Trump didn’t take military action against Venezuela in his first term. Here’s what changed.

Summary

Podcast Summary: Apple News Today – "Trump didn’t take military action against Venezuela in his first term. Here’s what changed."

Date: January 10, 2026
Host: Shumita Basu
Guest: Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at The New Yorker

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Overview

This episode examines the dramatic U.S. special operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, a move that marked an abrupt shift from former President Trump’s first-term approach. Host Shumita Basu and guest Jonathan Blitzer dissect the intersection of ideology, international politics, U.S. domestic interests, and the question of oil that led to this intervention—an event raising profound humanitarian, political, and legal questions for Venezuela, the U.S., and beyond.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Backdrop: Why Venezuela?

• Multiple Motives Converge: Venezuela is entangled in several Trump administration agendas including regime change, anti-socialism, drug interdiction, immigration, and access to natural resources.
• Prolonged Crisis: Years of dictatorship, economic collapse, and fraudulent elections led to mass migration (over 8 million Venezuelans fled since 2013).
• Influence of Key Figures:
  • Marco Rubio – Long-standing advocate for toppling Maduro, motivated by a vision to weaken both the Venezuelan and Cuban regimes (Venezuela being “the lifeblood” of Cuba via oil support).
  • Trump’s Evolving Stance: While “he did a lot of saber rattling about the need for regime change in Venezuela” in his first term, Trump hesitated to commit troops, preferring rhetoric and pressure, not intervention—until now.
  • Stephen Miller / Immigration Hardliners: Venezuela was portrayed as responsible for criminal migration—"Of course, this is not true, but that is the claim." (Jon Blitzer, 04:18).

[03:45] Blitzer:

“Given the different factions that are at play... that’s how the country has emerged as such a clear target for these political reasons, primarily, yeah.”

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2. Drug War Justifications & Contradictions

• US Military Strikes on Alleged Smuggling Boats:
  • The administration justified attacks as anti-drug measures—yet evidence is murky.
  • Boat Bombings:
    • First vessel bombed had 11 people on it, highly unusual for drug runs, where fewer people means more room for cargo.
    • “Everyone with kind of knowledge of these sorts of operations said to me, very suspicious, very strange...” [06:46]
  • False Premises: Justification leaned on the fentanyl crisis, but:
    • Fentanyl doesn’t come through Venezuela or these maritime routes.
    • “The Coast Guard has never seized fentanyl in the Caribbean Sea. So right out of the gate, the pretense kind of unraveled.” [07:46]
  • “It had much more to do with the administration’s interest in flexing its muscles and in propping up a narrative of drugs overtaking the United States.” [07:30]
• Political Messaging Over Fact: The juxtaposition of this “drug war” with the U.S. pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández (convicted Honduran ex-president for major cocaine trafficking) exposes inconsistencies in policy. [08:51]

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3. Political Strategy and Message to the Region

• Sending a Message:
  • Some insiders saw the strikes as a show of force—a warning to neighbors that the U.S. might take drastic action if crossed. [09:49]
• Why Not Target Mexico?:
  • Miller and others pushed the idea of bombing Mexican fentanyl labs, but it was rejected as diplomatically disastrous—so attention shifted to Venezuela as a “safer” target for militaristic messaging.
• Venezuela’s Unique Position:
  • “You had in Nicolás Maduro, an international pariah... the feeling was that if there was action taken against Venezuela... it would all align with the broader political agenda, and there’d be relatively little fallout...” [12:18]
  • Blitzer: “The bluntness and kind of myopia of that thinking is really unlike anything I’ve ever heard.” [12:54]

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4. The Oil Dimension

• Trump’s Focus on Oil:
  • Trump announced plans for Venezuela to "give millions of barrels of its oil to the U.S." and discussed infrastructure with U.S. companies.
  • Blitzer doubts the viability: “These aspirations... this is the stuff of years and years and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of investment. It’s all unproven, it’s all uncertain.” [13:41]
  • The practical U.S. need for Venezuelan oil is questionable (“It’s almost as though Trump is speaking of the United States several decades ago”).
  • Oil appears symbolic—a proxy for dominance rather than material necessity.

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5. American Dominance & Ideological Rhetoric

• 'Dominance Play':
  • The Trump administration leans heavily into rhetoric about U.S. authority in the Western Hemisphere.
  • Example: Stephen Miller's comments about “the future of the free world” resting on unapologetic U.S. assertion—baffling even to mainstream media hosts (referencing Miller’s CNN appearance with Jake Tapper). [16:10]
  • Blitzer: “There isn’t a kind of geopolitical explanation, not even a legitimate pretense to how the administration is talking about all of this.” [17:12]
• Rubio’s Contrasting Tone:
  • At the post-capture press conference, Rubio characterized the operation as a "law enforcement operation”, while Trump described “the U.S. will be running Venezuela.” [19:10]

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6. Risks, Humanitarian Concerns, and Uncertain Outcomes

• Regime Change’s Perverse Outcomes:
  • With Maduro ousted, Vice President Delsey Rodríguez—a key Maduro loyalist—now leads, still presiding over a regime apparatus antagonistic to both the opposition and the U.S.
  • Trump threatened: "if she doesn't do what we say, then she'll suffer a fate worse than Maduro's." [21:38]
• Escalating Crackdown:
  • Increased repression, use of paramilitaries ("colectivos"), and a broader mandate to target dissenters—result: “catastrophic for Venezuelans.” [22:55]
• U.S. Immigration Fallout:
  • 600,000+ Venezuelans in the U.S. on temporary protected status (TPS) or Biden-era parole now face heightened risk of deportation under a hardline Trump administration:
  • “What happens to them? … The Trump administration has already tried to cancel TPS for Venezuelans here.” [26:05]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On disinformation and toolkit of interventions:

  “If you believe this worldview… that Maduro was somehow behind this influx of immigrants… then you have a target that you yourself have written into the script.”
  — Jonathan Blitzer [04:29]

• On drug war pretext falling apart:

  “The Coast Guard has never seized fentanyl in the Caribbean Sea. So right out of the gate, the pretense kind of unraveled.”
  — Jonathan Blitzer [07:46]

• On pure power projection:

  “It had much more to do with the administration’s interest in flexing its muscles and in propping up a narrative.”
  — Jonathan Blitzer [07:31]

• On defective rationales for oil:

  “American oil companies… are motivated primarily by profits. And so if you’re interested… this is not a stable environment in which to be working right now.”
  — Jonathan Blitzer [15:18]

• On new, U.S.-backed leadership’s dilemma:

  “It is a head scratcher to then name his number two who participated in all of the illegitimacy of that regime to this new position of power.”
  — Jonathan Blitzer [21:00]

• On the future and U.S. demands:

  “What is it that Venezuela can offer to the United States, the current regime can offer the United States? What does it mean basically, to do what the US says? Because it frankly doesn’t seem clear to me that the US even has a concrete ask.”
  — Jonathan Blitzer [25:09]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Topic / Quote | |----------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 00:04 | Introduction — U.S. operation in Venezuela | | 01:39 | The ideological motives—Rubio and U.S. priorities | | 04:18 | Immigration justifications and hardline influence | | 06:24 | Drug war pretexts and contradictions | | 09:49 | U.S. show-of-force and Venezuela as a testing ground | | 13:10 | Oil as motive: rhetoric vs. reality | | 15:32 | Rhetoric of U.S. dominance and global reaction | | 19:10 | Messaging shift post-Maduro capture — Rubio vs. Trump | | 20:36 | Risks of regime change, power dynamics after Maduro | | 23:54 | Forward-looking: Blitzer on volatility and immigration |

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Conclusion

This episode provides a nuanced, in-depth examination of the U.S.’s abrupt intervention in Venezuela, exposing the conflicting rationales, the roles of ideology and political image, and the immense uncertainty for both Venezuela and Venezuelans in the U.S. Jonathan Blitzer’s analysis underscores the high stakes and confusion produced by the Trump administration’s mix of bluster, symbolic assertion, and policy inconsistencies. The fate of Venezuela, its regime, its people, and its migrants in the U.S. all remain deeply uncertain.

Listen to the full episode for more, and read Blitzer’s reporting in The New Yorker for ongoing coverage.

Transcript

[A]

This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemit Sebastu. Today, how to make sense of the US's operation in Venezuela. It's been just about a week since the world learned of the U.S. special operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores. It came after months of mounting US military pressure on the country. Trump has said that the US will run Venezuela for as long as necessary, years, even though what exactly that means remains unclear.

[B]

Any kinds of moves like the ones the administration has made in recent days have just immense consequences that can ricochet in countless directions.

[A]

That's New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer.

[B]

Jonathan Just the degree of uncertainty and confusion at a time when the actual human and political consequences are as grave as they are, I think has made this situation absolutely astonishing to try to follow.

[A]

Jonathan has been reporting on immigration and foreign policy for years. And the way he sees it, Venezuela sits at the nexus of so many interconnected Trump administration priorities, from stemming migration to addressing drug trafficking to amassing natural resources. I sat down with Jonathan to ask him to untangle the reasons why he says Venezuela has long been an obvious target for Trump and for the people in his orbit.

[B]

A few factors at play. To begin with, you have people like Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security advisor, who have long had designs on ousting the current regime in Venezuela for a whole host of reasons. And to be clear, the Maduro regime in Venezuela was a brutal, repressive, dictatorial regime that there was never any question about that, and it was in very obvious ways illegitimate. Most specifically, In July of 2024, there were national elections in Venezuela. Maduro lost, declared himself the winner, and that was that. And since 2013, for instance, there have been 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country as it's essentially collapsed. Economic failures, repression, just the country has really been completely upended in the last decade. Plus. So given that backdrop, you have someone like Rubio who always had this ideological position about the need to topple the Venezuelan regime as a way of eradicating the wider region of the kind of scourge of socialist dictatorships. Specifically, what is the main obsession for Rubio is the regime in Cuba. And so Venezuela, the thinking goes, is basically propping up the Cuban regime by giving them oil, essentially providing them with some sort of lifeblood to prop up a failing government in Cuba. And so the logic always was that if you could remove that peace in Venezuela, then the Cuban regime is, you know, on borrowed time, the socialist regime in, in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega is Also extremely vulnerable. And so for someone with that kind of design for the region, Venezuela has always loomed large. Then you have the element of Trump and what he represents. Trump is actually a somewhat complicated figure in all of this. In his first administration, he did a lot of saber rattling about the need for regime change in Venezuela. He talked about the idea that Maduro had to be ousted. He tried to use strong rhetoric as a way of scaring or pressuring members of the military in Venezuela to break ranks with the Maduro regime and instigate some kind of coup or transition. None of that worked. But one of the reasons why it didn't work was specifically because Trump himself was uncomfortable with the idea of committing U.S. troops or resources to a more thoroughgoing intervention in Venezuela, which is actually, to be clear, not an unreasonable position. It's a very complicated undertaking. And so he has kind of bounced back and forth among different positions on what the US Posture should be vis a vis Venezuela. Oil has always been, I think, enormously attractive to him in the sense that Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world, and yet, because of mismanagement, the actual infrastructure for extracting that oil has fallen into disrepair. There's also then issues like immigration to people who are nativist ideologues like Stephen Miller. There has always been this sense of, okay, we have to do something with Venezuela because Venezuela is responsible for this influx of migrants. And one of the reasons, I think, why Miller specifically has been circling Venezuela as a target is that he has been making arguments and feeding those arguments to the president now for years, about the fact that immigrants living in America right now, particularly those who have recently arrived, and especially those from Venezuela, are all criminals. Of course, this is not true, but that is the claim. And now we're seeing, I think, the kind of foreign policy ramifications of that, that if you believe this worldview, if you subscribe to this worldview that Maduro was somehow behind this influx of immigrants with this malign purpose of trying to destabilize the United States, then you have a target that you yourself have written into the script. So I think that's how the country has kind of emerged. Given the different factions that are at play inside the Trump administration, that's how the country has emerged as such a clear target for these political reasons. Primarily, yeah.

[A]

I mean, there's so many. There's so many different overlapping factors here as to why Venezuela is on the administration's radar in this way. Let's start to pull some of these apart and try and drill down into these different reasonings. Let's take the war on drugs aspect of it first, as the administration likes to call it. I mean, we've now watched for months US Strikes on boats. The administration alleging that these boats are carrying drugs. I mean, what do we actually know at this point? What has the reporting borne out about these boats, who was on them, what was on them?

[B]

I think what's incredibly striking is how little we know actually about what was on those boats, who were on those boats. And in many ways this is precisely the problem, that the United States took unilateral action on the grounds that somehow US Intelligence had reason to believe that people on these small vessels in the Caribbean and in parts of the Pacific were transporting drugs to the United States. It's possible some of them were. It's also possible, by the way, that there was a mix of things that you know, in particular, for instance, the very first boat that was bombed. I remember having conversations with former high ranking US Officials with expertise in the region who all told me to a person how struck they were by the fact that the first boat bombing consisted of an attack on a boat with 11 people on it. Everyone with kind of knowledge of these sorts of operations said to me, very suspicious, very strange that there'd be that many people on one of these boats, because typically drug smuggling operations, every person you have means drugs you can't transport because of the weight. These are small vessels. And so a lot of people said to me immediately after that very first bombing, like there's something that doesn't add up here, which again just speaks to the fact that we know next to nothing. And traditionally what would happen is if the US Government thought that there were boats smuggling drugs to the United States, the Coast Guard would intercept them, it would apprehend them, and some sense would be made of what they were actually doing. And that would be that. Obviously that did not happen in any of these cases. And so I think it had much more to do with the administration's interest in flexing its muscles and in propping up a narrative of drugs overtaking the United States. When the administration initially offered its justification for those strikes, what it said was this was an action taken in national self defense because the presence of drugs in the United States was causing massive overdoses. The lion's share of overdoses in the United States in recent years, which very much should be a source of concern for any American administration, are the result of fentanyl, not cocaine. Fentanyl does not come from Venezuela or travel along these particular routes. The Coast Guard has never seized fentanyl in the Caribbean Sea. So right out of the gate, the pretense kind of unraveled. So it's hard to even really think about those boat bombings in specific relation to the rational rationale given by the administration, because no actual factual element of that rationale made sense. I will say alongside all of that, this happened a little bit later. At the end of November. The President pardoned the former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Menendez, who was serving a 45 year prison sentence in the United States on the charges of narco terrorism. So the idea somehow that the Trump administration would be concerning itself with Venezuela and the wider region out of concern for drug smuggling and drugs reaching the United States, and then at the same time, have the US President pardon someone like Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had already been convicted of basically being responsible for some 400 tons of cocaine reaching the United States in the eight or so years that he was president of Honduras. It just again gives lie to this idea that this has been about stopping the flow of drugs.

[A]

And what are the folks that you've spoken to making of it? The people who've watched this region for a long time, I mean, how do they interpret the inconsistency when the first.

[B]

Of these strikes occurred? I made a bunch of calls and I essentially heard two different categories of explanation. The first was, and this is coming from people who served in high positions during the first Trump administration, that to Trump's way of thinking, this was a chance to send a message to the wider region, essentially to show them that Trump was willing to do anything and that this was, insofar as any country in the region questioned what he was doing and whether or not this could impact them if they kind of wound up on the wrong side of Trump on any individual issue, insofar as they were that these foreign leaders were even asking themselves that question, the message was somehow coming through. That was one explanation I heard. Obviously, that's just a sort of general characterization. The more specific thing I heard was that there had been a desire from the President himself, from someone like Stephen Miller, to bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico. The President had talked about this during his first term and was essentially told by the Secretary of Defense, you can't do this. This makes no sense. Mexico is our largest trading partner. It's an ally. We depend on them for all sorts of law enforcement operations. The idea of the US taking military action on the ground in Mexico would completely sever the US's diplomatic relationship with the country. Who knows what that could even mean on a human or political level, given the fact that we share a border and so on. That idea died on the vine in the first Trump administration and then kind of lived on among hardline Republican congressmen while Biden was president and then came back to life. I suppose I'm mixing the metaphor here, but came back to life at the start of the current administration when people like Stephen Miller wanted to dust the idea back off and put it in motion. And once again, they were, look, this is just counterproductive, really, in every sense. And so quickly the idea of bombing fentanyl labs morphed into, according to the explanation I got, morphed into a plan to bomb someone and something else in the region to try to send a similar sort of message. And that's where Venezuela emerged, for the reasons that you and I have begun to discuss. You know, Venezuela, for all these different reasons, was on the minds of all of these top ranking Trump officials. You had in Nicolas Maduro, an international pariah, a known bad actor dictator who had recently refused to acknowledge his electoral loss. The feeling was that if you took action against a country like Venezuela, which had been the subject of so much recent political rhetoric in the United States, with the president talking about the Venezuelan prison gang trend, talking about drug smuggling and so on, Maduro was becoming increasingly a household name among conservative Republicans, just in terms of how they spoke about immigration, how they spoke about the wider region, that maybe if there was action taken against Venezuela, it would all kind of align with the broader political agenda of the administration, and there'd be relatively little fallout as compared to the sort of fallout you might see if the US Were to take this sort of action in a place like Mexico. Now, I want to be clear, that shocked me when I heard that. I mean, the bluntness and kind of myopia of that thinking is really unlike anything I've ever heard. But that was at least the explanation I got.

[A]

I mean, let's talk about the oil of it, all right? Another justification that the president has offered is access to Venezuelan oil. He announced this week a plan for Venezuela to give millions of barrels of its oil to the U.S. he's holding talks with U.S. oil companies about building up oil infrastructure in the country. The US has now seized two sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela in the North Atlantic and in the Caribbean. Caribbean. How much does oil appear to be a motivating factor in all of this?

[B]

Honestly, it's hard to say. I mean, these aspirations that Trump has voiced of Venezuela handing over all of this Oil to the US Of American oil companies reengaging in the country. This is the stuff of years and years and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of investment. It's all unproven, it's all uncertain. Also, the United States isn't particularly in need of oil. I mean, it's almost as though Trump is speaking of the United States several decades ago. So that doesn't compute either. The Biden administration, interestingly, in some ways took more concrete action to allow American oil companies, specifically a company called Chevron, to maintain access, some measure of access to Venezuelan oil. And Trump, initially, for political reasons why, wanted to undo some of the allowances made by the Biden administration that allowed Chevron to at least keep a foothold in Venezuela. I think it does motivate Trump, as evidenced by just the sheer fact that he's talking about it constantly. And I think to him. And again, I don't want to engage just in sort of cheap psychologizing of the president, but you know, just to judge from the sort of body of his public statements and what we're hearing day in and day out from the administration, I think the oil issue is almost a kind of proxy for his view of America getting too throw its weight around and make demands and extract what it wants. And that's, to my mind, a kind of clearer strain in all of it, almost the symbolism of oil, because the actual mechanics of this are extraordinarily uncertain. And it should be said too, by the way, American oil companies, you know, obviously are motivated primarily by profits. And so if you're interested, primarily by a kind of profit motive or a business, bottom line, this is not a stable environment which to be working right now.

[A]

Well, so I do want to talk about what you're saying here about the assertion of power, a power play, a dominance play more than anything else. I mean, we have seen the administrative, we've seen the president, but also members of the administration now really align around rhetoric about American dominance, U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. And we've seen really an uptick in that kind of language, but it's contributing to the conversation around Greenland. It's now kind of ricocheting around the world, frankly. How do you see that conversation evolving on the global stage?

[B]

It's funny, I've actually found in some strange and perverse ways the last 24 to 48 hours to be helpful and revealing of the administration's line of thinking, particularly because of some of the statements that we've heard from the likes of Stephen Miller about Greenland, as you say, and about these kind of broad, I don't even really know what you'd call them, sort of civilizational explanations for what this is all about. That the United States since the Second World War. I'm referring specifically to a comment that Miller made on cnn, which I think befuddled the host Jake Tapper, and continues to befuddle me and anyone really who would have listened to it. The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests with that apology.

[A]

This whole period that happened after World.

[B]

War II, where the west began apologizing and groveling and begging, I don't even know honestly what you're talking about right now. I mean, this is a kind of grab bag that I think we're hearing from someone like Miller for all kinds of very idiosyncratic interpretations of the last half century of US and world history. And as far as I can tell, the really only kind of common thread in all of it is Miller's belief that were right to feel aggrieved for some reason or another and that this is a chance for the US to somehow bulldoze its way out of those emotions. I don't mean to sound flippant about this. I just. There isn't a kind of geopolitical explanation, not even a legitimate pretense to how the administration is talking about all of this. And so I'm kind of casting about, honestly, journalistically, to try to understand what sort of motivating not just the administration's recent actions, but even more generally, the way in which it's talking right now. Because there is a world in which after an action as dramatic as the one the Trump administration has taken in Venezuela in recent days, there's a world in which a sense of de dramatizing rhetoric can set in. And I actually think in some ways, you almost saw Rubio try to do it. There was the Mar a Lago press conference that Trump gave on Saturday immediately after Maduro was captured. And I spoke to a number of former Trump administration officials before that press conference. And what some of them said was, okay, it's possible that Trump can claim victory. Maduro, this person who he's been talking about ad nauseam now for years, is out. The US Ousted him. There were no American lives lost, never mind the fact that there are dozens of Venezuelan Cuban lives lost. But whatever, there were no American lives lost in the operation. This is a chance. If the Trump administration wanted some sort of notional off ramp now, Trump could claim it. And that was in fact the opposite of what Trump did. Trump himself came out and said that the US Would be running the country. We're going to stay until such time as we're going to run it, essentially until such time as a proper transition can take place. Not even Marco Rubio said that. In fact, Marco Rubio at that very press conference. And it's very notable given the fact that Rubio is the chief ideologue when it comes to regime change in Venezuela. Rubio described the operation as a law enforcement operation. There was an indictment out for the capture of Nicolas Maduro for drug related crimes. The US Effectuated that indictment and made its arrest. Nicolas Maduro was indicted in 2020 in the United States. He is not the legitimate president of Venezuela. That's not just us saying it. The first Trump administration, the Biden administration, the second Trump administration, none of those three recognized him. He's not recognized. Recognized by the European Union in multiple countries around the world. He is a fugitive of American justice with a $50 million reward. He was trying again to, in the face of all the evidence that we were seeing, portray this operation as something that was more limited and more localized around a law enforcement objective. And Trump obliterated that line right there on the podium.

[A]

Let's talk about this regime change, even the phrase regime change being used here. Right. I mean, we've seen now Maduro's vice president, Delsey Rodriguez is leading the country. You recently wrote that. And now she finds herself in this strange position of really having to please two distinctly different audiences, one being the Trump administration and the other being the regime that she now helms, really, the Maduro regime. Can you speak to how that dynamic is playing out in real time and some of the risks that lie ahead for her?

[B]

Absolutely. So a few thoughts on it. First, just speaking in relation to Delsey Rodriguez herself, this is someone who has been one of the staunchest loyalists to Maduro from the very beginning. Her political fortunes are tied to Maduro's rise. She was vice president at the time of Maduro's ouster. She was vice president because Maduro had picked her personally to that role. Her brother was Maduro's chief political strategist. He presided over the National Congress. He was responsible for ramming through the fraudulent 2024 election. Now, this is someone who is implicated in all of the misdeeds of the Maduro regime. And so if the administration, the US Administration comes out and says Maduro was il legitimate, and there's good reason to say that of Maduro, it is a head scratcher to then name his number two who participated in all of the illegitimacy of that regime to this new position of power. The regime has always been able to persist without Maduro. Those elements remain in place. And this has always actually been a legitimate political conundrum for anyone who has advocated any sort of regime change or intervention in Venezuela. The Venezuelan opposition has a broad popular mandate. It won national elections in 2024. But it is viewed with hostility and hatred by the very people who control the country, members of the military, members of the government, as it is now. And so there was always going to be this question of what you do. And so it seems like the Trump administration threw up its hands, cast the Venezuelan opposition to the side, and decided to allow for Maduro's number two to take power. And then Trump, in his characteristic way, said the day after she was sworn in that if she doesn't do what we say, then she'll suffer a fate worse than Maduro's. You know, what does this mean for Venezuelans living in Venezuela? It means horrible, unsettling things. One of the things that Maduro had done before, he thought he was actually going to be captured. But when it was clear that the US Administration was ramping up pressure to dislodge him from power was he did what most strong men would do under the circumstances. He took advantage of that political moment to further consolidate his power and further crack down on dissent of any kind in the country. He issued, it looks like a kind of draft emergency declaration that basically unleashed the government on anyone who was perceived as being an enemy of the country. And any perceived enemy or opponent of the regime suddenly got lumped in with the U.S. interventionists. And so the regime now had a much kind of broader mandate, it felt, to go after anyone and everyone in the country who it didn't like. That is what Delsey Rodriguez is now presiding over. And what we've seen in recent days is a kind of chaos on the streets of different cities in Venezuela, all across the country, in which the government is going after people. These armed vigilante groups that are sort of paramilitaries associated with the regime, called collectivos, are running roughshod over the public. And so it's been catastrophic for Venezuelan. So you have this kind of duality of, on the one hand, finally, this brutal leader who's repressed the country and run it into the ground for so many years is gone, but the crackdown has intensified.

[A]

John, what are you watching for in the next days and weeks? What are you most Curious to see play out. What are you anticipating?

[B]

I mean, I have to say I'm overwhelmed by the uncertainty of all of this. And there are people who are more expert than I who really have their finger on the pulse of different dynamics in the Venezuelan political situation. I think from my perch here in the U.S. you know, I'm kind of looking at two things. Primarily, what the current Venezuelan regime's crackdown on the public there is going to look like, how the current regime is going to harden many of its positions. We're already seeing evidence of it. There's been a lot of reporting about horrors in Venezuela right now undertaken by the new, can we call it US Backed regime? That's a very strange notion. The idea of a Chavista regime backed by the US or operating as a kind of puppet of the US Very unclear to me what's gonna happen in that way. So I'm very, very keyed into kind of what the human fallout is gonna be. I'm just sort of trying to absorb as much of it as I can and understand it. I do think it's gonna be a really interesting question. Interesting, maybe it's not the right word. Overwhelming question of what? You know, when Trump says if Del Rodriguez doesn't do what we want, she's going to suffer these horrible consequences. What does the US Want right now? The Venezuelan government, when Maduro was at the helm, offered the US Great access to its oil reserves. That was meant at the time, this was in late 2025, as an effort to draw down American aggression. Exactly, Exactly. And the U.S. basically cast that aside and wanted to go after Maduro personally. So what is it that Venezuela can offer to the United States, the current regime can offer the United States? What does it mean basically, to do what the US Says? Because it frankly doesn't seem clear to me that the US Even has a concrete ask, let's say, or a concrete order to make of the current Venezuelan regime. So that's another question. And I think that the third and final thing, and something that I'm in a better position really to try to understand and report out is, you know, what happens now to Venezuelans living in the United States. What we've seen over the last year or so in the current administration in the United States is an administration that is unconcerned with the rule of law in general ways, but most specifically in the immigration space. So you have all kinds of people who have, say, work authorization or some sort of provisional legal status that the administration is just casting aside. And when those people show up, say, for an immigration appointment or for immigration court, are just getting apprehended, detained and eventually deported. This is a population, the Venezuelan population in particular, that is extraordinarily vulnerable. There are some 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States under what's called temporary protected status, which is a provisional status that has to be renewed every 18 months. The Trump administration has already tried to cancel TPS for Venezuelans here. There are another tens of thousands of other Venezuelans who came to the United States under a parole program during the Biden years. Those people, in theory, could have applied for some more lasting status, but a lot of them were interrupted by the change in administration. What happens to them? And so that kind of confluence is something that I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time trying to understand more specifically.

[A]

Well, John, we'll keep following your reporting, and thank you for making some time to come here and talk to us about it. I appreciate it.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

We'll include a link to Jonathan Blitzer's reporting for the New Yorker on our Show Notes page. And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.