The Dom Doctrine

Domination, Theft, and the Mind of MAGA

The invasion of Venezuela, the abduction of its dictator, and the promised seizure of its assets in many ways echo the colonial swagger of prior centuries. Dark-skinned infantilized denizens of “shit-hole countries” are disciplined and controlled by a paternalistic Uncle Sam. But so far, it has been largely a performance of imperial piracy. The long-term outcomes of the attack cannot be predicted. But we already know a few things. It was done with open contempt for and indifference to Congress. The drug-trafficking rationale has been laughable on its face, given Trump’s recent pardon of a convicted drug kingpin, Honduran ex-president Juan Hernandez. That was a pardon driven by Trump’s undisguised identification with Hernandez as a fellow gangster pursued by the dogged beat cops of the Biden administration DOJ.

The usual motive for such adventures – theft of natural resources – has been stated directly, unapologetically, and proudly. There is, of course, the usual Trumpian twist. His claim on Venezuelan oil was yet one more confession by way of accusation when he voiced the debunked lie that it was, in fact, Venezuela that was the thief of America’s oil. The MAGA regime felt no need to offer up the usual fusty rhetoric about bringing democracy and human rights to a benighted backwater plagued by dictatorship and poverty.

After the legitimately elected president of Venezuela, living in exile in Spain, Edmundo Gonzalez, insisted that he be allowed to take office, Trump said no thanks, we got it. “We will run the country,” he proclaimed. What Trump seems to mean is that he will run the thugs who have run the country all along.

He didn’t want regime change; he wanted a change of dictators. A new, more malleable autocrat, like the current corrupt vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, will do fine as long as she defers to him. In fact, a classified but leaked CIA assessmentprior to the invasion concluded that Rodríguez would be well-positioned to manage the country’s police state apparatus to maintain stability in Maduro’s absence. The carrot for any puppet regime will be its cut of the spoils. The stick will be the possible return of US forces or perhaps targeted assassinations, threats Trump has already implied would be directed against an uncooperative Rodríguez.

Like so many of Trump’s assertions, his statement that he’s working with American oil companies to extract Venezuela’s oil was a lie. In fact, industry representatives insist they have no intention of investing in the risky decades-long project of developing the industry in an unstable and violent failed state. However, Trump may ultimately succeed in bullying oil CEOs into making his pirate dream come true, just as he’s extorted so many other American institutions.

While the attack on Venezuela does appear to be about taking their stuff, more importantly, it is about Trump proclaiming his right to do so. His stance is, in essence, we’re taking it because we want it. We have the military to seize it, which is proof of our entitlement. Moreover, the entire hemisphere of the Americas is ours because we say so.

The use of the military to abduct Maduro, the murder of fishermen and perhaps small-time drug smugglers, and the extradition of America’s brown immigrants to El Salvador’s torture gulags has so far not been about achieving any grand aim, but about Trump and the mafia state he commands showing their ability and entitlement to do it, to show that the Americas are his sphere of influence. And domestically, those actions demonstrate our current de facto reality – power lies with only one branch of the federal government, Trump’s executive branch.

In a deliberate echo of the 19th-century rationale for US dominance and control of the entire Western hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine, Trump dubbed his approach the Don-Roe Doctrine, which had already been codified in the administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) document in November of 2025.

Unlike those of earlier administrations, this NSS embraces Putin’s dream of returning to the global balance of tyrannies that prevailed two centuries ago, in which the world was carved up by empires that honored one another’s territorial claims and prerogatives to defend them by any means necessary. The “Donroe Doctrine” is a scheme not all that different from the gentleman’s agreements between organized crime organizations that divide geographical areas and criminal enterprises among themselves to avoid unnecessary and costly conflicts.

The present US threat to seize Greenland reveals, with even more clarity, the dynamics at play. Denmark has made its willingness to grant the Trump administration everything it is asking for explicit – a better mineral extraction deal, more territory to station bases, more troops on the ground, and more fulsome intelligence sharing. The US side has shown no interest in the offer. Clearly, the national security reasons for Trump’s insistence that he possess Greenland are bogus. As one confidential source in communication with the American administration, as well as Denmark, said, “The problem is that Trump has gotten into his head that the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is his thing. He’s now very focused on this. And it’s hard to come to an agreement with the Danes when Trump thinks he can just take it.” For this regime of predators, as gratifying as the thing stolen is the act of stealing. Handshakes imply a kind of mutuality, a relationship the MAGA Right and conservatives more generally find loathsome, weak, and unmanly. Coercion and the brutality of asymmetric force is the point. Domination as both performance and outcome is the goal. It could be called the Dom Doctrine.

Domination is about the effort to subjugate, to deny, and crush the agency of others. To be more plainspoken, it is theft – theft of another’s freedom, labor, bodily autonomy, land, health, resources, and recognition. Taking from others is the logical extension of the zero-sum mental world in which right-wingers reside. They detest what they call “woke” because of the implication that those at the receiving end of poverty, discrimination, or mistreatment are somehow equal and equally entitled as those with privilege.

Psychologists have described and researched what they call “social dominance orientation” (SDO). I’ve written about it extensively in my book, Hatreds We Love, and in other Minding Politics Substack posts. It refers to the tendency to embrace group-based hierarchy and a corresponding aversion to equality. One’s tribe is not only viewed as superior, but that superiority justifies rule over other tribes seen as inferior.

It is an attitude that even extends to the non-human natural world, which should be subordinate to humans and exists only to be exploited. In various colonial discourses, the two have merged. In other words, non-white and indigenous people have been conflated with the rest of nature, fauna whose main value lies in their enslavement and exploitability. Over many decades of research on psychological variables that predict partisanship, SDO is among the strongest predictors. Trump and his followers’ preoccupation with dominance – especially its display in nearly all social interactions – is part of what places MAGA firmly in the conservative tradition.

Domination is a Relationship

Donald Trump is a scrupulous follower of the golden rule – not, of course, the more familiar ancient aphorism of reciprocity but the cynical, more modern one, “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” It first appeared in print when uttered by the character of a tyrannical king in the 1965 comic strip by Brant Parker and Jonny Hart, Wizard of Id. That line and the strip’s title are presciently befitting the current White House aspirant to royal status, whose own predatory and untrammeled id guides his every action.

Trump is only the most recent American leader to be guided by that authoritarian axiom. And it has not been limited to US politicians, nor even confined to those with the power to govern. It is also embraced by a significant plurality of the governed, both here and abroad. Fascist leaders don’t endure without fascist followers.

With apologies to the consensual kink community, in politics as well as personal life, you can’t be a dom without a sub. The crucial difference is that when it comes to autocratic power in government, there is no “safe word,” only obedience or obliteration. But naked coercion makes political control brittle and unstable. And it can provoke rebellion. Much better to induce what psychologists call identity fusion, a state of mind in which, through imagined merger with the group and its leader, submission is reframed as vicarious domination.

That is why autocrats from Louis the 14th to Donald Trump have explicitly conflated the people with the nation and the nation with themselves. If the citizens are the “body-politic” and the leader is the “head” of state, together they are one inextricable organism (at least until the guillotines arrive). One of the many instances in which he stoked that merger fantasy followed his indictment for mishandling classified documents. He famously announced, “They’re not really coming after me. They’re coming after you. And I’m just standing in their way.”

The fusion message to his base takes many forms, but the central theme is always: his self-interest is the tribe’s interest, which makes it your interest. When he fights for himself, he’s really fighting for you. Each time no one holds him accountable for crimes, it is also you who are untouchable. When he adds yet one more piece of gilded kitsch to his White House wall, it’s as if your own double-wide is resplendent with luxury adornments. And perhaps most important, when he demeans, humiliates, and hurts others, you also get to enjoy the sadistic frisson of punching down and, for at least a fleeting imaginary moment, your own status soars into the heavens.

There is an overlapping term of art used to describe how subordination and abjection can be mentally inverted, “identification with the aggressor.” This concept was first developed by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. It is often used to describe the tendency of victims of child abuse, domestic violence, or other trauma to identify with the perpetrator. In hostage scenarios, it is called “Stockholm syndrome.” It begins as a strategy to cope with powerlessness but turns malignant when the identification drives one toward self-harm or assaulting others.

In politics, it is generally tribal outsiders who are targeted for harm. As I detail in my book, Trump has always been a permissive daddy for the sadistic aggression of his base. The joy of trolling, threatening, assaulting, and killing others, either directly or vicariously through government actions, has long animated the MAGA base. We should not be surprised to see that 60% of Republicans approve of their leader’s chest-beating proclamation to run Venezuela and steal its oil. In contrast, only 16% of Democrats and 26% of Independents find it acceptable. “America First” now means America dominates. The Right wants an empire, especially if it can be achieved with maximum swagger and merciless cruelty.