Venezuelans hate the idea floated by Donald Trump of making their country the 51st state. Americans who love their country hate it more.
Donald Trump once crusaded against the admission of millions of Latin Americans into the United States. Now he promotes the idea of a Marxist South American narco-state with a population larger than Texas entering the union. Why build a wall to keep a few million out when you want to grant citizenship to 32 million Venezuelans?
“Just got off the phone with @realDonaldTrump,” John Roberts of Fox News wrote earlier this week, adding that “he told me he is seriously considering a move to make Venezuela the 51st state.” Roberts said that Trump told him that Venezuela “loves Trump.”
The president again this month posted a map that featured Venezuela as a U.S. state.
Why not retroactively make Seattle’s CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) or Robert Owen’s New Harmony experiment states, too? Surely Democrats like their chances of recapturing the U.S. Senate with Venezuela in the union.
For years, left-wingers have pushed for Washington, D.C., statehood and Puerto Rican statehood as a means of altering the ideological makeup of Congress. Aside from the political stupidity of Venezuelan statehood, the notion that a separate nation speaking a separate language can somehow integrate itself into a nation on another continent seems quite ignorant of the ties that bind.
Unfortunately, so many ideas initially dismissed as silly … become pursued policy during the second Trump administration…
The president has at various times during his second administration pushed the idea of admitting into the United States Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, and other locales more left-wing than Vermont. If he did not exert more energy attempting to exile the taxpayer’s best friend from Congress, Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, one might take Trump’s expansionist rhetoric with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, so many ideas initially dismissed as silly — assumed as emanating from stream-of-consciousness speaking after too many Diet Cokes — become pursued policy during the second Trump administration to just ignore the Venezuela talk.
The Venezuelan socialists, like the American conservatives, do not seem particularly eager to offend Trump. On this, the socialists proved more courageous than the mute conservatives. They meekly declined the president’s invitation.
“We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” Venezuelan President Rodríguez said on Monday. Venezuela, she noted, is “not a colony, but a free country.”
President Trump, the man who presides over the national government, views addition as making America stronger. From the perspective of the states that constitute the United States, this amounts to not addition but dilution.
Daniel Webster thought so. One of the great American statesmen of the 19th century, he believed that the founders established a republic, not an empire, and felt tasked to guard it upon the addition of a foreign country into the union during his time in office.
“It is evident, at least, that there must be some boundary, or some limits to a republic which is to have a common centre,” he wrote in 1844. “Free and ardent speculations may lead to the indulgence of an idea that such a republic may be extended over a whole hemisphere. On the other hand, minds less sanguine, or more chastened by the examples of history, may fear that extension often produces weakness, rather than strength; and that political attraction, like other attractions, is less and less powerful, as the parts become more and more distant.”
Rather than increase the power of his adopted home state of Massachusetts, the former and future senator believed that repeated annexation, followed inevitably by statehood, weakened it.
“We have a republic, gentlemen, of vast extent and unequalled natural advantages; a republic, full of interest in its origin, its history, its present condition, and its prospects for the future,” he counseled. “Instead of aiming to enlarge its boundaries, let us seek, rather, to strengthen its union, to draw out its resources, to maintain and improve its institutions of religion and liberty, and thus to push it forward in its career of prosperity and glory.”
Good advice — for 1844 or 2026.
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