Kate and Josh discuss Venezuela and Tim Walz dropping his reelection bid.

Not long after I first moved to Washington, D.C. more than 25 years ago, I was at a foreign policy event and my friend, who was the moderator, talked about “high trust” versus “high fear” international orders. The concept is simple: trust and fear each build on themselves and tend to create their own equilibria. A high-trust environment encourages trustworthy and predictable behavior. A high-fear environment makes trust foolish and dangerous. It makes rapid resorts to violence and force logical and common. What is most important about this observation is the way each environment is self-perpetuating, how each creates a logic which participants are foolish not to follow, even if they wish they were in a different international order altogether.

I’ve been watching the various debates about what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela, and may possibly do in Greenland, Cuba or other Latin American states. Most of them, as I’ve noted, seem wildly overdetermined. You have different factions pushing for various military adventures, often for different reasons. If they can pique Trump’s interest, there’s a good chance the adventure will happen. What the reason is depends on which faction you decide was most important. Whatever you find out from that analysis is probably an illusion. There’s a more general pattern that helps understand this current moment, one that has little to do with formal ideology and quite a lot to do with his business practices before he entered politics.

The new year dawned with a shock. After months of saber-rattling against Venezuela and illegal attacks on alleged drug-running boats throughout the Caribbean, the U.S. military swept into Caracas on Jan. 3 and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. 

As TPM’s David Kurtz put it, by ordering the stunning strike, “President Trump is claiming and exercising an unbridled form of executive power not heretofore seen in the United States, unconstrained by a pliable GOP-controlled Congress that has abdicated its constitutional powers.” David has been chronicling Trump’s trampling of the rule of law in his flagship Morning Memo newsletter, and on Thursday Jan. 29, you can hear him break it all down live with an A-list lineup of panelists.

On Saturday, a friend and I were comparing notes on the events following the U.S. raid on Venezuela. Setting apart all the questions about just what the White House is trying to accomplish in Venezuela, my most basic takeaway from the events of the last week is this: as President Trump’s popularity and power erode domestically he will respond with more aggressive assertions of power in those areas where his executive and prerogative authorities remain unbounded, where his domestic popularity matters the least. (This applies most obviously, though not only, to his military powers overseas.) Anything else wouldn’t be consistent with Trump’s character, which is inflexible and unchanging, though perhaps hardening with the progress of advanced age. The current situation between the U.S. and Venezuela shows how jagged, unstable and uneven this may become.

Let me reiterate a general point I’ve made in other posts. I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezueala for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with Maduro. That combination of factors created a lot of forward momentum within the U.S. government with nothing pushing back in the opposite direction. That gets you to today. My point is that it’s a mistake to think there’s a “real” reason mixed in with other subterfuges and rationales, or that it’s important to find out which one the “real” reason is. It’s not that linear or logical.

Let me share a few thoughts about the U.S. action overnight in Venezuela. I say “action” because it’s not clear to me that the U.S. itself (as in the people calling the shots in Washington) know what this was, or have decided. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the news of some major U.S. attack. That only registered a few WTFs in my mind. Then I woke up again at maybe 4 a.m. and saw at the least the claim that U.S. forces had captured and exfiltrated Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Then my WTFs escalated to 11.

Let me take an initial crack at assessing what the United States has done in Venezuela with the proviso that time can easily prove such analyses mistaken. Donald Trump’s claimed takeover of Venezuela has been compared to what the American invasion aimed to do in Iraq in 2003, but I’d go back instead to the American intervention in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and its conquest and takeover of Cuba and the Philippines, about which I wrote in Folly of Empire. 

• As you’ve no doubt seen by now, Trump held a press conference during which he stated that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela through a “a group.” He also talked a lot about oil.
  
• Trump was asked about additional military involvement in the country to facilitate this plan to “run” it. “No, if Maduro’s vice president — if the vice president does what we want, we won’t have to do that,” he said. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has today been publicly reaffirming that Maduro remains president and demanding the U.S. release him.
  
• Congress was not notified in advance of the strike, members have said and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed. “This was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on,” Rubio said during Saturday’s press conference.

Trump’s full Truth Social post from 4:21 a.m. ET:

The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Experts are condemning the strikes as illegal under international law, and questioning why Congress wasn’t consulted.

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. There is no known indictment of his wife.

I’ve been getting lots of your emails about Artificial Intelligence and its place right at the center of so many inflection points — alliances in the new world of oligarchs, the global authoritarian movement, the Gulf princes and their money and more. One of those emails was from TPM Reader AO. AO’s central point was that this is principally a technology, productivity and economics question, and really not a political one. People may hate it but mostly because they don’t know what it is. And in any case it doesn’t matter. Because this is a transformative technology being driven by private capital investment and it’s a change that’s coming regardless of what anyone thinks. With that roll out you may think we were off to a bad start. But it was an interesting conversation and it continues. I reiterated various points I’ve made in posts here, etc. But there was one point that I realized I hadn’t made explicitly enough in those posts.

As I’ve said before, I think it’s really important to distinguish between the actual technology — LLM-based AI — and the political formations forming around it. They’re not the same thing. They’re both really important on their own terms. It’s important to give both sufficient room in a discussion of either topic.

So here goes.