Invasive Species

From warships off Venezuela to an empty seat at COP30, Trump’s America spreads like a blight across the hemisphere.

Good morning! The world’s largest aircraft carrier slid into Latin American waters this week like a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with the American psyche, loud, overcompensating, and armed to the teeth. The USS Gerald R. Ford, a floating $13 billion monument to dysfunction, has arrived off Venezuela under the banner of “anti-drug operations.” Washington swears it’s there to “bolster capacity” against illicit actors, which is Pentagon-speak for “we felt small and needed to flex.”

From Caracas, the view looks different. President Nicolás Maduro, who has spent years perfecting the art of dictatorship, suddenly finds himself playing reluctant David to Trump’s Goliath at sea. Venezuela’s military is on what it calls a “massive” defensive deployment, two hundred thousand troops, militias, missile brigades, and a smattering of Soviet-era hardware wheeled out for nostalgia. No one in Caracas actually saw military activity, but never mind, this is theater. Both sides are acting: Trump pretending it’s about narcotics, Maduro pretending it’s about sovereignty.

The collateral damage is real. Since September, U.S. forces have bombed twenty boats in international waters, killing seventy-six people, none of whom appear to have been charged with anything. Human-rights observers call it extrajudicial killing; Trump calls it leadership. Russia, always eager to play the moral authority in somebody else’s hemisphere, condemned the strikes as “lawless.” Which is true, though coming from Moscow it sounds like a mobster lecturing you on ethics.

While the Pentagon flexes abroad, Washington is dragging its own corpse of governance back across the marble floors of the Capitol. After a seven-week recess, Speaker Mike Johnson has finally reconvened the House to vote on reopening the government, because apparently democracy now works like an off-season resort. The shutdown has lasted forty-three days, idling hundreds of thousands of federal workers while Trump’s team repurposed leftover funds to pay soldiers and cops, the priorities of a regime that sees civil service as an inconvenience and the military as décor.

Johnson, the choirboy-turned-arsonist, declared the vote “the beginning of the end.” Which, given the trajectory of this administration, sounds about right. The stopgap bill runs through January 30 and conveniently avoids extending Affordable Care Act subsidies, because nothing says “fiscal responsibility” like sabotaging health insurance for millions. Democrats are furious, moderates are melting down, and the Freedom Caucus, of all people, is giddy. Andy Harris, who treats compromise like a communicable disease, now calls the deal “reasonable.” Translation: it gives Trump unchecked control over the purse strings until the midterms, so what’s not to love?

But the real show isn’t in the House chamber, it’s in the digital colosseum of MAGA meltdown. MeidasTouch captured it perfectly this week: “It’s all falling apart.” The once-messianic movement is eating its own tail. Polls show Democrats leading by seven points on a generic ballot, while MAGA influencers online are begging J.D. Vance to stage a dramatic resignation just to save face. Trump’s latest act of political self-harm was telling Laura Ingraham that Americans “don’t have talented people” and that the nation must import workers on H-1B visas because its citizens are too dumb to build things. Yes, the self-proclaimed defender of the working class just called the working class incompetent. The base responded with shock, profanity, and the kind of existential despair usually reserved for people who’ve just realized their messiah can’t spell “messiah.”

For an encore, Trump told the same audience that American universities would collapse without Chinese students, effectively admitting that U.S. higher education runs on foreign tuition. The MAGA faithful, who built an identity on xenophobia and delusion, did not take it well. Within hours, MAGA Twitter was ablaze with theories about blackmail, dementia, and demonic possession. When your movement’s influencers are using the phrase “full heel turn,” you’ve officially entered Season Eight of the apocalypse.

As MeidasTouch pointed out, the administration is now citing DoorDash press releases as economic data, literally replacing the Bureau of Labor Statistics with take-out metrics. Trump’s Transportation Secretary, a former MTV reality-show contestant, confessed on air, “I can’t guarantee your safety,” proving that the administration’s metaphorical chaos has at last become literal. Congress, meanwhile, debated amendments to stop taxpayers from subsidizing Trump’s new $350 million ballroom for his billionaire donors. Representative Jim McGovern, returning from the long Republican vacation, greeted them with the enthusiasm of a parent catching teenagers sneaking in after curfew: “Where the hell have you been?”

And just when it seemed the circus couldn’t get darker, the Epstein files resurfaced with enough radioactive power to light the swamp. House Democrats released a batch of emails showing Jeffrey Epstein bragging that Donald Trump “spent hours” at his home with one of Epstein’s victims. In separate notes to Michael Wolff, Epstein wrote flatly, “Of course he knew about the girls.” Wolff advised him to let Trump “hang himself”, a phrase that now doubles as prophecy. With Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva sworn in today as the 218th vote, the House can force a floor vote to release the full cache of Epstein records, bypassing Mike Johnson’s blockade. For Trump, whose every scandal now overlaps like bad wallpaper, this could be the one that peels all the way to the studs.

While the U.S. drowns in moral failure and administrative rot, the rest of the world gathered in Belém, Brazil, to discuss the survival of the planet, and the United States couldn’t be bothered to attend. The COP30 climate summit convened beneath the Amazon canopy, where indigenous leaders and scientists pleaded for a livable future. The official U.S. seat was empty. No delegation, no envoy, no conscience.

Into that vacuum stepped California Governor Gavin Newsom, the nation’s most senior attending American official and possibly its last functioning adult. Newsom didn’t waste the opportunity. He called Trump an “invasive species,” a “wrecking-ball president,” and accused him of trying to “recreate the nineteenth century.” He promised that Trump’s plan to open the California coast for oil drilling would happen “over my dead body.” The audience in Belém applauded; somewhere in Palm Beach, Trump probably started Googling “is sea water flammable.”

Newsom’s delegation of mayors and governors, the so-called alternate U.S. delegation, has been treated as the real face of American climate policy, a coalition of states saying, “We’re still in, even if Washington isn’t.” Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris Agreement, said America’s absence was actually a blessing: “Ciao, bambino.” Newsom laughed and agreed. “He pulled away. That’s why I pulled up,” he said. If democracy dies in darkness, at least California brought a solar panel.

So here we are: a government reopening not out of principle but exhaustion; a president too erratic for his own cult; a Congress haunted by Epstein’s ghosts; and a climate summit where the United States exists only as a cautionary tale told by its own governor. The empire’s still moving, but mostly by inertia, a flaming zeppelin insisting it’s a sunrise.

That’s where I’ll leave it for today. Between putting the finishing touches on a long-overdue sustainability essay and indulging Marz’s ongoing campaign to convince me that romping is a full-time job, I’m stretched about as thin as the last layer of ozone over the Amazon. I’ll be back up to full speed on the political commentary soon, there’s far too much madness unfolding to stay quiet for long.