Your Latest Trump Regime Amateur Hour, Courtesy Of Marco Rubio And Ric Grenell!
Nailing it, guys.
Here’s something that’s not really much of a surprise.
It turns out this week’s snafu over the Ukraine weapons shipment that Defense Secretary Shitfaced Pete Hegseth paused without bothering to tell anyone including his boss wasn’t the only foreign policy/diplomatic fuckup the Trump administration has been working lately. We know! Surprise. And here you were thinking their fuckups were the exception to the rule.
This one isn’t as high profile, but it’s still wow. It involves Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/lunch lady/White House hamster groomer Marco Rubio and Trump’s star self-loathing gay quisling/special envoy Ric Grenell, who we guess took a break from his important duties angrily emailing people who don’t want to be associated with Stupid Hitler’s Opera House or its 10,000 performances of CATS to do all the fuckups in this story.
You see, Marco Rubio was working a Venezuela thingie, and Ric Grenell was working a Venezuela thingie, and oh no, it turned out they were accidentally working against each other on their respective Venezuelan thingies!
It’s too bad they never showed each other their Venezuelan thingies. Fucking idiots.
The New York Times took a breather from writing “Zohran Mamdani Says He Counts When He Pees, But In What Language????” to tell the story.
You ready? Take a breath and follow this bouncing ball.
OK, Marco Rubio was over here doing important grownup diplomacies, to make a prisoner swap thing happen where Venezuela would release a bunch of its own political prisoners and a few Americans, in exchange for all these Venezuelans the Trump administration had kidnapped and sent to torture prison in El Salvador.
Meanhwile Ric Grenell was over here doing a different prisoner swap, where Venezuela would release a few Americans in exchange for Venezuela’s shithole authoritarian government being released from the torture prison of … Chevron not getting to keep working in that country, which involves big $$$ for the Venezuelans.
Venezuela liked Ric’s big Chevron pri$$$oner swap better than Little Marco’s stupid one!
But it all got fucked up because, again, Ric and Little Marco never showed each other the Venezuelan thingies they were working on, perhaps while standing next to each other at the urinal in the White House. And they crossed streams!
The State Department never sealed the deal. The top U.S. officials did not appear to be communicating with each other and ended up at cross purposes. The approximately 250 people expelled from the United States are still being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. And it became clear that while Mr. Trump’s White House once said that it had no control over the detainees in El Salvador, it was willing to use them as bargaining chips.
Yeah, weird.
Both U.S. tracks — one managed by Mr. Rubio and the other led by the envoy, Richard Grenell — involved speaking with the same Venezuelan representative, Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, one U.S. official and the two other people said.
Hate that, when you’re talking to the same Venezuelan guy and telling him two entirely different things and both pretending you’re the only official representative of Donald Trump, and now the Venezuelan guy probably hates both of you and nobody is releasing any prisoners. Who among us.
[T]he lack of coordination left Venezuelan officials unclear about who spoke for Mr. Trump and, ultimately, left both American and Venezuelan detainees imprisoned.
“Am I dealing with the real American government here” is likely one of the first questions people like to have a firm answer to before they ink deals with the US government, we’d reckon.
They got really far on Little Marco’s deal, though. As of May, flights from Caracas to El Salvador and from the US to Caracas were being scheduled to pick up and transport different people involved in the deal. But again, Ric Grenell was playing with his own thingie:
Before pitching it to the Venezuelans, Mr. Grenell called the president to tell him about the offer and believed he had the president’s support. But Mr. Grenell had not actually received the president’s final approval, according to one of the U.S. officials. […]
That same month, Mr. Grenell went to Venezuela on a separate mission in which he won the release of Joseph St. Clair, an Air Force veteran held in Venezuela.
Yes, Grenell did that — he also got six Americans released from Venezuela back in January — but he did it while reportedly totally pissing off Donald Trump and other administration officials, who apparently weren’t in the loop. The New York Post reported at the time that it was viewed in the administration as a “Hail Mary attempt to pressure Trump to extend Chevron’s license to import Venezuelan oil,” which was expiring May 27. The license expired, replaced by a new, much narrower authorization.
(Read the Washington Post last month for how Grenell’s little Chevron deal almost fucked up Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill with Cuban-American Republican congressmen.)
Anyway, the New York Times’s sources say Little Marco’s deal is still on offer, but Ric’s — the one Venezuela actually likes — isn’t. You hear that, VENEZUELA? Are you reading the New York Times for your secret diplomatic messages from America?
Meanwhile, Ric is still pretty sure he’s the only REAL Venezuela talker-toer, like who does Little Marco think he is, the secretary of State? (He is the secretary of State.)
Mr. Grenell, [according to a person close to him], was surprised to learn about the swap, and is the only authorized negotiator on any deals with Venezuela. But since the episode, Mr. Rubio has taken the lead in talking to the Venezuelans, one of the U.S. officials said.
But somebody close to Ric Grenell also shit-talked Little Marco’s deal to the Times, saying it would never happen because Donald Trump would never allow GANG MEMBERS to be released from El Salvador, because we guess that person is still pretending all the men Trump and Stephen Miller kidnapped and human trafficked to El Salvador are GANG MEMBERS.
Ric Grenell responded to Times requests for comment on this latest Trump regime fuckup by Ric-Grenell-ing.
Mr. Grenell declined an interview request, but in an email used a profanity to denounce The Times’s account of the separate deals as false.
Yep, that tracks. And then he probably went back to trying to start drag battles with Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Anyway, North Korean News Barbie Karoline Leavitt said there is no conflict in the Trump White House, everybody loves each other, “there is no fraction or division,” and “The president has one team, and everyone knows he is the ultimate decision maker.”
Hooooo-kay, sounds great.
And the Times has a quote from one of the family members of an American imprisoned in Venezuela, expressing frustration at all this fucking amateur hour:
“The sense that we parents had was that you had various people talking, but they weren’t working together — one negotiator would say one thing, and another would say something else,” said Petra Castañeda, whose son, Wilbert Castañeda, 37, a Navy SEAL, was arrested last year in Venezuela. “You would think they would be duly coordinated.”
You would think.
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As always, with this Republican junta:
"𝗧𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁-𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀, 𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝘀𝘆𝗺𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗽𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗮𝗹𝘁𝘆."
~ Hannah Arendt
"President Donald Trump praised Liberian President Joseph Boakai for speaking "such good English," apparently unaware that it was the official language of his country."
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-liberia/
Boakai: "My question is why don't you?"