From Epstein to empire: why Trump attacked Venezuela and threatens Greenland

I spoke with Kim Lane Scheppele about lawlessness, imperial power, and the global risks of MAGA

Last Saturday was supposed to be a big day in US politics. January 3 was the legal deadline for the Department of Justice to submit its written justification for failing to publish in full more than five million documents from the Epstein files.

Once again, Donald Trump’s relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was set to dominate the news cycle.

Instead, in the early hours of Saturday morning, US special forces swooped into Venezuela. Reports of the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro flooded the airwaves. Almost nobody mentioned the missed congressional deadline.

“A lot of this is a distraction from Trump’s mounting troubles at home,” Kim Lane Scheppele told me during a video interview for Democracy for Sale.

Scheppele is a US legal expert and professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University and one of the world’s leading experts on democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. She has lived and worked in Russia and Hungary, and has spent years studying how strongmen dismantle the rule of law from within.

When news broke of the US attack on Venezuela, Scheppele was one of the first people I wanted to speak to - to understand not just what had happened, but what it signals for democracy globally.

I began by asking about the legality of Trump’s actions. Scheppele did not mince her words. The Venezuela raid, she said, was “blatantly illegal” under international law. The only scenario in which it might have been lawful would be if the US were acting to install a government widely recognised as the legitimate winner of Venezuela’s last election, in 2024.

But Trump has shown little interest in democracy or human rights in Venezuela. Indeed, just hours after our interview on Monday afternoon, he suggested the country should not hold elections at all.

Instead, Trump has said the US will “run” Venezuela - effectively turning the oil-rich country into an American protectorate. “That’s extractive colonialism,” Scheppele told me. “And it’s not legal.”

The irony, she noted, is that Venezuela once had one of the most stable democratic systems in Latin America. Some of its fiercest opponents in the 1970s were US oil companies - the very firms Trump now expects to pour into the country.

So what does this mean for democracy more broadly? Are we seeing a return to a world where, as Thucydides put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”?

Scheppele argues that Trump is “very fond” of military adventures abroad. During his time in office he has ordered missile strikes on Iran — twice — and Nigeria. Around 80 people, including at least 32 Cubans, were reportedly killed in last weekend’s US operation in Venezuela.

Trump has now set his sights on Greenland. This is not just bluster. Stephen Miller, a key MAGA ideologue, recently said the quiet part out loud on CNN: “Greenland should be part of the United States.”

This is the logic of empire and expansion freed of the constraints of even paying lip service to sovereignty and democratic rights.

For Scheppele, these threats reflect something deeper than aggression or opportunism. They are the product of an administration that has “comprehensively rejected” the rule of law — at home and abroad.

From refusing to divest from his businesses while in office, to attempting to overturn the 2020 election, to weaponising law enforcement against political opponents, Trump, she says, “thinks laws are there for fools.” Scheppele recently explored the rise of American autocracy on Strict Scrutiny, a podcast on the US Supreme Court.

The US has long claimed to be the global defender of freedom — even while toppling democratically elected governments from Chile to Grenada. But now, Scheppele argues, Washington has become the most powerful opponent of the very “rules-based order” it once championed.

“Is Trump going to give permission to China to take Taiwan?” she asked. “Who knows? He might.”

That fear is reinforced by the latest US National Security Strategy, which identifies liberal democracies in Europe - rather than Beijing or Moscow - as America’s primary threat.

As Scheppele points out, the document’s language on immigration, civilisational decline, and “patriotic” parties would be entirely at home in a speech by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. (She recently discussed MAGA’s admiration for Orbán on the 242 podcast.)

It’s not just Orbán. The British Right, from Nigel Farage to Robert Jenrick, is busy building links in Washington - and even looking for cash across the pond.

In Scheppele’s view, the US is already emerging as a global “bad actor”, increasingly willing to interfere in elections to support far-right movements and leaders. The question now is whether an international system built on law can survive MAGA.

Her assessment is sober, but not without hope. I was struck by her insistence that the rule of law still has defenders - and that outcomes are not yet predetermined.

I hope you find the conversation as illuminating as I did.

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Speaking of foreign interference…. just before Christmas, Democracy for Sale reported that two former UK ambassadors are now paid lobbyists for the pro-Russian, genocide-denying government of Republika Srpska.

Yesterday, Labour MP Phil Brickell raised our investigation with Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty during a Commons inquiry into how malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy. (Clip below.)

Minister Doughty said he was aware of our story - but declined to comment on whether it is appropriate for former British diplomats to work for a Moscow-aligned government whose leaders are under UK sanctions for undermining peace in Bosnia.

The minister might be keeping schtum but we will keep digging - and keep asking these important questions.

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