The Trump Doctrine: Violence Is Us

Law enforcement officers secure the scene in Minneapolis where an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nichol Good, a 37-year-old mother. Christian Zander/NurPhoto via AP

I rarely do this, but for this issue I’m featuring an article that was already published elsewhere. My goal as a journalist is to produce scoops and analysis you don’t find in other outlets. That’s not always easy, particularly when it comes to subjects that are widely covered. But this week, I believe, I found an important link between three pivotal events that hasn’t received sufficient attention, and I want to make sure all Our Landers see it. My apologies if you’ve already read this piece. If so, scroll below for other content. (There’s a lot more for premium subscribers.) Or devote the time you would have spent reading this newsletter to a walk outside or a call to a pal.

The military assault on Venezuela, the shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent, the launch of the White House's new revisionist website about January 6—these three events convey a powerful and unsettling message from Donald Trump and his crew: Violence is ours to use, at home and abroad, to get what we want.

In each episode, the Trump administration has employed or embraced violence that seemingly violates the law and extends beyond ordinary state powers. The US military attack on Caracas and kidnapping of its repressive and fraudulently elected president, Nicolás Maduro, violated the Constitution and international law. Absent an imminent threat from Venezuela—and none existed—Trump did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally launch an act of war against the country. Yet he deployed the tremendous force of the United States' war machine to dethrone and abduct Maduro, contending that he was some sort of drug lord. But that's not a legitimate justification for a military attack.

The horrific killing in Minneapolis of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was unwarranted and arguably criminal. The initial videos make it look like murder. Yet the Department of Homeland Security, before it could investigate, quickly defended and justified the officer's actions. It claimed that Good was one of a group of "violent rioters" who "weaponized her vehicle" and attempted to "run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them." The department called this "an act of domestic terrorism" and maintained the ICE officer, "fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots." In other words, this was right thing to do.

On those videos, though, it did not seem like Good was aiming to mow down ICE officers with her car. She was trying to flee the ICE agents. When the officer shot at her, the car was moving away from him. Initial reporting indicated the officer did not follow ICE protocol. Still, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem praised the officer for acting so fast and stated, "This goes to show the assaults that our ICE officers and law enforcement are under every single day." That is, well done, sir.

Trump affirmed the sentiment in a social media post in which he falsely stated the victim was "a professional agitator" who "viciously ran over the ICE officer" and blamed the shooting on the "Radical Left."

Neither Noem nor Trump expressed any concern or any sympathy for Good. They were saying that ICE had the authority and justification to use lethal force in this situation. It was more than a hint: Mess with ICE, and this could happen to you.

The day before the ICE shooting, the Trump White House honored—yes, honored—the January 6 rioters. It unveiled an official White House website that ranks as one of the most excessive acts of government gaslighting in modern American history. The site hails Trump for issuing "sweeping blanket pardons and commutations for nearly 1,600 patriotic Americans" who were in the mob that assaulted the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory. The site denounces Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the House select committee that investigated the riot for having fabricated "an 'insurrection' narrative" and pinning "all blame" on Trump.

This site is loaded with absurd falsehoods about January 6. It maintains that the "Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as 'insurrectionists' and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump...In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election." And it presents an utterly phony timeline of the day, asserting that when peaceful "patriots" marched to the Capitol, police officers responded with "provocative tactics" and "violent force" that "turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos"—and that Trump repeatedly called for calm. None of that is true. In fact, once the melee began, 187 minutes passed before Trump urged his supporters to withdraw from the Capitol.

The website is a laughable fraud. But it's troubling beyond being an Orwellian assault on the truth. This site signals that Trump and his team not only accept the violence of that day; they celebrate the domestic terrorists who were part of the marauding horde. These are our people, the White House is declaring. These violent thugs are with us—and we're with them.

The Trump gang's embrace of violence is not subtle. On Monday night, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, spelled it out on CNN. Asked by host Jake Tapper if the Trump administration might use military force to seize Greenland, he refused to rule it out, and remarked, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland."

He then shared what might be called the Trump Doctrine: "We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

In short, might makes right. This was a not-too-veiled threat against...well, everyone, including foreign governments and all people within the United States. If the Trump administration has the power to do something, it will. Implied in this stance is the exercise of violence. Either in Greenland or in the homeland. Those who do not bend to Trump's will—or Miller's—can expect to feel their violent wrath. 

In those two sentences, Miller was saying that there is no rule of law. The world, instead, is governed only by force. That means violence. This ugly and dark stance is an attack on the fundamental concept of rules-based civilization. It is profoundly anti-democratic. It ignores such niggling matters as rights, societal order, and the public good. All that counts is who has the bigger or better club to swing.

An essential element of a police state is the excessive use and threat of violence, and in the past few days the nation has seen such displays. As Trump reaches the end of the first year of his return to power, he and his lieutenants are demonstrating their willingness to deploy force beyond its legitimate use to achieve their aims. The warning is clear and intentional: We are violent. Beware.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Poor Tulsi Gabbard. The director of national intelligence was left out of the planning for Donald Trump’s assault on Venezuela. That really shows you what Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio think about the supposed top intelligence official in the administration. “The move highlights the increasing isolation and the turbulent tenure of Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, amid her struggle to penetrate the president’s inner circle and influence policies,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The joke now in Trump national security circles is that DNI stands for Do Not Invite.

As embarrassing as this may be for the highly unqualified DNI, it might have been for the best. After all, she has a long—very long—record of decrying US military intervention, particularly in Venezuela. As a compilation of her tweets from the first Trump presidency (assembled in the Decensored News Substack) shows, she banged this drum hard:

The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders--so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.” (January 24, 2019) 

It’s about the oil … again. Bolton just exposed real motive for intervention in Venezuela: ‘We’re in conversation with major American companies now…It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot at stake here.’” (January 28, 2019)

Trump campaigned against regime change wars when he ran for President but now bows to the wishes of the neocons around him, clamoring for the regime change wars he claimed to oppose, this time in Venezuela and Iran. These powerful politicians dishonor the sacrifices made by every one of our service members, and their families - they are the ones who pay the price for these wars. (February 2, 2019) 

The root cause of mass immigration on our southern border is our history of US military intervention in Latin America that left countries destroyed. Before we talk about a wall, we need to end our ongoing threats of intervention - this time in Venezuela. #SOTU” (February 5, 2019

Oil lobbyists have ‘unprecedented access’ to Trump’s administration—meanwhile Pence/Bolton continue their crusade for regime change in Venezuela, the world’s richest oil reserves. The height of swamp politics. (April 4, 2019)

Throughout history, every time the US topples a foreign country’s dictator/government, the outcome has been disastrous. Civil war/military intervention in Venezuela will wreak death & destruction to Venezuelan people, and increase tensions that threaten our national security. (May 13, 2019)

After Trump’s arguably illegal raid on Caracas, Gabard hailed the assault: “President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers. Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve.” Anything for Dear Leader—and to keep her job. 

What a week to return to this contest. Some of the most despicable remarks of the week came from Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump. After the horrific shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, Trump called Good “a professional agitator” who “viciously ran over the ICE officer.” And Noem essentially said the same thing: “People need to stop using their vehicles as weapons.” She accused Good of committing an “act of domestic terrorism.” This was slanderous and deplorable. The videos of the incident clearly showed Good steering her car away from the ICE officers. She obviously was endeavoring to flee. She ran over no one. To suggest otherwise is a foul calumny.

Of course, other GOP lickspittles joined in. Senate Majority Leader John Thune blathered, “What happened there is an indication of the uptick we're seeing across the country in these protesters starting to attack ICE officers, law enforcement officers who are trying to lawfully enforce immigration law.”

Good did not attack ICE officers. Thune was promoting a lie to get in line with Trump and excuse a murder.

Sen. James Langford (R-Okla.) did the same. He called the shooting “a classic law enforcement moment. They have to fire their weapon and then when you see her car crash, law enforcement is running to her to provide aid.”

The ICE officer, according to protocol, did not have to fire in this situation—and should not have fired his weapon. And ICE agents did not rush to Good’s aid. They prevented a physician from treating her for 15 minutes.

Also on the deplorable front was Trump’s comment during a New York Times interview that the only limit on his global power was “my own morality, my own mind.” He added, “It’s the only thing that can stop me.” That is, international law doesn’t count for anything. And then there was the remark following his military attack on Venezuela that “we’re going to take back the oil that frankly we should’ve taken back a long time ago.”

Take back? Who does that oil belong to?

Vice President JD Vance answered that question in an interview with Fox’s Jesse Waters: “We're gonna be able to control the incredible natural resources of Venezuela.”

They’re saying it aloud. It’s the new colonialism. But what might the people of Venezuela think (and do) about this?

Defending Trump’s decision to not inform Congress before striking Venezuela, Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-N.C.) said, “There are members of Congress that they just cannot trust. And I understand that. We have folks [in Congress] that are Somali first and not America first."

The racism and nativism speaks for itself.

Speaking of racism, in the same Fox interview with Watters, Vance referred to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as “the guy who wants to take all property away from white people.”

The judges can remember a time when a racist crack like that would have been big news. Now it’s just a throwaway line that garners no headlines.

Ed Martin, a senior Justice Department official, was back in the running for reposting a dumb comment from Jesse Kelly, an ultra-right commentator. Kelly tweeted, “Colonization is one of the greatest things that ever happened to the backwards parts of the world and the only reason most don’t know this is because they were educated by communists who hate Western civilization.” And Martin re-Xed it with an absurd comment: “A confident America!”

Martin is an election denier and a January 6 denier and a promoter of various conspiracy theories. His celebration of a celebration of colonization was ridiculous and troubling. (By the way, Kelly deserves a honorable mention for a hateful commentary he posted about Good that called her a “communist” who “tried to run over a federal officer.”)

Despite all the awfulness from Trump and his lackeys this week—of which only a miniscule slice is represented above—our winner is a man outside the regime: Tony Dokoupil, who has just begun his stint as the anchor of CBS Evening News. At the end of Tuesday night’s show, which was broadcast from Miami, he concluded with what was intended to be a humorous segment on the many jobs that Rubio holds in addition to his gig as secretary of state: acting national security adviser, acting national archivist, and acting head of USAID. He jovially showed AI-generated memes depicting Rubio in other posts, such as the Shah of Iran and the Michelin Tires Man. And Dokoupil exclaimed, “Marco Rubio, we salute you.”

This is how a supposedly serious network news show covers the point man for an administration that is accused of mounting an illegal military assault and that is moving toward authoritarianism?  We salute you? Sounds like cheerleading. Dokoupil can share the trophy with Bari Weiss.

It was fun to see AOC get the better of Fox News.

I thank the many readers who shouted hooray for the recent issue on Trump’s efforts to erase the January 6 assault.

Peter Greenwald wrote:

Of all the violations of law and decency, the one that will always be prominent in my mind is Trump’s treatment of the January 6th assault on our Capitol and his audacity to pardon the convicted perpetrators.

That’s certainly at the top of the list.

Tom Hutchinson shared this:

The strategy of everything all at once is having an effect on me. I start counseling next week to help me cope. I often get lost in my own feelings about the actions of and attitudes expressed by members of this Republican-sponsored autocracy. Your essay on the importance of remembering and the efforts to bring forth some light on what January 6 was—and how it related to the efforts by prosecutor Jack Smith—was admirably done.

What amazes me, in addition to how such horrible people could gain control of our country, is the extent to which they seem to have been educated toward this purpose. I sense that there must be an effective training in acting sincerely no matter how horrible the words and action. Finally, I see much of our media crippled by a pervading notion that any action and any speech can be justified as political. And political actions are only judged by whether they are effective politically. I even hear this in the tones of young erstwhile sincere journalists on my favorite PBS stations. 

Shirley MacNeal wrote:

I am a clinical psychologist, now retired after more than 50 years of experience. Your column emphasized the collective forgetting of what happened that fateful day, and all the attempts at rewriting history. This is a principle of propaganda with long historical roots. I remember how I was profoundly shaken by studying Goebel’s propaganda strategies in a social psychology class in college. I was also very influenced by reading the novel, 1984. In my psychology practice,

I studied clinical hypnosis, which details methods for creating suggestions that will be influential when a person is vulnerable. One of the clinical hypnosis principles is the power of repetition. When Trump was first campaigning for president, I noticed his lies and his tendency to keep repeating what he wanted others to believe, and how his followers began to accept his lies as truth. He uses language to create brief sound bites which he delivers with strong emotion. These strong brief statements tend to stick with people much better than logical reasonable more lengthy statements. I could go on with other examples but suffice it to say that I believe much more needs to be said to the general population about how Trump manipulates people without their awareness. I’m not sure about how best to accomplish this, but I think you might have ideas.

These are important points. But it is hard to discuss such topics in a public forum without sounding elitist, as if you’re accusing voters of being dumb or easily manipulated. 

Jessica Landman wrote:

Great column. I would love to send Jack Smith some forget-me-nots.

That would be appropriate.

Iris Vander Pluym took issue with a general characterization I included in the recent (recycled) piece on Trump’s deconstruction of America:

Even with your caveat, I respectfully take issue with this statement you wrote:

“Trump, following the playbook of Project 2025, is attempting to shift the basic balance of power in the United States and revoke a fundamental agreement of American society: The rich and the powerful get to be rich and powerful, while government constrains their excesses and looks out for the common interest of the rest of us.”

I am middle-aged, and I have never seen my government honor this "fundamental agreement," regardless of which party was in power. Regulatory capture and the revolving door between corporations and government have been the status quo for so long I have no recollection of it ever being otherwise. 

Years before my birth, President Eisenhower warned the citizenry of exactly this with regard to the military-industrial-complex specifically, and it is difficult not to see that thread expanded with each subsequent decade, regardless of who held the levers of power in DC. 

Case in point: the Affordable Care Act—enacted into law when Democrats held both houses of Congress and the White House—entrenched rather than restrained unbridled capitalist healthcare for at least a generation, without even a whiff of a tiny step toward a single-payer system. 

When Democrats have held the Senate, they too have enabled every corporate interest. No one has ever held the banksters accountable for their crimes in any meaningful way. I have never been able to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, unless you count my futile vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. The power centers of the Democratic Party would never, ever let anyone like him anywhere near the presidency. 

Please note that I am not arguing the old "just-as-bad-as" canard. That is demonstrably untrue with regard to just about everything else of importance. But when it comes to corporate interests being enabled over the "common interest of the rest of us?" Well, if the shoe fits... 

After reading the recent issue on Stephen Miller, Victor Bulger had a sharp critique of us Americans:

Foreigner here. I am profoundly disheartened that Americans remain supinely indifferent to both the expanding right-wing authoritarianism of their federal government, and its obvious trajectory (vide your article on Miller) towards a white Christian race war at home and abroad. 

Comparisons with Germany after 1933 are impossible to ignore. For months ICE brownshirts have been carting off to concentration camps people of color, including citizens, to merely fitful public response. As a group, Americans have been mostly content to leave it to institutions to stand up against the authoritarian impulse. But all those institutions have revealed themselves as complicit in the project: the Congress, the Supreme Court, and even the last hope, the military, which now breaches its duty to refuse unlawful orders by murdering unidentified foreign civilians in international waters. 

 As has been clear all along, it’s up to the people to act. But those No Kings protests? Pitifully small potatoes given the stakes. About 5,000,000 Americans gave up part of one weekend in June, and then about 7,000,000 did the same on a day in October. That means that, at best (since many people likely attended both), about one-tenth of the number of people who watched the 2024 Super Bowl on television (127,700,000) were engaged enough to march in a No Kings protest in the last 12 months. Let that number sink in. It leaves me speechless. You?

Like you, Victor, I'd like to see far more people engaged. But I wouldn’t call this pitiful. The question is trend lines. Is opposition/resistance growing or not? We shall see in the coming weeks and months. 

Karen McGrath commented on the video I included in my tribute to Rob Reiner—the famous “Sock and a Sock, Shoe a Shoe” bit from All in the Family:

This tiny bit of humor needed a special thanks. That episode about the shoes is my favorite as well.  And I remember it nearly every time I put on and tie my sneakers! Often I put on a sock and a shoe, and a sock and a shoe...just because. Isn’t it amazing how we all connect in such small ways- usually never known. Thanks for sharing this connection.

Dell Erwin had a criticism:

Shorten your paragraphs. Compare your publications to those of Robert Reich. Or newspaper articles. Your long paragraphs are not easy to read. Your information is too important to have readers eschew it because it’s not easy to read.

I.
Will.
Try.

Jonothan Cullinane, after reading the recent item about musician Sam Fender and his link to Bruce Springsteen alerted me to this video:

“Is all this really necessary? I feel ridiculous.”
“There are hunters around here, Moxie, and they like their beer.”
“And the booties?”
“Last time, you walked through puddles and streams, and your paws got covered with ice— and you complained.”
“What if I promise not to complain this time?”
“Let’s keep them on.”