Right now, MAGA ideologues are apparently cheering Trump’s decision to attack Venezuela, kidnap the Maduros, and declare that the US will now “run” the country and its oil refineries. Because MAGA ideologues always cheer Trump. But also because they understand something that too many other smart people do not seem to fully understand—that this is a triumph for the MAGA ideology, whatever its ultimate outcome, something that no one can predict.

Some on the liberal center are clearly confused. They opine: “How can this be what Trump meant when he said ‘America First?’ How can that idea mean attacking another country? He will obviously outrage his base over this.”

And some on the left are equally confused. They ask: “how can anyone really think there is anything particularly disturbing or dangerous about what Trump is doing, given the fact that he is simply doing what a long line of presidents have done, especially in the Western hemisphere, since the late 19th century? What’s new?”

Both of these responses are deeply confused, because each in a different way fails to take the full measure of Trumpism.

Anyone who considers the current attack on Venezuela as in tension with MAGA has not been paying attention to MAGA.

The centrist liberal confusion rests on a failure to understand that for Trumpism, “America First” cannot be understood apart from “Making America Great Again,” and neither can be understood apart from the distinctive features of Trumpist authoritarianism: contempt for the very idea of law, cynicism about the susceptibility of most Americans to the basest of appeals, and unbounded faith in literal bullshit. None of the rhetoric of Trumpism out to be taken too literally, and all of it is fairly easily transmogrified into its opposite as it suits The Leader. Did anyone serious really take seriously Trump’s bullshit about being “the peace president?”

“America First” has always meant America first. Not “The United States” first. America. Obviously, this is partly a matter of sheer semantics. “America First” is a better slogan, that trips more easily off the tongue. But it’s not only that. And for two reasons.

“The United States” is the name of a specific, federally-organized and yet singular nation-state, designated as such by a Constitution, whose Preamble twice names the nation-state as “the United States of America.” [Note: the language of even the Declaration of Independence is different, and can be read as referring to the thirteen colonies as now united, as independent states, in collectively declaring independence.] This “United States” denotes and constitutes something very particular, and it is linked to a very specific set of Constitutional Articles, a great many subsequent Amendments, and an entire body of law and precedent. For Trump, and his current administration, and for all of those Republicans—almost every single one—who support Trump, all of this constitutional stuff deserves nothing but disdain.

And “America First” has always been about America, where the reference was not to one enormously important nation-state on the continent of North America—the US–but to America, understood as one enormous landmass, connected by an isthmus that was only broken by the construction of the Panama Canal, begun in 1904 after the US acquired the territory after the aptly named “Spanish-American War.” That war pit Spain against the United States of America, but also, especially for US ideologues, against all of America which, thankfully, the US government chose to “liberate.” “America” thus understood means North America, Central America, and South America, as superintended by the benevolent US.

Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, the US has asserted a special hegemony over the Americas and most of the Caribbean.

Trump’s “America First” never meant “we don’t care about what is outside of our borders.” It has always meant “we real authentic Americans–as opposed to the liberals and Marxists and woke lovers of ‘illegals’ and ‘cross dressers’—will decide who deserves to be inside and who outside. And we believe that the great danger confronting us comes from the south, and those brown people who are invading us because they are rapists and killers and drug dealers and sex traffickers.”

Trumpism has always been about ruling the hemisphere, building walls, strengthening borders, and by all means necessary controlling the dangerous populations to the south. A special love for Bolsonaro and Kast and Milei. A special hatred for Maduro but also Chavismo more generally. A special hatred for Cuba no doubt intensified by the “statesmanship” of “Little Marco” Rubio. And above all, an absolute determination to keep those “invaders” at bay.

Trump’s recent national security policy is all about such regional domination, as has been widely observed by commentators, whether they are MAGA enthusiasts who love to imagine a world divided up between the US, Russia, and China, and liberals and progressives who rightly recoil at the thought.

In addition, what could do more to “Make America Great Again” then to cosplay Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” by attacking Caracas and seizing Maduro, thereby demonstrating to the world that Pete Hegseth is a man’s man, and his Pentagon is a War Department, and his military is all about the “warrior ethos” of killing and breaking things?

Anyone who considers the current attack on Venezuela as in tension with MAGA has not been paying attention to MAGA. It is true, as some have noted, that this US intervention might turn out to involve the loss of much US blood and treasure, in which case many in Trump’s base might turn on him. But if that happens, it will not be because they were ideologically opposed to US military attacks or even occupations. It will be because they are ideologically opposed to protracted and costly wars. But the MAGA base does not oppose the deployment of massive brutality, either inside or outside the country’s borders, in the name of “American Greatness.”

Leftists who mock those who are confused or incredulous about how Trump could do this are right to insist that Trump’s attack on Venezuela is the latest of many such imperial interventions. But they are wrong to regard Trump’s attack as simply that, and to recycle conventional platitudes about US imperialism that can be found in old Chomsky essays or Howard Zinn book chapters. For in a different way, they........

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