Any hope that Donald Trump would be an “antiwar” president went out the window almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, when he filled his administration with a coterie of warmongers. After a year in which Trump backed Israel’s war with Iran, went on a spree of blowing up boats in international waters, and has now attacked Venezuela and abducted its leader, that hope has sailed over a cliff and crashed into the rocks below.

It hardly needs to be said that Trump’s regime change operation in Venezuela is brutish, dangerous, and brazenly illegal, though it is obviously all this and more. It’s illegal on multiple levels: a clear violation of international law, of course, but also the latest instance of Trump cheerfully wiping his shoes on the US Constitution. Despite what Vice President J. D. Vance claims, there is no loophole that magically invalidates that document’s War Powers Clause if the Justice Department indicts a foreign leader.

Those drug-trafficking indictments, by the way, have nothing to do with what Trump just did, though we’ll no doubt hear about them endlessly in the weeks ahead. As analysts have pointed out at length, Venezuela has almost nothing to do with the flow of cocaine into the United States. And Trump has gone almost comically out of his way to undermine his own talking point, pardoning a convicted narco-trafficking Latin American ex-president just weeks ago and publicly musing about how much he’d like to get his hands on Caracas’s oil reserves. He is now practically licking his lips over the field day that “our very large United States oil companies” are going to have as they get “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry.