Vicious cycle: Venezuela’s summer raises fears about America’s fall

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COMMENTARY The vicious election denialism in Venezuela warns us of a repeat of Jan. 6 here if Trump loses — and of the responsibility leaders like Miami's GOP Congress members have to prevent it.

I’m not shocked by the viciousness of the election theft that Venezuela’s dictatorial socialist regime is committing right now.

I’ve seen that vicious face before — not just there but here. And seeing it this summer in Venezuela reminds me of the awful likelihood of seeing it this fall in the U.S.

This is hardly the first time Venezuela’s regime has lost out and lashed out. In 2007, its messianic founder, the late President Hugo Chávez, couldn’t summon enough votes to change the Constitution to let him run for re-election in perpetuity. The night after his setback, I had drinks in Caracas with two of his top aides — and what I saw on their own faces was frightening.

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Up to then, these leftist but sensible young men had insisted Chávez was no Fidel Castro-style autocrat looking to rule for life. Now, after eight years in the hyperbaric chamber of “revolution,” it was obvious they’d drunk the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat Kool Aid. Their opinion of Venezuelans who’d voted No on Chávez’s eternal re-election bid was, well, vicious.

“They’re fascists,” one told me with a menacing look I’d never seen him flash before. “They’re escuálidos ,” said the other — using Chávez’s insult for what he labeled the filthy, evil nature of anyone who opposed him. And if those escuálidos wouldn’t submit, then the revolution would have to ram the re-election measure down their throats. Which is exactly what Chávez did.

Ditto after the revolution lost the National Assembly to los escuálidos in 2015. Chávez’s successor, current dictator Nicolás Maduro, simply shut down that legislature and created a new one. Anyone who cried foul got pounded by his security forces — viciously enough that the U.N. designated the crackdown a crime against humanity.

July 28 or Jan. 6 — both reflect the sociopathic belief in a birthright to rule, a certainty that anyone outside that divine orbit is filthy, evil… escuálido.

Ditto after Maduro lost to escuálido candidate Edmundo González in the July 28 presidential election by the largest landslide in Venezuelan history. Maduro claimed “victory” while his security forces performed a brutal encore, jailing 2,400 protesters and killing 27. So far.

Venezuela’s regime thinks holding elections makes it democratic, the way Elon Musk thinks owning SpaceX makes him Neil Armstrong. But the vicious cycle in this case is to lose an election — then respond to voter rejection not by listening up but by doubling down.

Zero-sum zombies

It’s the sociopathic tic of people who’ve been programmed to believe that they and they alone possess a birthright to rule, and anyone outside that divine orbit is filthy, evil … escuálido.

Rioting Trump supporters confront police as they storm the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, attempting to block then President-elect Joe Biden's victory certification by Congress.

We’ve seen that denialism software short-circuit U.S. democracy’s hardware, too — especially on Jan. 6, 2021, when at the urging of then President Donald Trump, his insurrectionist followers violently stormed the U.S. Congress to prevent certification of his 2020 re-election loss.

One political scientist after another in this country is warning that Trump and his hardcore MAGA base show every sign of erupting in a Jan. 6 redux if he loses this November's presidential election. The reason: their own zombie-like, zero-sum certainty that anyone who defies Trump is likewise filthy, evil, escuálido .

They’ve in fact laid it out this time in manifestos like Project 2025, a scheme of right-wing retribution that its Heritage Foundation drafters call a blueprint not just for a new Trump presidency, but for “the second American Revolution — which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Bloodless if the left allows it to be . That’s not the mission statement of a candidacy or constituency willing to acknowledge “the majesty of democracy,” as the late Republican President George H.W. Bush put it when he lost re-election in 1992.

It’s a chilling advisory from the Chávez-Maduro wing that rules the GOP in 2024.

As a denizen of Miami, with its large Venezuelan population, my question is: will my city’s Republican congressional delegation get the lesson staring at us from across the Caribbean and try to blunt that vicious impulse in their own “revolution” if Trump loses — instead of spinelessly pandering to it as most of them did on Jan. 6?

Will the likes of Florida Sen. Rick Scott and Miami Congressmen Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez — who voted to block certification of Electoral College votes for then President-elect Joe Biden that day — urge Trump’s legions to accept the majesty of democracy?

If not, I won’t be shocked. Again.

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