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It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Don't Feel Fine)

This is how it starts. Not with earthquake, birds and snakes and airplanes, not with declarations, not with Congress voting, but with extrajudicial kidnapping and regime change.

Venezuela today. Greenland tomorrow. hell maybe even Panama, Colombia, and Mexico!

Oil here. Strategic territory there. Allies confused. Statements issued. Lines crossed. Norms bent. Rules treated like suggestions. Treaties reduced to vibes. Sovereignty debated on cable news like it’s a zoning dispute. And while everyone’s busy asking whether he really means it the answer is yes.

Just listen to him yourself

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, last night we got this gem

January 2026. A new year. Year two of Trump 2.0.

For those of you who logged off, took a vacation, or just tried to keep your head above water—welcome back. You missed one hell of an offseason. A month-long news cycle packed into every single day. Chaos doesn’t begin to cover it.

I’m going to assume most of you caught at least some of the headlines. The Epstein files—millions more released, illegally, wildly out of compliance with redaction rules, a legal and political mess that somehow still hasn’t fully landed. Trump openly talking about personally handling foreign oil shipments like he’s running a dockside racket. And then the one that should have snapped everyone fully awake: the United States kidnapping the leader of Venezuela and announcing—out loud—that we are going to run the country and take its oil.

Those aren’t assumptions. Those are Trump’s words. Rubio’s words. Press conferences. Press gaggles. True Social rants about Venezuela “sending” tens of millions of barrels of oil directly to the United States, unloaded at American docks, handled personally by the president. No congressional briefing. No legal framework. No attempt at plausible deniability.

And that’s where I want to take a look at where we may be heading.

Because the instinct—especially with Trump—is to treat each outrage as isolated. Another scandal. Another insane day. Another thing we scroll past and move on from. But taken together, this isn’t randomness. It’s coherence.

I’ve been talking for years about Trump’s hostility to NATO, his bizarre alignment with Putin, the way Republican senators knowingly pass along Russian disinformation even after being briefed by U.S. intelligence that it is Russian disinformation. Putin isn’t subtly influencing American politics anymore. He’s operating in broad daylight, and Trump is protecting his interests.

For a long time, even I thought the worst-case scenarios were still theoretical. I’ve said versions of this for years: that five years down the line, America could become the Evil Empire—the phrase we once used for the Soviet Union. A country that wages aggressive wars, extracts resources, props up corrupt regimes, and calls it “order.”

What I didn’t fully understand until recently was how we would get there.

Now I do.

Venezuela wasn’t just illegal. It wasn’t just corrupt. It wasn’t even just authoritarian. It was colonial—in the most literal, nineteenth-century sense of the word. A great power using force to remove a sovereign government, discard an inconvenient opposition figure, and extract resources by threat and coercion. Openly. Proudly. Without even pretending it’s about democracy.

With Iraq, they lied. They wrapped it in freedom talk and stability rhetoric. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney understood you weren’t supposed to say the quiet part out loud.

Trump doesn’t bother.

He says we took the country. We’re running it now. The oil is ours. You stole your own oil from us. We’re taking it back.

Once you cross that line, you don’t uncross it.

And Venezuela isn’t the endpoint. It’s the prototype.

Because Trump isn’t just talking about Venezuela. He’s talking about Colombia. Panama. Greenland. Places that sit squarely inside the post-World War II security order and are now being discussed as assets—things to be acquired, controlled, repossessed.

This isn’t idle talk. This is pattern formation.

Here’s the part people don’t want to sit with: our allies cannot stop us.

The onlt people that can save us now are the ones who work to give Democrats back control of the House and 20 Republican senators in the senate.

You read that right. The only people that can save us is Senate Republicans so you definitely deserve that drink.

Denmark cannot go to war with the United States. Greenland cannot repel the U.S. military. Europe cannot “stand up” to America in any meaningful way without triggering catastrophe. The entire NATO system is built on the assumption that the United States is the guarantor, not the aggressor.

We have spent the last 80 years building up what is by far the largest and most powerful military in the world: one that dwarfs our NATO allies. It was built to protect democracy and police behavior around the world.

It may be soon turned to a very different strategic mission. If that happens, there is little the world could dop to stop it.

So no—our allies can’t stop us. If America breaks bad- and invading Greenland is tantamount to Germany seizing Austria- no one can stop us and they know it.

But when you push them like this, they have to respond.

And they are.

People in Greenland aren’t laughing this off. They’re furious. They’re scared. They’re watching the leader of the world’s most powerful military casually speculate about annexing their home, while pundits treat it like a branding exercise. Denmark has been forced—publicly—to reaffirm Greenland’s sovereignty, to say explicitly that Greenland is not for sale, not transferable, not negotiable.

A NATO ally having to say that to the United States is not normal and doesn’t point to a good future for humanity here and abroad.