Trapped by web of deceits
- Rich Moniak
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
Two stories in the past week illustrate how Sen. Dan Sullivan is trying to cope with the dismantling of America’s constitutional order. They involve the authoritarian impulse to cling to power. And in both, the president of the United States makes Sullivan look like an uninformed fool.
The first one is about a military attack in which President Donald Trump did not consult with Congress. Its objective was to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the U.S. to stand trial on drug and weapons-related charges.
Sullivan commended Trump in a social media post after it was successfully executed. He called Maduro “an illegitimate, indicted dictator who has been leading a vicious, violent narco-terrorist enterprise in our Hemisphere that was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.”
The allegation of illegitimacy is accurate. Maduro became president after Hugo Chavez died in 2013. Although he won the 2018 election, his government was accused of banning the two most prominent opposition parties from running against him. In 2024, international election monitors, along with the U.S, Canada, and several South American and Latin American leaders, believed Maduro lost. Even some who were aligned with Maduro’s government called for an independent audit to verify the official vote count. It never happened.
However, Trump undermined the narcoterrorism justification a month earlier when he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. He was found guilty of running what prosecutors described as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
What Trump did that Sullivan didn’t appear to anticipate was let Maduro’s vice president assume the presidency instead of the opposition candidate who the U.S. believed won the 2024 election. And the rest of Maduro’s regime was left intact.
Perhaps Sullivan didn’t foresee Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller explaining that the new government will be expected to “meet the terms, demands, conditions, and requirements of the United States.” That includes giving between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil to the United States to be placed under Trump’s control.
And he certainly didn’t expect Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to indicate Greenland may be next.
"President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region," she said in a statement obtained by ABC News. Trump “and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue” that objective, "and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option.”
Sullivan should have heeded the adage that it’s “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” Except in this case, it was less about revealing his ignorance than an inability to anticipate that an incessant liar like Trump would tell the truth about his imperial ambitions.
Which brings me to second story: Trump’s lies about the attack on the Capitol five years ago.
“There is no excuse for political violence,” Sullivan said the day after it happened. “Those who chose violence in order to disrupt our constitutional duties, however, did not have the last word.” Congress did, he implied. And he did his part by voting to certify the fact that Trump lost the election.
Trump’s White House has now officially rewritten the last word about the events of Jan. 6. In its newly published timeline, certifying the election resulted in “the greatest election theft in U.S. history, with widespread fraud deliberately ignored by courts, officials and the media.”
Furthermore, it wasn’t Trump loyalists who caused the violence. It happened because the Capitol Police had been “deliberately escalating tensions” by “deploying violent force” against some protesters while at the same time inviting others into the Capitol Building. “These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”
Blaming the Capitol Police is certainly not what Sullivan meant when he condemned both “the horrific violence that engulfed the Capitol” and “Trump’s poor judgment in calling a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a riot.”
Presently, Sullivan’s statements about Jan. 6 that I’ve quoted from are still on his official Senate website. But if he continues to act like Trump’s cheerleader instead of a U.S. senator, he might soon be inclined to replace them with lies approved by the White House.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
