The Word For This Is 'Coup'

The media must call what Donald Trump just did in Venezuela by its proper name.

Via Donald Trump

There is a readily available four-letter word that describes what Donald Trump did this past weekend—namely, violently overthrowing the leader of a sovereign state and vowing to replace him with a leader who will do the bidding of Trump and his government.

The word is “coup.” That is what has just happened: Donald Trump and the government of the United States carried out a coup in Venezuela.

Trump sent the U.S. military into Venezuela, abducted President Nicolás Maduro on blatantly illegal grounds, flew him to a federal jail in Brooklyn, and then repeatedly declared on camera that the U.S. would now be “running” Venezuela and profiting from its oil wealth. That’s called a coup.

There is no ambiguity about any of this. Usually, American presidents—at least the ones of the past 80 or so years, when the “international rules-based order” meant you had to pretend a little more—like to hide behind a fig leaf of deniability when they engineer coups in other countries. Don’t look at us! It was the people and the people alone who decided to overthrow Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2019; Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009; Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004; Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002; Argentina’s Isabel Perón in 1976; Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973; Bolivia’s Juan José Torres in 1971; Brazil’s João Goulart in 1964; the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1960; Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954; Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953; and many other people I’ve surely forgotten.

Not this time. Trump is beyond eager to let the world know that the U.S. is in the driver’s seat in Venezuela. He declared that a group of his favorite psychopaths, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, will be in charge for the foreseeable future. He threatened to oust Venezuela’s acting leader, Delcy Rodriguez, if she doesn’t get with the program. He even called his actions an attack on “sovereignty.” This could not be more of a coup if it tried.

But despite all of this, if you look at our major news outlets, “coup” is not a word you will see used to describe what Trump has done. It never came up on any of the big Sunday shows, almost all of which featured an interview with Rubio. You won’t find it in the New York Times or the Washington Post (though the Times did find space for genocidal monster Jake Sullivan to muse about the “flamboyant” nature of Trump’s “Venezeula venture”). Instead, these outlets and others have rushed to echo Trump’s framing of the coup, running huge headlines about the “capture” of Maduro—a term that implies that Maduro was a wanted man in a legitimate legal process rather than a sovereign leader who was, let’s say it again, removed in an American coup.

It’s easy to see why these outlets would avoid calling this a coup. First, America’s elite media has never been comfortable with the idea that coups are something this country does, despite the fact that it’s something this country does all the fucking time. Even the president of the United States practically screaming “LOOK AT COUP YAY” is not enough to dislodge this. After all, that would imply that the U.S. is not a beacon of democracy around the world, and heaven forbid anyone think that.

Moreover, we’re living through a particularly embarrassing moment of media toadying to the Trump administration, with more and more outlets being yanked in the direction of their billionaire bosses. The day before the coup, for instance, the Bari Weiss-run CBS Evening News declared that one of its foundational tenets was “We love America.” Good luck finding a nuanced take from those guys.

Why am I harping on about this? First, because it is important that we tell the truth, and second, because the words we use to describe things matter. Take this opening line from a Post article on Sunday night: “The Trump administration’s bold operation to capture strongman Nicolás Maduro from his home in Venezuela was a startling tactical success.” A “bold operation” that captured a “strongman”! A “startling tactical success”! You can see the sycophancy from space. Nowhere in that line, or in the rest of the piece, is there any indication that the U.S. even might have acted illegally, or that the removal of another country’s leader is something most people consider beyond the pale. (We are told, though, that “Maduro’s allies in Caracas are still in power, some defiantly haranguing about U.S. ‘imperialism.’” How dare they talk of such things right after the U.S. carried out a brazen act of imperialism against them!) The more this sort of stuff is allowed to go unchallenged, the more it becomes the settled version of events.

So let’s repeat the truth: The United States has just carried out an illegal coup in Venezuela. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.

Update, 10:05 am ET: As I was saying!

The reason to hold the line on stuff like this is because if we don’t, these outlets just become propaganda factories. It was a coup! He was kidnapped! He literally was!