At a Greensboro, North Carolina, campaign rally on June 10, Donald Trump parroted Steve Bannon’s line on a number of important policy issues – including a full-throated defense of using sanctions to topple governments and steal the oil and other assets of developing sector nations, such as Venezuela and Syria. None of this will help him defeat the criminal indictments arrayed against him, and the broader operation to rip up the Constitution and destroy the Presidency.
Trump began his speech by denouncing the Biden administration’s (minimal) lifting of some sanctions on the Maduro regime in Venezuela. “We’re buying oil from Venezuela!” Trump stated. “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would’ve taken it over and would’ve gotten all that oil and it would have been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, so we’re making a dictator very rich.”
It should be recalled that it was the Trump administration’s economic sanctions – orchestrated by the likes of John Bolton and other Bannon allies — which took Venezuela from a bad situation, to the point of being “ready to collapse,” from which a lot of people died and millions of others fled the country because of the effect of those sanctions. The would-be U.S. overlords tried and failed, however, to topple Maduro and install the puppet government of Juan Guaidó.
Not surprisingly, important leaders of the Global South quickly protested against Trump’s remarks. For example, former Bolivian President Evo Morales tweeted that Trump “as U.S. President threatened to use a `military option’ and an armed intervention against the brotherly people of Venezuela,” and that his latest remarks “confirm that all of the U.S. operations and interventions around the world in the name of freedom and democracy, are to loot natural resources from free peoples”
The disastrous policy effect of arguably the worst decision of Trump’s entire Presidency – choosing to exonerate the insider provocateur Steve Bannon, rather than Lyndon LaRouche, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden – is clearly bearing fruit in comments such as these by Trump.
