Trump’s Triple X Testosterone Crusade to Capture the Western Hemisphere
Veteran journalist and LGBTQ+ ally Lucian Truscott IV analyzes Trump and the Venezuela invasion
No one’s talking about Donald Trump’s small hands now or his low poll numbers or affordability failures or the 5.2 million unreleased Epstein files or the testimony of former Trump Special Counsel Jack Smith on the 5th anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection – not after the U.S. unleashed a surprise shock and awe bombing campaign in Venezuela on Friday night, Jan. 2. With great military precision, the United States successfully kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores without the loss of any American lives.
Apparently, the 80 people who were killed - including civilians, Cuban nationals, and some Venezuelan military –are insignificant collateral damage.
A moment after the decapitation of leadership settled in, some Venezuelans celebrated the end of Maduro’s brutal reign of power. But Trump swiftly snatched away joy, announcing that “we are going to run the country,” along with Maduro’s former vice president who was threatened into accepting the Interim presidency to stabilize the transition to whatever Trump wants next in this sovereign country and to facilitate oil transactions. There is some confusion about the loyalty of the rest of the intact Maduro regime and reaction from opposition activists.
What does that mean for someone like Andry José Hernández Romero, the gay stylist who fled Venezuela after being persecuted for his sexual orientation and open opposition to Maduro? Though he complied with all requirements to seek asylum in the US, he was arrested and without due process, was deported with 250 other Venezuelans to the horrendous torture prison CECOT in El Salvador where he suffered daily assaults and abuses.
“We were lied to by ICE officials and then greeted in CECOT with beatings,” said Romero after he was sent home. “At every step of the way they abused us. But being Venezuelan is not a crime. I’m grateful to Congressman Takano who has called for justice for the 252 Venezuelan men sent to CECOT without the opportunity to present their case in immigration court.” Questions about to how and why so many amoral violations of due process took place are still on hold.
Trump’s second term is all about toxic performance masculinity and following up bellicose bluster with actual brute force. Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has murdered more than 100 people aboard alleged drug smuggling boats blown up by drones as if in a video game. The UN calls the killings “extrajudicial executions” since the US has produced no evidence or allowed due process to contest the claims the boats were hauling fentanyl for distribution in the United States.
Oddly, the Pentagon has not released video of the blowing up of two survivors of a strike, clinging to a piece of wood for 45 minutes before they, too, were blown up Sept. 2 by a plane they apparently thought might rescue them.
It’s all about the drugs, say Trump acolytes, as if that balances out the inhumanity. Attorney General Pam Bondi provided a new 25-page indictment charging Maduro with heading a transnational narco-terrorist organization along with his wife and son. Secretary of State Marco Rubio -- who has been pushing for regime change in Venezuela, described the attack as a “law enforcement” operation, without the need for Congressional advice and consent.
But the US indictment against Maduro cites cocaine, not fentanyl, which is “almost entirely produced in Mexico using chemicals from China,” according to U.S. authorities. “Venezuela plays no known role in its trade, nor does any other South American country,” the New York Times reports.
Venezuela is a pass-through country for cocaine. Meanwhile, in 2022, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York charged ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández with “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world,” responsible for the “unfathomable destruction” cocaine had caused in the United States.
Hernández was abruptly pardoned by Trump last month. “The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump,” Trump told The Times, adding, “This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country.”
Trump seems addicted to unabashed lying. The Washington Post Fact Checker team found that Trump’s false or misleading claims totaled 30,573 over his first four years in office, “averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.” On July 07, 2025, Yale experts released their findings of Trump’s claims or assertions. “Artificial intelligence discredited all the Trump claims we presented, fact-checking the president with startling accuracy and objective rigor,” they reported.
Trump demands that loyalists buy into his lies and bellicosity – including the latest claiming Western Hemispheric domination. Rubio is salivating over destroying Cuba – as giddy as when he dreamed of besting his GOP rival in 2016.
“He is taller than me, he’s like 6’ 2”, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’ 2”,’ Rubio joked. “Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands – You can’t trust them,” ABC News reported.
Trump flipped the script on this manhood vulnerability, convincing the crowd they weren’t seeing what they were seeing. “Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands -- if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee you.” (Fact check: porn star Stormy Daniels says Trump’s penis is like “a toadstool.”)
Remember those small hands when Trump talks about going into a sovereign country to get oil or deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller talks about annexing the Danish territory of Greenland. There’s a smirky sexual overcompensation infused with the presumption of power.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Sounds like Trump’s reply to E. Jean Carroll’s out lawyer Roberta Kaplan during his 2023 deposition.
From CNN transcript: “KAPLAN: And you say – and again this has become very famous – in this video, ‘“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p*ssy. You can do anything.” That’s what you said. Correct?
TRUMP: Well, historically, that’s true with stars.
KAPLAN: It’s true with stars that they can grab women by the p*ssy?
TRUMP: Well, that’s what, if you look over the last million years I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.
KAPLAN: And you consider yourself to be a star?
TRUMP: I think you can say that. Yeah.”
Grabbing Venezuela’s oil or Greenland’s potential wealth of critical minerals is rape of someone else’s land. As Trump’s testosterone-related lawsuits suggest – he’ll need a lot of money and back up to get away with it.
I called my friend Tom Carpenter, an attorney and Marine Corps Captain and Naval Academy graduate who chaired Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, for his thoughts on what’s happening – might there be a draft to cover all the invasions Trump’s threatened? Tom said he’s following his friend - West Point Academy graduate Lucian K. Truscott IV - a straight man in the alum’s gay Knight’s Out association - whose Substack is erudite, illuminating and funny.
Case in point: “Boy, are the think tank and media foreign policy poohbahs stumped after Trump’s big kidnapping of Mr. and Mrs. Maduro on Friday night. All of them agree that it was a brilliant military operation, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists on calling a law enforcement ‘mission in support of the Department of Justice.’ Which I guess isn’t that far-fetched a description, given the fact that we have platoons of armed, uniformed men in full combat gear running around our own country conducting Gestapo-like law enforcement missions on unsuspecting people, immigrant and citizen alike, as they go about their business of living peaceful lives in the United States of America.”
In Trump’s plan for Venezuela: A hope, a prayer, and golf, Lucian also noted in a White House photo that a waiter stood behind Trump, Rubio, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in a makeshift ballroom/sit-room watching the assault. “Trump couldn’t inform Congress, but if you were a Mar a Lago waiter on Friday night, you knew everything that was happening in Venezuela in real time.”
Lucian comes from a long line of Army heroes: his father was an Army colonel who served in Korea and Vietnam; his grandfather Lucian Jr. was a U.S. Army general during World War II, commanding the 3rd Infantry Division and later the Fifth Army in Italy. Lucian attended West Point, graduating in 1969 but not before causing some “good trouble” – which we discuss in our Zoom conversation.
A journalist and author, one of his books, Dress Gray, is about the murder of a gay cadet. In 1986, it was adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal and made into a TV miniseries that aired on NBC March 9–10,1986.
Lucian is also a descendent of American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and created some controversy by inviting the descendants of Jefferson’s enslaved mistress Sally Hemings to a 2000 family reunion.
But among LGBTQ+ historians, Lucian is perhaps best known as the first eyewitness reporter, along with gay columnist Howard Smith, his colleague at the Village Voice, to cover the riots at the Stonewall Inn, published July 3, 1969.
“Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of ‘gay power’ erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen,” Lucian wrote opening a very detailed account, laced with words like “faggot” and “dyke,” commonly used language at the time. Lucian later wrote that a protest led by Jim Fouratt over the slurs prompted Lucian and the Village Voice to change their language.
Importantly, Lucian writes with specificity about that night on June 28, 1969 – including: “The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle — from car to door to car again. It was at that moment that the scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops.”
Two nights later, Lucian hangs out with famed gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. “Gay power! Isn’t that great!” Allen said. “We’re one of the largest minorities in the country — 10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.”
Lucian accompanied Ginsberg into the Stonewall Inn blaring with rock music and later walked him home. “Along the way, he described how things used to be. ‘You know, the guys there were so beautiful — they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.’ It was the first time I had heard that crowd described as beautiful.
“We reached Cooper Square, and as Ginsberg turned to head toward home, he waved and yelled, ‘Defend the fairies!’ and bounced on across the square. He enjoyed the prospect of ‘gay power’ and is probably working on a manifesto for the movement right now. Watch out. The liberation is under way,” Lucian wrote.
In our Zoom conversation, we talked about Trump, Venezuela, how Trump’s ludicrous dreams of imperialism could defeat him, Sen. Mark Kelly, a possible draft and so much more. I also asked Lucian why he is an LGBTQ+ ally.
“That’s the kind of thing I learned from my parents and from my mother, from my grandmother – was you disarm people with humanity. That’s what you do. If you’re a human being, act like one,” Lucian K. Truscott IV said. “And if you act like one, eventually, once you brush things and clean crap off your feet like Donald Trump - you win… So I guess my message is: it’s not going to be easy - but this, too, will pass. It will.”
It’s our job to hasten the passage.
Please enjoy this conversion with Lucian K. Truscott IV and read his daily Substack. Thank you.