International law. Cartoon of 04/01/2026 in CTXT
On 6 January 2021, the world saw a mob of dangerous right-wing nutjobs storming the Capitol after being outnumbered by the police. They kicked over cameras and strolled through other parts of the country with rifles at the ready. That was Donald Trump's Christmas present to his country, an attempted coup disguised as a popular uprising.
In June 2022, the US House of Representatives select committee investigating the events of 6 January 2021 documented how Donald Trump staged and encouraged the "coup attempt" on Capitol Hill and described the orange sociopath as the architect of the biggest attack on US democracy.
To no avail. In January 2025, one of the first things Trump did as soon as he took office as President of the United States in his second term was to grant pardons and commute the sentences of nearly 1600 people who had been prosecuted for various crimes committed that day that left five dead and several injured.
And if they can do that at home, why not keep doing it and stage a coup d'état in any other country, as is the tradition?
Five years after that infamous domestic coup attempt, with all those involved now stripped of any responsibility, including its main instigator, Trump ordered the bombing of several places in Venezuela, kidnapped (they call it "extraction") Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and transferred them to the United States. Since 2020, a Manhattan federal court has accused Venezuela's president of being the leader of the Cartel of the Suns, among other things.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi made the announcement:
"Nicolás Maduro has been charged with narco-terrorist conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States."
To accuse the president of a country of having weapons is so absurd that it seems like a bad joke; by the same argument, any president in the world with any responsibility over his armed forces or who is the head of an army, however small, should be kidnapped.
Incidentally, the accusation that Maduro was the head of the "cartel of the Suns" (about which nobody knew or knows anything) has quietly disappeared from the charges. This is very reminiscent of the film about those weapons of mass destruction that never existed and which was the star excuse for the invasion of Iraq.
On 5 January, at his first court appearance in New York, Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores pleaded not guilty and accused the US government of kidnapping them from their home. Maduro also added that he considered himself a prisoner of war.
The crude oil war. Cartoon of 20/12/2025 in CTXT
Meanwhile, thousands of talking heads and compulsive chatterboxes were still discussing in the media whether or not this action had anything to do with oil. To all of them, Trump made the plunder issue clear. One of the first things they did was to take "between 30 and 50 million barrels of high-quality oil".
I am pleased to announce that the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States! I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.
The few criticisms of this US act of war in Venezuela in the US media were rather lukewarm. Among the less mild ones, the New York Times did not go beyond saying that Trump's attack on Venezuela is illegal and reckless, since "without congressional approval, his actions violate US law".
One of the passages as absurd and painful as it is funny in this story was that of María Corina Machado kneeling down to offer Trump to "share" her Nobel Peace Prize with him in an act of supreme lamebotism.
But Tump had already shaken Corina off by saying that he was not counting on her for the distribution of the Venezuelan government, that she is a very nice girl, but that she has neither the support nor the respect of the Venezuelan people and that he had already chosen the chavista Delcy Rodríguez to govern. To put the icing on the cake of this comedy act, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo appeared with the final gag.
Corina, seeing that all is lost, has already entrusted herself to the Most High and met with the Pope before his meeting with Trump at the White House, scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday 15 January.
Forget all that new world order bullshit and any thorough geopolitical analysis of the moves of the chronic narcissistic, fascist, redneck, millionaire millionaire bigot. Trump has long since dropped his trousers and shat on international law, receiving the occasional meme and little else as punishment .
