Foreign Affairs The Ugly Ironies in Trump’s Venezuela Press Conference  Washington could have accomplished its aims without military intervention. Donald Trump held a press conference last Saturday following the military operation that led to the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. Trump explained, with help from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, that Maduro was an illegitimate leader who had lost the last election and who had stayed in power as the head of the Cartel de los Soles drug cartel. Trump boasted of the success of the operation and promised that, unlike past presidents who “ousted dictators without… a plan for what comes afterwards,” he would ensure this regime change would go smoothly.  Over the last week, we’ve learned that claims made during the press conference were tinged with very ugly ironies. During the Q&A, Rubio told the press that “Nicolás Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this. He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers” for leaving Venezuela that he turned down. “He could’ve been living somewhere else right now very happy,” Rubio said. Indeed, The New York Times reports that, in late December, Maduro “rejected an ultimatum from President Trump to leave office and go into a gilded exile in Turkey.” Since he refused to leave on his own, the soft coup became a hard coup, and the U.S. removed him by military force. Power would now transition to Vice President Delcy Rodríguez. The very ugly irony here is that the counteroffer made by Maduro to the ultimatum he was offered is not far off from the situation that has been inflicted by force on Venezuela. The world seems to have been closer to resolving the standoff and avoiding the military operation than presented. The Miami Herald and Reuters have reported that, in late November, Trump offered Maduro safe passage for him, his wife, and his son if he agreed to resign right away and flee Venezuela for the destination of his choice. According to the reporting, Maduro told Trump he was willing to leave under three conditions: He and his family had to have complete legal amnesty. Sanctions on over a hundred Venezuelan officials had to be dropped. And Rodríguez needed to become head of an interim government until elections could be held. Trump rejected these conditions, yet he authorized a risky military intervention that has brought about a similar outcome, and perhaps a riskier one if Maduro loyalists suspect Rodríguez made a secret deal with the Americans, betraying the ousted president. That Rodríguez is the leader the Trump team has settled on to work with is also revealingly ironic. In his press conference, Trump repeated the often-made American claim that Maduro is an “illegitimate dictator” because he stole the last election, holding onto power for “many years after his term as president of Venezuela expired.” Yet the military operation left the regime in place, plucking only the president from its structure.  As the White House has noted, Maduro stole an election won by the opposition. “He is not the legitimate president of Venezuela,” Rubio said. But Trump declined to work with the leader of the opposition that he said won the last election: Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado.  Following the removal of Maduro, Machado declared, “Today we are prepared to assert our mandate and seize power.” But Trump spurned that offer, saying instead that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader if she doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect within [Venezuela].” Instead, the U.S. would work, at least temporarily, with Rodríguez. For all the complaints about Maduro’s lack of democratic legitimacy, the operation does not enhance the democratic legitimacy of Venezuela’s government. Trump turned his back on democracy in Venezuela, putting aside the opposition his team insists won the election, and working, instead, with the vice president of the administration they claim stole the election. Two days after the military operation, Trump made clear that there would be no democracy in the country anytime soon. He said that he is in charge in Venezuela and that “we have to fix the country first. You can’t have an election. There’s no way the people could even vote. No, it’s going to take a period of time,” though it’s not clear why. Trump thinks that even war-torn Ukraine is capable of holding an election. Two key points were made about the plan for Venezuela’s leadership going forward. The first was that there was a compliant leader; the second was that Venezuela’s oil would pay for the U.S. “running” Venezuela, reimburse the U.S. oil companies that had the oil stolen from them, and improve the lives of Venezuelans who had suffered under Maduro. Both claims are questionable and ironic. Rodríguez initially appeared to remain loyal to Maduro and defiant. She maintained that “there is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.” She called America’s actions “barbarity.” And she insisted that they “will never return to being the colony of another empire.” In response, Trump warned that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” On January 5, Rodríguez issued a statement that sounded more conciliatory but, in fact, preserved her main points. She continued to say, as both she and Maduro previously had, that Venezuela “consider[s] it a priority to move toward a balanced and respectful international relationship between the United States and Venezuela” and “to work together on a cooperation agenda aimed at shared development” but added that this must be done “within the framework of international law” and “based on sovereign equality and non-interference.” She insisted that there can be no “external threats,” and she continued to refer to Maduro as president. More strikingly for a Trump administration that evaluated Rodríguez to be compliant, at her January 5 swearing-in as the interim President of Venezuela, Rodríguez called Maduro and his wife “two heroes” and said she was accepting office “with pain because of the suffering that has been caused to the Venezuelan people after an illegitimate military aggression against our homeland.” After the swearing-in, she greeted representatives from America’s leading adversaries: China, Russia, and Iran. And the promise of oil is no more certain. Trump claimed that the “socialist regime” of Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, “stole” America’s oil “through force.” He said, “Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets, and American platforms costing us billions and billions of dollars.” He then promised that, with Maduro removed from power, “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.” Trump claimed that the U.S. oil companies would “invest billions of dollars” to get oil production running. But U.S. oil companies seem less willing to rush back into Venezuela than Trump believes. Prior to the military operation, the Trump administration was “asking U.S. oil companies if they’re interested in returning to Venezuela once leader Nicolás Maduro is gone.” The answer they got was “no.”  Low oil prices are dampening the temptation to risk huge investments into a Venezuelan oil infrastructure in bad need of maintenance. The increasingly uncertain political environment in Venezuela is also giving oil executives pause, as is the concern that Washington doesn’t have a fully developed plan for the country’s political future. The Trump administration is pressuring American oil companies to get on board. The military intervention for oil, in other words, has spooked the companies needed to extract and process the oil. Trump’s framing of the oil question when it comes to Venezuelans is also ironic. He promised that once American oil companies “get the oil flowing the way it should be… we’re gonna make sure the people of Venezuela are taken care of.” Trump said that his message to the people of Venezuela is that they’re going to have “some of the riches that you should have had for a long period of time that was stolen from you.”  But that was the promise that Chávez made to his people. Chávez promised that his “government is here to protect the people, not the bourgeoisie or the rich.” With that promise, he nationalized the electricity, telecommunications, and steel industries to divert the profits from Venezuelan resources into social programs for Venezuela’s people. Most importantly, Chávez strengthened the terms of the oil and natural gas partnerships the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA had made with American corporations.  Before Venezuela’s oil profits were decimated, in large part, by U.S. sanctions, its economy was improving, with both poverty and income inequality in decline. Trump is promising to restore what Venezuela already had—oil revenues improving the lives of the people—before U.S. sanctions immiserated the Venezuelan people and helped destroy the energy sector. But the greatest irony of all was not revealed until the updated indictment against Maduro was unsealed. The greatest part of the case against Maduro, and the justification for the bombing of alleged drug boats, the embargo on oil ships, and the military operation against Maduro, was that he was the leader of a “narco-terrorist” state and was the “kingpin,” Trump said in his press conference that Maduro headed “the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.” But when the rewritten indictment against Maduro was revealed on the day Maduro was captured, the claim that the Cartel de los Soles was an actual organization and that Maduro was its leader was gone, replaced with the weaker claim of a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption.” Coupled with the U.S. intelligence conclusion that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [the Tren de Aragua] TDA crime syndicate and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the principal case against Maduro disappears.  Despite Maduro offering something close to what the Trump administration imposed, and despite the main justification of the operation being apparently bogus, the operation went ahead. The long-term plan depends on a compliant transitional government whose compliance threatens its domestic credibility, and on the cooperation of American oil companies  who don’t seem eager to produce the oil that Trump claims to have secured for them. If America is entering a darker phase of international politics, it is doing so in a darkly ironic way. The post The Ugly Ironies in Trump’s Venezuela Press Conference  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics After Minneapolis, Democrats Revive ‘Abolish ICE’ Shaking off the shackles of woke might be easier said than done. One of the core elements of the peak woke Democratic Party was “Abolish ICE.” It became such a popular idea in the first Trump term that most 2020 Democratic hopefuls had to entertain the idea. That dalliance would later haunt Kamala Harris in her 2024 bid. After Donald Trump’s landslide 2024 victory,  “Abolish ICE” seemed to be one of those woke elements, alongside mandatory pronouns and “Defund the Police,” that the Democratic establishment would bury for good. It alienated voters and made the Democrats look like maniacs. In the aftermath of defeat, party leaders wanted to ditch woke and seem more moderate to ordinary Americans. But their base thought differently, as clearly evidenced by the reaction to the ICE shooting in Minneapolis. Now the calls to abolish ICE are reviving once more and finding an enthusiastic response among Democratic voters. This woke priority will influence the party agenda in 2028. Democrats were apoplectic over the ICE shooting. Regardless of the facts on the ground, they determined the officer murdered an innocent woman in cold blood and want immigration law enforcement to pay the price. Prominent Democrats in Congress, such as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), want the federal agency defunded in the budget for Homeland Security. Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL) plans to introduce articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem over the matter. Other Democrats explicitly called for ICE’s abolishment. Massachusetts’s Rep. Ayanna Pressley declared ICE a “rogue, violent agency” that “must be abolished.” The Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner claimed in an X post that “Dismantling ICE is the moderate position.”  “Unmask these thugs, arrest them, and make them answer for these horrors,” he added.  Protesters throughout the country carried “Abolish ICE” banners following the shooting.  This is a feeling that’s long been simmering within the Democratic base. While leading Democrats such as Gavin Newsom  acknowledge the party failed to secure the border and promise to correct that error in the future, the progressive grassroots has been focused on different priorities. Polls show Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove of ICE, with a November YouGov survey finding 85 percent disapproval among Democratic voters and an additional 76 percent back protests against the agency. Axios reported last summer how Democratic lawmakers are inundated with calls from left-wing constituents that they should violently confront ICE raids. A number of Democratic lawmakers and candidates have been arrested for trying to block ICE actions. The sentiment is now reflected on the campaign trail, with Platner, the Illinois congressional candidate Patty Garcia, and several others now making the abolition of ICE a core part of their pitch to voters. “Let me be clear: F— ICE,” Garcia said in her campaign announcement. “It’s time to abolish ICE and hold Trump and his entire clan accountable.”  Democratic governors and mayors can’t abolish ICE, but many of them want to use any means necessary to stop agents from enforcing immigration law. Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson and Oregon legislators are just some of the Democrats who want local law enforcement to arrest ICE. Minnesota’s embattled Gov. Tim Walz appeared to share this sentiment this week when he threatened to send the National Guard to Minneapolis to stop ICE from doing its job. He also encouraged citizens “peacefully” to resist the federal agency. The rhetoric and proposals are only going to get more radical and hysteric in the wake of the Minneapolis and Portland shootings. Democrats’ plans to look moderate for 2028 could go up in flames. As outlined by Newsom, there is a needle Democrats wish to thread about immigration. They want to look like they support border security and distinguish it from internal immigration law enforcement. They want to be perceived as stopping illegal immigration outside the country, but doing no deportations of those already here. Every Democrat with brain cells understands open borders killed the Biden presidency and was an albatross around Kamala’s neck in the general election. They know millions of illegal immigrants flooding into the country upsets the general electorate. But their primary voters may view it differently. Liberal audiences, fired up with rage over Trump’s immigration actions, don’t want to hear candidates try to thread the needle and attack ICE but praise Border Patrol. Their own voters could very well insist that both are curtailed in a future Democratic administration. It’s important to remember that the initial calls to abolish ICE convinced the party to institute open borders in the first place. The Biden administration responded to base demands by refusing to enforce immigration law. There was no distinguishing between ICE and border security in the Left’s outrage. The same scenario could easily play out once more. Democrats indicate this is how it will turn out by their eagerness to oppose any forms of immigration enforcement during Trump’s second terms. Blue states passing laws to prevent the detention and deportation of illegal aliens in their states, regardless of which heinous crimes they committed, exhibit a hostility towards all forms of immigration law enforcement, whether at the border or within the interior.  Despite the intentions of its leadership, the Democrats may stick with wokeness. Party conferences still mandate pronoun announcements. The DNC still follows strict diversity quotas for leadership roles. Leaders still talk about doling out reparations, with Maryland, San Francisco, and other locales pursuing the deeply unpopular policy. Democrats were eager to declare themselves no longer woke at the start of the Trump administration. But it’s 2026, and the party seems to think it would be better to not make any real changes. That’s why the DNC buried its 2024 autopsy report, which likely chastised the party for adopting too many far-left positions that alienated ordinary Americans. But with strong results in 2025’s elections and the base angrily insisting on radical positions, the Democrats feel it’s best to stick with a left-wing direction. There’s no better way to show America that they haven’t changed than to revive “Abolish ICE.” The post After Minneapolis, Democrats Revive ‘Abolish ICE’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Latin America Machado’s Failed Venezuelan Gambit The Venezuelan opposition finds they have been left high and dry even after Maduro is gone. Thousands of Venezuelans rejoiced across the globe after the United States conducted a lightning operation that left Caracas in flames and captured President Nicolás Maduro. Many believed that the U.S. was on the brink of toppling the regime and installing the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado or her follower Edmundo González as the new leader of the country. Their celebration quickly turned to confusion and indignation. At the press conference following the raid, President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. would work with the government of Venezuela’s then-vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Machado, Trump said, “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.” The Venezuelan opposition’s predicament cannot be understood apart from the long shadow of the country’s disputed election. Machado’s movement insisted—credibly, in the view of many outside observers—that the vote was manipulated, that Maduro’s victory was manufactured, and that the regime had exhausted whatever legitimacy it once claimed. Yet these assertions, however accurate, never altered the basic balance of power inside Venezuela. Maduro’s National Electoral Council proclaimed him the winner, and the military and police cracked down on protests by Machado and her opposition. The presidential candidate González, who probably won the election, fled the country. The opposition produced spectacle at home and sympathy abroad, but nothing that meaningfully shook the grip of the Venezuelan government. By the time Machado and her allies turned decisively to Washington, they were already operating from a position of severe weakness. That weakness was obscured, for a time, by the drama that surrounded Machado herself. Barred from office and driven into hiding from the state, she became a celebrity for sympathetic Westerners. Her Nobel Peace Prize—less a recognition of concrete achievement than of symbolic resistance—cemented her status as the international face of Venezuelan democracy. Her decision to publicly praise Trump and to dedicate the award to him was strategic. Machado understood that the only force capable of dislodging the regime was external, and hoped that the Trump White House could serve as the necessary instrument. But praise is not power, and symbolism is not governance. Whatever rhetorical sympathy the Trump administration expressed toward the Venezuelan opposition, it never embraced the premise that Machado and her circle could actually run the country. That skepticism hardened as U.S. planners confronted the practical consequences of Maduro’s removal. Venezuela is not a collapsed microstate; it is a large, polarized society with an entrenched political class, armed factions, and a population exhausted by years of instability. Installing an opposition government that lacked control over the security forces or the civil service would not have produced a democratic renaissance. It would have produced paralysis at best, anarchy at worst, and would almost certainly have required the backing of American guns and troops on the ground. Whether the Trump administration has learned all the right lessons from America’s wars in the Middle East is an open question, but it at least seems to have a definite aversion to the occupation and nation-building a Machado government would necessitate. Instead, once Maduro was gone, the United States pivoted immediately toward continuity. Rodríguez, a figure inseparable from the chavista state, emerged as the acceptable face of the interim order. To the Venezuelans who had been celebrating Maduro’s capture, the decision looked perverse: After years of condemning the regime, Washington was just going to leave it in place. But the administration’s logic was straightforward. Rodríguez commands institutional loyalty. She can speak to the military. She can keep ministries functioning. Most importantly, her elevation reduces the likelihood that the United States will inherit direct responsibility for governing Venezuela. The alternative—a wholesale purge followed by an opposition-led reconstruction—would have required the sort of long-term foreign entanglement that Trump has studiously avoided in his foreign policy efforts. For the Venezuelan opposition, this outcome is devastating. Their entire strategy rested on the assumption that American intervention would be total, transformative, and explicitly aligned with their own ambitions. They mistook the Trump administration’s denunciation of Maduro for an endorsement of his internal political opponents. But the United States intervenes to manage problems, not to vindicate allies. Once the immediate objective—removing Maduro as a disruptive actor—was achieved, the preferences of exile groups and opposition leaders became secondary. For Americans, the Trump administration’s response is probably as good as can be achieved now that Maduro is out. By avoiding a complete dismantling of the Venezuelan state, the administration has limited American entanglement in the country, reduced the risk of state collapse, and significantly increased its leverage over the Venezuelan government. But it has also signaled—quietly but unmistakably—that American involvement has limits. Venezuela will not be remade in the image of Miami politics, nor will its future be dictated by opposition figures whose legitimacy depends on foreign arms. Not that this will necessarily secure the desired results of the Trump administration. The current arrangement rests on fragile foundations. Cooperation from regime holdovers is conditional and self-interested. Figures like Diosdado Cabello, whose power derives from his control over Venezuela’s chavista militias, will tolerate the new order only so long as it protects them. Even currently compliant figures like Rodríguez may attempt to wait out U.S. interest in the region in hopes that they can buck American control off at a more auspicious time, betting on the Trump administration’s now-obvious reluctance to topple the government and occupy the country. Whether American intervention will prove to be productive either for the U.S. or the Venezuelan people remains in doubt—the use of military force often creates as many problems as it solves—but what is clear is that María Corina Machado’s moment has passed, at least for now. Her international accolades and her pandering to Trump proved insufficient when confronted with the harsh realities of power. This does not make her cause unjust, but it does render it politically impotent. The United States simply has no interest in assuming a project as risky and costly as attempting a wholesale national reconstruction, no matter how popular the spokeswoman of such a project may be. In the end, Venezuela offers a cautionary lesson for those who believe military intervention can conjure democracy from the ground. Force can remove certain obstacles; it cannot create effective states and institutions. The Trump administration’s decision to prioritize order over democracy promotion reflects at least a partial recognition of these limits. The post Machado’s Failed Venezuelan Gambit appeared first on The American Conservative.

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