For a serial liar, Donald Trump can be bracingly honest. We’ve known about the mendacity for years – consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from the president’s first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election – but the examples of bracing candour are fresher. This week both began and ended with the US president speaking the shocking truth.
At a press conference to celebrate his capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that from now on the US would “run” that country, before moving in the very next breath to Venezuela’s oil. There was no pious talk of democracy, scant mention even of the drug trafficking that earlier served as a pretext for military action. Instead, Trump said out loud what had once been a slogan on leftist placards in protest at past US interventions, admitting that it really was all about the oil. It was as transparent a revelation of Trump’s true motive as you could have asked for.
As the week closed, there was another disarmingly frank disclosure from the president, a confession that makes sense of both the crazy start to 2026 – and the man who is increasingly shaping our world.
Before we get to that statement, it’s worth registering how hard it can be to square these flashes of Trumpian honesty with the stream of untruths and, more subtly, contradictions and hypocrisies that emanate from him the rest of the time. Note, for example, Trump’s response when asked for his new year resolution: “Peace. Peace on Earth,” he said. Two days later, he was raining lethal fire on Caracas – and a few days after that, he was defending a US federal agent who had shot dead a mother of three in Minneapolis, a woman who posed no conceivable threat to anyone. The self-styled President of Peace is the bringer of war at home and abroad.
These two fronts are more alike than they might seem. The common thread is rule by fear. Trump’s aim in Venezuela has been to remove Maduro and hope that fear will do the rest. No need for a boots-on-the-ground occupation or “second wave” military assault; no need even for regime change. Removal of the man at the top should be enough to intimidate Maduro’s erstwhile henchmen, and especially his chief henchwoman, into doing the US’s bidding, starting with the handover of its oil industry.
What’s more, fear is contagious. Cuba has most reason to be anxious, but Trump also warned Colombia’s leader to “watch his ass”, while signalling that he is considering airstrikes on Mexico, aimed at drug cartels he says are now running that country. The mere threat of a repeat of last weekend’s action on Venezuela may well be enough to bring the rest of the Americas to heel.
That fear reaches across the Atlantic. Trump’s desire for Greenland was once dismissed as a punchline, but after Venezuela no one is laughing. Now we know that Trump’s words are the best guide to his future actions: if he says he wants something, he may well take it. In truth, the US’s European allies have been governed by fear since the day 11 months ago when Trump humiliated Volodymr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office: they worry that if they stand up to the bully in the White House, the bully will turn on them. Specifically, they fear that if they complain about Trump’s designs on Greenland, he will pull the plug on US support for Ukraine.
But, to Trump, fear is not only a commodity for export. It is how he rules at home too. Much has been made of his campaign of intimidation of US institutions, from the media to the universities to the courts. Rather less attention has been paid to his efforts to intimidate the American public, to make ordinary US citizens frightened of their own government.
But that is where we are now. For many months, masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have been snatching people off the streets and meting out brutal punishment to those who get in their way. Witnesses in Minneapolis described an “insane” scene on Thursday, 24 hours after the killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good: “Large convoys of heavily armed masked men, blocking off streets at random, grabbing people nearly at random.” It’s always illuminating to report this as we would if it were happening somewhere far away: “Heavily armed government militias are roaming unchecked through US cities and shooting human rights observers dead in the streets,” to quote the New Republic’s Greg Sargent. On Thursday border patrol agents in Portland, Oregon shot two people outside a hospital.
Fuelling the fear are the lies. Trump pretended his beef with Maduro was the supply of narcotics into the US, even though it is hardly Venezuelan drugs that are killing Americans – and even as he, Trump, had just pardoned and released the ex-president of Honduras, who had been convicted and jailed for flooding the US with 400 tonnes of cocaine.
The lies at home are even more egregious. On the killing of Good, Trump and his officials have urged Americans to disbelieve their own eyes, insisting that Good was a “domestic terrorist” bent on using her car as a weapon when video footage of the incident leaves no doubt that she was not trying to kill ICE agents, but to get away from them. The lying never stops, even when that means defaming the dead. JD Vance called the slain woman a “deranged leftist”.
Of course, what these assaults, domestic and foreign, have in common is the drive for power, free of challenge or restraint. South American countries are to submit, as are Democrat-run cities and states. Whether it’s sending special forces to Caracas or ordering the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington DC, the goal is control.
Which brings us to that second eruption of honesty. At the end of the week, Trump told the New York Times that he recognises only one constraint on his ability to act: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” All the other official checks or balances are as nothing. His disregard for international law is total, but he sees domestic law much the same way: judges only have the power to restrain him “under certain circumstances”, he told the NYT.
That is an honest account by Trump of how he sees himself: not so much a national president as a global emperor. Now those who oppose him have to be just as honest. Trump may be right that the US arsenal is such that no country can stand up to him, and certainly not alone. But the major European powers, and others, do have leverage, especially if they act in concert. More directly, the US public has a formidable weapon in its hands: it can vote to wrest the House of Representatives, at least, from the Republicans in November, which will act as an instant curb on Trump’s power. At home and abroad, it means overcoming fear, combining together and admitting the menace we now confront – and doing so honestly.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
