- 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.
- TPM noted in December that all of the administration’s saber rattling toward Venezuela had excited various 2020 “Stop the Steal” dead-enders — minor right-wing celebrities who claim that Venezuela played a part in a massive, international Marxist conspiracy to steal that election from Trump. Venezuelan opposition figure (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) María Corina Machado and other regime-change influencers had also embraced those conspiracy theories, presumably seeking to curry favor with Trump.
Whether or not that campaign played a role in what happened overnight, the wild 2020 claims are still, clearly, on Trump’s mind: earlier today, the president mused during a Fox News interview that Venezuela’s 2024 election “wasn’t a hell of a lot worse than what they did to us in 2020.” International observers say Maduro soundly lost the 2024 election, but stayed in power anyway. Trump went on to describe the 2020 U.S. election as “a disgrace.”
- As with Trump’s decision to bomb Iran in June, outgoing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is not pleased with this latest, wild foreign adventurism: “Boomers and half of Gen X will cheer on neocon wars and talking points, but the other half of Gen X and majority on down see through it and hate it,” she wrote on X. She adds: “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”
- Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), another — and longstanding — thorn in Trump’s side in Congress, blasted the tension in the administration’s statements about what, exactly, they had done and are doing. “AG and others legally characterize attack in Venezuela as ‘arrest with military support,'” he wrote on X. “Meanwhile Trump announces he’s taken over the country and will run it until he finds someone suitable to replace him.” He also questioned whether Rubio’s assurance to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) that this was essentially a fancy law enforcement occupation squared with Trump’s threat to attack Venezuela’s military.
- I wrote this morning that there was no known indictment of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores. Now there is. In a superseding indictment, unsealed today, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York charges her and others with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices. Since Flores is also, according to the administration, being taken to New York, these charges are part of the dubious claim that this was all a law enforcement operation, not an effort at regime change, and not a violation of U.S. or international law.
(Here, too, Massie observes the irony: “If this action were constitutionally sound, the Attorney General wouldn’t be tweeting that they’ve arrested the President of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law,” he writes.)
This post has been updated.
