Kiko Toro (9:11)

I don't know, it's. It's all been so weird.

Mike Pesca (9:15)

I'm a. I'm a hard news guy. But I'll start with feelings. What are you feeling today?

Kiko Toro (9:21)

I've really struggled with that because of course we've been hoping to get rid of Maduro for the longest time. It's been a nightmare for Venezuela. The guy destroyed the gun. The regime has been really a catastrophe. But we got rid of him and of Celia, his power broker wife. But the regime is still in place. The political prisoners are still in political prison. Communications are still censored. People are not any more free than they were on Friday. So it's this strange double sense of, well, an important thing happened. We're not actually, actually better off.

Mike Pesca (10:01)

Right? Because for a dictator to be important and potent enough to warrant this sort of intervention, he has to have tentacles and a large network of suppression. And that was exactly the case. In fact, has he perfected or expanded the regime that Chavez started?

Kiko Toro (10:21)

Yeah, look, Maduro is really a creature of the Cuban regime. He came up into the revolution because he was a member of this like extremist pro Cuban party that was founded as a guerrilla outfit in the 1970s. That's where he got his education. That's what he was good at. And what the Cubans did is they built these like systems of social control that were not really based on one person, that were in a way depersonalized. They learned a lot from the East Germans and the Russians, but then they brought it to Latin America and they made it their own. And my little brought that stuff to Venezuela. But it wasn't a personalist regime. This was not a kind of one man show at all. And what's been really, really strange is that he's. Now that he's gone, you can see that this regime has its own kind of internal momentum and its own internal structures and it's ticking along. So I thought it was really telling that there were a lot of venzolans celebrating in the streets of Lima and of Miami and, and wherever like these 8 million Venezuelans have had to leave. But not in Caracas. And Caracas are not celebrate.

Mike Pesca (11:34)

Right. Because they know that they will be the first ones to bear the brunt of any crackdowns which are quite possible. So I did want to ask you about that. Has U.S. foreign Policy overindexed for the influence of the Venezuelan exodus in America. In other words, these would be the most anti Maduro and also the most impassioned, maybe the people with the most resour who wanted his ouster the greatest.

Kiko Toro (12:00)

Well, that was my fear going into this. But I don't think that's where we are right now. Those people are all feeling really, really betrayed. You know, these are people who tended to vote for Trump if they could vote. People who tended to support the magazolanos is what we call them sometimes. And they thought that the idea was that you would depose the regime in order to put Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition and the pro democracy move in power. But that's, that's not what's happened. I think these people are just feeling betrayed now because in his press conference right after Maduro was well extracted. I don't even know what the right verb is. You know, Maria Corinacho is very nice, but he does. She doesn't have the support to run the country and that she's going to go with the people who are there now, including Delriguez who has is a died in the world and the world like communist extremists. Really.

Mike Pesca (13:00)

Yeah. So that is the. She's the vice president, I guess she's the president now. And she. When you say communist extremist people who thought the Soviet Union weren't communist enough, that's her ilk.

Kiko Toro (13:11)

Yeah, yeah. So these are people like Maduro who joined initially was called the Liga Socialista. This was the pro Fidel. I don't know to what extent Americans really understand that Cuba and Fidel Castro they always had an independent foreign policy during the, the Cold War. Now they didn't just follow whatever Moscow said and they were often a lot more radical than the Soviets and they were founding these guerrilla groups all over Latin America. And this is like their political tribe. It's Communism, but it's not Soviet communism, it's Cuban communism. That's her political tribe. That's where she came. That's how she came up. When Nicolas Maduro became President of Venezuela, he brought with him this cadre of fringy pro Cuban extremists, mostly because, well, I think the reason is that the Cubans initially installed him in the Vice Presidency. They wanted their guy there. So it's a really weird, it's just inexplicable to me that a guy like Marcos Lubio, who is a Cuban American who like, understands the extremism of Cuban communism better than almost anyone in Washington, looked at a lady like Densi, whose father founded the pro Cuban League Associalista. There's a whole story there. And, and said, yeah, this is the moderate that we can, that we can work with. Like, no, you'll never find a Venezuelan who would call Del C. Rodriguez a moderate. She's definitely not that.

Mike Pesca (14:39)

She's like in many ways the Marine Le Pen of Venezuela, just in terms of her lineage and the radical legacy, though not aligned ideologically. So Rubio was asked about who are you going to work with, who is going to lead Cuba on the Sunday shows. And on one of them he said, we'll see. We're going to make an assessment. We're going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly. In the interim, what do you think Delsey Rodriguez or anyone else can do in the next few weeks that would convince Rubio, and I guess by extension Trump, that this is our person to lead Venezuela?

Kiko Toro (15:17)

I mean, I think Trump telegraphed this pretty clearly in his press conference. If she signs the appropriate deals with the appropriate American oil companies, and clearly the Americans are expecting some concessional deals that allow U.S. oil companies to come in and pump oil in conditions that they never would have gotten even before Chavez came to power. Then they'll look the other way and they'll just let the political prisoners stay in their political prisons and the torture chambers run the way they always have been. I mean, if there's one thing that we cannot accuse Trump of in this whole thing is hypocrisy. He's never pretended this is about Venezuelan democracy. He's at least spared us the indignity of trying to pretty this up as some kind of pro democracy thing. It's like, no, he wants to extract oil and if he can cut a deal with a socialist hardliner to allow him to do that, he isn't particularly care what happens to Venezuelan civil rights, I don't think.

Mike Pesca (16:21)

Right, right. So do you think he is opposed to Maria Corina Machado, the Peace Prize winner, being installed because she is at heart a Democrat?

Kiko Toro (16:32)

I mean, I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it here, I almost see the logic from his point of view. He clearly Trump doesn't want to have a full scale invasion of the country, doesn't actually want to depose a Republican regime that would cost too many American lives, that would fracture the MAGA movement in the US that's just off the table. Right. So if you're not going to militarily overthrow the regime, then you're going to keep the regime in place. And if you want to keep the regime in place, you want to probably keep it intact because you want to be able to do deals with this regime. Right. And so then you're going to need a regime insider who is able to command the loyalty of the people in the regime, somebody who gives confidence of the people in the regime. If you can find a regime insider who will cut these oil deals, they'll probably go for it. And that, that appears to be the size of what they're trying to do in Venezuela. I mean, I think one of the.

Mike Pesca (17:24)

More common heuristics in how people think, it's called different things, mirroring. But it's to believe that your adversary, your peer, everyone else thinks like you do. So Trump is entirely transactional. And I assume that he's assuming that these corrupt leaders are driven primarily by corruption and not a combination of corruption and ideology. But I wonder, as you're, as you're detailing just how steeped in ideology Rodriguez is and the rest of the cadre of leaders who at least say it, but also seemed to walk the walk to the extent that the people of Venezuela suffer because they are so committed to communism or Bolivar ism or Chaviz ism. What's your assessment of that? Are they more corrupt and willing to deal as Trump would assume? Or is Trump going to run into problems because of these leaders, their actual ideological commitments?

Kiko Toro (18:24)

I mean, they're awfully corrupt, there's no question about that. But I also do think on the.

Mike Pesca (18:28)

Plus side, for the US they're awfully corrupt. Joke. Right.

Kiko Toro (18:32)

But I do think there's a hardcore of ideology there, especially for Diladrigas and her brother, who we haven't mentioned, who is the head of Congress and probably now the number two or three most powerful person in Venezuela. These are people who grew up inside this pro Cuban Communist way of looking at the world. I think the real challenge for them is that they're going to want to protect the revolution, but also the Cuban revolution to the extent that they want. And, and the question really is what happens when those two things really come into conflict. When Marco Rubio notices that a bunch of the money that is coming out of these oil deals, that some of it will have to flow back into the Venezuelan regime. Well, some of that is going to end up in the Cuban Communist Party's coffers too. So at what point does that become unsustainable or unacceptable to the American administration? I don't know. I tend to think that what's going to happen here is that we're going to go between periods of disengagement and dealing and then periods of the American administration feeling that they're not being kowtowed to enough. And then maybe there'll be bombing rates every six months. I mean, it looks to me almost the way Iraq looked between the two Gulf wars when there was a no fly zone and they were still kind of bombing every few weeks, radar installations and such. It wasn't really a war, but you weren't actually at peace either. It looks very murky to me right now. But I don't know, I just, I keep thinking of it from the point of view of the like the thousand, roughly 1,000 political activists who are in prison in Venezuela right now. Like this must be inexplicable to them.

Mike Pesca (20:18)

So obviously the regime will say things about and try to bang the drum of anti colonialism. That is some rhetoric that they could, that that will be in their interests. But how true is it if the United States is seen, like in Iraq as imposing will, as opposed to like in Panama, of taking away a dictator who is oppressive. And pretty quickly there was able to rush into the maw of Noriega's absence with real democracy. What's the dynamic there among the people or among the people who have levers of power? How much can a fervor for self rule be undercut by messages and reality of colonial imposition?

Kiko Toro (21:02)

Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. That's what we're going to be finding out. Because what, what's clear is that for both sides in this dynamic, the appearance of, you know, for the Venice Islands being seen to be independent and for, for Donald Trump being seen to be dominant, the appearance, appearance of that, the sort of optics of that are really, really important. I don't think Donald Trump will be satisfied just to make A bunch of oil deals. If you know that if Delilah is like spitting, spitting at his like, image every, every two weeks on, on venison tv. I know, you know, but, but, but also for Lodriguez, like, being sick, seen to kowtow to the Americans is probably not something that she or her movement can stomach. So how sustainable this arrangement that seems to be getting proposed is, I don't know. Trump and Ruby are saying very explicitly that they plan to coerce Delsy into doing what they want him to do. Can Dilsey get away with that? She's reported to be really smart and quite good at like, negotiating out of tricky situations. I guess this will be put to the test.

Mike Pesca (22:22)

And what about the stated rationale of the raid, which wasn't liberation, as we've been talking about? He didn't go down the road of neocon rhetoric, but the stated purpose was, and there's legitimacy to it, was that Maduro was in, in addition to everything else, essentially a drug kingpin. And putting aside hypocrisy and the President, Honduras and all that, will this significantly interrupt whatever drug operations that he and the Cartel of the sun, which I think might be a misnomer, were in charge of?

Kiko Toro (22:58)

I mean, we're going to find out about that too. Venice Elvis is not a drug producer. It's a cocaine trafficking point, mostly for Europe and not the U.S. so the state of rationale was really, really thin. I mean, I think this was a real, this was actually a real politic thing where, you know, Donald Trump did not like Russian and Cuban companies having big stakes in like a major energy producer in the Western hemisphere. And that, that is what this is about. And he didn't want to say that too explicitly beforehand. They needed some kind of rationale. I think that he, Trump got sold, or Marco Rubio thought that he had sold him on this rationale of portraying it as a law enforcement operation. Trump kind of stepped all over that framing by saying just very explicitly that from his point of view this was about taking the oil. But I don't think anybody takes that stuff to too, too seriously. It's just they were unable to do a deal with, with Melodo. It's being reported today, by the way, that as of six months ago, the discussion was to give Maduro a kind of golden exile in Turkey and moved in very much in the same direction that we're going in now with Del C in control of the government and making oil deals with the Americans.

Mike Pesca (24:17)

So I like that, by the way. I like that. Michael Clayton Foreign policy. I'm not the guy you kill, I'm the guy you bribe. I mean, if you could get those results without risking $150 million. I mean, sorry, 150 lives and many millions of dollars the raid cost, it seems like something the United States used to pursue more and could pursue more of. But I just want to go back to this point. Should we think of Venezuela as a narco state or was that just, you know, aside a pot that they had their hands in? But it's not as crucial to the state as some other really explicit narco states.

Kiko Toro (24:55)

There are a lot of businesses, many of them legal, many of them illegal, that Venezuelan regime connected officials are involved in. Everything from like things like fishing and like insurance and construction to like illegal mining and like diamonds and gold and uranium too, and things like this and drugs like cocaine trafficking and oil sanctions, bucks. And these were all sort of portfolio bits of the portfolio of, of illegal, well, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal money flows to, to this connected elite. I don't think it was really sort of the most important one. This is not a situation, well, like in Honduras where it really was sort of a main way that the, the country made money under Landes. So I, I don't think anybody should take the narco stuff too seriously. Yes, it happened. It was not a main way that the venison regime was, was funding itself.

Mike Pesca (26:00)

And I'm not going to ask you to make a solid prediction. Give me a band of outcomes in a year. What do you think the life of the average Venezuelan will be vis a vis what their leaders or our leaders have done?

Kiko Toro (26:14)

That's a really hard question. I mean, I do think that it is not impossible. It's maybe a 50, 50 scenario where the arrangement that they seem to be going towards does kind of stick and more investment does go into Venezuela and that should slide, that should stop the slide of the Venezuelan currency and should sort of slow down inflation, might begin to see a bit of economic growth. It's not impossible. You start to see some Venezuelan, some of the 8 million venison left who have, most of them want to live in Venezuela, is where their families are, is where they're from, is where their networks are. You could start to see some migration back to Venezuela. I don't, I wouldn't entirely rule that out. But there's so many pitfalls and it's so easy to see the wheels coming off of this thing because both sides are so intransigent and so doctrine.

Mike Pesca (27:10)

Kiko Tor is the director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute and the writer of one percent Brighter, which is his substack. He is a Venezuelan and expert on these matters. Thank you so much, Kiko.

Kiko Toro (27:24)

Thank you.

Mike Pesca (27:32)

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Kiko Toro (29:59)

Dictator Nicolas Maduro to justice.

Mike Pesca (30:02)

Trump also did say that the US Will be running Venezuela now and articulated this is his plan going forward.

Kiko Toro (30:11)

We're in the oil business, we're going to sell it to him. We're not going to say we're not going to get.

Mike Pesca (30:15)

In other words, we'll be selling oil probably in much larger doses because they.

Kiko Toro (30:19)

Couldn'T produce very much because their infrastructure was so bad. So we'll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries, many of whom.

Mike Pesca (30:27)

Are using it now. But I would say many more will come. So he is saying that this is regime change for justice, but also more tangibly, oil. But you know, Trump says a lot of things, which is the point of this spiel. When evaluating the Trump presidency, commentators, including careful ones, do what they can do. The only thing they can do, they can go by what the man says. And what he says is not the truth. It is true that Trump just isn't. He lies constantly, he exaggerates, he misstates, he performs analysis without a crystal ball, but with his own inaccurate words point out to the public that he is spouting nonsense. And good. It's good to point that out. The lies are correctly identified. They're catalog their fact check. But you know what happens? The exposure of falsehoods becomes something like a proxy for evaluating the entire operation. Was it smart? Didn't work well. Trump lied about it. Must not have gone so well that he could have told the truth. But this is important to remember. He can't tell the truth if Trump says something inaccurate or absurd. The inference that follows is that the thing itself must be unserious, failed or illusory. It feels like an intuitive conclusion to draw. Problem is, it's frequently mistaken. As hard as it is to acknowledge, Donald Trump's relationship to the truth is a poor indication of of how outcomes are actually produced. His rhetoric is so unreliable. But rhetoric is not the mechanism through which military campaigns or intelligence operations or bureaucratic programs are executed. These unfold through institutions, institutions with people much more proficient than Trump. And even though he has done a purge of many of the institutions, there are enough staffs there and planners and career officers and logistics experts to produce excellent results. That Trump narrates badly. This doesn't mean that events obediently mirror the bad narration. And I'll also acknowledge that this term, specifically one key military planner. So long as I'm holding the military up as an example of competence during the Trump administration, one key military figure is Pete Hegseth, who offers no better relationship to accuracy, which is essentially why he was tapped to lead the department. In fact, the department, which should be called the Department of Defense, he calls the Department of war. Think about this right now after the Maduro raid is being sold as a defense of Americans from drugs or a defense of the democratic ideals of the Venezuelan people, sort of a humanitarian intervention. Wouldn't a message other than this is war go down a bit more easily? President Trump is deadly serious about stopping the flow of gangs and violence to our country, deadly serious about stopping the flow of drugs and poison to our people, deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us, and deadly serious about re establishing American deterrence and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. This is about the safety, security, freedom and prosperity of the American people. This is America first. This is peace through strength, and the United States War Department is proud to help deliver it. Trump's statements and Hegseth's bluster heard there are weak evidence about the facts on the ground. They tell us little about damage assessments or strategic effects or execution. US Operations are designed and carried out, as I said, by professionals with redundancy and delegation and buffers that limit how much presidential confusion and distortion can actually have an effect on the real world. Once you recognize this, you might begin to think differently about the most common form of analysis. In the immediate wake after a military operation, Trump said x that is a lie. Therefore, the operation success buttressed by the lie can't be credited. Sometimes that's the right way to look at it. I mean domestically, let's take domestic situation. He has said great things that are totally inaccurate about health care or doge or tariffs. They were all going to be so great and also going so well, and none of that was true. Also internationally is spoken that way about solving the war between Russia and Ukraine. He has lied and been stymied. But internationally, and especially militarily, there are plenty of examples of a lie queuing analysis that the operation was flawed or failed or a disaster or a time bomb, when in fact a fair analysis would indicate the operation seems more or less successful. Take the bombing of the Fordeau facility in Iran. Trump said tonight I can report to.

Kiko Toro (35:35)

The world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.

Mike Pesca (35:46)

Obliterated means something. It has a definition in the dictionary, and that definition does not apply to what happened to Iran's facilities at Fordo and the other nuclear enrichment sites. However, now that we have the benefit of some analysis and some distance and some deep breathing, the important thing doesn't become if the word obliterated was right, the important thing becomes, well, what happened in Fordeau? And it turns out that despite Trump's words, despite the contradictory assessment by one of the intelligence agencies issued with low confidence in the days immediately after, it seems that Fordeau went pretty well from an American perspective and certainly not an Iranian1. On November 21, the Institute for Science and International Security, which is very respected, wrote the main nuclear sites at Fordo, Netanz and Esfahan were largely destroyed and have seen little significant activity since the war. Overall, satellite imagery suggests that Iran's uranium enrichment program remains significantly set back. At present, Iran does not appear able to enrich uranium in any significant manner or make gas centrifuges in significant numbers. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities, its facility to produce uranium, and its centrifuge manufacturing and research and development facilities remain severely damaged or destroyed. Now, in the moments afterwards, obliterated was the word to seize upon and rebut. And that's what many in the media and the Democratic Party did. Here was Simone Sanders talking to Senator Chris Van Hollen about the leakers of that initial skeptical assessment.

Kiko Toro (37:37)

When the government is not telling the truth, when the government is lying, when the government is fudging the facts, the importance of these people who are willing to come forward and give the information out, I think is critical, particularly in this climate where misinformation and disinformation will get literally around the world twice before the truth ever shows up.

Mike Pesca (37:54)

Van Hollen went on to say that the administration was sending the message, if you tell the truth, we will punish you. But the truth was not on his side. In that case, the truth didn't come out of Trump's mouth with the word obliterated. But the overall truth was mission successful and certainly no wider war sucking in the United States and costing millions of lives. Here are some more examples. In the first term, Trump killed Qasem Soleimani. His public understanding of what went on appears shallow. His messaging was chaotic. It was of course self centered, yet the targeting was accurate, the execution was precise, and it really affected things to the benefit of American foreign policy. So you don't have to credit Trump's often inaccurate boasting, but you do have to evaluate what happened independent of the boasting. Here's another good example, the defeat of the Islamic State, which more or less happened. Oh, Trump said it happened before it happened. And he claimed instant and total victory. And that was false. But during his term, ISIS lost significant territorial control, governing capacity, revenue streams, conventional military strength. They're basically, they're almost nothing now. They're not a major fearful player in the region. So he did lie about how quickly that came about and how completely that came about and how it was only because of him. But you can't take the lies as evidence that the program didn't work. And of course, the things he gets wrong do lodge in your brain because it's wrong and shocking that a president lies like that. And so you pay attention. And of course, of course we shouldn't excuse dishonesty. Rhetoric shapes trust, legitimacy and long term cohesion. Leadership quality matters. But it does mean that holding a president to account for speech is not the same thing as holding power to account for outcomes. So what I generally do is I don't disregard Trump's lies. I track them down. But I discount his narration as an evaluation tool. I come back to what really happened after better conclusions can be drawn. We should all do this, but we don't. Was the last time you read or heard about that assessment of Fordeaux that I shared? Responsible media, even the ones who received the leaks at the time, if you recall all said things about now, this is preliminary now. We have to wait a long time for the better information to come out. Here was Ken Delaney, and on msnbc.

Kiko Toro (40:31)

These have been completely and totally obliterated.

Mike Pesca (40:34)

But three people familiar with the matter.

Kiko Toro (40:35)

Are telling NBC News there's a new.

Mike Pesca (40:37)

Intelligence assessment out today that paints a much different picture. This initial battle damage assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that this American.

Kiko Toro (40:45)

Bombing attack may have only set back.

Mike Pesca (40:47)

Iran's nuclear program by as little as.

Kiko Toro (40:49)

Three to six months.

Mike Pesca (40:50)

But of course, when the better information did come out, it wasn't as much as a story as it was in the immediate days after, when the strike was on everyone's mind, but so was contradicting the lies of Donald Trump. Just as Trump says whatever pops into his head, he has really bad impulse control. The media doesn't always exhibit the best habits of careful, considered communication. They don't lie exactly like Trump, but they're less than honest. I want to be fair. They're less than clear in a slightly different way. They don't lead you towards the truth, as maybe some different habits which take longer would accomplish. They allow disqualification over Trump's pronouncements to do too much work to cement in the public's mind an assessment of Trump's policies. Otherwise, critique becomes satisfying but shallow, accurate about the words in a way that Donald Trump isn't, but inaccurate and inattentive to the effects. And that's it for Today's show for 2026. Corey Wara is the producer. Jeff Craig runs our socials. We have a pretty great new website with a lot of features that Astrid Green contributed greatly to. Catherine Sykes. She's still doing the just list, which, you know, it's no longer discounted. We told you all about it. But please go and check that out@mike pesca.substack.com and still running it all, even in this late year. Michelle Pesca, CEO of Peach Fish Productions. And thanks for listening.