A brand new season of the Freakshow opened with a bang: Donald Trump, ruler of the Western Hemisphere, on every screen in the world announcing the capture of a sovereign nation’s leader. But he looks… about to keel over, lips white, saurian lids drooping. Thank God he has handed the mic over to the virile courtiers. Kegseth – spray-tanned, hair-oiled and nose-powdered to “look commanding” – reads his script. Little Marco twitches nearby. By nightfall, these victors will have paraded their shackled captive through the streets of New York in an open van – a spectacle ancient Athenians and Trojans would have recognized.

Welcome to the boffo third season of the Freakshow. Its theme: DOMINANCE. From the Indo-European root domus, meaning home, to the Latin dominus, meaning lord or master over home or territory, it is the Viagran centurion’s obsession, the bully’s neurosis.

Was there ever any doubt that this is where the fetish for “masculine energy,” the prevailing aesthetic of the AI revolutionaries, was headed? Soft men with big, hard bank accounts cosplaying tough guys, with no real use for their own muscles or even the strength of actual working men – except for the fists of their hired goons.

Maybe there were reasons to remove Maduro, but were they really stronger than the evidence available to arrest Netanyahu? Or MBS? Murderous crooks can make effective allies; everybody knows it. A month ago, Trump pardoned the former Honduran president serving 45 years for trafficking tons of cocaine to the US. Trump now claims that Maduro works with an apparently fictional “Cartel de los Soles” to attack the United States with fentanyl – a drug the opioid-addicted wing of MAGA knows well… and which actually comes through Mexico.

The bleak circumstances of people in some nations south of the border have driven migration for decades. For the most part, the US government has ignored the core problem – or worse, sided with the grimmest of regimes on behalf of corporate oligarchs, like Chiquita, who needed to shut the peasants up. (See Kissinger and Pinochet, Kissinger in Argentina, and El Salvadors’s death squads for a refresher.)

This Venezuelan adventure is, as often in Trumpworld, simultaneously grave and ridiculous: it’s an Epstein files distraction and state-sponsored plunder, aimed at controlling a swath of South American natural resources. A “national security” rationale was explained in 2023 by retired General Laura Richardson, former commander of Southern Command. The Wall Street Journal reports that select American investors are already planning a Venezuelan field trip in March to scout possible projects. Trump supporter Paul Singer’s hedge fund is already deep into Venezuelan oil. Just over a month ago, Singer acquired Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company (He had donated at least $5 million to Trump, and $37 million to Republicans in Congress in 2024).

Besides the oil-igarchy, it is not clear who is actually calling the shots in the White House where Trump dodders physically and mentally. Any combination of a motley crew of businessmen, the enhanced virility courtiers, race scientists and eugenicists, out Nazis, crypto-Nazis, and their self-mutilated Mar-a-Lago-faced auxiliary could be running the domination project.

Meanwhile, Trump has lulled voters with the refrain that their dissatisfaction is the work of “Mexican rapists,” making their man into the perfect tool for the global oligarchy that diminishes them in every way.

But has a smaller man ever acted on the world stage?

While nominally commanding the Maduro op, the old man was apparently on his phone, tending to the insatiable appetite of his MAGA movement for vile bullshit. As a handcuffed Maduro was on his way to New York on the warship Iwo Jima, and while Kegseth and Rubio were still showering off the war room sweat, the boss was hitting send on an unhinged MAGA conspiracy: that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz arranged the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman – whose murder (along with that of her husband) by a deranged white Christian nationalist, Trump has never once expressed outrage or sympathy for the survivors.

The video to which he gave the presidential seal of approval features “TheRealRyker,” a classic MAGA dopey white dude with a wispy mustache who looks like he smells of Doritos and Axe body spray. In his upclose selfie, Ryker raises his eyebrows theatrically over an embedded Tiktok video with the headline: ”Did Tim Walz really have (D) Melissa Hoertman [sic] assassinated?” A woman’s voice narrates: “Was Melissa Hortman “un-alived [sic] in her home by Vance Boelter who… later sent a letter to the FBI saying it was Tim Walz who forced him to do it?”

The presidential retweet is a matryoshka doll of deranged MAGA social media. The video originated from a TikTok account called Discernment Activated, whose profile states “we discuss the spiritual and prophetic implications of current events, pop culture, politics, history & the supernatural,” followed by emojis of a purple cross and the American flag.

Hortman’s murder by a white Christian nationalist freak is being sewn into the Minnesota Somali immigrant daycare fraud scandal that Fox, and other right wing influencer sewer lines, have been spewing for weeks to pump up anti-immigration sentiment. Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum was the only public figure to object: “I call upon Republican elected officials at the federal, state, and local level, as well as the Republican Party, to condemn this outrageous and cruel lie about the murder of Melissa and Mark Hortman.”

Crickets.

Trump’s been projecting his own sense of personal inadequacy onto the national psyche for a decade. America has been so badly used, so humiliated! Is it really any surprise that a majority of Republicans polled this week – primed for dominance – are fine with our country behaving like Germany in the 1930s?

How did we get here? This is a good place to remind readers that Trump was wholly responsible for the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, whether the half of America that chooses to deny that agrees or not. Here are 255 pages of former prosecutor Jack Smith’s testimony that make that abundantly clear.

Trump masterminded his own coup attempt – but he isn’t really a war president. He spent the last half-year panicked about the exposure of his, his friends’ and his wife’s potential appearance in The Epstein files. He needed to go big, a crowd-pleasing diversion, something more than Somali immigration fraud. He clearly hopes the Epstein problem will fade with every act of dominance still to come.

Newsflash: It won’t.