America First Gets a Big Win in Venezuela
The operation to apprehend Nicolás Maduro was a stunning success, and it opens the door for meaningful change in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Early Saturday morning, the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the “Night Stalkers,” in conjunction with federal law enforcement, carried out a “large-scale strike” in Caracas, Venezuela. The objective of Operation Absolute Resolve was to do one thing: capture dictator Nicolás Maduro. Boom, done, zero American casualties, zero American equipment lost.
‘Merica!
That’s the sentiment of millions of Americans over the last couple of days. The reaction of other Americans — namely Democrats — is to defend a commie dictator and scream about Trump. It might be the dawning days of a new year, but some things never change.
“Overwhelming American military power — air, land, and sea — was used to launch a spectacular assault,” said President Donald Trump on Saturday morning. “And it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II.” We cover the details of the operation in today’s Executive News Summary, so I’ll focus on some bigger picture things.
Trump spent much of his first year in office focusing on what his administration calls the narco-terrorist regime in Venezuela. He has blown up numerous drug boats and amassed a huge U.S. Navy fleet in the Caribbean. Drug cartels traffic narcotics and people across the U.S. southern border, wreaking havoc in our nation, including causing the deaths of perhaps tens of thousands of Americans each year. Moreover, Venezuela has been in cahoots with China, Russia, and Iran, which runs afoul of the two-century-old Monroe Doctrine of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
Trump is completely resetting American foreign policy to put America First, including pushing the ChiComs and others out. This raid sends an unmistakable message to other regimes that are trying American patience. Despotic rulers in Tehran and Havana are at the top of that list. So is a certain thug in Moscow who signed a “Strategic Partnership Treaty” with Venezuela in October. (With a straight face, Vladimir “Ukraine Is Mine” Putin condemned this breach of Venezuelan sovereignty.) So is Beijing, which had a delegation meeting with Maduro just before the American raid. (Can I just say how incredibly fantastic that is?) So are the Mexican drug cartels and a left-wing president who’s far too comfortable with their deadly business.
The American president is restoring fear and respect for the U.S. worldwide after four years of utter ineptitude by the Biden administration. In fact, with a few exceptions since the mid-1990s, America has been on a downward trajectory in terms of global influence. Trump wants to change that, and he thinks big.
The Washington Post editorial board … [checks notes] … loved the raid, but Democrats utterly hate it.
Despite Joe Biden and Kamala Harris routinely complaining about “root causes” of the surge in illegal immigration for which they were the root cause, Democrats detest the fact that Trump just addressed one of the most significant factors driving refugees from South America — a tin-pot dictator (and his predecessor) who’d run a formerly prosperous country into the ground with what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani might call the “warmth of collectivism.” Venezuelans loved socialism so much that they fled to the world’s greatest capitalist country.
Despite Democrats caterwauling about Trump “stealing” the 2016 election and then condemning his objections to the Democrats’ theft of the 2020 election, they won’t countenance Trump removing a man who actually stole the last election in his country.
Despite all those “No Kings” rallies, leftists are mad that Trump took out a “king.”
Despite Team Biden putting a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head less than a year ago, Democrats can’t tolerate that Trump is the one who got him. “Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela do not make America safer, stronger, or more affordable,” Harris bitterly griped.
Senate Democrats intend to force a vote on a war powers resolution to condemn Trump’s operation. “One of the reasons the Founding Fathers gave the ability to declare war to the Congress is so there would be debate, discussion, different points of view before something so momentous happens,” complained Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “And they’re just ripping up that part of the Constitution.”
Democrats would never rip up the Constitution.
I’m not saying there aren’t constitutional questions. Republican Senator Mike Lee thinks there are: “I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force.” The Trump administration called it a law enforcement operation, not a military invasion. There has been a warrant for Maduro’s arrest since 2020.
In any case, Democrats are playing games if they think there aren’t precedents for this very thing. The closest parallel is Manuel Noriega in 1989. The Panamanian dictator was captured by U.S. forces and brought to Miami, where, as constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley notes, he was “convicted of drug and money laundering offenses and sentenced to 40 years in prison.” Likewise, Maduro is in New York to face similar charges, primarily for his role running the Cartel of the Suns.
More broadly, Turley argues, “Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation. Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this ‘kill list’ policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.”
As for what’s next, Trump painted in broad, if vague, strokes. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a proper and judicious transition,” he said, though there are no U.S. forces on the ground there any longer. “We don’t want to be involved with someone else getting in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.” He added, “We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country.”
Strangely, Trump doesn’t think Nobel Peace Prize-winning María Corina Machado will be the next leader: “I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.” I’m not sure why he’s saying something so demonstrably bogus, but maybe it’s the proverbial 4D chess since Maduro’s cronies are still in charge at the moment. The next leader could also be Edmundo González Urrutia, the man who took Machado’s place in last year’s election and won before Maduro stole it.
American oil companies will have a green light to help restore Venezuela’s infrastructure, too. “We are going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” said the president.
Trump will brief congressional leaders later today, and he’ll need approval for any long-term operations in Venezuela. For now, at least, this has to be one of the most remarkable U.S. military operations in history, and if the Trump administration supports the right players in Caracas, it could lead to very good things in Venezuela, South America, and the whole Western Hemisphere.
Correction: It does not appear to be true that the U.S. actually bombed the mausoleum of Hugo Chávez.
