What did Donald Trump do today?

He may have figured out how badly he'd played himself in Venezuela.

Yesterday, Trump declared that he was "running" Venezuela through Delcy Rodriguez, Nicolás Maduro's vice-president and now acting president of the country. He appears to have been convinced that this was possible by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly tried to negotiate Maduro's ouster with Venezuelan officials. This narrative was immediately demolished by Rodriguez's fiery denunciation of Maduro's abduction and the cost in Venezuelan civilian life.

As of today, Rodriguez appears to be fully in command of the Venezuelan state apparatus, and remains defiant towards Trump. The result is that Trump appears to have blundered into a situation where he's strengthened the genuinely corrupt and illegitimate Maduro regime—and further weakened the legitimate Venezuelan opposition, which also condemned the attacks—in furtherance of a corrupt bargain that existed only in his mind.

Today, as that reality seems to have become clear to him, he threatened Rodriguez's life. "If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” he told The Atlantic. This comes less than a day after he'd bragged that Rodriguez was in effect his puppet, and that she would be "willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again."

Rodriguez wasn't the only person Trump has had to threaten to go along with his plan. The real justification for the attack, as he explained it yesterday—seizure of the oil fields that Venezuela nationalized fifty years ago for exploitation by American oil companies—is foundering on the fact that those American companies don't see Venezuelan oil as profitable to exploit. Venezuelan crude is of low quality and requires highly specialized refineries to be turned into useful products. That would mean an enormous up-front investment in new refining capacity, which would only make economic sense on the scale of decades' worth of access to oil that neither the Rodriguez-Maduro government nor its opposition are willing to simply give to the United States as a prize.

Summarizing the last two days: Trump has tried to turn Venezuela into a client state with the explicit goal of getting oil that even American oil companies don't want, by tightening the grip on power of the very same regime he was trying to oust, in the face of massive American public opposition. At least 80 people, mostly civilians, are dead, not counting the people killed on boats when Trump was trying and failing to drum up support on the theory that his problem with the Maduro regime was drugs, not oil.

Trump also threatened to attack Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland today. 

Why does this matter?

• There's no difference between a president who isn't capable of thinking through the logical consequences of starting a war and a president who simply doesn't think he has to. 

• There's a difference between having power and saying you have power in the hope that anyone will believe you. 

• When the United States behaves like an expansionist dictatorship, it makes it more likely that other countries will too.