Is Trump About to Unleash the Kraken on Venezuela?

In late November and December 2020, after all hope had faded from Trump’s re-election bid, his supporters were left with the “Kraken.” It was thought to be a monster of evidence that would prove, once and for all and to all skeptics, that massive voter fraud, interference, and manipulation had perpetrated a delusion on the American people, leading them into the false belief that Joe Biden won the election that year.

Attorney Sidney Powell unleashed the Kraken in the form of a Nov. 19, 2020, press conference and lawsuit, filed days after. Unfortunately for the outgoing president, they were more comic relief than anything else. But they contained a claim that’s survived in the MAGA mind over the intervening five years and which, growing evidence suggests, may be playing a bizarrely significant role as the Trump administration wages a pressure campaign on Venezuela. 

Powell and Rudy Giuliani, during that mid-November presser, accused Venezuela of interfering with the 2020 election, using software from a voting machine company to swing the election to Biden. It was, they said, part of an international communist conspiracy with none other than Hugo Chavez as its long-dead mastermind. 

Now, the Kraken has returned. María Corina Machado, a key opposition figure who has asked the Trump administration to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power, told Bloomberg in October that Maduro and others “are the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including the U.S.” 

Trump himself acknowledged the connection late last month. In a Truth Social post that boosted an interview between CBS reporter-turned-right-wing influencer Lara Logan and two men who have spread claims that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election and that the Tren de Aragua gang is controlled by military officials in Caracas, the President wrote: “We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”

Other characters who you may recall from desperate, sweaty-palmed 2020 conspiracizing are also getting in on the action. Michael Flynn has boosted claims that Venezuela stole the 2020 election and called for the administration to take out Maduro. Other, lesser-known Stop the Steal figures, are also pushing for it. 

To be sure, there are many other factors potentially driving the administration’s flirtation with war in Latin America. Memoirs from Trump’s first administration, written by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, both portray regime change in Venezuela as one of many unfulfilled goals from Trump’s first term. That predated the 2020 Stop the Steal campaign. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the child of Cuban emigrants, may have his own reasons; Trump himself has mused about seizing the country’s oil. A National Security Strategy released this month called for the U.S. to reorient its focus to the western hemisphere. 

But it all raises the question: To what extent is the MAGA fantasy of 2020 election fraud connected to Trump’s Caribbean military buildup? 

Machado

María Machado came up in Venezuelan politics in the mid-2000s by starting Sumate, a group that focused on fighting voter fraud and advocating for free and fair elections. It’s been a part of her career, protesting elections in the country that are widely recognized as having been rigged to support both former president Hugo Chávez and, after his death, Maduro. 

Last year, Venezuela held an election that Maduro was shown to have lost. He stayed in power anyway; Machado has said that she’s not so much asking the Trump administration to change the regime in power in her country as to “respect the will of the people.” 

Until leaving Venezuela this month to accept a Nobel Peace Prize, Machado was in hiding. That hasn’t stopped her from doing interviews with American media outlets. In the Bloomberg interview, for example, she both repeated claims that Venezuela’s left-wing authoritarian regime had rigged elections in the United States and that “there is currently an investigation going on” in the U.S. into the matter. The Guardian has since reported that Trump’s Justice Department is investigating the claims via the U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico. 

The conspiracy theory, first brought into the public discourse by Powell and Giuliani, largely focuses on the idea that Smartmatic, a voting machine company that briefly ran an election in Los Angeles in 2020, played a decisive role in stealing the 2020 presidential election; some versions of the theory pin Barack Obama’s meteoric rise on the company as well. 

Machado has also played up other elements of the administration’s interest in Venezuela.

In February, as the administration was planning its Alien Enemies Act removals, Machado told Trump son Don Jr. that the Tren de Argua gang was controlled by Maduro. Weeks later, the administration invoked the late-18th-century law to remove hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT, where, they later said, they were subjected to torture. The removals took place after a federal judge ordered them to stop. Trump, in his Alien Enemies Act proclamation, said that Tren de Aragua was “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

The claim has been refuted by experts on the gang as lacking basis in reality. But to Don Jr., weeks before the AEA invocation, Machado said, “we all know that the head of the Tren de Aragua is Maduro.”

“The regime created, promoted, and funds the Tren de Aragua.”

Stop the Steal reunites

Over the past several months, former general and MAGA booster Michael Flynn has taken to boosting Machado, as have other longtime Trump-aligned activists.

In several posts on Telegram, Flynn has called for Machado to replace Maduro. 

“Venezuela, under the leadership of Maria Corina Machado, will prosper and be united as an example and a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world to emulate,” he wrote in one post last month. Venezuela, under the leadership of Maria Corina Machado, will prosper and be united as an example and a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world to emulate.

Flynn has also boosted the “Kraken” Venezuela claims, and linked them to the military buildup in the Caribbean. In one post this month, he boosted a letter written by a former Venezuelan general who pleaded guilty in July to four federal criminal charges related to a drug trafficking conspiracy. In the letter, the general boosted the election claims, and alleged again that Maduro controls Tren de Aragua. 

That set of claims made its way through the MAGA food chain: attorney Peter Ticktin, representing former Mesa, Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, cited the letter in asking Trump for a pardon. The president issued one last week, though it’s not clear if a federal pardon for a state-level offense means anything.

It’s clear that the administration is listening. 

Several Venezuelan exiles told TPM that they’re in contact with the administration about plans for the country after Maduro’s departure; some of them repeated claims about Smartmatic and 2020. 

It’s all redolent of the run-up to the Iraq War, where figures like Ahmed Chalabi told the Bush administration what it wanted to hear. The difference now is that MAGA doesn’t want weapons of mass destruction; it wants the Kraken.