A Child Of Chaos
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/opinion/venezuela-trump-oil-democracy.html
This op-ed by Tom Friedman in The New York Times on January 9 is illustrative of the difficulty that is faced by those who wish to dominate their environments by promoting chaos using the power of military force. This piece is about Venezuela. In it, Friedman notes that Trump’s takeover of the Venezuelan oil is his only goal. The political chaos that has ensued by not promising new and fair elections to a country that (unlike 2020 America) really did have its last election stolen, will probably chase away any new investment by American oil companies in the petroleum infrastructure of the country. This investment is needed to get the oil out of the ground. Friedman’s point is that without political stability in the form of a representative democracy, big oil will stay away from Venezuela and Trump can do nothing to make them invest until the oil executives can explain new capital expenditure in terms of return on investment to their shareholders. No democracy; no oil. Instead, Trump, the child of chaos, will try to run the country himself. Good luck with that.
And the same chaos is happening with the Trump Administration’s immigration actions. Everyone can get behind an organized effort to round up illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in this country and deport them. Everyone cannot get behind ICE wandering the streets of blue states and sanctuary cities looking for anyone they can find. Due to the volatile and chaotic nature of the immigration service’s activities and resistance to these activities as well as the apparent lack of adequate training for some of the agents (how stupid do you have to be to stand in front of a car? My grandsons know better), four people are dead. It sounds like the two in Portland were truly bad actors and should have been deported, but the death of the woman in Minneapolis was an awful and fatal mistake, perhaps by both her and the ICE agent who shot her. As for the recent fourth shooting, perhaps this time we will have a real investigation.
But Trump does love chaos. He loved the chaos on January 6, 2021 so much that he let all the guilty insurrectionists out of jail so they could do it again, if Trump determines that to be necessary.
He’s throwing NATO into chaos by seeming to be a fair-weather ally with designs on Greenland. We have a base in Greenland. Why do we have to own a place where English is the third most frequently spoken language?
Trump gravitated to the casino business. What could be more chaotic? What’s more, he was lousy at it. Many bankruptcies followed.
Surely, he had many people around him who knew he had lost in 2020, but he persisted and persists to this day in denying that our elections are fair and thus, creates chaos and doubt among the electorate in the integrity of the democratic process.
Remember this all started back in 2015 with Trump’s Birther Movement doubting the legitimacy of the citizenship of President Obama. Of course, Obama making fun of Trump at a large Washington dinner is what probably got Trump to enter the presidential race. Obama created a little chaos, too.
From a personal point of view, I hate chaos. When I was an administrator, I did everything in my power to eliminate chaos in the oversight of federally-regulated research. We had chaos all the time anyway, but I surely didn’t relish it.
Trump loves it. He feeds off it. In essence, he creates the problem that “only I can fix.”
Donald Trump is my idea of a ten-year-old kid who just loves to bully others, create trouble, and watch other people struggle. That’s not leadership. That’s a formula for autocracy.
The United States is currently plagued with chaos in schools, in government, and even in law enforcement because, as a close friend said before the 2024 election, “if Trump is elected, law and order will be gone.” My friend was right. Chaos.
