The Performance And The Price

Tren de Aragua justified deportations. Transformer shortages exposed the grid. Coal got the subsidies. Trump's governing principle is always the same: protect the powerful, send everyone else the bill

Good morning! One of the more durable lessons of the Trump era is that a threat remains existential only until the person behind it becomes useful.

For more than a year, Donald Trump and his administration have presented Tren de Aragua as something close to an invading army: a transnational terrorist organization dispatched by the Venezuelan government to infiltrate the United States, terrorize American communities and justify a deportation apparatus built to move first and ask questions only after the plane lands.

The gang’s name became load-bearing. It helped transform Venezuelan migrants from human beings fleeing political collapse into a suspect population. It supplied the menace needed for mass designations, expedited removals and the steady erosion of due process. Alleged association became evidence. Tattoos became dossiers. Suspicion became verdict.

ProPublica reports that the Trump administration has been working directly with Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s powerful interior and justice minister, even though Chilean prosecutors are investigating whether he hired Tren de Aragua to kidnap and murder an exiled Venezuelan dissident.

Cabello is not some minor functionary whose name got lost on a State Department spreadsheet. He remains under U.S. indictment on drug-trafficking charges. The American government has offered a $25 million reward for him. He has long been accused of overseeing political repression and working with criminal organizations. Three witnesses in the Chilean investigation have allegedly implicated him in the abduction and killing of Lt. Ronald Ojeda, a former Venezuelan military officer who had received asylum in Chile after opposing Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Ojeda was taken from his apartment in Santiago before dawn by men disguised as police officers. He was dragged away in front of his wife and child, tortured and killed, and his body was buried beneath a cement floor. Chilean prosecutors believe Tren de Aragua carried out the operation and are examining whether Cabello ordered it.

Yet Cabello has not been isolated, arrested or handed over. He has sat in meetings with senior Trump officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, while the United States negotiates over Venezuela’s mining sector, oil wealth and political future. He recently participated in discussions with the head of U.S. Southern Command. The administration, which once cited the Ojeda killing as evidence of Tren de Aragua’s links to the Venezuelan government, now has remarkably little to say about the man accused of commissioning it.

That silence is transactional. Former U.S. diplomat Todd Robinson told ProPublica that leaving Cabello in place raises the question of whether Washington’s professed commitment to the rule of law is genuine or merely “a cover for its interests in exploiting Venezuela’s oil.” His conclusion was admirably undiplomatic: “It’s just a horrible, horrible idea to leave him in place.”

Another former diplomat, Brian Naranjo, described the bargain even more plainly: “As long as he figures out a way to keep handing over things the Trump administration wants, I think he endures.”

There it is. The foreign policy doctrine of the second Trump administration, reduced to a sentence fit for embroidery.

Cabello endures because Cabello can deliver.

The contrast with Rafael Gámez could scarcely be more revealing. Gámez, the alleged Tren de Aragua figure accused of organizing Ojeda’s kidnapping, sits in a federal jail in Los Angeles awaiting extradition to Chile. Before his arrest, he had worked as a barber, in a restaurant kitchen and as a DoorDash driver. He denies involvement in the killing and says authorities have used the gang’s name to cast an ever-wider net over Venezuelans, connecting people to Tren de Aragua “to arrest them and throw them out of the country.”

The evidence against Gámez may ultimately prove substantial. Chilean investigators say they have communications, witness testimony and links to gang leadership. That is what trials are for.

The hierarchy of enforcement is already visible. The barber-turned-delivery driver goes into the dragnet. The powerful minister alleged to have paid for the killing gets a chair beside Doug Burgum. The accused operative faces extradition. The suspected patron discusses mineral rights. The migrant gets the terrorist designation. The man with leverage gets a diplomatic calendar.

Trump’s Tren de Aragua rhetoric was never applied according to the severity of the alleged conduct. It was applied according to the power of the person standing in front of him. The gang was an existential threat when its name could justify removing thousands of Venezuelans. Its alleged government sponsor became a necessary partner when he could offer oil, minerals and political stability.

The same distance between public performance and operational reality is now visible in Trump’s energy policy. For all the administration’s talk of American energy dominance, the United States is confronting a deeply unglamorous obstacle to the AI boom: it cannot obtain enough transformers.

Transformers are the largely invisible machines that allow electricity to move through the grid, stepping voltage up for transmission and down again for safe use. Roughly 90 percent of electricity passes through one between generation and consumption. Without them, there is no modern power system. There are no factories, no neighborhoods, no electric vehicles, no renewable installations and, most relevant to Silicon Valley’s current fever dream, no data centers.

The largest transformers are not products that can be summoned from an app. They are enormous, highly specialized machines made from electrical steel, copper and oil, often requiring months of labor and skilled hand-winding. Many are built to order. Some weigh hundreds of tons. Production depends on materials supplied by a small number of manufacturers and on workers with expertise that cannot be generated by issuing a press release about innovation.

Lead times that once lasted months now stretch into years. Prices for some large transformers have nearly doubled since the pandemic. Manufacturers report backlogs extending four or five years, and analysts expect the shortage to persist until at least 2030. The AI industry has discovered that the cloud has a substation.

Almost 40 percent of U.S. data-center projects expected to come online this year may be delayed, according to data cited by the Financial Times. Power infrastructure is one of the principal reasons. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet are on course to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI-related infrastructure, while data centers are expected to account for more than half of the growth in U.S. electricity demand through 2030. Each large campus can consume as much power as a small city, and because operators demand extraordinary reliability, they often order redundant equipment to keep the servers alive when something fails.

This is the physical economy intruding upon the speculative one. Software can scale in months. Transformer factories cannot. Venture capital can create a valuation overnight, but it cannot wind hundreds of kilometers of copper by hand.

Elon Musk can propose putting data centers in space, because apparently every infrastructure problem eventually reaches the “what if rockets?” stage, but even an orbital data center would still need equipment to manage voltage. Gravity may be optional in the sales pitch. Electromagnetic induction is not.

Even the Trump administration knows this. Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act and declared the country’s grid-supply-chain capacity “dangerously limited.” His government is offering loans and incentives to expand domestic transformer manufacturing because the administration understands that access to reliable electricity is becoming a binding constraint on economic growth.

That admission sits awkwardly beside Trump’s sustained hostility to the very modernization the grid requires. Publicly, electrification is a scam. Wind turbines are ugly. Climate policy is a plot. Electric vehicles are an affront to freedom, presumably because the internal combustion engine appears in the Federalist Papers.

Privately, the administration has reached for emergency industrial powers because the electrical system cannot support the future it keeps promising.

The kayfabe would already be impressive if the story ended there. It does not.

The Guardian reports that the Trump administration has directly committed roughly $2.7 billion in public money to cancel offshore wind projects while pouring at least $1.125 billion into prolonging the life of coal plants.

Since March, the Interior Department has struck deals with energy companies to relinquish eight offshore wind projects and redirect investment toward fossil-fuel generation. The administration insists it is merely returning lease payments, not spending taxpayer money. But money paid for the use of public lands and waters belongs to public accounts. Calling the payment a “return” does not alter what is happening: companies are being compensated for surrendering legally acquired rights to produce electricity.

The administration is not simply slowing projects through permitting or regulation. It is paying developers to stop.

A Department of Energy spokesperson offered the ideological version of the same argument. Ending what he called the “Green New Scam,” he said, was necessary because clean-energy subsidies had already cost taxpayers trillions and left the country with higher prices and a shakier grid. It is a tidy inversion: clean-energy subsidies are blamed for wrecking the grid, while paying companies not to build new generating capacity is called a return of funds rather than a subsidy.

The Department of Energy has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to “modernize,” retrofit and extend the lives of coal plants that were heading toward closure because they could no longer compete economically. Last month, the department set aside as much as $500 million in Defense Production Act funding to expand or preserve the capacity of 13 coal plants and support a coal export terminal.

That gives us two uses of emergency industrial policy operating side by side.

In one, the government invokes the Defense Production Act because the country lacks the transformers necessary to deliver enough electricity.

In the other, it invokes the Defense Production Act to keep aging coal plants alive after the market has already concluded they are too expensive.

Emergency power for the transformers. Emergency welfare for the coal plants.

The administration says this is about affordable, reliable energy. The numbers tell another story.

Coal plants are not closing because environmentalists have hypnotized utility executives. They are closing because many are expensive to operate and increasingly uneconomic compared with newer generation. A 2023 Energy Innovation analysis found that 99 percent of domestic coal plants cost more to run than replacing their output with renewable energy. Another analysis estimated that forcing 35,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel generation scheduled for retirement to remain online through 2028 would cost ratepayers at least $3.12 billion.

The cost doesn’t disappear. It merely changes who is presented with the bill. Taxpayers pay once to keep the plants alive. Ratepayers pay again through higher electricity bills. Communities near the plants continue paying through polluted air and damaged health. Everyone pays through the climate consequences.

Coal companies, naturally, receive the part of the arrangement described as “energy dominance.”

Trump has also lowered federal coal royalty rates from 12.5 percent to 7 percent, reducing what companies pay the public to extract coal from public land. Wyoming alone estimates that the change could cost the state $50 million annually. When the administration held the largest federal coal lease sale in more than a decade, the only bid came in at one-tenth of a penny per ton.

The administration’s defense is that renewable energy receives subsidies. This is true, in the same way it is true that rain contains water. Fossil fuels have received tax preferences, public infrastructure, favorable leasing terms, environmental exemptions and direct government support for generations. The Trump administration is not removing the government from energy markets. It is using the government more aggressively than before, only on behalf of industries it considers politically obedient. It is the fraud at the center of the “free market” performance.

There is no neutral contest here between subsidized clean energy and rugged fossil-fuel capitalism. There is a federal government paying wind developers to walk away, lowering the price of coal extracted from public land, directing the Pentagon to buy coal-fired electricity, offering hundreds of millions of dollars to extend the lives of uneconomic plants and using emergency production authority to shelter favored companies from the verdict of the marketplace.

Once coal loses, free-market conservatives become central planners overnight.

Placed together, today’s stories offer an unusually clear view of how Trumpism governs.

Tren de Aragua is an existential threat when its name can be used to strip migrants of due process. The man accused of employing it for political murder becomes tolerable when he can deliver access to Venezuela’s resources.

Grid weakness is dismissed when acknowledging it would support electrification or climate policy. It becomes a national emergency when transformer shortages threaten the AI buildout.

Government intervention is socialism when it supports wind, electric vehicles or cleaner infrastructure. It becomes patriotism when it rescues coal plants and lowers royalty payments for fossil-fuel companies.

The principle is never the principle. The principle is who benefits.

Trump’s politics requires an enemy for the public and a bargain for the powerful. Migrants are recast as invaders, wind turbines as menaces and electric vehicles as cultural threats. Indicted ministers, fossil-fuel donors and uneconomic coal operators, meanwhile, are waved through the service entrance.

The performance says law and order, energy abundance and free enterprise. The operating system says leverage, patronage and selective immunity.

Working Americans, as usual, receive the bill.