The U.S. government has removed from political power the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, on the pretext that Maduro has been indicted by a U.S. grand jury on drug and weapons charges – this action being taken barely a month after Donald Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras on a 2024 conviction on, you guessed it, drug and weapons charges.
“As far as last night was concerned, it was really genius, what they did is genius,” Trump said in a victory-lap phone interview with his favorite call-in show, “Fox & Friends,” on Saturday morning.
The U.S. president said he watched the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on a live feed, as if he were watching a TV show, because of course they made sure to loop him in.
The guy is riveted by the TV.
News broke to the outside world after midnight ET that the U.S. military had launched a series of strikes on Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, with local news reports highlighting a series of explosions in the capital city.
Trump posted on his socials at 4:21 a.m. ET that Maduro and his wife had been captured, and that the “operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement.”
The pretext, that the operation was of a nature involving law enforcement, doesn’t stand well against the Nov. 29 action by Trump with the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in the U.S. in 2024 for conspiring to traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine and on weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
ICYMI
Trump justified that move by claiming Hernández was, “according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly” – though there is an uncomfortable fact with the Hernández case for Trump, in that the investigation into Hernández was initiated in 2015, and led by Emil Bove, a Justice Department prosecutor who later became Trump’s personal lawyer, and was appointed last year to a federal judgeship by Trump.
Hernández was found guilty on charges that he helped move more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes from major traffickers, among them Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
“The hypocrisy underlying this decision is especially glaring. This same president recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a U.S. court on serious drug trafficking charges, including conspiring with narcotics traffickers while in office. Yet now, the administration claims that similar allegations justify the use of military force against another sovereign nation. You cannot credibly argue that drug trafficking charges demand invasion in one case, while issuing a pardon in another,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Critics have speculated that Hernández bribed himself out of prison, essentially buying the pardon from Trump, and that with respect to Maduro, the reason he ended up in Trump’s crosshairs is, he didn’t want to play ball with a pre-bribe.
There’s also Trump’s own words about the Venezuelan government action in 1976, nearly a half-century ago, to nationalize its oil industry, which shut out U.S. companies from Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world.
Eighty percent of Venezuelan oil goes to, wait for it:
China.
Trump, today, in the phone call with “Fox & Friends,” said what should have been the quiet part on that out loud, about the motivation for today’s action in Venezuela:
“We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.”
I’m apparently alone in wondering what China will do in response to this provocation from the U.S.
Probably invade Taiwan, and dare us to say anything, right?
The focus of the criticism this morning seems to be on basic matters of the rule of law and constitutionality, which, yes, certainly, important – but arguing the way the game is played is missing out on the much bigger issues at play here.
“America’s strength comes from our commitment to the rule of law, democratic norms, and constitutional restraint,” Warner said. “When we abandon those principles, even in the name of confronting bad actors, we weaken our credibility, endanger global stability, and invite abuses of power that will long outlast any single presidency.”
“President Trump’s unauthorized military attack on Venezuela to arrest Maduro, however terrible he is, is a sickening return to a day when the United States asserted the right to dominate the internal political affairs of all nations in the Western Hemisphere,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noting that “it is long past time for Congress to reassert its critical constitutional role in matters of war, peace, diplomacy and trade.”
Reality check: we all know that our Congress, still right now under the thumb of MAGA Republican majorities, isn’t going to assert anything with respect to Trump.
Trump, anyway, knows this; it’s why he felt empowered to do what he did overnight.
“Democrats, maybe they’ll take a shot, you know, they’ll take a shot, all they do is complain,” Trump said on his call with the “Fox & Friends” crew. “They don’t talk about, they should say, you know what, we did a great job, we’re stopping drugs from coming into this country, and nobody’s been able to do it until we came along. But they should say, great job. They shouldn’t say, oh, gee, maybe it’s not constitutional, you know, the same old stuff that we’ve been hearing for years and years and years.”
Video: The latest on Venezuela
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Chris Graham
