Heather Cox Richardson

wants that oil.

I think what we are seeing is a real attempt to institute the kind of Putinization of the United States of America, if you will, in that what Trump did is

in Venezuela was not to overturn a government in order to install a democratically elected leader or an opposition leader, or even really to hurt the party in power because he left that party in power.

What we saw was him extracting a leader, almost just a threat to those remaining behind to say, give me a cut or I'm going to do something even worse.

And if you think about it that way and you think about the threats against Mexico and the threats against Colombia and the threats against Cuba and even the threats against

Greenland, it certainly looks as if what he is saying is not just America is going to be the country controlling the Western Hemisphere, but also the way to get along with the United States is not to spread democracy or public health or all the things that we have tended to emphasize in the past.

The way to get along with the United States is to give

expletive to the president, whatever he wants, give crap to the president, and then he'll back off.

And that is, I mean, that is actually slightly different than the United States is going to become a colonial power.

That is a personalized power that looks very much like Vladimir Putin.

This is a fascinating mix.

And I am annoying when I say that because this is sort of as a historian.

Let me suggest that rather than trying to figure out how they are trying to justify as a law enforcement organization,

operation that they then turned around and kept the Senate Judiciary Committee outside of and that required the mobilization of the U.S.

military.

I mean, what we are doing when we do that is we're trying to untangle the skein of whatever ball of barbed wire is in Donald Trump's head.

And what that means is that then we don't react, you know, because we're sitting there trying to think.

We're adapting, yeah.

Yeah, so where's the law that says, you know.

But if instead of thinking about taking their words at face value and trying to make sense of them, you turn it around and you say, let's look at the facts on the ground.