Trump speaks to Venezuelans
Trump's speech on capturing Maduro and reactions
If you haven’t read it, I recommend my essay After Maduro, reflecting on the capture of Latin America’s most evil living dictator and the future of the country he enslaved.
Late last night, and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power—air, land, and sea—was used to launch a spectacular assault.
These were Trump’s opening words during yesterday’s press conference announcing the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. A few concerns here. Forcibly seizing a sitting head of state within his own country is potentially a violation of international law. Specifically, the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Exceptions are narrowly limited to self-defense against an armed attack and UN approval. Not to mention, using our military to enforce U.S. criminal charges abroad dangerously blurs the line between law enforcement and war. Imagine China trying to enforce its laws on U.S. soil, which they already do, or snatching a head of state as we just did. We should want countries to go through multilateral, diplomatic channels of action. This is how we foster international stability. On the other hand, Maduro was an evil man who enslaved an entire nation and we just cut their chains. China, if it did something similar, would be acting in the opposite direction of liberty. And yes, there is a difference between breaking the law to free people and breaking it to enslave them. This is also where Christopher Hitchens would lean in to say intervention can be justified if it removes a murderous tyranny and advances universal human rights, and taking out Maduro easily passes that test.
Indeed, there have been only a handful of dictators worse than Maduro in the entire history of Latin America. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic stands apart as the worst of all, followed by Pinochet and his empire of torture in Chile. The strongman Batista, so brutal a figure he helped radicalize Cuba into the arms of a communist apocalypse, is third on that list. But Maduro is not far behind, and worse than many more. Worse than Hugo Chávez, for example, who rewrote Venezuela’s constitution to weaken checks and balances, packed courts and electoral bodies with loyalists, expropriated private industry and oil revenues, crushed independent media, empowered the military and colectivos, hollowed out democratic institutions, presided over extrajudicial killings by security forces, and tortured detainees—activists, protesters, officers who weren’t dirty—with beatings, prolonged isolation, agonizing stress positions, asphyxiation, and electric shock. All of which, naturally, directly enabled Maduro’s rule and the nation’s economic collapse. All of which, inarguably, pales in comparison to what came after. Maduro was also worse than Noriega. Worse even than Castro with all his firing squads, show trials, mass executions, gulags for dissidents, gays, and Christians, worse than all of that.
Leftists, the same ones who will look you in the face and defend the slaughter of infants in their cribs using farm tools during Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the genocidal executions under Lenin, or Hamas butchering teenagers at a concert, or Pakistani immigrants in England gang raping little girls, all because it furthers the Cause, will tell you it’s wrong to capture Maduro. “Hands off Venezuela!” they’re already chanting as they march in Los Angeles, Toronto, and hundreds of other cities. But for added context, you should know that Hands Off Venezuela isn’t just a slogan, it’s an organization founded by the International Marxist Tendency, formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist International. What’s more, the guy who founded Hands Off Venezuela, Ted Grant, was a huge admirer of Chávez and personally met with him many times over the years, leading to speculation that he was one of the dictator’s close political advisers. But Grant spent most of his adult life living among the Victorian and Edwardian terraced house of Islington in north London, not in the Caracas slums of Cota 905 or La Silsa, where murderous gangs run by Maduro turn the ghetto streets into war zones that make East St. Louis look like the suburbs of Chesterfield. So Grant can kindly shut the fuck up.
But Maduro’s capture presents yet another problem. Trump cannot initiate an act of war, or something functionally equivalent, without congressional authorization. A unilateral capture risks violating the War Powers Resolution and bypassing Congress’s exclusive authority to authorize force. Then again, President Obama authorized a unilateral Navy SEAL raid deep inside Pakistan, killing Osama bin Laden without Pakistan’s consent or prior congressional approval, and justifying it under the 2001 AUMF and inherent Article II powers as a limited counterterrorism operation rather than an act of war. Stephen Colbert opened his show that week by leading the studio audience in a chorus of U-S-A! U-S-A! before opening, “Suck my giant American balls, Al-Qaeda! Folks, I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl who just shot bin Laden in the eye.” Jon Stewart was no less thrilled. On The Daily Show, he famously declared, “Last night was a good night for me. And not just for New York or D.C. or America, but for human people … Al Qaeda’s opportunity is gone … Can they still do damage? I’m sure. But we’re back, baby.” He added:
I just want details. What look did he give when bin Laden realized the helicopters overhead were not giving traffic and weather updates? You think he pulled a Culkin? Maybe he gave a little more dramatic chipmunk? ... Believe me, he wasn’t expecting it. You know, he was living in some staid and upscale Pakistani suburb for some time when we got him. You know this guy’s out there preaching suicide bombing and jihad, pretending he’s Gandalf wandering the frontier, all the while he’s living like one of the housewives of Orange County.
Rachel Maddow also weighed in:
This is the day they got bin Laden. This is the Situation Room. And that is probably as much as any of us need to know about what exactly the president of the United States was thinking while it happened. … I think it’s just incredible.
But after Trump’s capture of Maduro this week, Maddow’s reaction was not celebratory at all. Rather, she troubled the news with concerns about Trump’s real motives, what this means, and the impact it might have. She looked deeply troubled. Funny how that works. But for all her concerns, which are not unreasonable—it’s her unprincipled hypocrisy I disdain—and the ones I’ve already listed here myself, but also as someone who knows the horrors of what Maduro wrought, I have to confess, Trump’s opening words struck a patriotic chord in my heart. Maduro was an evil man who plagued millions. But Trump didn’t execute him. He captured Maduro, who will now face justice in court. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted in Argentina by Mossad agents and secretly flown to Israel, where he was tried and executed. Even then, the scales were not balanced. But who thinks it was wrong to take him? If Mossad had put two .32 ACPs between Eichmann’s eyes, it would have been too good for the bastard. Maduro is no Eichmann, but he is the worst living dictator in the entire Western Hemisphere.
It was an assault like people have not seen since World War II. It was a force against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of Caracas. To bring outlawed dictator Nicolás Maduro to justice. This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history. And if you think about it, we’ve done some other good ones, like the attack on Soleimani, the attack on al-Baghdadi, and the obliteration and decimation of the Iran nuclear sites, just recently, in an operation known as Midnight Hammer. All perfectly executed and done. No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday or, frankly, in just a short period of time.
Trump later added:
If you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it. But it was an incredible thing to see. Not a single American service member was killed. And not a single piece of American equipment was lost. We had many helicopters, many planes, many, many people involved in that fight. But think of that. Not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed. The United States military is the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet by far, with capabilities and skills, our enemies can scarcely begin to imagine.
Trump then explained that Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, have both been indicted in the Southern District of New York, “For their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens.” I’ll be damned, I said to myself. Donald Trump just pulled a Batman. In The Dark Knight, the mob accountant Lau flees to Hong Kong, thinking himself safe. The Joker shows up to a meeting of Gotham’s crime bosses and says of Lau, “As for his so-called plan, Batman has no jurisdiction. He’ll find him and make him squeal. I can tell the squealers every time.” One wonders if Maduro squealed. Batman slips into Hong Kong in at night and rips Lau out of the window of a skyscraper, extracting him midair, proving no one is beyond justice under his watch. But Batman is a vigilante. Not a president. Still, the story Trump narrated earlier today sounded like it fell from the pages of a comic about Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. Silent insertion, flawless capture, exfiltration, no U.S. fatalities. And with every word, my mind fell back to the millions upon millions of Venezuelans who now weep for joy that America has returned to them their cherished freedom. I am not blind to the problems with how this went down, but thinking of all those people, it makes me proud to be an American. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes:
President Donald Trump has launched not a splendid little war, but perhaps a splendid little operation in Venezuela. He has captured a dictator and removed him from power. So far, Trump seems to have executed a bad idea well: The military operation, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” seems to have been flawless. The strategic wisdom, however, is deeply questionable. And the legal basis, as offered by the president and his team, is absurd. Some Americans, and some U.S. allies, are appalled.
Russia and China claim to be appalled, too, but to use a classic diplomatic expression, the leaders in Beijing and Moscow should be invited, with all due respect, to shut their traps.
No kidding. Putin and Xi ought to pray we don’t turn our attention their way next. If Trump captured Putin in a similarly flawless mission and dropped him off, gift-wrapped on the steps of the National Police in Kyiv, ending the war overnight and possibly leading to the recovery of the 20,000 children who were torn from their parents and deported into the dark heart of Russia, would we look back on that moment in history decades later as a gross example of American imperialism? Or would we regard it, like Eichmann’s capture, as a rare but glorious moment when dictatorial monsters were not only defeated, but defeated in the courts rather than shot in their beds? More importantly, what would Ukrainians think? What would Russians think, whose sons would no longer be fed into the meat grinder of Putin’s psychopathic war? What do Venezuelans think today?
We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. We don’t wanna be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. It has to be judicious. Because that’s what we’re all about. 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. It’s their homeland. We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. We’ve had decades of that. We’re not going to let that happen. … We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.
This addresses concerns about a power vacuum, or one of Maduro’s henchmen taking over, or the failure of the economy to restart, thus leading to systemic collapse and eventually state failure once again. Of course, we wouldn’t have stepped in if there was nothing in it for us. We do not actually purely out of selfless Christian virtue, nor should we take any such rhetoric seriously. But if we can liberate 30 million slaves, give them back the democracy that was stolen from them, rebuild their economy so that they and their children may flourish, and serve justice to their former master, how much moral discount should we factor into our analysis that we make a pretty penny in the process? We must not, however, seize Venezuela’s oil for ourselves. That is their wealth. But also, that is not what Trump describes when he talks about spending billions to fix a broken infrastructure. We spent lavishly to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II, $13 billion on Germany alone under the Marshall Plan, all of which was to our profound benefit—but even so, it was still the right and noble thing to do.
I think it can be colorably argued that there is no other way to have done this. Sanctions have done nothing to change Maduro’s behavior, much less his tyrannical regime, though they did make life harder for the people. So you either leave Maduro to murder and rape millions for the next few decades, and who knows, maybe a full century if the man who comes after him is as bad or even worse, or you stop him, and if you stop him, now having involved yourself, you have a duty to the people. But to leftist critics, of course, all this will look like colonialism. The problem they are going to have with that argument is that Venezuelans couldn’t possibly be happier.
Besides, American interests in Venezuela are not exclusively altruistic. Maduro was responsible for harming our own citizens too.
The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States, as alleged in the indictment. He personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de las Solis, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans. Many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years, of Americans, died because of him. … Maduro remained in power and waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States of America, threatening not only our people but the stability of the entire region. And you also saw, in addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs, that he inflicted untold suffering and human destruction all over the country. All over. In particular, in the United States. Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide. And he did indeed. They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called the police. They were brutal. But they’re not so brutal now. … The gangs that they sent raped, tortured, and murdered American women and children. They were in all of the cities I mentioned, Tren de Aragua. And they were sent by Maduro to terrorize our people and now Maduro will never again be able to threaten an American citizen or anybody from Venezuela.
People may be wondering whether this is good intelligence or Trump playing fast and loose with the facts, as he so often does. Did Maduro actually send Tren de Aragua to terrorize foreign citizens in their own countries, including in the United States? If so, that would potentially be an act of war. The UN Charter’s Article 2 says a state may not use force against another state’s territory or people, but that isn’t limited to a formal military invasion. Sending armed killers counts too. In April, the Human Rights Foundation reported, “Venezuela’s Maduro continues to use Tren de Aragua for transnational repression, kidnapping, assassination.” The report said:
On Feb. 21, 2024, Ronald Ojeda — a 32-year-old former Venezuelan army lieutenant living in exile in Chile — was abducted from his home in Santiago by individuals posing as police officers. Days later, his dismembered body was discovered inside a concrete-encased suitcase. Ojeda had fled Venezuela in 2017 after facing persecution for his anti-regime activities and was granted political asylum in Chile in 2023. Chilean authorities quickly identified the perpetrators as members of Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest criminal network.
Chilean investigators suspected the assassination was ordered by Maduro as retaliation for Ojeda’s activism, and formally classified the case as a state-ordered political assassination. Attorney General Ángel Valencia agreed. The report adds:
For years, the Maduro regime has harbored and enabled Tren de Aragua. Born within Venezuela’s prison system, the gang expanded under the protection of Maduro’s inner circle. Until a raid in late 2023, Tren de Aragua operated openly from Tocorón prison in Aragua state — a facility transformed into a fortified criminal compound complete with pools, nightclubs, and armories, functioning as a “liberated territory” with government acquiescence. Security experts have long noted that the regime co-opted criminal groups like Tren de Aragua as enforcers, deploying them to attack pro-democracy protesters and eliminate political opponents. Operatives have effectively acted as an extension of the regime’s repressive apparatus, shielded by official impunity and alleged financial ties to state officials.
If Tren de Aragua takes orders from Maduro then its theft, drug trafficking, extortion, sex trafficking, and murders in Chicago, New York City, parts of Colorado, El Paso, Salt Lake City, and other U.S. cities are acts of war, no different than if Maduro had sent black ops forces into U.S. territory. It’s important to understand that Tren de Aragua is best documented in the United States not as a major drug cartel, but as possibly the largest network in the country for sex slavery and human trafficking. And where are Western feminists to raise a placard for this? Sadly, hiding in the same place as when the conversation turns round to the fact that Pakistani immigrants are raping little girls or that Somalis butcher their women as a common practice. Namely, on their hands and knees combing through the grass for another opportunity to blame white Western men.
Early last year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee announced a federal indictment charging eight Venezuelans tied to a multi-state human trafficking and sex slavery conspiracy centered in Nashville. Prosecutors say the defendants worked together to recruit poor, young, vulnerable girls from Central and South America, mostly Venezuelans, under false promises of a better life, then got them to Tennessee—as well as New York, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, Nashville, Miami—told them they now owed massive debts with massive interest piling up, and sexually enslaved them to be repeatedly raped on a daily basis by men who contacted Tren de Aragua using WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, specifying what they wanted to do to the girls, and paying a higher price for more “exotic” pleasures. Let your mind sit with that for a minute or two. Recall it when you see people chanting, “Hands off Venezuela,” because what they really mean is “Hands off Maduro.” And the natural reply should be, “Hands off Venezuelans.”
America can project our will anywhere, anytime. The coordination, the stealth, the lethality, the precision, the very long arm of American justice, all on full display in the middle of the night. Nicolás Maduro had his chance. Just like Iran had their chance. Until they didn’t, and until he didn’t. He effed around. And he found out.
Spot on David. Would like to know what you think of this argument: https://x.com/javierhfabre/status/2007496975948587464
Reportedly the Special Forces also brought back filing cabinets from Maduro's compound. Some of his American supporters - Sen. Jeff Merkley perhaps? - might be sleeping a little less soundly tonight.