Pirates of the Caribbean, Washington Edition

Oil tankers, gold visas, and a foreign policy held together with duct tape and delusion.

Good morning! The country woke up today acting less like a constitutional democracy and more like a particularly wealthy pirate guild with a central bank. Not even 48 hours into this news cycle and the transformation is now complete enough that even Rand Paul, Rand Paul!, is on television clutching his pearls and muttering that Trump’s Venezuelan tanker seizure “sounds a lot like the beginning of a war.” When the Senate’s leading doomsday prepper thinks we might be picking a fight we can’t explain, you know something has gone off-script.

The Guardian’s live blog captured the vibe perfectly: a U.S. helicopter landing on a sanctioned tanker off Venezuela’s coast, FBI agents and the Coast Guard pouring out like the world’s least relatable action movie, and Pam Bondi uploading the raw footage to X as if the Justice Department had decided to pivot into content creation, followed minutes later by DHS releasing its own hype reel, complete with LL Cool J, just in case anyone missed the point. Venezuela responded with the diplomatic equivalent of “WTF?” and called the seizure “an act of international piracy,” which unfortunately only highlights the emerging theme of the week: they’re not wrong.

Trump, asked about ownership of the ship, said only: “We’ve just seized a tanker… the largest one ever seized actually,” and then, when pressed about what happens to the oil, delivered the line that will live forever in the annals of imperial honesty: “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.” In past eras, presidents at least pretended to respect maritime law; today we get the rhetorical equivalent of Captain Jack Sparrow in a red tie.

Europe is gently losing its mind. Trump spent Wednesday telling reporters that his call with Starmer, Macron, and Merz featured “pretty strong words,” which is the presidential code phrase for “I told our allies they were wasting my time.” He dangled U.S. participation in the next round of Ukraine peace talks like a substitute teacher threatening detention, insisting he needed “some things” answered first, unspecified, undefined, and probably no more real than the 20–25% GDP he says we deserve if the Fed would “stop killing our growth.”

Europe’s version of events? They described it as a “critical moment” and are scrambling to keep the process alive while Trump toys with skipping the weekend summit because he is, spiritually speaking, the guy in the group project who shows up at the last minute and demands to be team captain.

Zelenskyy, caught between Russian armor, aerial bombardment, and Trump’s insistence that he hasn’t held an election recently enough for Washington’s taste, looked exhausted on camera as he told reporters that, sure, Ukraine is ready for elections, just as soon as the U.S. and EU provide the security, the funding, the logistics, and presumably the anti-aircraft coverage necessary to keep polling places from being shelled. Nothing says democracy like holding a national vote while your cities are on fire to satisfy the Americans.

If there’s a glimmer of sanity in this week’s geopolitical psychodrama, it came from an unexpected place: Congress. In an exceedingly rare moment of institutional competence, the House pushed forward a $900 billion defense bill that not only rebukes Trump’s plan to hollow out Europe-based U.S. forces but outright bars him from lowering troop levels for more than 45 days. It even locks in $400 million in Ukraine aid so that American commitments aren’t dependent on whether Trump had a good golf shot that morning. This is the closest Congress has come to childproofing the presidency since Watergate.

While all of this was happening, Jerome Powell stepped out like a man who might genuinely prefer Venezuelan airspace to another minute of Trump’s economic monologues. In calm and soothing tones befitting a hostage negotiator, Powell explained that inflation “remains somewhat elevated,” growth is sluggish, the labor market is cooling, tariffs raise prices, and the Fed can’t just drop rates because the president wants to juice campaign-season numbers. It was the softest possible way of saying Trump’s economic claims are about as tied to reality as the gold card visa program he rolled out this week, the one that allows wealthy foreigners to buy a “direct path to Citizenship!” while poor migrants are subjected to raids, ideological screenings, and five years of social media audits simply for wanting to visit Disneyland.

In any other era, a $1 million green-card fast lane would be the headline crime. Today it competes with oil seizures, European panic, World Cup immigration chaos, insider-trading accusations involving LNG barons, and a Fed chair forced to publicly contradict the president’s imaginary job numbers. It’s getting hard to keep track of which part of the system isn’t on fire.

And so we arrive at the truth that unites this entire week’s news: from the tanker raid to the gold visas to the Europe snub to the pressure campaign on Ukraine to Powell’s quiet dissent, the United States isn’t acting like a superpower at all. It’s acting like a rogue nation, a country that no longer believes rules apply to it, that treats allies as inconveniences, that treats migrants as suspects, that treats natural resources as trophies, and that treats its own institutions as speed bumps.

And that brings us to our closing kicker, one that Powell himself practically wrote for us:

Trump insists the economy is roaring, inflation is dead, 3% growth should be 25%, and America is “the hottest country in the world.” Powell, in contrast, gently noted that the labor market is softening, growth is flat, inflation is not gone, and tariffs are pushing prices up. Translation: the president is drawing a cartoon of the economy while the Fed is trying to prevent the cartoon from detonating.

The American Rogue Nation now has an economic doctrine to match its foreign-policy swagger: If reality contradicts the president, reality must be wrong.
This is the logic behind the tanker, behind the gold cards, and the logic behind berating Europe. Now it is the logic behind Trump’s economics.

For decades, the U.S. lectured the world about the dangers of strongmen who seize resources, intimidate allies, monetize citizenship, and bully central banks. Today, we don’t have to look abroad for examples. We can simply peer out the window.