George H.W. Bush invaded Panama, captured its president (who'd been accused of drug crimes), brought him back to America to stand trial ... and then got us into another war a year or so later, against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Bush's son invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, failed to find Osama bin Laden, gave up on that mission, and started a war of choice in Iraq. I suspect that the attack on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolas Maduro won't be Donald J. Bush's final war.
I'm not sure why Trump is more bellicose now than he was in his first term. I think he ran in 2016 with a determination to destroy the apparent front-runner, Jeb Bush; he tapped into his resentments of the Bush family and stressed his opposition to the Iraq War, though he didn't oppose the war during the run-up or in its early days. During the 2016 campaign, I think advisors helped shape Trump's half-thought-out instincts into an ideology -- opposition to the Iraq War meant he was anti-"globalist" and "America First." He liked that, ran with it, and started believing it.
This time around, advisors persuaded him that wanting to be a hemispheric hegemon is "America First," or maybe "Americas First." Ignoramus that he is, he's running with that now, and appears to believe it.
Although he obviously isn't limiting his bellicosity to our hemisphere:
I’m thinking this morning about all the people I spoke to last year who were absolutely convinced, and tried to convince me, that Trump would be antiwar compared to Biden and Harris. In the past week alone he has attacked Nigeria and then Venezuela and also threatened to attack Iran (again).
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 8:18 AM
He might be thinking, If they won't give me a Nobel Peace Prize, fuck 'em -- I'll be a warmonger.
And, obviously, there are natural resources to be plundered in Venezuela -- not just oil but rare earths. Since World War II, Americans have mostly believed the predominant narrative about U.S. wars -- that we always fight them to right moral wrongs -- but Trump is an unabashed believer in plunder. Even when he claimed to be against war, he regularly said that America should take the oil whenever it scores a victory in a resource-rich area.
In some ways, Trump is being Trumpian (or Milleresque, as in Stephen), rather than Bushlike. Here's a tweet from Senator Mike Lee (the original is here):
👀 First out of the gate to get a justification for what Trump ordered in Venezuela. Sen. Mike Lee after a call w/Marco Rubio... "This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack."
— Pam Spaulding (@pamspaulding.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 6:18 AM
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We attacked Venezuela and are justifying the attack by saying our troops were attacked? That's how the administration talks about ICE. ICE goons go into a city aggressively, are met with resistance, then claim they can arrest protesters for responding to the troops' aggression, as if the targets of U.S. force are the aggressors and the troops are passive victims.
I don't think this will give Trump a boost in the polls, or at the ballot box. Poppy Bush's attack on Panama in December 1989 and January 1990 briefly raised his Gallup job approval rating from 71% to 80%, but it quickly dropped and was at 68% by March. (It's anoshing now to see how high Bush's approval rating was in the first two years of his president when he wasn't fighting a war, but he was the last president who managed that level of bipartisan support.) Bush's party lost seats in the 1990 midterms, and Democrats wound up with a 267-167 House majority and a 56-44 Senate majority. (This was, of course, before the 1994 midterms that put Newt Gingrich's GOP in charge of Congress.)
I'm not sure Trump will get even a week or two of better polling. Bush at least tried to persuade Americans to support his first war. The prime-time speech in which he waved a bag of crack cocaine he said had been purchased in Washington's Lafayette Park took place in September 1989, a couple of months before the Panama invasion. Trump has been bombing suspected drug boats, but he hasn't really been talking about drugs or addiction.
And after the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles, Americans are vastly more skeptical about U.S. wars than they were in the late 1980s. I assume the people who like this attack will mostly be people who already liked Trump. The rest of us won't notice any improvement in our day-to-day lives, and will judge Trump accordingly.
But we'd better get used to this. After all of Trump's talk about "heaven" in 2025, and his recent Wall Street Journal interview about his health, I assume he's afraid of death (though that doesn't mean he's actually dying) and is trying to go out with a bang -- he wants to die knowing he was the most consequential person on earth, if not the most consequential person of all time. Hence the renaming and building and redecorating. He's trying to preen and bomb his way to a legacy. I hope we survive this.
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