Everything About WTF With Venezuela That We Could Fit Into 1,600 Words Or Less!
Can we get some checks and balances over here? Ha ha, just kidding, that is not a thing anymore.
Saturday, the man who is somehow president and commander-in-chief of the United States and its armed forces went shopping for tile for his ballroom at a Florida strip mall. And then he went back to Mar-a-Lago, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put up some kind of impromptu war room with see-through curtains.
And then the military went in and bombed Venezuela, killing at least 80 civilians.
And US forces apprehended Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and flew them to the Brooklyn detention center. Maduro was in what looks like a VR headset, on his way to stand trial on charges of narco-terrorism, conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, and corruption.
It was shocking, but also kind of not, because Trump has been talking about wanting to take over Venezuela since his first term, telling a confused John Bolton that Venezuela was actually part of the United States. And in 2019, former US National Security Council official Fiona Hill told the House of Representatives in a deposition that in March, April and May of 2018, Russia had been pushing for a very weird quid pro quo (page 58):
And the Russians at this particular juncture were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine. In other words, if we were going to exert some semblance of the Monroe Doctrine of, you know, Russia keeping out of our backyard, because this is after the Russians had sent in these hundred operatives essentially to, you know, basically secure the Venezuelan Government and, you know, to preempt what they were obviously taking to be some kind of US military action, they were basically signaling: You know, you have your Monroe doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. We, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine.
Project 2025 also endorsed US takeover in Venezuela, see page 181, urging the US president to “unite the hemisphere against this significant but underestimated threat [of Venezuela] in the Southern Hemisphere.”
And now seems it has come to pass. Trump has done everything in his power to help out Russia with its invasion of Ukraine, from undercutting Congress’s attempts at sanctions to putting out a security manifesto rejecting any expansion of NATO and blaming Europe’s problems with Russia on Europe not being white and confident enough.
And now it seems Putin has returned the favor by turning a blind eye, other than some hypocritical words about how it was bad, and that the United Nations Security Council ought to meet and do something. That sounds like Putin making jokes!
So here we are. Donald Trump has done the thing, and if we know Donald Trump, he has a flawless plan for what to do next. Will Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Cortina Machado, leader of the opposition, be allowed to lead a democratic transition? Ha ha ha ha, you kid! The Washington Post reports that Trump is shitting on the very idea, as she committed the cardinal sin of accepting that Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump views as rightfully his, so now she is dead to him.
No, there’s been some kind of drug deal where Maduro’s veep Delcy Rodríguez gets to take over, which means this regime change hasn’t really changed much. And how did she manage to convince Team Trump she was the right person to do this?
Wellllll, reports the Miami Herald, she’s been talking to Ric Grenell and:
“Senior Venezuelan government officials, led by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez...have quietly promoted a series of initiatives in recent months aimed at presenting themselves to Washington as a “more acceptable” alternative to Nicolás Maduro’s regime...funneled through intermediaries in Qatar.” […]
According to sources, the proposals were presented to the White House and the State Department by U.S. Special Envoy Richard Grenell, who earlier this year met with Maduro at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas and helped secure the release of several American citizens whom Washington considered wrongfully imprisoned by the regime.
Oh, like last summer when Ric Grenell was freelancing Venezuela policy behind Marco Rubio’s back and the administration’s right hand had no fucking idea who the left hand was jerking off?
Cool, we are sure they have learned from those amateur hour mistakes by now!
Anyway, after Trump announced he and his Cabinet were going to be running Venezuela as a “group” or something, and he bragged that Rodríguez had told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” then Rodríguez publicly contradicted Trump, calling Maduro’s apprehension “shameful” and an “illegal kidnapping.”
Later Sunday, Trump huffed to The Atlantic, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Is that a death threat? Sounds like a death threat. Whatever it was, by last night, she made a statement WaPo called more “cautiously conciliatory,” so we’ll see how that holds.
Anyway, anyway!
Whatever the purpose of this mission — a war for oil that oil companies don’t actually want because they correctly think it is stupid? — it was not about stopping drugs. After all, Trump just pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of proudly flooding the US with literally tons of cocaine, earning millions for the world’s most violent cartels, and who got sentenced to 45 years in prison for that. But now Trump is blaming Rubio and Rubio is blaming Trump for that pardon, derp.
Awkward. Three-jobs Rubio looks like more of a soulless husk every day trying to keep up with the old man’s lies and contradictions. How-EVER will he succeed in his upcoming fourth job as the president of Venezuela?
And again, it was never about the drugs. Trump’s own intelligence says that Maduro never controlled the Tren de Aragua gang. Venezuela is not a main importer of drugs to the US and it does not export fentanyl to the US at all. And no fentanyl has been found on the boats Pete Hegseth has blown up, which have now killed at least 115 innocent-until-proven-guilty people since September. Venezuela’s port is a waypoint for cocaine, but an estimated less than eight percent of even the cocaine that flows through the port winds up in the US. Most of it goes to Europe.
Trump now seems to have completely forgotten that importing drugs was even his pretense in the first place, and is saying out loud that this coup was all about the oil:
And no, that video is not slowed down, Trump really does sound that unwell. So, anyway, forget the drugs, now the oil companies are going to go in, and “we” are going to take all of Venezuela’s oil. (Again, the oil companies don’t want it. But heeeennnngh, Trump does!)
Obviously the Duma Congress was not briefed or informed or asked permission about any of this. Ha ha! Even Susie Wiles knows that Trump is supposed to have congressional approval for war, but that’s old thinking in Putin’s America. Jim Himes, Democratic ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang Of Eight, which in normal times would have been briefed on this, explains:
By the way, the invasion or whatever this is of Venezuela is wildly unpopular with US voters. Only 35 percent of Americans support military action there, including only 66 percent of Republicans. Compare that to the invasion of Iraq, which more than 70 percent of Americans supported at the time.
And now Trump says Mexico and Greenland — which he says he “needs” —will be next. And maybe Cuba too. Or Colombia. Its president just called American leadership a “clan of pedophiles,” Trump gonna have to show him. Healthcare, housing, and schools at home, who needs ‘em. America first? No! America, he is going to use your tax money to go into more debt invading everywhere else!
The US as global lawless entity operating at the whims of Trump’s imperial fantasies is not just a problem for Venezuela, Mexico, Greenland, Cuba, or whatever the next stop on the imperialism tour happens to be. It’s a gift to would-be colonialists everywhere who might be considering the same. Like Russia and other former Soviet republics, or China and Taiwan. How much has US influence kept peace around the world in the past century? We will now all find out!
The US certainly would not like it if France came in and snatched Trump and threw him in La Santé Prison next to Carla Bruni’s husband for breaking French laws. But the new rule of law is, who the fuck is gonna stop us?
Where is all this headed? Stay tuned, we guess.
[The Atlantic archive link / NPR / Miami Herald]
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“The US certainly would not like it if France came in and snatched Trump and threw him in La Santé Prison next to Carla Bruni’s husband for breaking French laws.”
Uh, speak for yourself.
"Three-jobs Rubio looks like more of a soulless husk every day trying to keep up with the old man’s lies and contradictions."
It will never stop being funny to me how the right and centre punditocracy hailed this man and that weird deep-sea amalgam Ted Cruz as the future of the Republican Party not so long ago.