When Americans awoke on Saturday to learn the United States had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, they likely expected their nation’s elected officials to offer an explanation about why we had done this.
After months of military buildup and activity in the Caribbean, it wasn’t a surprise that the U.S. had finally decided to embark on a crusade to bring down Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. What was stupefying was that America’s latest regime-change operation was apparently designed to leave the regime intact.
Helpfully, President Donald Trump duly appeared with his top Cabinet officials on Saturday to clarify everything. Among the range of casus belli he offered were the drug war (“those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela”); immigration (“they sent everybody bad into the United States”); terrorism (“a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion”); even the altruistic promotion of American ideals (“we want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela”).
Oh… and oil. “As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping,” Trump said, vowing that U.S. businesses would go to Venezuela and “start making money for the country.”
Well, pick your poison as to which of these you believe to be the real reason for the military intervention — or make up another. There are several that seem equally as plausible as anything offered: a need to counter Chinese influence in the Americas; a strategy to undermine Cuba; a balm to Trump’s ego in the face of Nicolás Maduro’s dancing defiance… Maybe just an uncontrollable urge to demonstrate unadulterated badassery, ’Murica-style, after decades of frustration and failure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s in light of those failures that the most surprising thing to come out of Saturday’s press conference was the outright declaration that America was taking over in Caracas.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said, later adding: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have them.”
Many onlookers could not have been more stunned if a ’roid-raging Uncle Sam had kicked in the door and poleaxed them between the eyes with the Stars and Stripes. Here was an American president openly ordering regime change and admitting to installing a puppet — and it wasn’t even being couched in diplomatic words or shrouded in high ideals. It was in the open. America is taking over Venezuela. Why? To make money from its oil. How? Well, through Delta Force and then… a shrug and a wave of the hand vaguely in the direction of the State Department.
“[Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio]’s working on that directly,” Trump said, noting that Venezuela’s deputy president — a regime loyalist — appeared to have taken over after Maduro disappeared into the night sky with several new American acquaintances. “He just had a conversation with her, and she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
It was unfortunate that mere hours later, the woman in question — Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodríguez — denied in a televised speech that she would cooperate with the gringos. “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”
Many anti-regime Venezuelans were initially thrilled that Maduro had been ousted, but were far gloomier about the fact that Rodríguez was now in charge — and that Washington’s decapitation strike seems not to have taken the head off the snake, but removed a single head from a hydra. Maduro is gone, his regime is still in power.
“This is the first time that I find myself wondering if I am on the opposite side of U.S. policy,” one Venezuela opposition activist tells Rolling Stone. “The U.S. now backs the regime, instead of opposing it,” the activist says.
They were certain that the situation was in flux, however, saying they believed the Trump administration would deal with “whoever is easiest to manipulate, corrupt, and make deals with.”
“What is the strategy? Who do they want to actually be in charge?” asks a former American special operations soldier with expertise in South America, who formerly worked in the region.
He says that mistrust inside Maduro’s regime will now begin to peak, with top officials convinced that at least one of their compatriots is secretly working with the Americans to take charge of the country. With Maduro gone, a shakeup is inevitable and could lead to internal conflict — possibly even civil war.
“We’re in for a roller-coaster ride of pretenders to the throne. But anyone who gets in with Washington’s blessing will lack legitimacy,” the special operations soldier observes, saying he believes the one thing that could really unite Venezuelans is opposition to U.S. control. “After destabilizing the country, what does Washington want?”
What, indeed.
One couldn’t have scripted a scenario more perfectly tailored to showcase American military might than the raid to abduct Maduro. All of the elite elements of the U.S. military and national security apparatus were brought to bear. It was an eloquent testament to the trillions of dollars America has spent on advanced weaponry, coupled with decades of hands-on experience conducting special operations.
That Washington has tools of military power that outclass any competitor is unquestionable. The problem is that tactical victories do not guarantee strategic success. The idea that a country can simply swoop out of the blue and change another government to its liking through force of arms without complication is an illusion — see America in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Russia in Chechnya or Ukraine.
Many commentators and critics are focused on the wider implications of the raid on Venezuela, its legality, or the idea that it will usher in a new era of realpolitik as described by Thucydides, where the “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
What, such commentators ask, is to stop Russia or China from doing the same, in Ukraine or in Taiwan?
You needn’t be a cynic to think the answer to that question has less to do with the norms of international law than it does with pure military capability. Indeed, Russia tried several times to capture President Volodymyr Zelensky in the early days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February and March 2022. It failed, at great cost to its special forces units.
Trump’s foray into Venezuela was unquestionably a military success. Its wider implications remain to be seen. But it is another step toward an unrestrained imperial presidency, actively working to dismantle a global system America itself created, as it sows chaos at home and abroad.
Paper shields alone have never kept the powerful from preying upon weaker neighbors, and most world leaders cast aside legality and morality when it suits their interests to do so. Trump is not the first. The international order America has long championed is a system of double standards, hypocritically applied or cast aside to suit Washington’s whims.
That it was a system that benefited the United States is rejected by MAGA true believers. They argue that, as most nations follow their self-interest, the era of America First is at least a more honest system of international relations.
You can also call this system the law of the jungle.
But of course, none of the animals in the jungle have nukes.
Balloons and signs lay on the floor as people celebrate during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago, Ill.
Trump Is in Freefall — But Can Dems Do the Work to Actually Win Back Voters?
Autopsies are inherently messy, but any forensic scientist would lose their license if they left as much blood splattered around the room as the DNC’s 2024 election report.
The process was chaotic from the start — a report commissioned, left unfinished, hidden by the top brass and then, when scooped by CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, suddenly released into the world riddled with crimson annotations that alternately disavowed and apologized for the shoddy product. This combination of defensiveness and reflexive apology is a perfect encapsulation of the problems facing the Democratic Party.
This is a shambolic shame because there is a real need for a data-driven analysis of what went wrong in 2024. Democrats need to deal with the uncomfortable fact that the party lost an election to an unhinged felon and two years later their approval rating somehow remains lower than Donald Trump, even while the president’s approval is in freefall because of rising costs, unprecedented corruption, chaotic government, an unpopular foreign war, and daily assaults on the Constitution.
The Democratic brand damage is deep and needs to be addressed. But there is a strong impulse toward denial in part because an honest assessment might offend someone, somewhere — and because Democrats look likely to benefit from the pendulum swing of politics by making the gains in the midterms.
These expected wins will give our republic the necessary checks and balances to get through Donald Trump’s disfigurement of American democracy. But they won’t be enough to break the fever in our polarized politics.
Especially with the rollback of the Voting Rights Act in the South and demographic shifts from blue states to red, Democrats need to rebuild the big tent and win back swing voters in swing states that have abandoned them over decades. That’s not all. They need to field a new brand of rural and red state Democrats, as well. To do this, they’ll need to drop the self-righteous ideological purity tests that preoccupy online debates and get back in the business of persuasion beyond the base.
In one of the few useful sections of the half-baked 2024 election report, the anonymous author analyzes the ticket splitting that occurred in the crucial swing state of North Carolina, where now Governor Josh Stein outpaced Kamala Harris’ campaign by a solid 8.5 points.
Yes, this success was aided by the Republican nominee Mark Robinson describing himself a “Black Nazi” with a love of online porn that rivaled his love for Trump. But the autopsy argues that Stein’s strength was rooted in his decision to “focus less on abstract issues and identity politics, and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most, including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability.”
This sentence is worth unpacking, as it’s the only place in the report that uses the phrase “identity politics” — which is one more time than the report mentions Gaza or Joe Biden’s age.
Blue Rose Research has published some of the most honest and challenging analysis of Democrats’ problems to date (and should be commissioned to redo this report). One of their most searing statistical condemnations — explained in an essential interview between Blue Rose’s David Shorr and the New York Times’ Ezra Klein — is the fact that Democrats lost ground with young voters and in communities of color. Hispanic moderates in particular swung 23 points away from Democrats between 2016 and 2024. Moderate Asian-American voters swung 11 percent against Democrats in that same time frame. Despite promising mass deportations, Trump actually won the votes of foreign-born immigrant citizens. A focus on identity politics is not achieving its intended goal. As a leading Democrat from the Obama White House once told me, “We appeal to voters as members of groups, but people don’t vote as groups — they vote as individuals.”
As the autopsy explains, “millions of Americans are suffering from poor access to health care, manufacturing and job losses, and a failing infrastructure, yet continue to be persuaded to vote against their best interests because they do not see themselves reflected in the America of the Democratic Party.”
Until Democrats face the hard truths of why folks don’t see themselves reflected in their vision of America, they are going to keep coming up short.
This disconnect is compounded by a core problem: Democrats score best on the issues that voters say they care about least — like LGBTQ policies, climate change, abortion, child care, and student debt — while Republicans maintain a reputation for being strong on cost of living, inflation, crime, taxes, national security, and border security.
All these issues are important, but there is a hierarchy of needs in people’s lives, and Republicans have a better brand perception when it comes to dealing with the fundamentals that apply broadly in day-to-day life for most Americans, with the exception of health care. For Democrats, the lesson is that if you don’t get the big things right, the small things don’t matter.
The next Democratic Congress and the next Democratic president are going to need a relentless focus on getting shit done — proving that government can work again for working people and deliver results that they can see and feel in their own lives.
Making sure that people see results is not just a communications problem, but it does require disrupting the consultant industrial complex. Buried on page 40, the autopsy points out the absurdity of the fundraising hamster wheel that delivers donor dollars to broadcast and cable ad buys: “In the current media ecosystem, Republicans own and Democrats rent,” it says. “Democrats pay for seasonal access to the networks, stations, platforms, and newspapers owned by Republicans or right-wing entities, to advertise and communicate with voters. … In a sense, Democrats are funding right-wing media to buy more properties and expand their ability to drive partisan perspectives.”
This is true. Democrats need to build their own long-term influence infrastructure instead of defaulting to broad-based cable TV ad buys and mailers. It would be far more effective to identify and target persuadable voters where they live — on their phones, on YouTube, and on social media platforms — in order to reach the right voters with the right message at the right time, as opposed to the essentially analog spray and pray model still in place today because consultants get 10 percent of the buy. It is an arena ripe for disruption.
To win back the middle of America, Democrats need to focus on rebuilding the middle class and the middle of our politics. They need to project strength, reclaim patriotism, and ditch identity politics in favor of focusing on affordability and the economy. Rather than defending a broken status quo, Democrats need to be the party of change and reform, modernizing government to help hard-working Americans get ahead, and delivering on the promise of putting the national interest over all special interests.