Matt Satten

A few hours after midnight, while America and (mostly) the rest of the hemisphere were sleeping, the U.S. military conducted missile strikes on targets in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. According to Anatoly Kurmanaev of The New York Times, explosions were witnessed at the La Carlota military airbase and Fuerte Tiuna, which is basically the headquarters of Venezuela’s defense establishment. A few hours later, Trump posted this on Truth Social: "The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" Official details on the operation are unsurprisingly scarce, but at this hour, Trump admin officials are claiming there were no U.S. military casualties. There is no confirmation on the scale of Venezuelan civilian and military casualties. I’m going to walk y’all through why this is very, very bad, and I’ll attempt to make it as clear as possible to outline the unnecessary risks and complications Trump is now forcing upon our country and the people of Venezuela and international stability. It was a few weeks ago that Trump announced a “total and complete” naval blockade of oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, saying on social media: "The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION." The Republic of Venezuela, of course, has not been designated a “foreign terrorist organization.” Trump is actually, incompetently referring to Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”), a massive drug trafficking organization moving cocaine internationally that’s been sourced out of Colombia. This past July, Cartel of the Suns was added as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by Trump’s Treasury Department and then as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by Trump’s State Department last month. The significant wrinkle in all this is the openly corrupt relationship between the Cartel and the Venezuelan military; many of their senior leaders are complicit. In fact, the Cartel’s logo—a benign-looking sun not unlike what you’d see at the end of a segment on CBS Sunday Morning—is the insignia for Venezuelan military generals. That’s all to say that the Venezuelan government—particularly its military and especially President Nicolás Maduro—are objectively bad people who do very bad things. Maduro has appointed many cartel members to senior positions within his government. Yet, that’s not close to the full scope of Maduro’s awfulness. He has long been considered a dictator, having banned opposition parties, stealing elections, openly engaging in corruption, murder, and torture, and generally being a contender for worst head of government of the 21st century, which, as you’ll have noticed, has formidable competition. Maduro has inarguably been worse for Venezuela than Trump has been for America, but ironically, Maduro is absolutely what Trump wishes he could be: an untouchable autocrat who expects his country—and the world—to bend to his every whim. But that also makes him perfect for Trump’s political needs because more than anything, Trump needs a sufficient distraction from the compounding failures of his second term. Everywhere you look, Trump is on the back foot. His cabinet is the source of constant embarrassment, his biggest policy projects (like DOGE) have been unmitigated disasters, he ultimately lost the shutdown fight over the budget, unemployment is the highest it has been in four years, and good lord, there are so many other things, but this is key: the Epstein mess is ongoing. This entire year has been one long effort by the Trump administration to bury the Epstein saga with an elongated series of distractions attempting to force it into obscurity. But nothing has worked. They just can’t seem to kill the damn thing. The very reason Trump was elected twice—offering up bloody red meat on Democrats and the promise of schadenfreude—has now become a rabid wolf that constantly bites him in the ass on this issue. Trump promised that all the pedophiles of the Democratic Party would be brought to justice. He literally campaigned on this, dangling that juicy schadenfreude for his diehard supporters who really don’t care about much beyond delicious retribution. But then he got into office and slow-walked all developments on Epstein. Little morsels were doled out, like “releasing” a batch of already public files to conservative influencers and his attorney general Pam Bondi claiming the matter was on her desk. Trump was hoping this shit would slowly go away, that he could titrate satisfaction, and honestly, given how everything else implicating him has gone away, why wouldn’t this, too? He figured that all he needed to do was wait it out, keep attacking Democrats, keep up the culture war nonsense, and he’d be able to emerge unscathed. But it just refuses to go away. Shit keeps popping up: leaked drawings and survivor testimony and rogue Republican lawmakers and the humming engine of the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” conspiracy theory. Perhaps more accurately: his base needs a combination of better schadenfreude in other forms than what they’ve been promised. Thus, we’re getting things like Trump attaching plaques of childish trolling under the portraits of his “Presidential Walk of Fame” and Hegseth putting out bullshit culture war salvos with the Defense Department and all the other nonsense propaganda that makes for easy copy by legacy media on a daily basis. They have to flood the zone with constant distractions away from Epstein and the economy and everything else that Trump and his team keep bungling. (This is why, of course, Trump is illegally, slowly releasing the Epstein files in small, heavily redacted batches — to buy himself more time and hope the American people get tired of the whole thing and move on.) Venezuela, in their minds, is perfect for that objective. Trump, despite his private admiration for Maduro, wants to make him the new Saddam Hussein. He figures if he can convince enough moderates and unaware voters that Maduro is (or rather was) their greatest existential crisis and Trump “did something about it,” he can wag-the-dog his way through the litany of scandals—and underperformance on kitchen table issues—that plague his administration. But Trump is incompetent and his administration is incompetent and their consultants are incompetent and the Republican Party is largely incompetent (on top of being blindingly subservient to Trump’s incompetence). These are not seasoned operatives that know a good workaround and PR strategy in the most cynical vein of the Bush administration. They are sociopathic clowns who believe they know how to play the game but keep fumbling on every drive. For instance, Trump began his weirdo campaign against Venezuela by authorizing U.S. military strikes against boats in the Caribbean and adjacent areas that he alleged were involving in drug trafficking. Since early September, as many as 25 strikes (sources vary) have been carried out. Part of the problem is that the Trump administration—primarily the Pentagon—have presented no credible evidence that any of the boats that were targeted were involved in drug trafficking. On top of that, there’s credible evidence that at least some of the boat strikes killed innocent civilians. The most notable, to date, is the “double tap” strike in which survivors of an initial attack were said to be clinging to boats (and debris)—upon which no contraband could be confirmed—and were murdered by a follow-up attack. That led to demands for video of the “double strike” to be released, which the Trump administration refuses to reveal and which Pete Hegseth has allegedly seen (and authorized) and for which responsibility was ultimately pinned on Admiral Frank Bradley, who now leads U.S. Special Operations Command and publicly went along with the story that he ordered the second strike. Meanwhile, Admiral Alvin Holsey, former Commander of U.S. Southern Command, allegedly expressed concerns regarding the legality of all these boat strikes—which he has reportedly denied—but strangely retired last month, two years early. Now, all of that is pretty damn weird in itself, but then you have Trump recently pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted last year by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in part for his role in importing more than 400 tons of cocaine. So, while Trump has spent a lot of time claiming his campaign against Maduro is rooted in his administration’s war on drugs, he just freed a head of government that was involved in a shitload of cocaine finding its way into the United States. Meanwhile, Trump is now pushing another narrative on this, as referenced above in his post: that the U.S. is seeking to “reclaim” oil that was stolen from our country by Venezuela. But the U.S. has no claim to Venezuela’s oil reserves. None. Zilch. Maduro—as horrible a human being as he is—did not steal oil from the United States. It’s all a propaganda feint — and a painfully bad one at that. You see what I mean? The Trump administration is blatantly lying about their justification for military action against Venezuela, did not receive authorization from Congress to do so, and didn’t even inform congressional leaders of the military operation carried out in the dead of night. There is no legal or moral justification for invading Venezuela and kidnapping its officials. We have no business in this country. The U.S. military were, once again, used as political pawns by Trump to distract away from his abysmal record and open corruption in office. But I’ll go even further: I am highly suspicious this may have been a coordinated plan between Trump and Maduro. It would not surprise me if Maduro and his wife are essentially given some form of asylum in the United States (or a country friendly to the Venezuelan dictator) while Trump pretends to seek punitive action against him that—surprise, surprise—never comes to fruition. Meanwhile, Trump gets to portray himself as the Strong Man he’s always desperately wanted to be and attempt to curry public favor that he hopes will insulate him from the accelerating criticism of his administration. Regardless of how this all went down behind-the-scenes, Trump has now thoroughly delegitimized the United States as a moral voice against illegal military operations carried out by other nations and given our worst enemies sufficient reason to take actions that further destabilize global security. What’s to stop China from finally pulling the trigger and carrying out an operation like this against Taiwan? What’s to stop neighboring nations from invading each other for resources? What’s to stop other countries from pursuing the development of nuclear arms as a security measure against invasion? Not to mention the way this will embolden terrorist groups around the world. They can point to Trump and say: “See? America is unhinged. We are justified in attacking the U.S. and its allies.” I despise Nicolás Maduro, and he has long needed to be removed and held accountable for his atrocities. But the consequences to come from Trump’s illegal actions in the dead of night will not be worth it. Do not be lured into the short-term legacy media narrative that will be trotted out in the coming days. This will not end well. ---- Link to piece here for easier sharing: charlotteclymer.substack.com…