The paradox of Donald Trump has always been that a man who lies so relentlessly can, at rare moments, speak with a startling candour. We have been trained to treat every presidential utterance as either a falsehood or a provocation, to be decoded rather than believed. That instinct was forged over years, culminating in the infamous “big lie” that he had won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary. Tens of thousands of documented untruths from his first term taught Americans that deception was not an accident of his politics but its operating system.
Yet in the opening week of 2026, Trump offered two confessions so nakedly revealing that they deserve to be taken at face value. They were not gaffes. They were windows into a worldview that is now reshaping the United States and the international order alike.
The first came at a press conference announcing what Trump triumphantly described as the “capture” of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. There was no attempt to cloak the operation in the familiar language of human rights, democratic restoration or even the war on drugs. Instead, Trump said plainly that the United States would now “run” Venezuela, and almost in the same breath turned to the subject of the country’s oil reserves. The admission was breathtaking in its simplicity. For decades, critics of American foreign policy have accused Washington of launching interventions for access to natural resources. Trump, never one for euphemism, made that critique sound like an official mission statement.
The second disclosure came days later in an interview with the New York Times. Asked what constrained his power, Trump did not cite the constitution, the courts or Congress. “My own morality. My own mind,” he said. “It’s the only thing that can stop me.” This was not bravado. It was a description of how he understands his authority: personal, unmediated, answerable to no institution beyond himself.
To see how those two statements fit together, it is worth lingering on the strange dissonance that has long characterised Trump’s presidency. On New Year’s Day he announced his resolution as “Peace. Peace on Earth.” Within 48 hours, Caracas was under American fire. The same week, he defended a federal agent who had shot dead Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis who, by all available evidence, posed no threat to anyone. The president of peace presided over violence abroad and lethal force at home.
This is not hypocrisy in the conventional sense, where stated values are betrayed by practice. It is something colder: rule by fear. Trump’s approach to Venezuela was not to occupy, rebuild or even formally change the regime. It was to remove the man at the top and trust that terror would cascade downward. Without Maduro, his lieutenants would be cowed into compliance, especially when it came to surrendering control of the oil industry. Fear, in this logic, is cheaper than soldiers and more reliable than treaties.
And fear spreads. Cuba has reason to tremble, but Trump has also publicly warned Colombia’s president to “watch his ass” and mused about airstrikes on Mexico, claiming that drug cartels effectively run that country. Whether or not such attacks ever materialise is almost beside the point. The spectacle of American jets over Caracas is meant to do the work of diplomacy through intimidation. It tells every leader in the hemisphere that resistance carries a price.
The contagion is not confined to the Americas. For years Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland was treated as a punchline, a billionaire’s whimsy. After Venezuela, the laughter has stopped. European capitals now read his statements differently. When he humiliates Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, when he hints that support for Kyiv is conditional on obedience elsewhere, allies do not hear theatre. They hear leverage. They worry, with good reason, that objecting to Trump’s designs on Greenland might be met with a sudden American disengagement from Ukraine’s defence.
At home, the architecture of fear is even more elaborate. Commentators have rightly focused on Trump’s assault on institutions: the media branded “enemies of the people”, universities threatened with defunding, judges dismissed as partisan obstacles. Less noticed is his effort to make ordinary Americans afraid of their own government.
For months, masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been seizing people from sidewalks and doorways, acting with a swagger that suggests impunity. After the killing of Renee Good, witnesses in Minneapolis described convoys of heavily armed men blocking streets at random and grabbing passers-by. In Portland, border patrol agents shot two people outside a hospital. The scenes sound like dispatches from a failing state. As journalist Greg Sargent observed, if this were happening abroad we would describe it without hesitation as government militias roaming unchecked through cities.
Fear alone, however, is unstable. It must be reinforced by lies, and Trump supplies those in abundance. He framed the assault on Maduro as a strike against narcotics trafficking, even as he pardoned the former president of Honduras, a man convicted of flooding the United States with hundreds of tonnes of cocaine. He insisted that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist” who tried to ram agents with her car, despite video evidence showing her attempting to flee. Even in death, the target must be smeared. JD Vance obligingly labelled her a “deranged leftist”.
What unites Caracas and Minneapolis, Greenland and Los Angeles, is not ideology but power: the drive to act without challenge. South American governments are to be bent to Washington’s will just as Democrat-run cities are to be disciplined by federal force. Whether it is special forces abroad or the National Guard at home, the objective is the same – control, stripped of procedural restraint.
That is why Trump’s remark to the New York Times matters so much. When he says that only his own morality and mind can stop him, he is not boasting about strength of character. He is declaring independence from the entire system of checks and balances. International law does not bind him. Domestic courts can restrain him only “under certain circumstances”. In his imagination, the presidency has metastasised into something closer to an imperial throne.
The danger is not merely that one man thinks this way. It is that so many have been trained to treat his words as noise, to assume that the lie is always the point. But in this phase of Trumpism, the truth is the more alarming signal. When he says he wants Venezuela’s oil, he means it. When he says only he can restrain himself, he is telling us how he intends to rule.
Opponents of this vision must respond with an honesty of their own. It is tempting to reassure, to minimise, to insist that “the system will hold”. Yet systems hold only when people insist that they do. Europe, acting together, still has leverage. So do other major powers who benefit from a rules-based order. Most of all, the American public has a blunt but effective instrument: the ballot box. A Democratic capture of the House of Representatives in November would instantly limit Trump’s freedom of action.
None of this is easy, because fear works. It isolates. It persuades people that resistance is futile or dangerous. But the choice is not between safety and defiance; it is between submission now and instability later. If Trump is right that no single country can stand up to the United States, he is wrong to think that coalitions, institutions and voters are equally powerless.
The era of decoding is over. The president has told us who he is and how he intends to wield power. The question is not whether to believe him, but whether we are prepared to answer with a truth just as bracing: that no democracy survives on the morality of one man alone.
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