Donald Trump has gone from fawning over Vladimir Putin and seeking his favor and support to actively emulating him in almost every possible way.

With America’s unprovoked and illegal attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president, Nicolas Maduro, Trump has taken the Putinization of U.S. foreign policy to the next level.

Trump is attacking our neighbors while showing a complete disregard for international and U.S. law. He is doing so based on fabricated grounds that do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. His reasons for doing so are likely corrupt and certainly are not in the national interest of the United States. In ordering the military to be the vehicle for his aggression, he is degrading them and inviting our military’s leaders to debase themselves by agreeing to his illegal orders.

That has been Putin’s playbook in Ukraine. It is now America’s playbook in Venezuela.

Of all the leaders Trump could have chosen as role models in the world, Trump has chosen the most brutal, corrupt dictator on the planet to imitate. We cannot be surprised at this point. Trump has often spoken of his admiration for stark autocratic displays of power. He envies the dull-eyed displays of loyalty it wins from cowering aides and military officers. He sees laws as restrictions imposed on little people, beneath him. Further, as a deeply greedy man who sees money as the only metric of success in life, surely Trump is awed by Putin’s status as possibly the richest man in the world, a man who has raised kleptocracy to an art form and made the enrichment of himself and his oligarch friends the primary goal of his government.

But there is a dimension to Trump’s imitation game with Putin that should be deeply worrying to the world in the wake of Saturday morning’s attacks on Venezuelan military targets and the capture and extradition of its president that is even more ominous—hard to imagine though that may be.

Putin sees the countries........

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