Absurdity as Authority: A Record for Posterity

By Cliff Potts, CSO and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
January 18, 2026 – 2:30 p.m. ET

On January 12, 2026, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was the “acting president” of Venezuela.

That sentence should be enough to end the discussion. But it isn’t, because this is where we are now.

This was not a parody, a fake account, or a moment of sarcasm stripped of context. It was a deliberate statement made by a former president of the United States, on his own platform, presented as a claim of authority over a sovereign nation. It deserves to be recorded for posterity precisely because of how casually it was done.

Let’s dispense with reality quickly. He is not the president of Venezuela. He has no legal standing there. No treaty, no election, no international body, and no constitutional mechanism places him anywhere near that office. None of this is debatable. What is debatable—and deeply alarming—is why a figure with his history and following would make such a claim at all.

This is where the stupidity hardens into something more serious.

When a political actor repeatedly asserts powers he does not have, offices he does not hold, and authority that exists only in his own imagination, the issue is no longer rhetoric. It is a pattern of behavior consistent with the erosion of democratic norms and the rejection of shared reality. This is not free speech testing boundaries. It is a sustained attempt to normalize unreality as leadership.

What year does he think this is?
What world does he think he’s operating in?
Who, exactly, does he believe he is?

These questions are no longer rhetorical flourishes. They are the kinds of questions investigators, historians, and future accountability mechanisms ask when assessing how a system failed to contain a destabilizing actor.

Absurdity here is not accidental. It is strategic. It exhausts critics, paralyzes institutions, and conditions supporters to accept that truth, law, and jurisdiction are optional. Belief is no longer required—only loyalty. In that environment, governance collapses into performance, and authority becomes whatever can be asserted loudly enough without consequence.

This is how decline looks before it becomes undeniable. Not with tanks or decrees, but with nonsense treated as normal, repeated until the public stops expecting coherence at all.

This essay is not written to amplify the claim. It is written to document it. Someday, people will ask how public discourse slid from argument into spectacle, from leadership into farce. The answer will be found in moments like this—dated, sourced, and preserved.

The other day, this happened.

Write it down.