Donald Trump, Imperialism’s Gangster-in-Chief

By Nikos Mottas

President Donald Trump did not “go too far” in Venezuela. He acted exactly as the system that produced him demands. 

Acting on the crude but deeply rooted imperialist doctrine that power itself is legitimacy, he authorized a military assault and proclaimed the “arrest” of Venezuela’s president — an act that, stripped of euphemisms, amounts to the kidnapping of a sitting head of state.

This was not law enforcement. It was political gangsterism. A unilateral use of violence, detached from international law (which, under conditions of monopoly capitalism and imperialist rivalries, has been reduced to a scrap of Paper), popular sovereignty, or even basic diplomatic norms. The message was brutally simple: the United States decides who governs, who falls, and who is dragged away in chains—provided Washington has the means to impose its will. Sanctions that strangle societies, covert operations, open threats, and now the claim of jurisdiction over a foreign president are not exceptions to this logic; they are its standard instruments.

What Trump’s move openly signals is the violent revival of the neo-colonial Monroe Doctrine — the 19th-century proclamation that turned Latin America into a US hunting ground and established Washington as the self-appointed monopoly of power in the Western Hemisphere. This is nothing less than a war declaration disguised as strategy. 

Under this doctrine, the Americas are treated as forbidden territory for any rival power, a sealed zone where ports, energy infrastructure, and telecommunications must either submit to US control or be destroyed. Venezuela is not an isolated target but a frontline in a broader imperial confrontation, particularly against China, where sovereignty is erased and entire regions are reduced to chessboards for global dominance. This is empire speaking plainly: obedience or annihilation, submission or force.

Trump, however, is not an anomaly. He is one of the most vulgar, aggressive, and undisguised expressions of a long-standing US imperial tradition. From covert coups to open invasions, from sanctions that starve populations to missiles sold as “democracy,” the logic is consistent. Trump merely stripped it of hypocrisy and exposed it in its raw form.

What unfolded in Venezuela is not about one man’s recklessness. It is about an imperial system that recognizes no limits except resistance—and no law except force. Trump did not invent this doctrine. He embodied it, loudly and shamelessly, as a political gangster acting in the name of empire. This is not foreign policy; it is organized crime, and it will continue until it is confronted by the real superpower—the world’s working class.

* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.