Stand in the middle of fifth Avenue and shoot someone :)
Have political enemies executed
Get his face on Mount Rushmore
Disband congress
Disband the Supreme Court
Keep Jimmy Kimmel off air
Get Jon Stuart to shut up
Get James comey indicted
Get a national holiday named after him
Etc.
Even when we focus on things he tried to do, there is a lot he couldn’t. Let alone when you look at things he didn’t try to do.
lots of these are of course also just a distraction to discuss at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner vs you know, other things
You said "anything", in the context of dictatorship. I only used items in this list which IMO you can reasonably say Putin, an actual dictator, can do. Right now. Except the first one! Because that was a joke, a reference to something he himself said he could do.
If you want to change to "anything which has backroom deal importance, not just bread and games for the masses, but the real things, if you know you know", that's a (slightly) different list.
But, it's also a different comment.
I think he could succeed in principle re: Mount Rushmore, to be honest. I think eventually people will cave in and agree to do it, and then they will just pray to cholesterol that they can wait it out.
To be exact, CNN reports that for the period Sep - Dec there have been ~30 boats destroyed in ~26 attacks, with at least ~105 deaths in these operations.
The US govt is of course claiming narcotics smugglers ("narcoterrorism") while others say they are not. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween, though who knows one which end of the spectrum.
What I think is maybe more interesting is the general pressure being applied to Venezuela by the US and the EU.
Want to see a real dictatorship? Ukraine jailed all opposing politicians during the war with Russia and stopped having elections. Yet, it's still supported by a large percentage of the population in the US.
The last administration not only tried to jail Trump on bogus charges, but any lawyer that supported him (and his supporters were fired from their jobs).
In addition to this, we are now seeing that large counties in states like Georgia violated laws with hundreds and thousands of votes in the 2020 election. These all point to a dictatorship, that we lived through, yet nobody like you is complaining about it on HN.
No, they did not jail "all" of the opposition. Fair elections cannot be held during an invasion, especially at the rate Russia frauds votes and candidates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_interfe...