Donald Trump is no different than his predecessors. During the campaign, he said whatever he had to in order to get elected. He promised to close down the neocon foreign wars and also fight the “deep state” by draining the swamp.

Obama also promised to end the neocon wars, but that was said with the same insincerity as his predecessor, George W. Bush, who said in 2000 he wasn’t into nation building and foreign entanglements.

It is now obvious, with the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s appointment of convicted criminal Elliott Abrams as his “point person” on Venezuela, that the neocons have taken full control of Trump’s foreign policy.

“This crisis in Venezuela is deep and difficult and dangerous and I can’t wait to get to work on it,” said Abrams after Pompeo made the announcement.

Recall the role Mr. Abrams played during the Reagan years. He helped fund the Contras in Nicaragua and is linked to the 1982 El Mozote massacre of hundreds of civilians in El Salvador. It was later estimated by a UN truth commission that 85 percent of the abuses during the civil war in El Salvador were committed by military death squads assisted by the Reagan administration.

Abrams has experience overthrowing government’s not following the neoliberal master plan. In 2002, during the Bush neocon regime, Abrams worked on a failed Venezuelan coup. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was jailed. Supporters and a loyal military freed Chávez and likely saved him from what would later be known as the Gaddafi method of deposing disfavored leaders refusing to follow neoliberal strictures as pushed by the Council on Foreign Relations where Abrams is a senior fellow.

Rex Tillerson wanted to bring Abrams on board at the State Department, but Trump wouldn’t go for it because Abrams opposed his election and was a prominent fixture of the Never Trump movement. Now that Tillerson is gone—after characterizing Trump as a moron, but for the wrong reason—and neocons Pompeo and Bolton are in place, we can conclude that the neocon takeover of the Trump administration is all but complete. The final act is impeaching or forcing Trump’s resignation so the more amenable (for neocons) Christian Zionist Mike Pence can sit on the ceremonial throne.

“Next time, in 2020, we’ll have had 12 years of Obama and Clinton, Hillary will be in her mid-seventies, Trump will be gone, and a new generation of Republican leaders like Rubio and Cruz and Ryan and Cotton and Haley and Sasse will still be in their forties,” Abrams said in 2016.

Trump will be left to fight off endless attacks by Democrats trying to unseat him. His major campaign promise—to build the wall—will go unrealized and he will go down as one of the more ineffective presidents in US history.

Meanwhile, US foreign policy continues uninterrupted, never mind the minor turbulence of Trump declaring (again) that he will get US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.

Bolton, Pompeo, and Abrams are in control. The wars will continue, expand—adding Iran and Venezuela to the forever war roster—and the people will be left to stand on the sidelines, ill-informed and distracted by lesser staged events.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” said Karl Rove, the Bush administration fixer and former Nixon dirty trickster.

It is unknown at this point what the neocon triumvirate—Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams—will do in regard to Venezuela. For now, the US has declared the “military option” (of murder and mayhem) is “on the table” in response to re-election of Nicholás Maduro. The heavy lifting will be left to the Lima Group—Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru—and these countries may be used to inflict a “humanitarian intervention” on the people of Venezuela.

The Organization of American States has not backed the neocon and Lima Group effort to evict Maduro and return the oil-rich nation to the neoliberal orbit. It cites the OAS Charter of 1948. Article 19, Chapter IV states: “No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.”

For a large number of Trump supporters, making America Great Again means continuing the imperial objectives of the empire—installing preferred satraps (Juan Guaidó in Venezuela) or those tolerable to Wall Street and the Chicago School version of neoliberalism.

The hypocrisy is palatable. Trump and his diehard supporters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Democrat “Resistance” and the “liberal” media in regard to Venezuela. “It is revealing how the supposedly anti-Trump media have closed ranks and are marching in lockstep with the administration when it comes to overthrowing Washington’s official enemies. The media are not opposing Trump or tyranny; they are enabling it,” writes Alan MacLeod.

There is very little pushback inside the United States over these grossly illegal and immoral interventions. The Trump faithful has demonstrated repeatedly there are few differences between them and the “libtards” when the issue is supporting the financial elite and their crimes.

War becomes “humanitarian” when you put the right face on it. That’s why Obama got away with killing Gaddafi in Libya and destroying Syria while maintaining the empire’s footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Reagan, he excelled at manipulating the American public.

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