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Folks. So as you can tell, this is not a normal broadcast, but then again, it wasn't a normal day in American history. The United States, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, has just deposed Nicholas Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela. So first, the fact According to the Wall Street Journal, in the early hours of Saturday morning, explosions rang out in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. By the time the sun rose in Caracas, Maduro's nearly 13 year grip on power had ended. In handcuffs, blindfolded, wearing a gray sweatsuit, he was on a US Warship on his way to New York City to face narco terrorism charges following a five hour operation. It was a very complex operation. It had been planned, apparently for months. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump concluded that Maduro, indicted in the United States in 2020, needed to face justice and that his supporters would still back his decision. According to administration officials, President Trump demanded that all of this be held closely in order to achieve the element of surprise. Again. This would make the second massive foreign policy decision that is essentially an in and out operation from the Trump administration, changing the nature of geopolitics on an extraordinary scale. Which we'll get to in a minute. Apparently the United States had everything ready by late December, but President Trump was hoping that Maduro would just relinquish power on his own. And then when that didn't happen, the then the US Got ready. So apparently the US Tried several times to launch an extraction mission, including on Christmas and on New Year's Day, but weather prevented all of that. At 10:46pm on Friday, Operation Absolute Resolve became a go. In a makeshift secure facility at Mar a Lago, According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump watched one of the greatest gambles of his two presidencies unfold. Flanked by top aids, Trump received blow by blow updates as 150 warplanes flew from 20 locations throughout the Western Hemisphere to reach the Venezuelan Capital before troops pushed their way into Nicolas Maduro's bedroom, his team monitored the social media site X on a large screen for any mentions of the word Venezuela to see whether people had picked up on what was going on. After 1:30am local time in Caracas, residents say they began to hear planes overhead and bombing began. Apparently there were blasts in the capital. The United States sends overwhelming air power for the operation. F18, F22, F35s, EA18 Growler electronic warfare planes, E2 Hawkeye command and control aircraft, B1 bombers that can carry 24 cruise missiles each and remotely piloted drones. Again, the United States, we here in the United States are privileged to have the greatest military in literally the history of the world. It's an extraordinary mission. No American casualties, essentially arresting and extraditing the head of a foreign state. But as we'll talk about, he wasn't the legal head of a foreign state because of course he was holding his power in spite of elections that he lost. The helicopters which carried an extraction force and law enforcement officers at some points were flying 100ft above the water during the flights into Venezuela. One US aircraft was hit during the operation, but remained flyable throughout the mission. By the way, gigantic failure for the Russians, as we'll discuss in a moment. The Russian government has been the leading tip of the security force for Nicolas Maduro and the Venezuelan regime for years. At 2:01am local time, a U.S. special Forces team arrived at Maduro's compound, according to Gen. Raisin Cain. As they approached, U.S. helicopters came under fire. American forces responded with overwhelming force and self defense, according to Kane. And then when US Special forces arrived inside the compound, they exchanged gunfire with Venezuelan personnel. According to President Trump, Maduro and his wife attempted to flee into a steel reinforced safe room, but they were unable to close the door in time. They gave up and they were taken into custody, but by the Justice Department. So that is the way that all of this went. By 3:29am local time, when everybody woke up on the east coast, it had already been over for three hours. Maduro and First Lady Chilia Flores were aboard US aircraft on their way out of Venezuela. And President Trump posted a photo of Maduro on the USS Iwo Jima after his capture wearing dark sunglasses, what appeared to be handcuffs and a Nike sweatsuit. They were then flown to New York. They faced federal charges in the Southern District of of New York. So unclear what exactly happens next at this point. And that of course is the big question, what's going to happen next? President Trump said the United States is going to, quote, run Venezuela until there can be a safe, proper and judicious transition. He said, quote, we are going to run the country. Now, what exactly does that mean? Unclear. Unclear at best, because the reality is that President Trump has said that he does not have plans, for example, to hand over control of the government to Maria Cordilla Machado, who is the Venezuelan opposition leader, or to the person who won the last Venezuelan election. And that is important because it helps explain what exactly the plan is. What exactly is going on here? First, we should start for folks who have not been watching this conflict for a long time, with who is Nicolas Maduro? So Maduro was the person who took over for Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez was a socialist dictator who took control of the government in 1999. He proceeded to run the Venezuelan economy, one of the most oil rich economies on planet Earth, directly into the ground. Like directly into the ground. When Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela, the GDP per capita in 1999 was something like $4,000 per year. Today it is under $3,000 per capita. The GDP per capita, okay, so it is 25% now below where it was in 1999. That's with all the inflation. That's with. That's with everything. That's with a quarter century of non development. Why? Well, they nationalized the oil industry and then proceeded to run everything directly into the ground. When Chavez took over, oil production was about 3.2 million barrels of oil per day. That's because American Western companies were involved in that oil production. Today, that number is about 850,000 barrels of oil per day. So that means that the production cut by fully 75%. Massive hyperinflation had characterized the Venezuelan economy for years. There's a point at which Venezuela's economy was running hundreds of percentage points of inflation every single year. Between 2013 and 2021, Maduro took over. In 2013, when Chavez died, the GDP per capita in Venezuela dropped beyond that. It dropped by 75% in the eight years immediately following Maduro taking over to just $1,500. GDP per capita. It's an annual figure. That's how poor the country is. People were relegated to eating animals off the street. Maduro is responsible for mass death in his country. He's responsible for tens of thousands in all likelihood of extrajudicial executions. According to the US UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which typically is pretty friendly to terrible dictatorships all over the world, his forces are responsible for the death of hundreds of people in security crackdowns, protests and all the rest and health and hunger crises may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives over the course of Maduro and Chavez combined. As far as how Maduro navigated geopolitics, very close allies, of course, with the Castro regime and what came after it. Cuba, very close with the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin. Russia was supposed to be providing Venezuela's advanced defense systems, including S300 VM and Buka M2 missiles, all of which apparently failed. The United States just ran right over them in the same way as we saw the Russian weaponry fail in Iran during the 12 Day War in the Middle East. Well, the same thing sort of happened here. China, of course, has been a gigantic state of support for Venezuela. They loan Venezuela some $50 billion repaid in crude. 70% of all Venezuelan exports in oil went to China. Iran, of course, very close with Venezuela as well. Iran has been sending certain chemicals to Venezuela for years to help process its heavy crude. Iran, of course, has been setting up terror centers apparently in Venezuela as well, and manufacturing suicide drones. So this brings us to what happens next. Now, again, the Trump administration statements thus far have been less than clear. They said they're not handing it over to the opposition.
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What?
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Why? Well, let's take a look at what the situation on the ground is right now. The United States does not have tens of thousands of troops on the ground in Venezuela. And it seems quite unlikely that President Trump would like to have tens of thousands of troops on the ground. Now, the administration is saying that if they have to, they will put troops on the ground. But right now my understanding is there are no troops on the ground in Venezuela, which suggests that this is less a full scale invasion and more like a half palace coup, which again is not rare in Latin America. I've talked about this on the show. You get somebody who is part of the military or a lower down member of the administration to work with you and then you have them basically turn over the top guy and then a transitional plan begins. So a lot of people today have been comparing this to the ouster of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 by the H.W. bush administration, but it doesn't match up quite. So in 1989, the United States overthrew the Noriega regime in Panama, but we already had 13,000 troops in the country pre invasion in that Panama Canal Zone. Right. Because we helped build the Panama Canal and we add another 14,000 or so troops. We then swore in the winner of the actual 1989 election, a person named Guillermo Andara as the president and we dismantled the Panamanian Defense Forces and replaced it with a new public force, like a police force. We're not doing any of that. What we do know, apparently, is that the Vice President, Del Rodriguez, was sworn in and apparently is expressing lots of willingness to cooperate with the US Transition. That's why I say this may in fact be a quasi palace coup, meaning perhaps the United States had contact with Rodriguez and was working with Rodriguez to basically secure the situation in Venezuela. And that would be the reason why the Trump administration is not immediately turning and handing this over to the opposition leaders. Because if they were to do that, they might be at war with the Venezuelan military, for example, like directly at war with the Venezuelan military. If they just said Maria Carina Machado has been sworn in, then presumably the infrastructure there doesn't support that. So this will be, I would assume, some sort of transitional plan. Now, this raises the question of legal basis. Now, I understand there are a lot of people, there's sort of two questions when it comes to legal basis. One is the international legal basis and one is the American domestic legal basis. Let me say up front, I do not care one iota about the supposed international basis for this sort of activity. I do not. There is no such thing as international law. It is specious, it is a lie, it is stupid, because there is no enforcement mechanism for international law. Who defines international law in the first place? The United nations, the most isly of geopolitics. A wretched hive of scum and villainy. The same United nations is going to condemn the United States for ousting a brutal communist dictator after leaving him in place for a generation. That, that, that international law, what I care much more about is domestic law. So here the comparison to Noriega makes a little bit more sense, because when we overthrew Noriega, we actually brought him to the United States, and then we tried and convicted him on charges of drug trafficking and racketeering and money laundering. And he served about 20 years in the US and then he was extradited to France. Now, the rationale for invading was that Noriega had declared a state of war. And then we declared there was an imminent threat. There are about 35,000Americans living in Panama at the time. We had some rights under treaties that were signed by Jimmy Carter with Panama that had been violated. And there was already a grand jury that indicted Noriega for drug trafficking. So what's the stated legal basis for this particular move? Well, apparently the United States has declared Maduro, a narco terrorist, as the Head of something called the Cartel of the Suns. The reason this is important is because, yes, there already is, by the way, a grand jury indictment in 2020 against Maduro for drug involvement similar to Noriega. If he is in fact the head of a terrorist organization, then he's a participant in armed conflict. And if he's a participant in armed conflict and we can claim that he's an imminent threat because he's sending for example, drug boats to the United States as part of that armed conflict, well then that's Article 2 power, right? That's presidential power under the constitution. Because Article 2 executive powers suggest that the President theoretically could do this sort of thing if it serves U.S. domestic law. And we're saying that sending drugs to the United States acts as an imminent threat. So there are people who are saying this is legally questionable on the basis of of Article 2 inherent power. Should the the American President have sought congressional approval? Now, let me just say up front, from a constitutionalist perspective, the answer is almost certainly sure. We should have sought, the administration should have sought some sort of congressional approval for military action in Venezuela. Now the question is what? Whether this actually counts as full scale military action. Because the reality is that the War Powers act, for example, says that Congress can sign into chat 60 days in after military action begins. Sure. Would it be preferable if we had a long scale debate about Venezuela and declared war and all of that? But that's not how military action in the United States has worked since essentially World War II. Just to be real about how war works, under Article 2, there is in fact a criminal indictment against Maduro, just like there was against Noriega for narco terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices related to drug trafficking. And according to illegal memo, the so called Barr Memo, which was William Barr who ended up becoming Attorney general in the first Trump administration back in 1989, he wrote a memo arguing the President can order the FBI to investigate and arrest individuals in foreign countries and, and that the UN Charter is non binding, it's not self enforcing. So is there a legal basis? There is a legal basis. How strong is that legal basis? Unclear. But in terms of people complaining about international law, one don't care. In terms of people who are complaining about lack of congressional approval, presumably if the conflict were to last more than 60 days, the war Powers act kicks in. But let's also be quite real about this. The United States routinely takes military action, the executive branch, in the absence of a full scale authorization of war by Congress, all The time. All the time. Okay, so what does this mean geopolitically? Well, it means, number one, that when President Trump says things, he means them. This is the second time again that he has done something truly transformative on the international stage, just in this administration. The first, of course, is the bombing of Florida, the nuclear facility in Iran, after he said over and over and over and again we're not going to allow Iran. So you get a nuclear weapon. And this President Trump has been threatening this for a long time. A lot of people thought it was empty rhetoric, didn't mean anything. Well, it meant something and it put a lot of people on notice. The Mexican drug cartels are on notice. Presumably the Ortega regime is on notice In Nicaragua, presumably the Cuban regime, which apparently is quite weak right now, is on notice. The, the Iranians are on notice. The Iranian regime, President Trump has already mourned. Listen, you start shooting protesters on mass, and the US Isn't going to sit still for that. The credibility of the United States is very, very high right now under President Trump because President Trump has the stones to do the thing. And one further note here. I've seen that there are a lot of people who are very, very upset, very upset on the so called isolationist right. People who have in the past, for example, suggested that the only people who would be against Nicolas Maduro's continued regime are Globo Homo. For example, something Tucker Carlson said only Globo Homo would want Maduro ousted because he's supposedly a social conservative, which is not actually true. Well, I suppose the administration may have to explain to people like Tucker Carlson that in fact it was not Globo Homo that ousted Nicholas Maduro, who is a conservative Republican president, a gutsy president who makes the calls to preserve America's national security and her foreign interests, her interests in the Western hemisphere and her interests internationally, undercutting enemies of the United States ranging from Russia to China to Iran to Cuba with moves like this. An audacious move from President Trump. Be fascinating to see what happens next. We'll have all the updates for you on Monday.