Trump is a second-rate gangster and he hates it. He wants to be Bibi.
By Ilana Mercer
January 9, 2026
The fuss and feathers over Trump's foreign policy is silly, childish. It attests to what happens to the minds of men when they view the very public mass murder of The Other-committed by their Leader -as unrelated to their own moral integrity and future welfare: the brain goes to mush. Or perhaps it was the size of a lentil to begin with.
In the mind of the minimally moral, minimally compos mentis American-"America First" and genocide ought to be two mutually exclusive categories.
Here's a useful clue: If your politician of choice, going into an election, supports genocide or is silent about genocide; he's not your friend. You ought to be smart enough, in possession of the very basic moral faculties-having reached a rudimentary development of conscience-to make that minuscule determination.
Has mommy not taught you that murder is wrong and that no mass murderer and congenital thief is your friend ? Alas, the decay of the American Mind is such that Trump's fans are apoplectic-and one or two has texted me in tears: "America First, Ilana; what-oh-what has happened to it?"
How the fuck should I know ? Did I vote for Trump in 2024 ? No ! For the reasons cited, I registered a protest vote for Jill Stein, whose foreign policy-from Israel to Latin America-is perfection.
I was hardly being a crusty cynic when, in a January 3, 2018 column, "How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism," I foresaw the coming vanquishing of Venezuela:
Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it be known that he was in neoconservative nirvana: '... for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'
'For a moment,"swooned Lake, 'I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.' (" How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,"Ilana Mercer, January 3, 2018)
"Onward to Venezuela!"I wearily wrote. It was not a mysterious sense of foreboding; I was just following facts. Then, I watched the lies with fascination. By now, I knew all the tricks. What's the excuse of Trump's base?
That his phlegmatic followers now whinge and whine over Trump's lackluster America-First focus is really quite puzzling, if not contemptible. It's like complaining-not that serial killer Ted Bundy killed a lot; but that he was unpatriotic for driving around in a Volkswagen Beetle.
"Ever heard of a Chevy Tahoe, Ted ? Boohoo, Bundy, why did you go to work in a Volkswagen, you traitor ? Buy America, not German.
Bundy and Trump, Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu, and their minions, are murderers all. Murder is what defines them; it's their defining feature. Except that the last three delegated mass murder to the mercenaries of a military. Bundy did the deeds himself.
Surely, you don't need mommy to tell you that murder is more than a secondary personality trait ? It defines who a person is. It tends to crowd out all other positive attributes. If that's not obvious, think of Oscar Wilde's simple guidelines for cretins: "Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner."
Still, for some reason, his fans and voters speak of Trump's genocide as though it were a minor item of foreign-policy, albeit-small mercies-an unwelcome foreign policy event. Absurd-as the commission of genocide puts the perpetrators and co-perpetrators outside the human species. And genocide and mass murder are the defining features of this man's foreign policy in Western Asia; in Gaza and beyond.
"Genocide for Israel" is Trump's de facto Middle East foreign policy.
Impoverished heroic Houthis of Yemen Trump has murdered beginning in 2018: The House of Trump in partnership with the House of Saud. Iranians Trump has helped murder. Somalis and Nigerians Trump has been murdering. Sailors in vessels, on the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, no due process required: them, too, Trump has murdered. All this with nary a meaningful check on executive power from the dullards serving in the world's "greatest" deliberative bodies, the US Congress and Senate.
And now Venezuelans, ordinary men and women, scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, or targeted by Hellfire missiles.
Genocide, the crime of all crimes, was Trump's gateway crime. Once you've crossed over to genocide, the world (and its people) is your oyster.
Indeed, like Joe Biden before him, Trump doubled down on the eradication of the international law and its redeeming natural-law features. Like Biden, Trump ensured that no international prosecutor or prominent UN chronicler of Israel's crimes against humanity went unpunished. Trump has sanctioned and persecuted countries and individuals who sought to cuff the criminal Netanyahu and levy the law of God and nature against Israel's sexually perverse serial killers, loosed upon the world. Also thanks to Trump. Yes, thousands of these sexually deviant Israeli serial killers roam among us, when they could be, should be, in the dock, at the Hague.
Enmeshed, the American and Israeli cabal, two self-appointed world powers-Pax Americana ceding to " Pax Judaica "-are presently and shamelessly still engaged in genocide. Israel acts to "disappear" the Palestinians as individuals, as a people and as a polity. Trump, who respects Israel's wishes to the letter, appoints people who do the same. He pursues and imposes policies that dovetail with what Israel demands.
Trump, corporate media and the political ring leaders sashaying up and down both aisles may call the "new" dispensation under which Palestinians live a " ceasefire." In point of fact, the so-called ceasefire is just Trump's " engineered new normal: a slow-paced genocide. " All for the love of Israel.
The future of Gaza, Trump has made clear, would " be pretty much up to Israel." Although he is there with Israel to help in the dismembering and looting of Gaza. When Israel declared its intention to take over Gaza, Donald Trump had shrugged and egged them on. " Ramp it up," he whooped. Having long since slipped between the sheets with soulmate Bibi Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the go-ahead to " fight and finish the job."
Under Gaza's weeping winter skies, massacres continue with Trump's imprimatur. Drones, killer quadcopters and other Israeli shelling implements come scudding at Gaza from the north all the time. The " destruction of remaining homes, property and land, and the prevention of the entry of food, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure materials" had never ceased, only let-up slightly. Genocide hums along now at the rate of more than eight human beings murdered a day, and at more than 20 injured, also each day.
By no unfortunate coincidence, Trump has normalized genocide for Israel, albeit at a slower pace. Any depravity Israel thinks up; Trump has fulfilled in kind and in kindly blessings. Pictured here is the president of the United States, partying, on December 31, 2025, with the butcher of Tel Aviv.
And his fans expected Trump to compartmentalize the killer-within and keep to his America-First promise ? Are they dense?
As to Venezuela: Trump knows nothing about the anti-imperial spirit of the Bolívar Revolution still animating Latin America. Successfully, Venezuela native " Simón Bolívar led the people of South America to rebel against Spanish colonial rule." However, the independence movement's victories, won between 1775 and 1850, live on in the wishes of a preponderance of the people of Latin America to retain national sovereignty, to decide about the political dispensation under which they'll live-including Chavismo populism-and control the bounty of their lands.
Trump's handlers, only marginally smarter than he, tell him to say stuff that makes him seem in-the-know. So, Trump stammers about The Monroe Doctrine and the imperative to make errant Latin America submit to America (much like Arabia bows to Bibi).
Trump's Other Handlers have yet to hand Trump his marching orders. But they're happy. On Israel's ILTV, four minutes into a segment titled " Maduro Arrest: Venezuela Blames Israel, U.S. Warns Iran ," one of Israel's many pig-ignorant panelists weighs in-the country is utterly bereft of high-minded intellectuals. The Hasbara comes courtesy of Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs.
Diker describes Venezuela as part of an evil axis of resistance, "a rear base for the Iranian regime." Hezbollah and Hamas are also all over that poor benighted and blighted country. Likewise Iranians: leaders who refuse to die by Israel (which in itself is utterly antisemitic); they too, accuses Diker, will often seek shelter in Venezuela. Altogether, Israel is pleased with Trump's decapitating moves in Latin America.
Although Israelis have expressed themselves about the American invasion of Venezuela at the speed at which they commented on the assassination of Charlie Kirk-they, in the person of Dr. Diker, want you to know that Venezuela's acting president Delcy Rodríguez is an... antisemite. She accused Israel "of orchestrating the U.S. military operation that led to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, branding it 'Zionist aggression.'"
Psychologizing about people is a form of ad hominem argument, in my opinion. It's bad. I don't like it one bit. But Trump is the kind of single-celled organism, an amoeba in mentation and affect, to which psychologizing is suited.
The simple, atavistic truth is that, Trump, a second-rate gangster, wants to be Bibi, a rank butcher.
Trump has been fellating Bibi Netanyahu without let. He has been made to feel politically impotent, lacking in agency in the face of the master magician, Bibi, who is leading Trump around by the nose. The bully-cum-tyrant Trump, a stupid man of cold violence, needs to regain manly potency by any means at all other than neutering Israel.
So he " bombs the Venezuelan capital, and kidnaps President Maduro." Let's hope Trump's acolytes understand by now, that folly, ignorance, bluff and blind conceit will continue to typify his actions, stateside and abroad.