As we have seen, Donald Trump has a penchant — no, an obsession — with naming and renaming structures and concepts after himself. Though he does not own many of the high-rise buildings where his name has been etched out in a gold-plated typeface, he has branded himself as a supposed successful and trendsetting business executive whose label carries sophistication and enormous cachet.
As we know, however, if the luster had ever truly existed upon his seal, it has certainly tarnished over the course of his presidency. Several building owners and corporate conglomerates have removed the “Trump” moniker from their properties, exposing the brand’s artificiality and the cold stone and plaster beneath.
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Not long after workers drilled and attached his name to The John F. Kennedy Center Memorial for the Performing Arts on the shores of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., members of the Kennedy family, including Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Maria Shriver denounced Trump’s offensive and insulting stunt.
Maria Shriver, journalist, John F. Kennedy’s niece and daughter of President Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, stated her outrage: “The Kennedy Center was named after my uncle, President John F. Kennedy,” she wrote on X. “It was named in his honor. He was a man who was interested in the arts, interested in culture, interested in education, language, history.”
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Shriver continued: “It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not. Next thing perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Jefferson Memorial. The Trump Smithsonian. The list goes on.”
While he has not yet added his name to other great monuments and memorials, he has recently reappropriated and renamed a U.S. geopolitical proclamation to himself as justification for his military invasion of Venezuela and extraction of its president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, for trial in the United States on charges of narcotics trafficking.
What was known as the “Monroe Doctrine,” Trump renamed as the “Donroe Doctrine” at a press conference following his announced military action.
But the quick and surprising military incursion came soon following Trump’s pardoning and freeing other drug dealers convicted of ties to drug gangs and cartels — most notably the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who helped to facilitate the importation of 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.
In 1823, U.S. President James Monroe proclaimed a U.S. foreign policy warning to European powers not to colonize or interfere in the independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. He, thereby, instituted distinctly separate spheres of influence for the Americas versus Europe’s.
Monroe, in turn, committed the U.S. to refraining from involving itself in European conflicts. The Monroe Doctrine has since come to be considered as ensuring the United States authority over the Western Hemisphere and closing the Americas to future European colonization.
The so-called “[Theodore] Roosevelt Corollary” in 1905 included an expansion of the Monroe Doctrine permitting the U.S. to perform as an international “stability” maintenance policing force thereby justifying military operations throughout Latin America.
Trump, however, invaded Venezuela without conferring with the U.S. Congress, without a declaration of war, and without a justification according to international law. Though his stated aims were to prevent the flow of illegal drugs entering the United States from Venezuela, documented research shows that “Venezuela is not among the primary direct traffickers of cocaine to the U.S.,” nor is it trafficking fentanyl, the leading cause of drug deaths in the United States.
At the press conference and in reported statements, Trump and other high-ranking administration officials — such as Secretary of State and National Security advisor Marco Rubio and Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — various contradictory and confusing justifications were given for our storming Venezuela: from ending narco-terrorism, to allowing U.S. oil companies to extract “our” oil from beneath Venezuela’s soil.
The justification of bringing democracy to Venezuela was virtually never cited, but rather, Trump determined that the United States would “run” the country, at least for the time being. This is much more about Trump asserting his autocratic muscle rather than about promoting a democratic process: autocracy and kleptocracy stand supreme as Trump’s motives.
The Monroe Doctrine: A background of colonialism
A series of papal bulls (decrees or edicts), beginning in the 1100s, began sanctions, enforcements, authorizations, expulsions, excommunications, denunciations, and, in particular, expressions of territorial sovereignty for Christian monarchs supported by the Catholic Church.
These bulls established what would come to be known as the “Doctrine of Discovery”: a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of territories not already inhabited by Christians. Two of these papal bulls particularly stand out.
1. Pope Nicholas V issued his “Romanus Pontifex” in 1455, granting Portugal a monopoly trading status with Africa, authorizing the enslavement of indigenous populations. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V called his Christian followers to “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens (Arabs and Muslims) and pagans,” take their possessions, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
2. Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera” in 1493 to justify Christian European explorers’ claims on land and waterways they “discovered,” and to promote Christian domination in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americans. This edict gave license to the genocide of Black, brown, Asian, and non-Christians across the world. It was the stimulus for Christopher Columbus’ travels based on patriarchal Christian white supremacy.
The United States justified its “Monroe Doctrine” in the 1880s by declaring U.S. dominion over the Western Hemisphere, and its claim of “Manifest Destiny” of expansionism westward as its divine destiny to control all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond. U.S. legal doctrine is based on the Doctrine of Discovery. In 1823, in the Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. federal law used to dispossess Native American peoples of their lands.
In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “The principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands” and Native peoples certain rights of occupancy.
In another example, in the 1835 Tennessee Supreme Court case Tennessee v. Foreman, the court ruled: “The principle declared in the 15th Century as the law of Christendom that discovery gave title to assume sovereignty over, and to govern the unconverted natives of Africa, Asia, and North and South America, has been recognized as a part of the national law, for nearly four centuries.”
As Trump has announced, he wants to capture and possibly incorporate other lands within the Western Hemisphere into the realm of U.S. control and influence, including but not limited to Panama, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and certainly Canada.
As President Trump has based his domestic policies on militarizing the streets of the United States, he has centered his international initiatives on the militarization of other countries with his use of threats, leading to his use of bombs to subdue his perceived enemies in countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Iran, and Venezuela.
For someone who refused to enter the military because of his sense of entitlement and specious medical justifications, his overcompensatory use of lethal muscular actions — like his invasion of Venezuela and the arrest of President Maduro and his wife for trial in the U.S. — sends the clear message to Putin of Russia and Xi of China that a powerful military nation can disregard the sovereign independence and rights of other nations if powerful countries intend to annex or rob them of their valuable resources.
Trump’s actions in Venezuela were also intended as a signal to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee that his invasion and extraction of the Venezuelan president and his wife far exceeded the work of the 2025 winner, María Corina Machado Parisca, a Venezuelan politician, activist, and prominent leader of the opposition to the administrations of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
What Trump failed to mention at his big press conference was that the U.S. military strike into Venezuela snuffed out the lives of an estimated 40 local military personnel and civilians and injured several U.S. military service members, and it cost the taxpayers billions of dollars.
Don’t be surprised when Trump pushes Congress to make Venezuela the 51st state of the United States of America.
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