Jonathan P. Baird

Over the last month or two, the Trump regime has been blowing up boats mostly off the coast of Venezuela. As of this writing on October 26, the U.S. military has killed 43 people in ten separate attacks. It is a kill first, ask questions later approach. The president of Colombia has said we killed a fisherman. The Trump regime has provided no evidence to support its claim that the vessels were carrying drugs.

Extrajudicial murder is now U.S. policy. No need for evidence, trial or any judicial process. If Trump wants you dead, that’s enough. These murders are crimes and people who have been murdered are not recognized as human beings with any rights. They have been dehumanized by an erratic individual who last week was self-promoting for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Venezuela episode demonstrates unprecedented recklessness and it is unclear if Trump intends a much wider scale attack on that country. The U.S. Navy has amassed an armada offshore. Congress has not been debating our foreign policy even though it is that branch of government that has the sole constitutional authority to declare war. Congress has been reduced to a nullity.

Without knowing more about the history of Latin America, it would be easy to see this episode as bizarre and exceptional. I would argue it is entirely consistent with America’s imperialist history in Latin America. Since the 19th century, America has used its enormous military, economic and political power to exercise control over Latin America. The best overview I have seen is Eduardo Galeano’s book, Open Veins of Latin America. Galeano writes:

“Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European – or later Unites States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources. Production methods and class structure have been successively determined from outside for each area by meshing it into the universal gearbox of capitalism.”

I would go back to the Monroe Doctrine in the early 19th century as a defining framework that declared European powers cannot colonize or interfere in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine laid the groundwork for U.S. hegemony in the region.

Next came the Mexican-American War from 1846-1848 in which the U.S. vastly expanded its territory, taking enormous swaths of land from Mexico.

Our imperialism took off though in the late 19th century. In 1898, the U.S. intervened in Cuba’s fight for independence and the Spanish-American War led to our control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. The Platt Amendment in 1901 gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and to establish naval bases. Around the same time, we also secured control over the Panama Canal.

In 1904. President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the Monroe Doctrine with his Roosevelt Corollary that claimed the U.S. had the right to intervene in Latin American affairs to maintain stability. This led to numerous U.S. interventions in Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The era is well-described by Major General Smedley Butler in his book, War is a Racket:

“I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of the country’s most agile military force – the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

In 1954, the CIA engineered a coup in Guatemala that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Later in 1973, the U.S. assisted the fascist military of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in overthrowing another democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende.

There were numerous other U.S. interventions I have not mentioned like the Dominican Republic in 1965 and U.S. support against revolutionaries in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Our government supported brutal military dictatorships like existed in Argentina during the dirty war. Behind the scenes, the U.S. provided substantial support to Operation Condor, a terror campaign/international death squad conducted by Latin military dictatorships in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Trump’s Venezuela initiatives blowing up boats and threatening military action must not be seen as an isolated foray. It fits inside the long history of interventions. There have been many American regime change efforts in Latin American history. What is going on now is an increasingly unilateral Big Stick diplomacy characterized by macho posturing. It is a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine.

Latin America still holds vast reserves of critical minerals, oil and gas reserves and a third of the planet’s arable land. The desire for economic imperialist control remains constant.

The cast of characters in charge of our foreign policy is anything but reassuring. I think it is extremely worrisome that Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command responsible for Latin America, resigned abruptly. It is a tragic state of affairs when the direction of a great power correlates to the whims of a dictator and the stooges who surround him. Military adventurism by the so-called peace president would appear to be in the cards.

The only good thing I would say about Columbus Day is that as a federal worker it provided me a three day weekend. To the extent I had thought about it, I have considered the holiday a big mistake. If there is going to be a commemoration, the replacement, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, is vastly preferable. Although we as a nation have continually dishonored and mistreated Native Americans, they are our true founders.

Still, the presidential proclamation issued by the White House on October 9 came as a surprise. In the proclamation, Trump laid it on thick. Christopher Columbus became “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth”. Trump went on to say Columbus “was guided by a noble mission to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”.

This idealized image and glorification has no basis in the historical record. Columbus never set foot in America. In 1492, he first landed in the Bahamas and then two months later on the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Sailing off to points unknown was risky. I would concede that.

What Columbus wanted the most was gold which was becoming the new standard of wealth. After extensive finagling, he had persuaded the King and Queen of Spain to finance his expedition with three ships. The deal Columbus worked was that he could take 10% of the profit if he brought back gold and spices. He would also become governor of the new-found land and he would obtain a new title, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

Columbus returned to Spain with indigenous slaves and gold. By exaggerating the gold potential, he again persuaded the Spanish Crown to finance a return journey to the Caribbean in 1493, this time with 17 ships. In the second trip, Columbus did not find gold but he went from island to island collecting slaves. He rounded up 1500 Arawak Indians. Of that 1500, he picked 500 of the fittest to take back to Spain for sale. Of that 500, 200 died on the trip back to Spain. The motive behind these voyages was pure greed. They were about as noble as Trump building a golf course in Qatar.

Columbus made two more expeditions first to Venezuela in 1498 and then to the coast of Central America in 1502. The other source of information we have is Bartolome de Las Casas, who transcribed Columbus’s journal and who wrote a multivolume History of the Indies. Las Casas wrote:

“Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy: small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then..The admiral, it is true was blind as to those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians.”

The presidential proclamation talks of gallantry but is devoid of any specificity. The great explorer reflected an imperialist mentality attuned to the Doctrine of Discovery. Under the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian explorers believed they had a divine right and calling to lay claim to territories uninhabited by Christians.

Dehumanization of Native Americans is implicit in the presidential proclamation. It indulges white Christian nationalist fantasy predisposed to seeing Columbus as an adventurous hero entering a vacant wilderness. Those who were displaced, enslaved or killed do not register in this mythology.

It may be that the Columbus myth appealed to early Americans because they were making voyages across the ocean parallel to what Columbus did. Possibly settlers to America saw themselves in him. Still you have to ask: how can you be the person who discovered America when you never landed there? Also an estimated 50 to 60 million Native American people already lived there.

White supremacy is foundational to the Columbus myth. The justification for our settler colonialism was that the “savages” had to be conquered. Somehow the fact that Columbus ushered in a genocide against Native Americans gets overlooked. It is estimated that tens of million indigenous people died in the Americas within the first 100 years of European colonization.

One oddity of the presidential proclamation is the touting of Columbus for spreading the gospel of Jesus. It is entirely contrary to the First Amendment admonition that government should play no role in establishing any religion. Considering how much Columbus trafficked in slavery, seeing him as spreading any religion is ludicrous.

Trump and other partisans of the holiday have tried to play the honoring Italian-American card. They have played to traditionalist Italian-Americans who are clinging to the old myth but there are far better ways to honor Italian-Americans. It would be better to have a holiday honoring Joe Dimaggio than Christopher Columbus.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has written about the origin of the Columbus Day holiday. FDR proclaimed Columbus Day a federal holiday in 1934. She wrote that he was trying to solidify a new Democratic coalition that included Italian-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan had been very strong in 1920’s America and had been attacking Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Ironically, the origin of the federal holiday was an effort to move beyond racism.

Like other Trump initiatives, the presidential proclamation is an effort to turn back the clock to a time before the Civil Rights movement so that we unlearn lessons we have learned over the last 75 years. If there is ever going to be acknowledgement of our sins and any effort toward rectification, honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day, not Columbus Day, is one small step forward.

So many political norms have been broken so quickly by the Trump regime that it is hard to keep up. Chaos is the new normal and it is all in an effort to create a one party-rule police state that could overwhelm any opposition. I wanted to list the features of this transformation that are most troubling. Individually and separately they may seem like scattered pieces of a puzzle but collectively they present a devastating totalist vision.

• Disappearance without due process. In a little reported story, hundreds of the detainees who were incarcerated at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida have disappeared. The Miami Herald has reported that two-thirds of the 1800 immigrants who were held there in July have gone missing from ICE’s online data base. Their families and attorneys have been unable to locate them. It is unclear if they have been deported or transferred to another facility. All legal process has been bypassed to fast track deportation. Extrajudicial black sites are replacing lawful process.

• Extrajudicial murders. The Trump regime has no legal authority to order the execution of civilians in international waters outside a military conflict. The war on drugs doesn’t justify killing an alleged enemy. Blowing up boats off the Venezuela coast was an act of premeditated murder as an estimated 20 people died. No proof was offered to show that these boats had any contraband on board. It is not enough to simply label people “narcoterrorists” and perform executions. Even if those murdered were drug runners, criminal penalty should be incarceration. Due process has been short-circuited so that the Trump regime can post videos and sadistically boast of the murders.

• Prosecuting political enemies. In the past there was always a wall between the President and the Department of Justice. Trump has treated the DOJ as his personal law firm firing attorneys who were unwilling to do his bidding. The prosecution of Jim Comey and Letitia James are malicious and there will, no doubt, be many more on the Trump vendetta list. The perversion of what Trump has done to the DOJ could not be more apparent as evidenced by his errant private message to Pam Bondi. Trump has turned the DOJ into a corrupt tool for personal vengeance. Pam Bondi makes John Mitchell look good.

• Troops in the streets. The Trump regime has deployed National Guard troops to cities that don’t want or need them. He has wildly misrepresented the facts by describing peaceful cities like Portland and Chicago as war-ravaged hellholes. Speculation is rife that he will invoke the Insurrection Act even though no rebellion is going on.The Trump regime uses the language of war in calling anyone who opposes it a terrorist or an insurrectionist. It is hard not to wonder if he will use troops as a means to intimidate Democratic voters in the 2026 election. Experience shows that he is unlikely to accept any election result where he loses.

• Threat to the First Amendment. Millions of Americans hold anti-fascist political views. As a nation we proudly fought fascists who committed enormous crimes in World War 2. The Trump regime has declared war on Antifa, an imaginary enemy. Antifa reflects a loose ideology and it is not an organization. It is likely the campaign against Antifa will be directed at all who dissent from Trump’s policies. In the Trump mind, opposition to Trump equates to terrorism even if it is just the Democratic Party. The effect is to block free speech and all dissent, kind of the ultimate cancel culture. Mark Bray, a history professor at Rutgers and the author of a book about Antifa has received death threats and felt so threatened he and his family just fled to Spain.

• Shredding the Fourth Amendment. On October 1 at 1am in the morning, ICE conducted a military style raid on a low rent apartment complex in Chicago using a Blackhawk helicopter and armored vehicles. They dragged everyone in the complex out of their beds, zip-tying all, including children. Supposedly this was a raid to capture the undocumented. ICE trashed the place making it uninhabitable. What happened to our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizures? There were no warrants and there was no specificity to the search. Everyone arrested did have a brown skin. This raid was exactly what our Founders warned against and with ICE’s massive funding, there are likely to be more. Nothing could be more un-American than masked, unidentified ICE agents running amok and sequestering people in secret prisons with zero transparency.

• Corruption extraordinaire. The degree of corruption in the Trump regime is unprecedented. Foreign governments pay bribes to Trump through crypto. The Trump family has cashed in to the tune of billions. The DOJ refuses to investigate bribes like the Tom Homan situation because he is a political ally. Supposedly there is a tape of Homan accepting $50,000 in cash in a Cava bag. The DOJ has so far buried the Jeffrey Epstein file because it incriminates his former best friend, Trump. 1000 FBI agents were given the task of redacting Trump’s name from the files. The journalist Michael Wolff has reported that Epstein showed him pictures of Trump with topless young girls sitting on his lap and Pam Bondi refused to answer questions about that from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. This DOJ specializes in disappearing and hiding evidence.

• The requirement of sycophancy. I recently watched the most recent meeting of the Trump cabinet. It gave new meaning to the phrase “worst of the worst”. To be a part of this cabinet you have to have sold your soul. Cabinet members slavishly lavished praise on their boss like he was the leader of North Korea. The meetings are dominance-submission affairs where loyalty is demonstrated by slathering accolades upon Dear Leader. Personal humiliation is a job requirement.

In putting the pieces of this puzzle together, the big picture is not hard to see. Call it dictatorship, police state, strongman rule, authoritarianism or fascism – all fit. What is going on is a government replacement from democracy with three co-equal branches of government. Now the question is what the American people will do about it.

American history is such a vast panorama that how it is seen is a Rorschach test. Emphasis could be placed on presidents, wars, westward expansion and the evolution of civil liberties or it could be placed on the history of slavery and the genocide against Native Americans. It is all about what we choose to highlight.

How we view our own American ruling class is subject to the same type of scrutiny. As someone who tends to see the darker shades, I find it hard to escape noticing an obvious trend. Our American ruling class has shed any notion of noblesse oblige that characterized the 19th century American elite.

Noblesse oblige is a notion that those with great wealth and power have a responsibility to model behavior that is honorable and generous. Part of the privilege is a duty to those less fortunate. While the American ruling class in the 19th century were often seen as robber barons, many of the most powerful capitalists like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon took the noblesse oblige duty seriously. They used surplus resources they possessed for public good. The idea they had was that to whom much is given, much is expected.

This perspective was ingrained in the old-money Protestant establishment. Many 19th century ruling class leaders engaged in large-scale philanthropy endowing universities, libraries, hospitals and museums that improved the quality of life for many Americans.

Andrew Carnegie funded 2509 libraries as well as Carnegie Mellon University. John D. Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and gave thousands of acres of land to the National Park Service, including Acadia National Park with its carriage roads and granite bridges. Andrew Mellon funded the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and was a major benefactor of the University of Pittsburgh.

These men cultivated an ethic of some public service and self-restraint. They preferred hiding the degree of their wealth and they were not showy about their money like someone who was nouveau riche and trying to impress.

At the same time, their legacy was complex, odious and at best, ambiguous. They earned their reputations as robber barons by violently repressing workers who were organizing unions. Carnegie and his manager Henry Frick locked out union members and violently crushed the Homestead Strike at his steel plant in 1892. Rockefeller and his son did even worse things in the Ludlow Massacre in 1913-14. They arranged for the National Guard to act as their private army to attack a miners’ tent colony, killing 24 people.

In that era, many saw the robber barons’ philanthropy as a form of public relations to justify extreme wealth and that view has merit, but nevertheless, their giving was tangible. It made some real world differences in education, libraries, art, medicine and national parks.

Now our ruling class would appear to be single-mindedly focused on maximizing their own personal wealth. They are much less steeped in any tradition of civic duty or responsibility. Instead of maintaining a safety net for those less fortunate, they are resentful of the safety net and do nothing as they watch its weakening and dissolution. None of these billionaires speak out against Trump excesses because they are afraid to get on his bad side. The billionaire class is defined by the pursuit of endless wealth and vaporous fame.

Donald Trump is an appropriate standard bearer for our billionaire class. He may never have read a book. No one could ever accuse him of cultivating any ethic of public service or self-restraint. Conspicuous consumption, gilded in gold, is the Trump trademark. No president has ever monetized the office like he has.

The billionaires around him like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are hardly different. As Musk has said:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy – I want to grab all that money.”

Musk is the first person to have a net worth of $500 billion, an unfathomable sum. Then, of course there is Jeff Bezos whose net worth is a mere $242 billion. Bezos’s wedding in Venice cost between $46-$56 million, placing it among the most expensive weddings in history. Any notion of noblesse oblige is dead to these billionaires. They don’t give back.

The fact that America has the greatest income inequality in the developed world is a result of a crony capitalist system where the ultra-rich shamelessly grab and hog as much wealth as possible. Musk is more focused on going to Mars than any plan that might help humans on earth. As a Jewish person, his nazi salutes did not escape my notice. His mentality would appear to be stuck in the apartheid era.

Which brings me to the matters of racism and sexism. Under the Trump regime there has been a concerted effort to turn back the clock. The anti-DEI campaign has been a thinly veiled effort to rehabilitate racism and sexism. Have any billionaires spoken up about this noxious campaign? Not one. Too many people have sacrificed and suffered to make the progress we have. The billionaire class acts like royalists from the distant past who see the job of people of color and women as to serve them.

Just like the 19th century ruling class, our ruling class indulges a eugenicist world view that posits they are biologically and socially superior to everyone else. For them, poverty is a character flaw, not due to class position and unfortunate circumstances. Assuming their superiority is a lame rationalization to justify the status quo.

You might think a ruling class would have a long-term survival perspective with a sophisticated orientation grounded in learning and history but our ruling class does not. Like the oligarchs who surround Vladimir Putin, our oligarchs’ major concern is feathering their own nests. Whether it is opposing constitutional violations, pandering to xenophobia, respecting science or opposing climate change denial, you don’t hear a peep from them.

Call it nihilism or self-interest, our oligarchs throw in and collaborate with the Trump regime. Our ruling class provides a living example of cowardice and moral debasement. They make Carnegie and Rockefeller look kind.