Remember Spangles? Remember white dogs’ muck? Remember when the United States at least used to proffer actual reasons to justify invading foreign countries, smashing everything to bits, and then enriching the American companies that got paid to rebuild them? Remember Paul Squire’s failed BBC vehicle Paul Squire Esquire? Well. Do you?
Remember how shocked we all were when the Bush administration’s Iraqi weapons of mass destruction myth unravelled in 2003, having been held together only by the unshakable faith of Tony Blairs, who eventually just argued that maybe were we all to blame for the non-appearance of the weapons of mass destruction by not having believed in them hard enough? Ah! The past!! They done things different there.
Initially, the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping, as BBC journalists are officially not allowed to call it, of a perfectly ordinary Venezuelan couple called Mr and Mrs Maduros was justified by the Americans by the Actual Fact that Mr Maduros triumphed in a bent election two years ago, and by the Alternative Fact that Venezuela fuels the American drug epidemic. This epidemic is, apparently, caused solely by foreign countries importing drugs into America and not in any way by Americans lazing around in sweatpants and eating them.
Trump should say he is trying to liberate the Greenlandic Inuit from the Danes, because if there’s one thing America hates it’s invaders co-opting the land and resources of Indigenous people
Put it this way. Just because there are four pork-and-leek sausages just past their sell-by date in my fridge doesn’t mean I have to scoff them all in one go. Come to think of it, that isn’t a very good example.
Venezuela is in fact the source of precisely none of the fentanyl that finds its way into America, but was responsible for a shocking 3.6% of the total cocaine seizures in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2024, though this amount is barely enough to fuel the average Tommy Robinson Christmas carol concert crowd. (Apparently Robinson found God in prison, which is a surprise given the problems God’s immense omnipresence would create in our already overcrowded jails.)
I do think we need to be careful in legitimising American attacks on countries that import things into America that Trump doesn’t like. These days, countries beyond America, such as Canada for example, are the chief exporter to the truth-deprived nation of actual news, and Trump is even less keen on facts than he is on fentanyl. He’s already banned people who have ever worked as “fact checkers” from applying for American visas. How long before he bombs Britain for being a source of half-reliable reporting, in a carefully targeted attack after which only Nigel Farage’s Twitter feed, Nick Ferrari’s massive trousers and the offices of Paul Marshall’s GB News are left standing?
And that 3.6% of cocaine seizures is of course also a small amount compared to the 400 tonnes of cocaine trafficked into the US by Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a man pardoned in November by Donald Trump himself. This might have been the first clue that the illegal invasion of Venezuela wasn’t really about the cocaine itself, the immorality of which seems mutable depending on the oil reserves of the supposed dealer.
Because in the first press conference he did after the kidnapping, Trump began a complex weave during which he forgot what the supposed justifications for the illegal invasion were, barely mentioning democracy and drugs, and fixating instead on all of Venezuela’s delicious oil, which he would now be in control of. Meanwhile, his flexible American-Cuban secretary of state, Marco Rubio, his tattooed Christian Nationalist secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and his Breitbart Nosferatu, Stephen Miller, stared at the floor waiting for it to end, like a polyamorous love triangle whose elderly basset hound has farted, hoping the smell will dissipate before their guests start retching.
Somehow, during the speech, which should have been celebrating his invasion of Venezuela, Trump’s wandering hand of random rhetoric managed to give the impression that he was also considering invading Colombia. I think that to declare war on one South American country over the new year holiday period may be considered a misfortune. But to declare war on two begins to look like carelessness. That’s an Oscar Wilde joke. Typical diversity hire.
Keir Starmer was trapped between the rock of the blindingly obvious illegality of the Venezuelan invasion and the hard place of the need to keep Trump onside in search of trade deals and Ukrainian peace promises he is unlikely to honour or even remember having made anyway. And so Starmer began a complex shimmy between incompatible positions, like a tired grey bee using the medium of dance to give suspicious fellow bees the impression that he knew where some really great pollen was hidden but wasn’t able to reveal the location at this exact moment.
Within hours, Trump’s communications director Katie Miller, the wife of the Breitbart Nosferatu, had risen in one swift vertical surge from a coffin full of rats and wet dirt to go off-piste and send a message on Elon Musk’s X, a social media platform currently fixated on the pornographic AI-driven sexualisation of small children, showing Greenland draped in an American flag with the word “soon” underneath it. It’s that kind of direct and unambiguous messaging that has made her such a great director of communications.
The Venezuelan excuse won’t work for invading Greenland. Greenland doesn’t export drugs or anything harmful to America. Indeed, the only thing I personally have ever wanted from Greenland is an original vinyl copy of the 1973 debut by the Greenlandic country-funk band Sumé, currently £70 on the internet but sure to become more scarce and thus more expensive should Trump destroy the island nation’s entire civilisation to redevelop it as a luxury resort and/or open-cast mine.
Needing a reason, Trump made up a story about Greenland being surrounded by Chinese ships, which was news to the people living there. Perhaps Trump should say he is trying to liberate the Greenlandic Inuit from the Danes, because if there’s one thing America hates it’s invaders co-opting the land and resources of Indigenous people.
And what is all this for, really? Conspiracy theorists say Trump’s on the warpath to distract from whatever presence he may or may not have in the Epstein files, a staggering 99% of which remain unreleased despite the legal requirement that everyone gets to see them. It’s a shame Russell Brand didn’t think of threatening Greenland, or Greenlandywandyandypandy as he might have called it before he became a serious political commentator. Then maybe all his troubles would have gone away.
American friends that have been working here this week tell me there’s no way Trump will invade Greenland, a European territory, and bring about the end of Nato, and then human civilisation as we know it. But everything we said Trump wouldn’t do he has done. And the irony is that every barrel of oil buccaneered out of Venezuela and resold by Trump just brings the planet one degree closer to total immolation. I think I’d better wrap this up and go and make an offer on that old Greenland record.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of next year, with a further 96 dates including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February.
Stewart is interviewing Sleaford Mods about their new album, The Demise of Planet X, at Rough Trade shops in Nottingham and London on 13 and 20 January respectively. A recording of the Nottingham interview will be available free exclusively for members of the Nerve.
Finally, he is also appearing at this year’s Laugharne Festival (20-22 March) for which the Nerve is the media partner. Members can book reduced tickets for £145 (normal price £165). To sign up as a Nerve member click here and then drop us a line at [email protected] to get the booking code.