While You Were Sleeping–Trump Invaded Venezuela and Arrested Maduro:
President Trump said on Saturday that the United States had captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and was flying him out of Venezuela, in what would be a stunning culmination to a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump’s administration to oust the authoritarian leader.
Mr. Trump made the announcement on Truth Social, his social media platform, and said that the United States had carried out “a large scale strike against Venezuela” in an operation that was conducted “in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement.” He said that Mr. Maduro’s wife had also been captured.
Venezuelan officials said in statements that while a death and injury toll was still being assessed, Venezuelans had been killed in the strikes. A U.S. official said there had been no American casualties in the operation but would not comment on Venezuelan casualties.
In a brief phone interview with The New York Times after the announcement, Mr. Trump celebrated the success of the mission to capture the Venezuelan president. “A lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people,” he said. “It was a brilliant operation, actually.”
When asked if he had sought congressional authority for the operation or what is next for Venezuela, Mr. Trump said he would address those matters during a news conference at 11 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla.
So. Do we own Venezuela now? Or just the oil? Can someone please wake Chris Coons up? If this isn’t an act of war, I don’t know what is.
Trump’s recent statements refer to Venezuela’s 2007 nationalization of oil assets, including those from US firms like Exxon, which he describes as “stolen” from American interests. He has called for their return via posts on Truth Social in December 2025, framing it as reclaiming expropriated property to counter the Maduro regime. Sources: Reuters, Al Jazeera, CNN.
While recently pursuing a favorite pastime – searching through Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings for publicly traded companies – I saw that Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group and others associated with Trump Media did a deal to purchase a publicly traded company Blue Water Acquisition Corp. III. I then saw that a few months prior to the deal the CEO of Blue Water, Joseph Hernandez, attempted an unsuccessful $10 billion bid to acquire the U.S. assets of Citgo Petroleum, which is majority owned by Venezuela. With Trump and his administration bombing boats in Venezuela and killing dozens of people in what some call war crimes fueled by oil interests, the latest Nunes and Trump Media related business caught my attention.
Since the Trump administration and Trump family businesses all have a somewhat loose definition of ‘conflicts of interest’ it will be interesting to see if Blue Water or any other Trump-linked businesses, show up in future opportunities to profit from the bombings in Venezuela. And even if not related to Venezuela, it will be interesting to see what business combination Blue Water Acquisition Corp. III pursues given its many links to Trump Media, which is majority owned by the U.S. president.
Like Swallows Returning To Capistrano:
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said on X that he had spoken with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who “informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States.” Maduro was indicted in 2020.
Lee, who had initially questioned how this attack was possible under U.S. law without the consent of Congress, did a quick 180, seemingly immediately satisfied with Rubio’s insistence that the “large scale strike” described by Trump was necessary to defend law enforcement. Other Republican members of Congress are falling in line this morning too.
At Least One Democratic Senator Speaks Out:
New Jersey senator Andy Kim, a Democrat, posted on X that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress.”
Sen. Kim accused Trump of rejected a “constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”
Kim, a former State Department employee under the Obama administration, Kim said the overnight strikes in Venezuela “doesn’t represent strength. It’s not sound foreign policy. It puts Americans at risk in Venezuela and the region, and it sends a horrible and disturbing signal to other powerful leaders across the globe that targeting a head of state is an acceptable policy for the US government.”
He warned that the strikes “will further damage our reputation – already hurt by Trump’s policies around the world – and only isolate us in a time when we need our friends and allies more than ever”.
Some Questions To Be Answered:
Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, has shared some analysis of the latest events in Venezuela and says attacks by the US have prompted many questions:
This isn’t a surprise. Though the narrative around the US rationale for the escalation and attacks off the coast of Venezuela has changed over time (anti-narcotics, removal of Maduro, regime change) this step was almost inevitable after the six-month escalation failed to generate internal dissent that could prompt Maduro’s removal or regime change.
It looks for now that the US focused on key military infrastructure: Tiuna Fort, an unoccupied military barracks, several airfields and bases. Will this be enough to provoke a regime change alone? Or will it need to continue. Frankly while some US special operations forces could land in Venezuela to support targeted strikes a full military invasion is unlikely. Can these strikes go on indefinitely?
According to surveys, US citizens are opposed to the use of its military in Venezuela. And any strikes inside Venezuela now will likely force a vote in Congress under the War Powers Act.
But assuming even if there is regime change-of some sort, and it’s by no means clear even if it does happen that it will be democratic-the US’s military action will likely require sustained US engagement of some sort. Will the Trump White House have the stomach for that?
I guess Trump’s invasion of US cities really was a test run for more military action. This time, with no pesky courts around to try to make Trump follow the law.
The NYTimes Editorial Gets It Right:
The nominal rationale for the administration’s military adventurism is to destroy “narco- terrorists.” Governments throughout history have labeled the leaders of rival nations as terrorists, seeking to justify military incursions as policing operations. The claim is particularly ludicrous in this case, given that Venezuela is not a meaningful producer of fentanyl or the other drugs that have dominated the recent epidemic of overdoses in the United States, and the cocaine that it does produce flows mostly to Europe. While Mr. Trump has been attacking Venezuelan boats, he also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran a sprawling drug operation when he was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.
A more plausible explanation for the attacks on Venezuela may instead be found in Mr. Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy. It claimed the right to dominate Latin America: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” In what the document called the “Trump Corollary,” the administration vowed to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more U.S. troops around the region.
Venezuela has apparently become the first country subject to this latter-day imperialism, and it represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world. By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors. More immediately, he threatens to replicate the American hubris that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump seemed to recognize the problems with military overreach. In 2016, he was the rare Republican politician to call out the folly of President George W. Bush’s Iraq war. In 2024, he said: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
He is now abandoning this principle, and he is doing so illegally. The Constitution requires Congress to approve any act of war. Yes, presidents often push the boundaries of this law. But even Mr. Bush sought and received congressional endorsement for his Iraq invasion, and presidents since Mr. Bush have justified their use of drone attacks against terrorist groups and their supporters with a 2001 law that authorized action after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Trump has not even a fig leaf of legal authority for his attacks on Venezuela.
What do you want to talk about?