “president” of Venezuela is also threatening to invade half the globe and is presently invading American cities. That’s a serious personality disorder but with a nuclear budget.

Abroad, the consequences are no longer hypothetical. A growing international movement is now calling for a boycott of the U.S.-hosted World Cup this summer, (not as glorious as a nationwide general strike might be), but as something Trump actually fears: public embarrassment. Fans are canceling tickets. Travelers are saying they won’t enter a country where ICE raids, arbitrary detention, and disappearing people have become policy, and FIFA, reportedly, is nervous. A hollow World Cup, empty seats, canceled travel, global warnings, would puncture Trump’s favorite fantasy: that he is universally admired, feared, and applauded. He can stuff the applause right into his inaugural FIFA peace prize. He may for the time being command troops, he doesn’t command respect.

The administration continues dismantling the rule of law at home with industrial efficiency. In Minneapolis, the FBI’s response to an ICE agent shooting and killing an unarmed woman, Renee Nicole Good, has not been to aggressively investigate the shooter, but to investigate her. Federal authorities are examining Good’s political associations, her activism, her beliefs. Trump has already declared her a “professional agitator.” JD Vance called the killing “classic terrorism.” Kristi Noem said she “weaponized” her car. The civil rights division at DOJ? Unbelievably, not expected to open a case. The message is unmistakable: if federal agents kill you, the question is not what they did, but who you were.

This logic is spreading. We’ve talked before about how companies like SpaceX police “ideological speech” internally, treating dissent as disloyalty and belief itself as a threat. The Trump administration has now scaled that model to the state, explicitly redefining ideology as a security risk and ethical restraint as operational sabotage. As Pete Hegseth put it bluntly, “Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us.” In this framework, protest becomes extremism, opposition becomes terrorism, and guardrails are dismissed as bureaucratic blockers. “Barriers to progress will be treated as operational risks, not bureaucratic inconveniences.” Guilt no longer flows forward from evidence, but backward from ideology, enforced at what the administration repeatedly calls “wartime speed.”

That framework was made explicit in a recent speech by Pete Hegseth delivered at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, a privately owned rocket complex that Elon Musk has successfully converted into a legally recognized city. Hegseth chose Starbase as the backdrop to announce a sweeping overhaul of Pentagon innovation policy, openly holding up Musk’s management style as the template for governance. Senior military leaders toured the factory in advance, and the address was framed as part of an “arsenal of freedom” initiative aimed at accelerating militarized AI, space systems, and weapons development by stripping away ethical oversight, bureaucratic checks, and civilian constraints, including the announcement that Musk’s Grok AI would be integrated alongside major tech platforms into Pentagon networks, both classified and unclassified. The message was unmistakable: this is the future of American warfare, built in places like this, by people like this, and governed by the same rules.

Last night in New York, City Council leaders held an emergency press conference after ICE detained a New York City Council employee, a data analyst with legal work authorization through October 2026, when he showed up for a routine court appearance on Long Island. He complied, attended his check-in, and was detained anyway. When the City Council tried to contact the ICE facility, the phone number didn’t work. The Speaker of the Council couldn’t reach the federal agency holding her own employee. The man was allowed one phone call. He called HR.

This is the system Trump’s DHS has built: show up and be punished; skip your appointment and be hunted. People are quietly transferred to detention centers in other states where immigration courts have been purged of judges who won’t comply. All this by the acting president of Venezuela…

According to a New York Times investigation, the Pentagon’s first strike in Trump’s so-called “war” on drug cartels used an aircraft deliberately painted to look like a civilian plane. It flew low enough for the people on a targeted boat to see it, tricking them into believing they were not under military threat. Then it fired. Eleven people died. Two survivors later waved from the wreckage, and were killed in a follow-up strike. Retired military lawyers are blunt: even if you accept Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict, disguising a combat aircraft as civilian to gain tactical advantage is perfidy, a war crime. The U.S. once prosecuted others for the same crime. The administration has since switched to visibly military aircraft.

Put it all together, and the picture is clear. Trump “governs” by declaration. By donor check, threat, force, anything but actual deal making or God forbid, diplomacy. He declares himself in charge of foreign countries, sidelines military lawyers, investigates victims instead of shooters, and detains people who follow the rules. Now the world is responding with canceled tickets, closed wallets, and a slow, collective refusal to take part in the spectacle. Peaceful responses so far, but will it last?

This isn’t the collapse of America in a single moment. It’s something more banal and more dangerous: the steady normalization of lawlessness, wrapped in flags, tariffs, and press releases. Once you see the pattern, it’s impossible to unsee it.