Trump calling his unilateral aggression a “police action” is the Gleiwitz doctrine. The explicitly named “Department of War” saying it will punish whomever it wants, whenever it wants, then trying to appropriate the language of law enforcement after the fact?

A German citizen named Franciszek Honiok has been recorded as the first victim of World War II. He sold farm machinery and had openly sympathized with Poland. For this the Gestapo picked him up August 30, 1939, dressed him in a Polish uniform, gave him a lethal injection, shot him dead, and left him at the Gleiwitz radio station as “evidence” of Polish aggression against Germany.

The Nazis called him and others they killed the “Konserven” (canned goods) because they were so well prepared — humans murdered to send a very specific public message that served Nazism.

Hitler made this playbook infamous. Trump is running it again. This is what Hitler said to his generals on August 22, 1939, the week before murdering Honiok:

I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.

Then Operation Himmler (August 31, 1939) used Honiok’s body and staged fake Polish attacks on German installations, including the famous Gleiwitz radio station incident, to fake the appearance of Polish aggression. Nazi SS operatives dressed in Polish uniforms, broadcast anti-German messages, and left Konserven behind.

On September 1, 1939 Hitler broadcast pure propaganda, as he said he would:

This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 a.m., we have been returning the fire… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.

Trump is repeating this Gleiwitz history as the true precedent for his abuse of the phrase “police action” in Venezuela. The criminal espouses the vocabulary of law enforcement and blocks police from responding, while committing the crimes.

That’s abuse, not misuse, of language. It’s Hitler’s stated doctrine of propagandist inversion. The term now means its opposite, to enable crimes against peace, an intentional and very targeted violation of 1945 Nuremberg.

Trump is basically the armed bank robber projecting “strength” by stating he’s the police recovering stolen money. Historian Florian Altenhöner has pondered:

The lie being constructed there is breathtaking. On the other hand, one has to ask why this regime doesn’t rely on its power, but wants to give the appearance of acting morally, that the [Hitler or Trump] offensive war must be justified as a defensive war. A strange notion of strength.

Tom Dannenbaum (Stanford Law) called it:

The action violated international law.

Milena Sterio (Cleveland State) made it clear:

Drug smuggling “does not constitute an armed attack and does not authorize the U.S. to use force in self-defense.” And: Washington “cannot exercise extra-territorial jurisdiction to arrest individuals anywhere it pleases.”

Adil Haque (Rutgers) said it too:

The capture was “an illegal infringement of the inviolability and immunity of a sitting Head of State.”

It’s not complicated. It’s not a mystery.

The East Wing of the White House represented American victory against fascism, and so it was attacked by Trump. The historic symbol of Hitler’s defeat was completely demolished under a plan that had stated it would be expanded without touching it. Get it? Expansion can’t touch the East Wing if it’s not there anymore.

It’s the Nazi Lebensraum strategy, as espoused by Peter Thiel. It’s the loophole of destruction.

JD Vance, funded by Thiel, announced that the U.S. courts no longer constrain its supreme leader, after he gladly accepted the VP role under the man that he had called America’s Hitler.

If you read that right, Vance claimed to be discouraged by the rise of America’s Hitler. Discouraged about what exactly, his chance of success at the polls? Vague. I mean he then called shotgun to ride with America’s Hitler into office and help declare the end of democracy.

The U.S. claiming that Article 51 self-defense is relevant is an inside joke. They know such a claim is laughable on its face. They are mocking the world, by pardoning convicted drug lords to send them back to work, while claiming an emergency War Department self-defense necessity against drug lords.

Drug trafficking is not an “armed attack.” No quoted legal scholar supports it. Drug war is not, and has never been, anything to do with war. But Hitler proved it doesn’t matter, because the U.S. is operating above the law as Hitler did.

Washington is saying it cannot be held accountable for any violation by the U.N. Security Council. It is stating that everything put in place to prevent another Hitler can’t stop… America’s Hitler. JD Vance is no longer discouraged.

The system designed to prevent this crime cannot punish the criminal because the criminal has a veto.

Nazi Foreign Policy Doctrine is Officially American Now

On January 3, 2026, the United States conducted airstrikes on Caracas, captured Venezuela’s head of state, and announced it would administer the country. President Trump declared:

We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.

For students of twentieth-century history, this language is not unfamiliar. That’s the exact kind of statement Hitler made (Prague Castle on March 16, 1939).

Filled with the earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples… to benefit peace and the social welfare of all.

The post-1945 international order was constructed specifically after the defeat of Hitler to prevent great powers from doing what the United States did this morning. The UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against the territorial integrity of states, the Nuremberg principles, the architecture of sovereignty norms—all of it emerged from a specific historical experience.

Hitler seized Austria. March 1938.

Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia. March 1939.

Hitler invaded Poland. September 1939.

In each case, the Reich provided legal justifications: criminal governance by target states, security necessities, historic claims, protection of “ethnic” Germans.

The Allied powers who defeated Germany did not merely punish these acts. They constructed an international legal architecture designed to make them impossible to repeat. The category of “crimes against peace”—the waging of aggressive war—was established at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime, from which all other war crimes flow.

Trump has just committed the crimes.

Geoffrey Robertson KC, former president of the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, says it plainly:

[Trump] has committed the crime of aggression, which the court at Nuremberg described as the supreme crime.

What requires explanation is how the United States, the principal architect of that order, came to abandon it entirely—and to do so using the precise rhetorical framework it was designed to prohibit.

Hitler’s doctrine of Lebensraum, as recently evangelized by Peter Thiel, held that great powers possess natural spheres, that smaller nations within those spheres exist at sufferance, and that absorption or control represents correction rather than conquest. The Reich did not describe itself as an aggressor. Germany was administering territories for their benefit. Germany was restoring proper order. Germany was defending itself against threats emanating from criminally governed neighbors.

The Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela follows this structure exactly. Venezuela is claimed not to be a legitimate state but a “narco-state”, meaning a criminal enterprise masquerading as a government. The 2020 indictments and the “foreign terrorist organization” designation create legal architecture for action. The United States is the supposed aggrieved party, “defending” itself against drug trafficking. And now, administration: America will “run the country” for Venezuela’s benefit. Trump said Venezuelans would benefit from their oil being sold “but so will the U.S.”

Venezuela is not an isolated case.

In recent months, his administration has claimed Greenland is “essential for national security” and declined to rule out military action against Denmark. It has declared that the Panama Canal should return to American control. It has described Canada as a future “51st state.” It has renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

This is not a metaphor.

This is the explicit application of Nazi spheres-of-influence doctrine to the Western Hemisphere—the Monroe Doctrine transformed from diplomatic posture into territorial acquisition, using the identical rhetorical structure that characterized Hitler’s aggressive expansion in the 1930s.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a German CDU parliamentarian who clearly knows Nazi history, recognized the pattern immediately:

With President Trump, the U.S. are abandoning the rules-based order that has shaped us since 1945. The coup in Venezuela marks a return to the old U.S. doctrine from before 1940: a mindset of thinking in terms of spheres of influence, where the law of force rules, not international law.

Before 1940.

He is being precise.

Before Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland.

The “rules-based order” was constructed because of what Hitler did before 1940. A German conservative parliamentarian is now watching the United States leader replicate the Nazi conduct that international laws and order were built to prevent.

The question historians will ask is not whether this represents a crime, breaking with post-war norms. It obviously is and does. The question is how a constitutional republic, the principal author of the post-1945 architecture, came to operate under Hitler’s foreign policy doctrine that architecture was designed to constrain.

The answer is not yet clear. But the fact is no longer in dispute. On January 3, 2026, the President of the United States announced on live television that American forces had seized a foreign head of state and that America would govern his country.

The Hitler Lebensraum doctrine—great powers absorbing smaller nations within their natural sphere—is now operative and overt American foreign policy.

The post-war anti-fascism order did not die quietly. It was killed obnoxiously, on camera, by fascists now running its principal architect.

A Defense Department functionary published an op-ed in The Hill this week falsely claiming that Donald Trump faces unprecedented resistance to executive power. The author throws “scholars” shade at President Truman and then signs his byline “a civilian employee of the War Department.”

The War Department was abolished in 1947.

Erick Chomskis is a good example of why.

He is not randomly picking Truman as an example (along with references to Carter, Clinton and Obama). He apparently has been tasked by someone to attack the architect of the system that constrains war crimes. The “War Department” signature isn’t cosplay, it’s an ideological marker. It rejects the entire post-Truman civilian oversight architecture.

Truman built the guardrails. In 1947 he set civil rights and the anti-fascist precedents the GOP hate. Notably, after he fired the “dumb son of a bitch” General MacArthur in 1951 for refusing to respect civilian authority… in 1960 Truman correctly warned that Nixon was “a no good lying bastard” and told voters that anyone who supported him “ought to go to hell.” He also said as much about the 1948 GOP in public.

PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL; Says When Bigots, Profiteers Get Control of Country They Select ‘Front Man’ to Rule DICTATORSHIP STRESSED Truman Tells Chicago Audience a Republican Victory Will Threaten U.S. Liberty TRUMAN SAYS GOP PERILS U.S. LIBERTY

Nailed it.

So Chomskis is revisiting a very particular angle of propaganda, spreading specific falsehoods about Truman, to reverse the defenses against fascism.

Writing Wrong History is Wrong

Chomskis claims Truman’s Korea intervention established a precedent for unilateral presidential action.

…what scholars call the “Korean precedent” for unilateral presidential action in armed conflicts.

This is absurdly false.

Truman acted under UN Security Council Resolution 83. The State Department meticulously documented the intervention as an international police action as intended under the emergent UN authority. Congress appropriated funds and extended the draft. Contested? Sure, because politics, duh. Unilateral? Not even close.

Let me be even more clear, to help the scholars Chomskis wants to invoke on this, because they actually contradict him.

Chomskis’ claim that Korea established a “precedent for unilateral presidential action” is brain dead. Truman explicitly ordered multilateral “police action” as a peace-time operation. It was the most exact opposite of Trump’s random acts of unilateral war.

Chomskis similarly screws up his claims that Obama “ordered military intervention in Libya in 2011 without a congressional vote.”

Nope.

He omits how Obama reacted under UN Security Council Resolution 1973, reported to Congress within 48 hours per the War Powers Resolution, and faced sustained Republican criticism almost as bad as the time he wore a tan suit.

Come on. America must have a shortage of historians because this op-ed is unfit for print.

Every example Chomskis cites operated within international legal frameworks. Yet Chomskis omits all the legal frameworks, to compare with Trump who ignores legal frameworks. That’s the whole ruse of his disinformation.

Trump’s Caribbean bombing campaign is within no legal framework, unlike how Presidents before him operated. The comparison being made isn’t about any real precedent. It’s a targeted attack on Truman, telling wrong history, corrupting the record, with shameless war propaganda.

Double Standard Donald

Chomskis is upside down and backwards as a sloppy propaganda tactic.

The establishment (Republican House) that couldn’t stop itself from puking all over Obama about Libya has said nothing about Trump bombing Venezuelan ports without congressional authorization.

The party that went absolutely bananas about executive overreach now eagerly watches Trump refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds, and says nothing.

The “establishment” supposedly persecuting Trump? That’s his own congressional majority, who are maintaining perfect silence.

Trump is committing obvious war crimes and is the literal opposite of Truman.

He faces no impeachment proceedings. No congressional war powers challenges. No resistance from the establishment on any constitutional question. The unprecedented persecution of Trump exists not at all, unless you count Chomskis’ disinformation.

Fiction Function

The Hill piece is an information operations product of the military—strategic omissions producing false conclusions from grains of truth.

Strip all legal frameworks, ignore all major details, erase congressional responses, and you can make anything look like a precedent.

The target audience probably aren’t historians and won’t know the UN resolutions. They’ll share because a “War Department” just produced a hit piece on Truman.

Chomskis is literally arguing in his conclusion that constraints on executive power threaten the republic—when unconstrained executive power is the actual threat to republics. This is weapons-grade military propaganda, pushing fascist inversion dressed in constitutional language.

His bonkers framing suggests that only elected officials (i.e. Trump) have legitimate authority, which is precisely the argument authoritarians make to dismantle checks and balances. His “permission slip” fear is pure projection. Trump constantly talks and operates as if the presidency IS a permission slip for him personally, from no one.

The byline of Chomskis is the signature. A defense bureaucrat calling his employer by its pre-Truman name is not confused about institutional attacks. He is announcing revisionism to promote fascism, choosing the wrong side of history.

The Hill served this state-run Trump disinformation sausage without correction. Draw your own conclusions about what The Hill has become.