The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
Is anyone really surprised that wealthy white men in the United States are encroaching on the sovereignty of a Latin American country with impunity to take their oil reserves?
No, I’m sorry Mr. MAGA, it isn’t about drugs.
The United States’ actions toward Latin America under Donald Trump is articulated most clearly through the Trump National Security Strategy (NSS) and operationalized further in Project 2025, and represents not a break from historical precedent but rather, a reversion to it. It is back to the future.
This is what white supremacy does and has always done.
While framed in modern language of border security, counter-narcotics, and great-power competition, these policies rest on a far older ideological foundation: the Doctrine of Discovery, a 500-year-old legal and theological framework that justified conquest by denying full sovereignty to non-European, non-Christian societies, and more recently, non-white groups of people.
What appears today as pragmatic security policy is, in fact, the modern expression of a civilizational hierarchy that has long underwritten U.S. intervention in the Western Hemisphere along with a genocidal colonization of the North American continent and the enslavement of millions of Africans for capitalistic gain.
This continuity matters because it reveals how invasion and intervention are not policy failures or excesses, but predictable outcomes of a worldview that treats Latin America as a managed space of subordinate populations, rather than a community of sovereign equals.
The Doctrine of Discovery emerged in the late 15th century through papal decrees such as Inter Caetera (1493). It established a legal fiction created out of thin air, with enduring consequences: lands inhabited by non-Christian peoples could be claimed by Christian powers upon “discovery,” reducing Indigenous sovereignty to occupancy without authority.
Understand that US actions in Venezuela impose the same formula: occupancy with out authority.
There are four core principles that defined the 15th century doctrine and persist today:
Non-Christian societies were deemed incapable of full political legitimacy. Modern equivalents, which expands non-Christian societies to include non-white nations, uses the language of “failed states,” “ungoverned spaces,” and “narco-states.” The implied hierarchical superiority still rests at the core of rationalizations for intervention.
Violence as it was used in the 15th century, was justified as a civilizing mission. The “New World” was deemed “Terra Nullius” or uninhabited land. Europeans would inhabit and develop the unused land. In the 19th century it was called “Manifest Destiny.”
Today’s terms such as “stabilization,” “restoring order,” and “counterterrorism” serve the same function. The use of benevolence simply hides the real motive: greed and profit. And, by the way, “we are doing this for your own good!”
Actions taken by the “superior” civilization were presumed lawful and legitimate, regardless of the brutality. Pioneers on the plains were not colonizers but were doing native tribes a favor by bringing Christianity and civilization to the continent. Contemporary invocations of the “rules-based order” function similarly, even when actual international law is ignored.
The Doctrine of Discovery was never purely theological. It justified land seizure (genocide), labor exploitation (slavery), and resource extraction (theft). Trump-era policy explicitly links Latin America to supply chains, energy security, and competition with China, framing control as a necessity for national security and future prosperity.
From the Spanish conquest of South and Central America to U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, and today, Venezuela, the same logic repeats: instability justifies intervention; intervention produces instability; instability confirms the need for further control. All of it justified through an ideology of civilizational superiority found in white supremacy.
Trump’s policies do not break this cycle. They intensify it.
By openly dismissing international law, elevating civilizational hierarchy, and treating Latin America as a security buffer rather than a region of sovereign nations, Trump and Project 2025 articulate the most explicit revival of conquest-era logic in modern U.S. policy.
What has changed is not the belief that some nations exist to rule and others to be ruled but the willingness to say it out loud. Trump’s “new” foreign policy was announced in November 2025 clearly reinforces past hemispheric domination intent.
Whether they realize it or not, Trump’s “National Security Strategy” and “Project 2025” are modern manifestations of this 500-year-old doctrine.
Here are the key sections of the NSS referencing the Western Hemisphere. The highlighted phrases are easily coded into imperialistic-colonial language. The real meaning is not hard to see.
…we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
The Trump Corollary includes military dominance of the Hemisphere:
The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region. The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.
This is pure modern Doctrine of Discovery at work. Latin American countries are contingent on the priorities of the United States. You can see how this translates into the concept of “right of occupancy” as opposed to sovereignty. Sovereignty is conditional upon accepting US domination.
In this NSS framework, Latin American nations appear repeatedly as “failed” or “fragile” states, sources of invasion through migration, and vectors of criminal or ideological contagion.
This language is not incidental. By redefining migration and drug trafficking as external attacks rather than shared regional problems, the NSS reframes civilian phenomena into military threats. Once this shift is made, unilateral action by the United States becomes not merely permissible but the responsible thing to do. Sovereignty, in practice, belongs only to those states deemed competent by U.S. standards.
This logic mirrors precisely the legal framework of the Doctrine of Discovery, which held that Indigenous societies lacked true sovereignty because they failed to meet European standards of civilization, religion, or governance. They only had a right to occupancy, not ownership. Trump-era security doctrine only updates the vocabulary, not the structure. It is the same as it was.
One of the most consequential aspects of the Trump NSS is its treatment of the southern border as a theater of war. Migration is described not as a humanitarian phenomenon driven by inequality, climate change, or U.S.-backed instability, but as an “invasion.” Cartels are framed as enemy combatants rather than criminal organizations embedded in complex political economies shaped by U.S. demand and weapons flows.
This framing does two things simultaneously: It absolves the United States of structural or moral responsibility and it authorizes the use of force beyond traditional law enforcement. That is what we saw in Venezuela and the capture of Maduro.
When Trump and senior advisors publicly floated the idea of military strikes inside Mexico or naval interdictions in the Caribbean, these were not rhetorical excesses. They followed directly from a strategy that collapses the distinction between domestic security and foreign war.
Historically, this mirrors conquest-era justifications in which Indigenous resistance was treated as evidence of savagery, thereby legitimizing and sanctifying escalating violence. The presence of disorder becomes proof that domination is necessary.
If the Trump National Security Strategy provides the ideological justification for intervention, Project 2025 supplies the institutional machinery and religious sanction to carry it out. Drafted by a coalition of conservative and Christian nationalist (supremacist) at the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is explicit in its goals: consolidate executive authority, weaken bureaucratic constraints, and subordinate international law to presidential discretion.
For an outstanding discussion of how Project 2025 predicted and justifies the invasion of Venezuela, I suggest reading Andra Watkin’s Substack article called, Venezuela Is Not a Distraction. It’s the Project 2025 Plan. She exposes the Christian Supremacist designs on Venezuela.
Several aspects of Christian supremacy are particularly relevant to Latin America:
First, Project 2025 seeks to reduce congressional oversight of military and intelligence operations. In practice, this would allow the president to initiate cross-border actions like airstrikes, special operations, and blockades, under the rubric of border security or emergency authority.
It is notable that Trump only consulted oil company CEOs prior to the attack on the sovereign nation of Venezuela. Congress was not needed…and…what Constitution?
Second, by defining migration, cartels, and ideological competition as existential threats, Project 2025 normalizes a perpetual state of emergency. Latin America has become a standing justification for extraordinary measures, much as colonial territories were governed under permanent occupation.
Of course, Latin America is by nature an existential threat because the people are non-white. Curtailing migration becomes necessary for the “civilizational integrity” of the United States. The white supremacist racism is only thinly veiled.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, Project 2025 embeds a Christian nationalist (supremacist) worldview that frames U.S. power as religiously ordained. The US is God’s chosen nation therefore, secular international law is treated as optional, while “order” is defined in explicitly moral-religious terms. This provides ethical insulation for actions that would otherwise be recognized as violations of sovereignty.
Here, the resemblance to the Doctrine of Discovery becomes explicit. Where papal bulls once granted Christian monarchs the right to conquer, Project 2025 implies that divine favor and civilizational mission supersede international norms, in fact, they are the international norms…not the UN Charter or any other international organization.
The Doctrine of Discovery has never been formally repealed. It has been secularized, bureaucratized, and rebranded. Trump’s National Security Strategy and Project 2025 represent its latest incarnation: a framework in which power creates legitimacy, morality overrides law, and domination is recast as defense.
Understanding this continuity is essential. Without it, intervention appears reactive, even accidental. With it, intervention reveals itself as structural, deliberate, moral, and embedded in the deepest assumptions of U.S. political theology. That political theology is rooted in white supremacy.
What is at stake is not merely Latin America’s sovereignty, but the credibility of international law itself. A world that accepts conditional sovereignty is not a rule-based order. It is an empire with updated language.
And like all empires before it, it insists that conquest is not conquest, but security and responsibility. Why?
Well…because of God.
