THIS IS WHY I RARELY USE THE WORD "DISTRACTION" IN REFERENCE TO TRUMP

Are we on the verge of war with Venezuela?

President Trump is shutting down Venezuelan airspace “in its entirety” amid a surge in drug trafficking from the South American nation, he announced Saturday morning.

“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY. Trump wrote in a morning Truth Social post.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The measure comes just two days after the president said he would begin bombing land-based drug trafficking targets.

“The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon,” Trump told reporters.

This is happening just after Trump renewed talk of Joe Biden's autopen:

In an angry social media post, President Donald Trump said that he would terminate every document his predecessor Joe Biden signed with an autopen and that if Biden lied about using one, he would be charged with perjury....

“Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect,” Trump said on Truth Social. “The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States.”

You'll say that all this is an effort to distract us from news that's bad for Trump: the passage of a bill calling for the release of Jeffrey Epstein files, or the revelation that Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike to kill survivors of a boat bombing by U.S. forces, undoubtedly in violation of the laws of war.

But Trump already had a distraction. This week, two National Guard troops were shot in D.C. by an Afghan national who came to the U.S. during the Biden years, even though he was ultimately approved for asylum by the Trump administration. I want to be completely cynical here: If Trump had chosen to do so, he could have milked this shooting incident for days. He could have wrapped himself in the flag and made the Marine who was fatally shot, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, a household name. We've seen how the right does this -- think of Laken Riley or Charlie Kirk. But Trump doesn't seem at all interested, and when asked about her, he quickly began talking about himself.

Q: Do you plan to attend Sarah's funeral? TRUMP: I haven't thought about it yet, but it's certainly something I can conceive of. I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 27, 2025 at 7:54 PM

Trump (and his handlers) seem to be actively preventing this story from being America's main focus.

And I'd argue that the bombing of alleged drug boats is actually a good issue for Trump -- in a recent CBS poll that was otherwise terrible for him (40% job approval, 60% disapproval), Trump's boat attacks received majority support.

But a war in Venezuela? Not so much.

And I can't see how pardoning the narcotrafficking ex-president of Honduras could be a shrewd distraction for Trump.

Trump looks for distractions sometimes, but more often he seems to be the one who's distracted. It's as if he has no attention span and is trying to match the rapid-topic-switch energy of Fox News or social media. And I'm not sure why his aides (particularly Stephen Miller and Russell Vought) and his media propagandists didn't want Trump and the rest of the right-wing movement to go into sustained-mourning mode after Beckstrom died, the way they all did after Kirk's death.

I think Trump's team is rather manic -- think about Miller's demand for greater and greater arrest and deportation numbers. And Vought's crew has so many missions to accomplish in Trump's term that they filled a 900-page manual. You might be surprised to learn that Project 2025's economic plan isn't exactly "Let's move all the jobs to the U.S." The manual calls for "A hemisphere-centered approach to industry and energy."

First, the United States must do everything possible, with both resources and messaging, to shift global manufacturing and industry from more distant points around the globe (especially from the increasingly hostile and human rights-abusing PRC) to Central and South American countries. “Re-hemisphering” manufacturing and industry closer to home will not only eliminate some of the more recent supply-chain issues that damaged the U.S. economy but will also represent a significant economic improvement for parts of the Americas in need of growth and stabilization.

You thought these guys wanted all the factories moved stateside? Silly you!

The people around Trump have him pushing what's been called "the Donroe Doctrine":

“He believes this is the neighborhood we live in,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Latin America until June, who continues to advise the White House. “And you can’t be the pre-eminent global power if you’re not the pre-eminent regional power.”

... Mr. Trump’s approach appears purely pragmatic: What is in it for the United States?

Stronger control of the hemisphere, and particularly Latin America, promises major benefits. Ample natural resources, strategic security positions and lucrative markets are all in play....

Some foreign policy analysts believe that Mr. Trump would like to divide the world with China and Russia into spheres of influence. In recent months, top U.S. officials have explained their strategy in those terms.

And this makes sense to Trump at a cruder level.

To a president who grew up in New York — where businessmen, politicians and mob bosses battle for turf — controlling a neighborhood is common sense, former officials and analysts say.

So what appear to be distractions are just evidence that the zealots, and their semi-informed leader, are in a hurry to remake the world in their image. Trump wants to exploit the hemisphere for profit -- and also wants to prosecute every enemy Joe Biden pardoned. He seems distracted because there's a lot of evildoing left to be done, on multiple fronts.