Wyoming’s dynamic Senate duo blindly follows Trump downhill

Is there a lie that Donald Trump can tell to distract Americans from his incompetence that Wyoming’s U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis won’t stand up and applaud?

I don’t think so, based on their response to Saturday’s reckless military strike against Venezuela. Trump’s administration didn’t even tell Congress it had invaded the country and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife until after the mission was completed.

Neither Barrasso nor Lummis questioned why the U.S. would attack a sovereign nation to force regime change that was certain to be condemned by dozens of other countries for breaking international laws, including China, Russia, most of Europe and Venezuela’s neighbors.

Whatever happened to Trump’s “America First” agenda that stoked his base in the last election? It sounds like he pushed it off the table to focus on his own dictatorship dreams.

The two senators didn’t say a word about how the move will destabilize the world and give bad actors like Russia an excuse to seize control of any country and its assets. 

Lummis went on social media to praise Trump’s “decisive leadership.” Both she and Barrasso branded Maduro a “narco-terrorist” — the GOP’s catch phrase of the day — and characterized his arrest as saving thousands of American lives.

Let’s be clear: Both senators were right when they called Maduro a dictator and said the world is safer with him out of power. But to contend that he posed an imminent threat to the U.S. and had to be forcibly removed without even consulting Congress just isn’t true, no matter how many stories Trump invents.

The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact examined Trump’s justification for blowing up more than 30 boats off the coast of Venezuela since September, killing at least 115 people. It noted he never provided any evidence about what illegal drugs were supposedly on the ships or where they were headed. In one high-profile case, a second strike was ordered to kill two survivors who were clinging to wreckage to keep from drowning. 

If that’s not a war crime, what is?

At his post-invasion press conference, Trump claimed drugs on each boat would kill, “on average, 25,000 people.” If true, the mini-armada would have killed some 800,000 people, nearly 11 times as many drug overdose deaths as the U.S. reports annually.

But Trump gave himself credit for knocking “out 97% of the drugs coming in by sea.” In less than four months! Do you believe it? Of course not, but Barrasso and Lummis apparently have to if they don’t want to get knocked around on Truth Social.

In reality, experts in crime, drugs and Venezuela say the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S. compared to Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico. But we aren’t toppling those nations’ leaders and rushing them to New York City for criminal trials.

Trump repeated his ridiculously false claim that Maduro emptied Venezuela’s mental institutions and prisons and sent them all to the U.S. “They were drug dealers. They were drug kingpins. They sent everybody bad into the United States, but no longer,” he said. “And we now have a border where nobody gets through.”

Then the president told us the real reason he invaded Venezuela. The South American nation, he said, “unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets, and American platforms costing us billions and billions of dollars.” Trump is pissed off, and he wants his revenge.

“Massive oil infrastructure was taken like we were babies, so we didn’t do anything about it,” Trump said. “I would have done something about it. America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere.”

I never expected the truth to suddenly burst from Trump’s lips, but he spelled out how he intends to help his billionaire oil buddies clean up. He said — again without evidence — that our country’s role in governing Venezuela “won’t cost us anything” because U.S. oil companies will invest in new infrastructure.

“It’s going to make a lot of money,” the president added, though many Americans would probably come to that conclusion on their own.

I think Wyoming voters still wearing blinders when it comes to Trump’s huge credibility problems, should ask themselves what’s more plausible: Is he actually kicking ass and fixing our national drug problems by taking over another country in total upheaval, or is Trump trying to make us forget all those phony promises to lower prices and turn the economy around?

There are myriad reasons why starting an illegal war probably seemed like a great option for Trump, who certainly won’t view it as a moral issue as long as people give him proper credit for doing it. 

His first year back in the White House must have been a miserable experience, except when he demolished the East Wing to build a garish $300 million ballroom, or added his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, or got his kicks ridiculing a famous Hollywood couple who’d just been stabbed to death.

The national media is finally focusing attention on Trump’s rapid physical and mental decline, though not nearly as much as it did by being complicit and railroading Joe Biden out of office.

Then there’s that pesky scandal about Trump’s dead pedophile pal, Jeffrey Epstein, and the treasure trove of documents yet to be released about the infamous crimes. It’s even driven a wedge between the president and some of his most previously loyal MAGA followers, like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Who could have seen that coming?

There won’t be any splits like that from the Wyoming delegation. Barrasso can’t keep his position as the No. 2 Senate Republican without Trump’s backing. Lummis is leaving the Capitol at the end of her term next year, but she won’t rock the boat. And her likely successor, Rep. Harriet Hageman, was strangely silent about the Venezuelan attack over the weekend, but she owes her political career to the president. 

If Secretary of State Chuck Gray continues his unlikely climb up the state’s political ladder and lands Hageman’s U.S. House seat, he’ll remain a loyal lapdog.

It would be great to see a Wyoming candidate who would dare question why Trump bypassed Congress. Even his chief of staff, Susan Wiles, told Vanity Fair that Trump would need a green light from Congress to approve land strikes in Venezuela.

A president can use military force as commander in chief, but only Congress can constitutionally declare war or fund one. If Trump used this mission just to take the heat off himself for the moment, I can see him simply declaring victory and looking for the next big magic trick to avoid accountability. 

But will any Wyoming Republican politician ever be held responsible for allowing Trump’s madness to be “sanewashed?”