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Five years ago, egged on by a president who lost the election but refused to accept the result, a mob of several thousand people stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the official certification. They terrorized elected representatives and threatened to murder the vice president, who took seriously his responsibility under the Constitution to preside over this normally pro forma procedure. One was shot and killed by Capitol Police when she breached a secure area and refused to withdraw. Three other rioters and one police officer died from injuries as a result of the violence and disorder. After National Guard removed the rioters, representatives returned to the heavily damaged and certified the election, allowing Joe Biden to claim his rightful victory.

This act of unprecedented violence should have ended the political career of the former president who instigated it, as it did to Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro when he tried the same stunt the following year. Instead, in a display of shocking depravity, the voters of the United States chose to return to power the person who refused to accept the results of a free and fair election and chose intimidation and violence as the means to stay in office.

Since then, he has pardoned the rioters and fired the attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice who prosecuted their crimes. Some of those violent insurrectionists have gone on to commit other crimes. Others have become part of paramilitary forces ordered to detain immigrants, even those who have no criminal record, other brown people who are here legally but look like immigrants, and anyone who shows up at a demonstration to support immigrants.

On the eve of this shameful anniversary, the current regime has also moved to take over the country of Venezuela and install a puppet government that would allow unlimited U.S. access to the country’s natural resources. This is not speculation. It is exactly what the leader and the regime’s officials have said. In doing so, they have spurned the real democratically-elected leader of the country, Edmundo González, and pro-democracy activist María Carmen Machado, who dictator Maduro banned from running. Machado went on to win the Nobel Prize, which our leader coveted. Was that the reason he bypassed and insulted her in the press conference? Or was it that he couldn’t control her the way he could control a dictator, Maduro’s own vice-president, whose tenure in office depended on his goodwill rather than the support of the Venezuelan people.

The plot thickens. The reason given for Maduro’s arrest was not his significant human rights violations and stolen election, but drug trafficking, in collaboration with cartels. Fair enough, but leader Trump just pardoned a former Latin American dictator, murderer of his people and stealer of elections, who imported 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. The Honduran strongman Juan Orlando Hernández and his lieutenants were proud of their achievement, claiming they wanted to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” JOH, as he was known, was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Teenagers and adults who want to know what is was like to live under JOH’s drug-and-violence-fueled misrule should read Bessie Flores Zaldívar’s 2024 novel Libertad. Libertad features a 17-year-old queer girl living in Honduras in 2017 who joins her older brother in a protest movement while considering the fact that she may have to leave her home to live her truth. In fact, refugees from Honduras flooded the U.S. during that time, providing much of the fodder for the border crisis that helped to bring Trump back to power. From 2014 to the end of 2021, when JOH finally left office, around half a million Hondurans fled north to the U.S. By comparison, over a million Venezuelans have immigrated to the U.S. under Maduro. Per capita, the rates are similar, as the overall population of Venezuela is around 28-29 million, while Honduras’s population is just under 11 million.

A couple of years ago, I told a MAGA-supporting family member that if Trump were elected in 2024, the only way he will leave office is through a natural death, essentially a deus ex machina. I am even more convinced of this fact now. And grateful that he’s 79 years old and in declining health. That he instigated a poorly-planned insurrection to stay in power last time is evidence that he will not be removed through electoral means. He and his circle have learned from their mistakes on January 6, 2021 and will not make them again. Well, you may ask, can he even run if the Constitution forbids a president from running for a third term? There are so many ways he can get around that — declaring a state of emergency to cancel the election, putting himself on the ballot and daring the states and the courts to stop him, putting up a puppet as Putin did with Medvedev for one term until he did away with term limits in Russia altogether. (Given the difficulty and time constraints of amending the Constitution to serve additional terms, I doubt he will use that method.) The problem Trump faces if he leaves office through any means other than death is that he has committed so many crimes, and engaged in so much open corruption, that he faces significant legal jeopardy. So a natural death, a protracted power struggle, and the acknowledgement that we will need a free and fair federal election to move forward appears to be the only solution that will preserve the peace and integrity of the nation.

My most popular blog post deals with the question of succession and how the predominately elected leaders who turned themselves into dictators in the 21st century have fared. The extraction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife is the first one of the new century in which a foreign power removed one by force, and I would consider it equivalent to the country losing a war. That said, Maduro rose to power as the designated appointee of Hugo Chávez, who died of cancer in 2013, and his own designated successor, Delcy Rodríguez, is now in charge in Venezuela, though apparently having to obey the foreign ruler who left her in place.