Breaking: Trump Invades Venezuela

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to "Pod Save the World." This is a breaking news episode that we just recorded on Saturday morning about the regime change operation in Venezuela. Here's the episode. Hey Ben, new year, new regime change. Early Saturday morning, the United States launched a regime change operation in Venezuela where U.S. Special Forces troops, along with FBI agents, blew up key Venezuelan military infrastructure and captured Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro. And his wife, Trump said the Maduro's are now on a U.S. warship, the U.S. S. Iwojima, their en route to New York City for prosecution. They are calling this operation absolute resolve. Gotta love these names. Trump and Rubiobo suggested that the military operation is over for now, but that U.S. troops are ready to conduct a second wave of strikes. If necessary, Trump said that second wave would be even bigger than the first. But in the interim, Donald Trump said that we, the United States of America, will be running the country of Venezuela. He literally said that the team of guys behind him would be in charge of a foreign country. That group was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, John Rackliffe, the CIA director, Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Stephen Miller. So he's a vice-roy now. I guess that collection of great minds is going to dictate terms to Maduro's former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who has since been sworn in as president. And I guess just run Venezuela as a vassal state through her. Though Trump said he's not afraid to put U.S. boots on the ground more of that in a bit. So this could be trending towards a military occupation. So we're doing this, the breaking news episode on the fly. We're learning information in real time, but we're going to try to cover what we know about the military operation, how the U.S. is going to run Venezuela going forward and what comes next internally there, including what it means for the Venezuelan opposition that desperately wanted this outcome, but now doesn't seem to be part of Venezuela's future, at least according to Trump. We'll talk about Trump's threats to Cuba and Colombia, what lessons he might learn from this, including very bad ones. We'll talk about the international reactions, such as it is at this moment. The legal questions, Congress's role, and then who Maduro is. And I don't know, we'll try to be a little bit hopeful, like maybe try to sketch out what a good outcome could look like, but I don't think either of us feel like we're trending that direction. But first, Ben, I have to say this is so much crazier than I ever could have expected. We've been watching this troop build up for a while. We've been covering this. We both, I think, felt like you don't amass 15,000 troops and a couple aircraft carriers in the Caribbean to do nothing. But Trump launching this capture operation against Maduro and then explicitly saying that his team of aides, including Viceroy's Rubio, Hexeth, Stephen Miller, are now going to run Venezuela until some transition point TBD is just bash it crazy. Trump is now overtly saying also that this was about taking back oil that was stolen from the United States. But yeah, I guess we now have like a Petro Vassal state in South America, Ben. That's how we're starting in 2026. Apparently, Tommy, and happy New Year to you and to the world here. There's the thing with Trump where you have to take him on his own terms, right? And the reality is he's been basically telling us who he wanted to be in his second term since he got elected. And keep in mind, one of the first things he started talking about after he was elected were Greenland and Panama. And the reason that's important is because, yes, that's not who was on the punch guard today. But we were kind of moved from yesterday into today from one era into a new era here, where the United States is back in the empire business in this hemisphere. And let's be clear, that's not hyperbole. Like that's what he said. Now, you know, you go through the roller coaster of the last few hours, it starts with this operation. It says, you know, I'm saying to myself, okay, we're doing this now. Like we've been saying for months on this podcast, clearly this is about regime change. Clearly was a decapitation exercise. And so when the targets started to leak out, the presidential compound, the defense ministry associated buildings, it's like, okay, they're trying to decapitate this regime. They did, they got Maduro, they got him on plane. By the way, the US military, it's capacity to conduct these kinds of operations. This is what it does best. They're kind of going in and getting somebody. It's the night raid. It's what happens after, exactly. It's a night raid essentially on steroids, literally. But, you know, you felt this sense of, okay, well, what's gonna happen next? Or, you know, they're probably gonna announce some transition plan. Maybe Miriam Machado's gonna fly back and the opposition leader and say there's gonna be an election or the, you know, because of the last election, should have gone the other way. We're gonna put these people in charge. And there'll be some kind of familiar, at least rhetoric around this. But I think what was really driving the home point for me was that press conference where Trump is just like, yeah, we're running this country. You know, Mark Rubio, he's already the archivist and the secretary of state and, you know, the national security adviser now, he's also, you know, the pro-console of Venezuela. And that's why this is such, to me, dangerous moment. Look, look, if I had no Venezuelans or happy today, they hate Maduro, they wanted to seem gone for a long time. But, normalizing the idea that not just any U.S. president and I don't think any U.S. president should do this, but this U.S. president, particularly, can just with no authorization, no legal basis, depose the leader of a foreign country and announce that we're not running that country. And you didn't even talk about drugs, really, in his press conference, you just talked about oil. - Barely, yeah. - The oil company is going to get on there. This is like early 1900s stuff that were back in the soup on. And so there's a lot of different angles on how that plays out in Venezuela in this country, with the role of Congress and with Trump's own, kind of authoritarian trends, how it plays out around the world. But boy, this is a seismic event, and you're right, it's, you know, for him to come out and just say this, and now, when he does it, you think, well, of course that's what he was going to do, is say that we're just running the country. But when you hear him say it in those blunt terms, you realize, man, we're not even one year into the Trump presidency, and we're already running foreign countries. That is not the best case scenario when it comes to having not a crowd as your president. - Yeah, he made some quip about how the Monroe doctrine is now the Don Roe doctrine, which even though, like, kind of little coterie of fluffers behind him couldn't find a way to fake laugh at, but yeah, it feels like a very big moment. But let's quickly talk about what we know. So, according to Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, there were 150 planes involved in this operation. They hit a military air strip in Caracas, they hit the most important military base in Caracas, and then seemingly took out a whole bunch of air defenses all around to facilitate these helicopters going in and out. The Delta Force troops did the operation itself with the FBI, Delta Force are sort of like a coterie with some of the most elite U.S. special forces operators in the U.S. military. They are, you know, it's so sensitive and secretive that I think the existence of a lot of these operators and teams is actually classified, but they actually do a lot of the night raids and things that have been conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan and other war zones over the past many years. Trump said Maduro, when they got to his compound, he tried to make it to a safe room, but he was too slow and got arrested with his wife as he was trying to close the door. No service members were killed that we know of. They said a helicopter was damaged in the process of the raid, but it could still fly. This operation was apparently approved earlier, but they waited until last night because of weather essentially. And the New York Times and Reuters have both reported that the CIA had a source in Maduro's inner circle, and then Reuters reported that members of the Venezuelan military worked with the U.S. to secure Maduro's arrest and someone told the Reuters reporter that there was an inside job aided by the military. So it does seem like there was a lot of conversations happening behind the scenes trying to facilitate the ouster of Maduro, but not necessarily the regime. And Ben, that's a lot of detail that's leaking quickly about like CIA assets inside another government, but it does make interesting Trump's sudden fondness for the current vice president and Trump saying that Rubio has been talking with her and that she seems willing to do whatever the new team of Trump AIDS that will be running Venezuela says, so we'll see if this really was an inside job. I'm sure a lot more will leak out. But again, the craziest part was to me, at least, Trump saying the U.S. is now gonna run Venezuela. And here he is answering a reporter's question about how that would actually work and whether the U.S. military will now be in Venezuela occupying the country. Let's play that clip. - Does the U.S. running the country mean that U.S. troops will be on the ground? How will that work? - Well, you know, they always say boots on the ground. Oh, so we're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have time. - I'm explaining the exact mechanism by which you're gonna run the country. Are you gonna designate it just for people? - Yes, it's all being done right now. We're designating people. We're talking to people. We're designating various people. And we're gonna let you know who those people are. - I would run Venezuela. - Well, it's largely going to be for a period of time the people that are standing right behind me. We're gonna be running it. - So the plan seems to be like, these guys are gonna figure it out. I mean, it's like making the poster rock war planning look crystal clear to me at the moment. - Yeah, it wasn't subtle, but also wasn't detailed. And I think that kind of sums this up. On the operation, look, they were clearly planning this for months. You know, they were prepositioning all these military assets or probably sneaking in CIA assets, probably Delta Force guys into the country so that they could have this kind of multifaceted operation. and they were probably putting the squeeze on people in Maduro's inner circle and in the military at the same time that they were doing that. And look, that raises questions, which we'll get to later, tell me, because that means that they were lying to Congress the whole time, because there are people that were going up there and testifying that this wasn't about regime change. We're not planning regime change. We'll come back to Congress and ask you if we do regime change. So that's a, you know-- Trump's chief of staff very recently told Vanity Fair that airstrikes within Venezuela would require congressional approval, but then when asked today about whether Congress had even been notified in advance, Rubio said, no, because this was like a hair trigger operation and it could have leaked. And then Trump jumped in and was like, well, in a lot of ways they knew we were coming in half for a long time, because there were a lot of boats out in the Caribbean. But yeah, I know we still couldn't have told Congress, which, you know, again, he's completely undercutting his rationale, but sorry, I continue. - No, that's right. And also lying, I think there were even officials that testified similar to what Cisiwell said. But then on the, what happens now, it's clear what the path that they're going to try to execute here, which is that you have Maduro, an ideological guy, clinging to power, running the places not a crack. But you have like powerful actors inside Venezuela, like the military that controls, you know, not only a lot of the guns, but also kind of some of the black economy that's emerged. And essentially what Trump's trying to do is go and keep this kind of rotted state in place underneath, essentially the United States running the place. Say to them, starting with the vice president, you know, if you don't basically allow us to run your country, we might just arrest you like Maduro, right? And he kind of made threats like this. And he's kind of explicit threats, yeah. And so what's interesting is he's not saying what you'd expect, which is we're going to come in, we're going to maybe we're going to install the person we think ran the last election, or we're going to say that there's going to be an election in 60 days. And who knows, maybe we'll get some of that later. But actually, they're just going to try to kind of keep this, you know, they don't want to antagonize the military because that's how you might get a civil war. And so maybe if we just give everybody a cut here, you know, we'll bring the American Royal Company's in and he was very clear about that. And start pumping oil and spread the money around enough that people and men as well will, you know, let us do that. Now that's a pretty big role of the dice. Let me just raise a few questions, Tommy. The boots on the ground, I think, would be for the oil facilities because he's talking about, you know, the US oil company is going in the rebuilding infrastructure. By the way, it sounded like American taxpayers might have to put some of the bill on that. So you need to guard the oil facilities. You probably have to guard the oil refineries, which by the way, are not next to the oil facilities in Venezuela. The oil facilities are in the middle of the country. The refineries are up in the north. So then we're going to be guarding the pipelines too. We could be looking to scenario where our US troops going to be literally guarding US oil companies in Latin America. That's a question I have. Then the question is like, under what possible legal basis is the United States running this country? How does that work? Like there are ministries who's going to be providing services in Venezuela, if there is violence, and there are a lot of people that have a lot of reason to be pissed off in Venezuela. Who's going to deal with the violence in the country? You know, what is the role of the opposition? Is very much, you know, he basically was dismissive of her. He was asked about her and he said, she's a nice lady, but she doesn't have a lot of support in the country. So so much for this being about democracy, you know? It's not, it's about oil, spoiler alert. So, you know, US regime change operations always look the best on the first day. When the military does something extraordinary, then there's a pictures of a guy like Maduro, who's a bad guy on a US aircraft being brought to justice, et cetera. But we all we know about what's coming next is that the US oil companies are going down there. That's like literally the only thing we know. All the things underneath that about how this country will be run, what the role of our military will be. Tommy, I got, what's your over on the room when Eric Prince puts in a bid to become the Venezuelan security services? So, there is a lot of grift and probably a fair amount of violence to come here. There's a lot we still need to see play out. 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He's gonna get to pick and choose winners and losers, whether they're oil companies or sort of the black water style security forces who wanna say, "Hey, Mr. President, we'll go in, we'll control things, we'll secure things," and eliminate any of those pesky congressional oversight questions or constitutional questions that you don't wanna talk about. By the way, we should just point out that before this operation, I think it was in December, there was a poll where Quinnipiac asked respondents if there were four against military action in Venezuela, 63% of respondents said no, 25% said yes. So this is not popular. There's no mandate for this in any way, shape, or form. And it's certainly exactly the opposite of what Trump ran against. I mean, he's always said that the problem with Iraq was not the war itself. It was that we should have kept the oil. So in some sense, we shouldn't be surprised here, but America first was not interpreted by any of his voters as let's revive them in row doctrine and revive regime change operations in central and south America. We should just say that like, so the USS Iwo Jima, I guess it's just gonna, well, maybe they'll go to another port and then fly Maduro to New York. They released a photo of him blindfolded and handcuffed in his sweatsuit, just I guess, on Twitter. Pam Bondi says that Maduro and his wife have been indicted again in the Southern District of New York. The charges are narco terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of guns, conspiracy to possess guns, or six defendants that includes Maduro's wife and son. I don't believe the current vice president is one of those defendants, which again, it doesn't make you wonder. - But the sincerity of this being about drugs and repression. - Yeah, and again, like we doubt Maduro's sincerity, it is just worth noting that. Two nights before this capture, Maduro didn't interview where he said, like, hey, to the American people, if you wanna have a conversation about anti-drug stuff, agreements were ready, if you want Venezuelan oil, Venezuela is ready for US investment, like with Chevron, whenever, whenever, however they want, people in the US know if they want comprehensive economic development agreements, Venezuela is right here, Trump himself said in this press conference, that Maduro tried to negotiate, but Trump said he was done negotiating. So it sounds like the US could have sort of had some sort of deal if they wanted. Now Ben, you just mentioned this. I mean, there is this very brave, very conservative Venezuelan opposition. One opposition leader is a woman named Maria Machado. She was not allowed to run in this last election, but she recently won the Nobel Peace Prize and dedicated it to Donald Trump for her, like, brave struggle against the Maduro regime. This is a clip of what Trump had to say about her at this press conference Saturday morning. - Did you as aware of the location of opposition leader Machado and have you been in contact with her? - No, we haven't, we haven't. - Mr. President, I was just about to answer this question. - How many head positions are about Machado? - Mr. President, on Monday. - I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. 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 to this. So to your point, Ben, it's not, he doesn't even try to say, look, there'll be a transition, we'll hold an election, the Venezuelan people will decide who runs their country. He says she's not respected. Does woman just want the Nobel Peace Prize dedicated to him? Not respected? Yeah. Here's the thing. It wasn't just that he said she wasn't supported. You're right. He's respected, and he said it twice. And look, this is a woman who's sacrificed a lot more than Donald Trump for Venezuelans. But again, it puts the lie, when these things happen, there isn't an attempt, and I'm sure you'll find some of the Republican Party, you'll find some of the American media who will try to project onto Donald Trump their own desires for there to be democracy in Venezuela or something. He's clearly not interested in that. He's telling you he's not interested in that. And he says respect, he means she's probably not respected by the military, which of course she's not, because the military is associated itself over the years with Maduro and is kind of her political enemies. So do not think that somehow this is in any way about making life better for Venezuelans. It's about Donald Trump's interest in controlling this hemisphere, Donald Trump's interest with some US oil companies and the largest proven oil reserves in the world. And frankly, his interest in having kind of power for power is sake. His ability to do this is kind of the point. And the same way that Vladimir Putin's ability to go into Crimea back in 2014 was kind of the point. I'm sending a message that we are in a new era of kind of territorial expansion where might makes right. I don't have to follow any rules. I can pick and choose leaders. Maria Machado is useful to me when we're building the case against Maduro. But as soon as I do this thing, I don't need to depend as well on democratic opposition in the same way I needed them for legitimacy and the ramp up to this thing. And I think that that's what people really need to keep in mind here going forward. What are Trump's interests and what is he going to be focused on? Because it's certainly not the kind of things that people in foreign policy usually talk about, which are like transition fines. Now, someone might even say to me, like, US foreign policy has always been about this. We just had to told a story about democracy. There's some truth in that. I'm some sympathy, but it doesn't make this right anymore than those past efforts, the Iraq war was launched under a fucking scaffolding of rhetoric about democracy when it was much more about the world's geopolitics. But again, this is not about anything that Americans care about. And because the thing that you said in the polling time, it's important here as Democrats, because sometimes Democrats get a little nervous when it looks like it's, you know, the first act of the war is going well. Americans don't want this. This is going to cause, it's already costing us money. Cost a lot of money to put that like Armada in the Caribbean. Cost a lot of money to map that out there last night. It's going to cost a lot of money to rebuild Venezuela's oil infrastructure. We're talking billions of dollars in Venezuela when that's not what Donald Trump has elected to do. Yeah, it's not what America first ever was assumed to have been. I mean, you're right. But there is a real politic. Come on, you naive guys. Always, there have been worse for oil, right? Look at Iraq, whatever. I tend to not actually really agree with that. I do think the Bush regime, maybe totally dishonest, but in some cases, since you're, they were just very wrong about WMD and Iraq, right? But with Venezuela, like it started with this bullshit about fentanyl coming out of Venezuela, even though there's no fentanyl coming out of Venezuela, Trump has, you know, tried to do this slippery thing where he pretends the drug boats that are trafficking cocaine from Venezuela are somehow responsible for killing 25,000 American lives each. It's all made up. But I think what's just, what listeners need to understand is, Venezuela has something like 17% of the world's proven oil reserves. And Trump is now explicitly saying this is about oil. So that he's finally being honest with us, but that honesty comes after the invasion already happened. There was no public debate about whether or not we should invade Venezuela for oil. That conversation, they tried to make it about drugs. There was no congressional debate or congressional authorization for a regime change war in Venezuela for oil. They just did it. And they said, you know, that Congress couldn't be trusted to be briefed in advance, even though Trump said, well, Maduro and all those guys actually knew we were coming anyway. And apparently they were coordinating with his regime. So it's a big mess. Ben, I think you sort of alluded to this. The question I have is what lesson will Trump learn from this and what lesson will other leaders take from this? Because I do worry that after Iran and after this, Trump is going to decide that military action or at least airstrikes are cost free. You know, there's not a big, there hasn't been a big blowback yet. And baby, he decides America first now means like let's let America expand and let's create a new empire. And I think this next clip from today's press conference gives you a sense of where the kind of, you know, empire gunpoint is pointed at next. Is there a method you procure for Cuba in the US for now? Well, Cuba is an interesting case. Cuba is, you know, not doing very well right now. That system has not been a very good word for Cuba. The people there have suffered for many, many years. And I think Cuba is going to be something we'll end up talking about because Cuba is a failing nation right now, very badly failing nation. One of the biggest problems the Venezuelans have is they have to declare independence from Cuba that tried to basically colonize it from a security standpoint. So yeah, look, I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I'd be concerned at least a little bit. On the impression of Gustavo Petro, you know, a couple weeks ago he said he's got to watch his ass. In today, he said he's not concerned about anything happening to him in the aftermath of this operation. So what's your message? Well, he has cocaine mills, he has factories where he makes cocaine. Yeah, I think I stick by my first statement. He's making cocaine and they're sending it into the United States. So he does have to watch his ass. So look, I mean, that's just two overt threats to leftist, left-wing governments in Latin America that we might invade you next. I mean, there's no other way to interpret that, right? Yeah. And we've never heard an American president talk like this or, you know, Rubio kind of trying to cosplay as a tough guy. And look, there's two things that I'm worried about in a kind of medicines. First, again, this stuff always, the empire building always starts with victories. You know, the hard days come later. The violence, the civil wars, the repression. There's a tale to these things. Again, we are old enough to remember when the Iraq war looked great when the Saddam Hussein statue was toppled in Baghdad and nobody could have predicted, or, you know, frankly actually some people did, but it was hard to predict how bad that would go. We just don't know what's going to transpire in Venezuela or in other parts of the-- And just to be like sort of open about a bag because you and I have talked about it offline. And the early days of the Libya operation under Iraq Obama, right, when Gaddafi was taken out and people were celebrating that this awful guy had been taken off the scene, and that is proven to be a slow-rolling disaster, not just for the people of Libya, but also for the entire continent of Africa and a lot of countries in the Middle East. If people want to play back at me, things I said when Gaddafi went, "Please do," because you're proved-- I agree with that lesson. This stuff gets harder as the time goes on. By the way, we don't know what other countries are going to be doing there. The Chinese have hundreds of thousands of nationals there. The Russians have had a presence there. They could choose to make things more difficult for us. And we've seen these kind of failed state places become proxy wars, too. But the second point is more important, and it's what I'm more worried about, which is the lesson he's going to take. He's going to get a lot of positive reinforcement for this. He's going to have all the Republicans saying, "Oh, look what a strong man you are." He's going to get a lot of the MAGA people, some of them, you know, are sincere in their America first and sinks. But some of them will be like, "Well, Trump, he looks like such a strong man now," and all those kind of naysayers or just the weak people who don't understand what he's doing. The lesson he could take is then we're what, going into Panama, maybe taking Panama Canal, or maybe we're going into Havana to take out the Cuban regime, or maybe we're just bombing Colombia because that leader is some of the Trump doesn't like. Or Greenland. Or maybe we, you know, we're taking Greenland. And again, go read your history, right? I mean, you get an autocratic strong man who starts going down this slope of conquering after conquering war, after war, regime after regime. That never ends well. It usually ends either in a lot of violence along the way in those places or in some kind of global conflict. And that leads to the other point here, which is what is the lesson that Russia and China are going to take from this? This is basically how Russia is operated since it invaded Crimea in 2014. What if they want to kill Zelensky tomorrow? And their justification is, well, you just, you know, arrested Maduro and put him on a plane. The Chinese, what if they go to Taiwan and say, "Well, you know, they're a threat to our national security." Just like you said, Venezuela was a threat to your national security. We are now in a world in which there really are no rules. And look, people might say, "Well, those rules were working." I don't know, like having some guardrails, some restraint. This kind of military operation was unthinkable, even in Trump's first term. When he was trying to get Maduro out, he never would have thought about doing this. And it just shows you how much this has been normalized. And he's now normalized an extra thing, which is no congressional authorization, no public case for it. I can just go in with the US military as a kind of my militia to take out a leader and say that we're going to be able to do it. we're gonna run the place and have the oil companies in charge again. I mean, yeah, the precedent I guess for that is like the 1900s. 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(upbeat music) - Yeah, I mean, look, sort of the modern regime change operation, like day one is the easiest because the U.S. special forces will win every single battle they are ever asked to fight, right? The U.S. Delta Force, they're more experienced, they're better trained, they're better equipped, they're better enabled by U.S. intelligence and by a trillion dollar per year military budget. Like that was never in question. I think there was some question, I remember asking these questions on the show, about how sophisticated or not Venezuela's air defense systems might be, whether you could see a situation where there were members of the Venezuelan military with manpads, those shoulder-powered missile launchers, you know, kind of like dispersed places that could take out a helicopter or two right and lead to U.S. casualties. Thank God that did not happen, right? But that's never been the issue. The issue is the United States sending U.S. military to solve political problems in other countries. And that is exactly what's happening here. Like Nicholas Bedurro was a bad guy. He repressed people, he locked up his opponents, he stole elections, he ran the state into the ground, he led to people's deaths, he led to mass migration, like no one's arguing any of that. But the question is, is it legal? Is it right to launch a regime change operation just because Donald Trump decides he doesn't like Maduro? And Rubio decides he doesn't like Maduro because that's a very slippery slope. It could lead to regime change wars in Cuba and Colombia because we're obviously threatening them. But what's to stop him from launching in anywhere else he wants? Like why not North Korea just 'cause they have a nuke, right? What message does it send to other countries thinking about proliferation and risk? So that's what people I think are quite worried about this. Even though in the early days it always looks kind of triumphant. Ben, I've seen some good statements and some pretty bad ones. Tim Cain had a great statement out asking the right questions US Senator from Virginia, sort of asking some of the questions you asked. Trump just threatened to attack the Iranians if they attacked protesters. Does that mean like we're on the precipice of deploying troops there? We know that Netanyahu was just at Mar-a-Lago for like this 17th time since Trump took office. There's all these reports that the Israelis are asking either for permission or US support for another bombing mission against Iran to take out their ballistic missile program. So that feels like a coming attraction. A lot of our international allies are a little more hesitant, you know, like Kier Starmer's out there saying he wants to get the facts. He wants uphold international law. I'm guessing he's not gonna like the facts and he's gonna believe that international law has not been upheld but then not really say much about it. - Not say anything about it, yeah. - Yeah, there's some top EU officials who express serious concern, right? That was sort of like the most I saw the dial turned up. But I'm gonna read you one of the stronger statements. I've seen, and I know you know who this is from, but I bet it'll surprise listeners. Quote, but there is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States had just brought about in Venezuela. The sovereignty of states is never negotiable regardless of their size, their power, or their continent. It is inviable and sacred. To renounce this principle today for Venezuela for any state would be to accept our own enslavement tomorrow. That was from Marine Le Pen, the current and former sort of head of the far right party in France, who look, I hate everything about her. I hate her policy reviews, but that is quite clear. And I think that is also the tone that I think a lot of America first voters thought. They were voting for. - Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting with Le Pen because there's always been this, you know, aspect of French nationalism that kind of resents, you know, the American empire, right? And so she's kind of playing to both the sovereignty, conscious nature of the right wing in this country, like you said, and something that is deep inside France. Yeah, I think, look, the thing that worries me is this kind of behavior can become contagious. And maybe it already has been, you know? I mean, maybe the American war on terror, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what, you know, Israel attacking seven or eight countries in the Middle East, we've been kind of conditioned for more and more of this kind of stuff, but you're already seeing, again, it's probably not like entirely coincidence that Trump is threatening Iran at the same time that he's doing this in Venezuela. It's just like this stuff, if you look at history, leaders start to say, well, this is my time to do that thing I wanted to do. Like, we're now in one of those periods where let's grab while the getting's good, you know? Putin will be using this, throwing this back in our face whatever he does in Ukraine, if he wants to go into Moldova or the Baltics, we'll be hearing about this, you know? And so this is my concern of just kind of that breakdown of order, but it's not just the breakdown of order, it's that sense of, if you're a strong man anywhere, it's like now's the time, sovereignty is out the window, you know? And we don't have to respect borders anymore, and we don't even need to have the pretext of going to the United Nations, or we don't have to have the pretext in our countries of going to parliaments for some kind of authorization. That's when this stuff gets real dangerous, and we kind of reenter the kind of history that we kind of thought we'd left behind. That's what you kind of feel on daily day. Now with the MAGA movement may prove to be the biggest constraint on Trump, you know? Because Republicans in Congress have not used their institutional prerogatives. And if people think that that sounds kind of wishy-washy, just think of the awesome power of the United States military in the hands of one person who doesn't ask that anyone permission to do anything with that military. Like that's why not to sound like a nerd, the founders were like, let's not let that happen because that's how you get dictators, that's how you get kings, right? And so if the Congress is sidelined, the only check on Trump is gonna be pushed back from within MAGA, that this is not what we signed up for, this is not what we voted for, this is not lowering costs for Americans, this is not addressing, you know, what they'll make a big show about, I think probably just deporting a lot of Venezuelans back to Venezuela, you know? That's why Steve Miller's up on stage, you know? - Right. - He's salivating at the prospect of deporting people there. - Well, also, you know, Steve Miller's just looking for any way to prove that we are at war with Venezuela so we can invoke the Alien Enemies Act and then deport like every Venezuelan who came here, even though a lot of them were told to come here because, you know, they were members of the opposition or they opposed the Maduro government, they thought they had like, you know, support from the United States, but here we are. You know, Ben, one person who, All right. which is mentioned real quick because there is a question about you know the future leader of the Magah movement is JD Vance. Now JD Vance, remember he served in the US military. He is very opposed to US support for Ukraine. He has repeatedly said that regime change wars are bad and Iraq was a huge mistake, right? Like you would think he would be the isolationist voice of restraint within the administration. But he was hot out of the gate with the tweets. He said the president offered multiple offerings was very clear throughout the process. The drug trafficking must stop the stolen oil must be returned to the United States. Maduro is the newest person to find out the president Trump means what he says. And then he said PSA for everyone who says this was illegal. He put that in quotes. Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narco terrorism. You don't get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas. Now that argument means that anytime a president wants to depose a foreign leader or invade a foreign country, you just have to get your DOJ, your attorney general who works for you, to indict that country's leader. And then you're good to go. That is an insane legal theory. That is like the just the latest example of JD Vance being the most full of shit person in the United States government. Everything he claims to have stood for or learned in his young political life has been bullshit. He will just say or do whatever it takes to make Trump happy and to get power including now supporting this regime change war. So here we are. Yeah. I mean, first of all, they just pardoned the guy from on tours. One Orlando Hernandez. Yeah. One Orlando Hernandez who was convicted of trafficking like just gobs of cocaine into this country. It's like 400 tons or something like that. Yeah. And you're right. This idea of using these new novel, you know, you're like, pet, listen how they described Gustavo Petro, the president of Columbia, right? He Trump said there's a lot of cocaine coming out of Columbia into this country and therefore like he better watches ass. Petro, nobody thinks that guy is like some narco trafficker and he's not and he's certainly and he's not a dictator like Maduro was. He's just a guy that Trump doesn't like. Well, what if he just says, well, because there are drugs coming from that country, I'm gonna, you know, say he's at fault for that and therefore what I can depose him or I mean, we're not going to do this, but if their legal theory actually applied universally, the fentanyl is coming from China, the precursor chemicals. We didn't write Xi Jinping, you know, for that. And the same thing on democracy and human rights like Maduro objectively bad guy, but if you open up a Pandora's box where you can just say, anybody I don't like who's committing human rights violations, we can violently depose. You'd have a list of dozens, if not over 100 world leaders that you could find a way to put on that list, you know. And so they, what they do is they post facto invent these justifications after the fact when all it's about is giving Trump the power to do what he wants. Yeah, whatever he wants arbitrarily to take control, to assume power in ways that were unimaginable, I think. I mean, they kind of, I do, you know, I'm sure we'll read some Axio stories soon about how Jared Kushner, experienced, you know, setting up the fucking Gaza board of peace in all the ways, you know, that they're, you know, taking control and making money and figuring out corrupt means to enrich themselves was kind of what facilitated and led to this, you know, new board of Trump advisors that will be controlling Venezuela going forward. And they're like, this has been a long needed break. There were so many moments throughout the course of this break where we could have broken it down a bonus episode. There was that apparently a report of a CIA drone strike in Venezuela and some random doc facility that just kind of came and went, there have been airstrikes on Nigeria. Again, this is the president wants, this is the president wants to know about peace prize. There are these massive historic inspiring protests happening in Iran as we speak, which, you know, again, Trump is threatened to take some sort of, I think he said, like, locked and loaded again, some sort of military action against the government of Iran if they use deadly force on these protesters. So I believe they've already used deadly force on protesters. So I don't know what's going on next. So there's been a lot that's happened, but this is, this story is shocking to me. I can't believe what we just watched at that press conference today. I don't know anything else you think we didn't cover today that we should touch on before we end this and get this thing up. Well, yeah, first of all, we bombed, you know, Trump's bombed Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela in his first year in office. That's pretty wild. List of countries. Those are, you know, big countries that if I told you, you know, a few years ago, we'd be bombing. You know, you thought we'd went through the looking glass and then some ways we have. Look, I do want to say, I, again, I know people in the Venezuelan opposition. We should just to kind of do the quick recap on Maduro. You know, Chavez gets elected democratically with democratic legitimacy. For times quite popular, you know, spreads a bunch of money around, you know, Venezuela is a place that was run in a very corrupt way probably because it was in part in service to an elite and new as oil companies. Chavez has legitimate left-wing grievances, but he, you know, he takes it too far. He starts a create not a credit system. Then he dies and hands it off to Maduro who lacks Chavez's charisma already, you know, their economy was imploding because of Chavez's own policies. And Maduro's basically governed the place as an increasingly autocratic, you know, enterprise in which as sanctions came out from the US, you know, he's getting more and more violent towards the opposition to hold on to the small and smaller piece of the pie that he controls. And so I do want to acknowledge for people like who I know people who've been imprisoned in Venezuela, I feel the sense of trepidation though for those people because Donald Trump is not coming there to help you. And my concern is, well, he seems to already be in bed with the military that was repressing those people because if those people will give us the access to oil fields, I don't think Trump cares much about how the human rights situation in Venezuela changes. And I will say like the best case scenario, I guess, is this model through in five years, Venezuela is a self-governing country with more freedoms than it had under Maduro. Even in that scenario though, I just think we just watched the first domino fall of what is going to be a return to imperialism for the United States and Latin America with the military at the forefront of that on behalf of US corporations and oil companies. And I just, I can't, there's silver linings if it works out for Venezuelans, but there's dark clouds and lots of other places. Let's put it that way. Yeah, I know, like I hear from the same people you do. And like, again, I've never once doubted the bravery of the Venezuelan opposition. Like you, I've known some of them, you know, personally earliest have friends, you know, who are very close to Leopoldo Lopez who went to Kenyan College, which is where I went and knew a bunch of people I know, including relatives of mine. Like, don't doubt the bravery for one second. I do think that, you know, respecting their bravery, wanting a better outcome for Venezuela does not require the United States to send US service members into battle to do that. And I think that's like pretty clear and obvious line that sometimes gets erased on Twitter. We should know that then as we've been recording this, Delce Rodriguez, the Venezuelan interim president, former vice president, she's delivering an address to the nation. She's reportedly taking a much more defiant tone than Trump suggested she would take. She said that she agreed to help the US run Venezuela, but that the US invaded Venezuela under false pretenses, and that Maduro as Venezuela's quote, only president. She said that with the invasion, quote, the masks had fallen off revealing only one objective regime change in Venezuela. This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy mineral and natural resources. This is the true objective in the world, the international community must know it. We will never again be slaves. It will never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature. So she's obviously right about, so that's all from New York Times. There's a live blog of this. She's absolutely right about the goals of the Trump administration. I mean, they laid them out at that press conference. Trump had made it sound like president, vice president, now president, Rodriguez would be the one facilitating this process. That speech makes it hard to believe. You have to wonder about all the factions within Venezuela that are armed. And again, there's no US troop presidents on the ground that we know of to keep peace or maintain order. So God knows what happens next. I think that's kind of the point. We just released a Pandora's box and who knows which way it goes. Because she's probably navigating between wanting to save her skin with the Americans, but also she's got some people over her shoulder, some who are ideological want you to stand up to the empire. And look, because Trump, the mask is down, all those things she said that usually people would roll their eyes at. Oh, that's just, you know, leftist rhetoric. Those are things Trump set out loud. You know, like this is not like about taking the oil, but you know, and so we're in this new phase. The other thing I do just want to reiterate, Tommy, is that what China and Russia choose to do here is also really important, because she's also talking to them. There's no question. There was a Chinese envoy in Venezuela yesterday meeting with Maduro, right? Yeah. There are a huge number of Chinese nationals. And I'm sure that there's some intelligence professionals among those Chinese nationals. Same thing with the Russians. There's a bunch of Cubans down there. This thing, this is a much more complicated situation than Trump was presenting at the press conference. And this is literally act one of what is going to be a much longer play. Yeah, this is the very, very beginning. So be Be wary of anyone offering a hot tip. on Twitter about how everything is great and how well this went. All right, I think that is it from us. Happy New Year, everybody. I'm sure we'll be talking about this again, early next week at Tuesday for Wednesday show, at a minimum, but maybe earlier than that. Thank you for watching this episode or listening to this episode of Podsave the World. Please subscribe to Podsave the World, both on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you again. Podsave the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is a Lone and Mkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vittor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Canter is our audio engineer, audio support by Kyle Segglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefkot, Mia Kellman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Adrienne Hills, our senior vice president of news and politics. If you want to listen to Podsave the World, add free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com/friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple podcasts. Don't forget to follow us at crooked media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus find Podsave the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more. And if like us, you're opinionated, leave us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized by the writer's guild of America East. [MUSIC]