Teddy Roosevelt would have loved this.
We woke up this morning to learn that the United States had captured the rogue Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and was flying him out of Venezuela to face trial in the United States. President Trump had been increasing pressure on Maduro and his illegal government for months, terming the Venezuelan leader a “narco terrorist” whose illegal activities threatened the welfare of the United States and the safety of its citizens. The President of the United States has the power to do this. Trump did it.
U.S. forces encountered no significant resistance from Venezuelan air defenses or land forces (the government had claimed to have an arsenal capable of repelling such a U.S. operation). It appears that no U.S. military personnel lost their lives, though we should be cautious in this regard, because all of the facts aren’t in yet. However, as with the strike on Iran, the U.S. operation in Venezuela unquestionably benefited the U.S. and its public, as well as the nation of Venezuela, which had been dominated by a ruthless dictator who would not allow fair elections since he has ruled Venezuela by decree since 2015.
The incursion is legitimately termed a law enforcement operation. Your Trump Deranged Facebook Friends will conveniently omit the fact that Maduro has been under Federal indictment since 2020. The indictment reads in part,
Since at least 1999, Maduro Moros, Cabello Rondón, Carvajal Barrios and Alcalá Cordones, acted as leaders and managers of the Cártel de Los Soles, or “Cartel of the Suns.” The Cartel’s name refers to the sun insignias affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials. Maduro Moros and the other charged Cartel members abused the Venezuelan people and corrupted the legitimate institutions of Venezuela—including parts of the military, intelligence apparatus, legislature, and the judiciary—to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States. The Cártel de Los Soles sought to not only enrich its members and enhance their power, but also to “flood” the United States with cocaine and inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in the United States.
The justification for the raid begins with the Monroe Doctrine, in which President James Monroe declared in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere is a distinct sphere of influence where the U.S. legitimately dominates for its own security. The U.S. has relied on the Doctrine to justify military operations in Granada, Panama and Cuba, where an Eisenhower operation to remove Fidel Castro was botched by tyro President John F. Kennedy shortly after he succeeded Ike.
Jonathan Turley, who does know his Constitution and legal precedents, quickly took to Fox News to explain why President Trump was acting within his authority. He writes in part…
…There is a pending 2020 indictment of Maduro in the Southern District of New York where he is expected to be taken to face prosecution.
The operation comes not long after the 37th anniversary of the capture of Manuel Antonio Noriega on Dec. 20, 1989. Noriega was convicted of drug and money laundering offenses and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was tried in Miami….This operation will be justified as executing the criminal warrant and responding to an international drug cartel, a very similar legal framework to the one used against Noriega. There is precedent supporting that earlier operation, which will now be used to defend the actions in Venezuela…Democratic members quickly denounced the operation as unlawful. They may want to review past cases, particularly the decision related to the Noriega prosecution after his capture by the administration of President George H.W. Bush.”
No they won’t. Trump did it, so Democrats will now declare that he has “defied democratic norms” and committed an impeachable offense. “Without authorization from Congress, and with the vast majority of Americans opposed to military action, Trump just launched an unjustified, illegal strike on Venezuela. He says we don’t have enough money for healthcare for Americans, but somehow we have unlimited funds for war?” wrote Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass). Democrats are ethically estopped from making that hypocritical argument. We don’t have enough money to protect the public from drug cartels, but we have unlimited funds for forgiving student loans? Slavery reparations? Pointless expenditures to stop speculative “climate change”?
Back to Turley:
“Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation. Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this “kill list” policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.
“Ordinarily, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and other international agreements require the United States to notify the embassy of a foreign national arrested and held in the United States. Notice seems a tad superfluous in this case.
“In his appeal, Noriega argued that his arrest violated international law under the head-of-state immunity doctrine. The district court rejected Noriega’s head-of-state immunity claim because the United States government never recognized Noriega as Panama’s legitimate ruler — an argument that will be made in the Maduro prosecution. The United States for the Eleventh Circuit also rejected the immunity claim.
“Noriega also argued that his capture violated the Treaty Providing for the Extradition of Criminals, May 25, 1904, United States of America-Republic of Panama, 34 Stat. 2851 (“U.S.-Panama Extradition Treaty“). The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992), however, was found to bar this argument. The issue was whether he was abducted to the United States with a superseding extradition treaty …Legally, Trump has the upper hand in this case. Maduro will replay the arguments of Noriega, if anything, he makes for a weaker case on the merits under the controlling precedent…”
The Democrats and their Axis of Unethical Conduct allies will now continue their 2025 obsession with supporting the most despicable rogues, miscreants and lawbreakers imaginable because President Trump has opposed them: illegal immigrants, domestic abusers, drug smugglers, assassins, terrorists, anti-Semites, DEI hucksters, corrupt prosecutors, demented puppet Presidents, Somali fraudsters, a New York communist and now a brutal dictator.
The apparent agreed-upon spin is that the President started a war without consulting Congress. First, there is no indication as yet that the action started a war. If Venezuela’s new leaders react by saying, “Thanks! We needed that!” as Panama did after Noriaga’s removal, the argument will be moot. Meanwhile, given Congressional Democrats’ proven untrustworthiness and intractable determination to foil whatever the elected President (“He’s evil! EVIL!”)tries to do, it would have been pure incompetence to brief the likes of “the Squad” and Eric Swalwell regarding an operation that had to be secret in order to succeed.
In short, regarding last night’s operation, GOOD.
Or as Teddy would put it, “Bully!”
Ethics Alarms 
Sounds good. Now just send the actually elected leader to Venezuela to take charge and it’ll be set. That might also need some support from the U.S., but it was not really a close election — Maduro just stole it.
There is zero chance of the legitimately elected leader being installed now. Trump has said so. Rule will be from the US.
Well, my sister is horrified. She wonders how we would feel if someone did this to us.
My response — if it was Trump, MSNBC would be applauding the move. She doesn’t agree.
The other thing I wonder — what if we did this to Putin? What would people’s reactions be? Not that I think we would, although is being a mass murderer better than being a drug lord? Knotty question.
One key point. Maduro didn’t have nukes. I would say Tehran better take a hard look at what they’re doing right now.
In a way this is to stop Putin. Right after he took over, Russia walked in to take over the oil production. It’s a lot easier to stop someone who is short on funds.
Regime change in Cuba falls within the parameters of the Monroe doctrine. I am wondering whether Trump is pondering that option.
I do not think Trump is weighing in on regime change in Russia or Iran, given the experiences with Iraq and Afghanistan.
I wonder whether all the Venezuelans living in South Florida under who knows what immigration classification will be “encouraged” to return to their country.
Trump owns and operates the Doral golf course and resort in, or adjacent to, what is now the city of Doral, Florida, and the epicenter of the Venezuelan expat population. I wonder whether Trump’s interactions with the Venezuelans relating to the golf course and result didn’t lead to his focusing on Maduro. He may have become sympathetic to their plight on a personal level. Or, they may have given him lots of campaign funds. Latins know very well how the game is played. And Miamian Marco Rubio may have also pushed this very hard as well.
Venezuela was doing more or less all right (at least for South America) due to oil wealth until the foolish election of far-left Hugo Chavez, a former military officer who may have also been nuts (at one point he appeared at the UN immediately after George W. Bush and said he could still smell the sulfur and brimstone). He turned the nation into a cult of personality and was faced with very inept opposition. He was popular with the poor, who constituted a big enough chunk of the population to keep him in power through three elections, and I have no doubt that he would have found a way to stay in power through more (although that’s supposed to be all you get in Venezuela) if his career hadn’t been ended by cancer in March 2013. It also proved to be an end, or at least a move away from the recent marea rosa (pink tide) or giro a la izquierda (turn to the left) in Latin America that gave us tyrants who were corrupt like Brazil’s Lula or idiots like Bolivia’s Evo Morales, all of the leaders in which looked to Chavez as a potential and ultimately actual successor to Castro, last of the Cold War dictators.
Maduro, a former bus driver turned politician, had all of Chavez’s tyrannical impulses, but few of his abilities and none of his charisma. In the end he was just a thug like Hoxha or Ceaucescu, but with a pretty much limitless source of funds and muscle. In Columbia, the drug cartels may have been the power behind the government, but in Venezuela under Maduro, the cartels were the government. Unfortunately, those in the primary business of drug manufacture and sales do not tend to be very good at government. Venezuela famously had clinics staffed by Cuban doctors and state-run grocery stores, but that has long fallen apart. Maduro wasn’t even popular with this own people anymore and pretty decisively lost the last election, but, like Hamas in the Palestinian territories, once he was in, he wasn’t going out willingly, never mind those inconvenient things like elections (of course Jimmy Carter once said there were questions about our election in 2004, but Venezuela’s elections the same year were totally on the up and up). At that point he ceased to be a legitimate head of state and became a rogue dictator.
No one before now had the moxie or the resources (or in Biden’s case, the competence) to take him down. Apparently, Trump had been planning this for a while, and it was long overdue. Venezuela was a source of oil for tyrants, a rising staging area for enemies of the US in this hemisphere, a factory for addictive drugs, and potentially, with the wealth acquired from this drug trade, a corrupter of elections at who knows what level. Maduro was Noriega on steroids, and there was just no upside to allowing him to remain in power. He was a mini-Stalin, maybe not as cruel to his own people as Saddam Hussein or as much of a headline-grabber as Moammar Gaddafi in his day, but just as bad for the world generally.
The problem here is the one that’s always plagued this nation. We are VERY good at winning wars. We are not so good at winning the peaces that follow. I hope for Trump’s sake he’s got some local leaders waiting in the wings AND a plan. He said we’re going to run Venezuela for now, but he was light on details as to how. We don’t need another Iraq.
With the recent track record of NY courts, the fact that the Southern District will have jurisdiction gives me some pause. However, I just looked up the US Attorney for the district and he seems to be a straight shooter: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/meet-us-attorney
Let’s hope the presiding justice is similarly inclined.
Side note: you may have seen this already but Trump has updated the Monroe Doctrine to the “Donroe Doctrine”. Say what you will about the man but he is consistently funny: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2007499620872487210
That is terrific.
But wait…there’s more.
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2007546721598079414
Unpresidential? Mmm…possibly.
Hilarious? Absolutely.
It also occurs to me that the left spent endless hours speculating that Donald Trump would refuse to leave office if he lost the election. They thought the military should march him out of the White House in that instance.
Well, as it happened, Trump did lose and did leave office.
Maduro lost his election and he did refuse to leave office. He’s no longer a recognized elected head of state. The Venezuelan military didn’t march him out of office — so our military did instead.
Somehow I don’t think this line of reasoning is going to get much play on MSNBC. But prove me wrong?
“Well, as it happened, Trump did lose and did leave office.”
But not before inciting an insurrection, remember? The Left will never acknowledge that Trump would have exited the office peacefully.
I am curious about the reactions of the left next week in Congress.
Celebrations in New York City and in Miami.
Oh, the deeply viscid irony!
No one, and I mean NO ONE, embarrassingly self-parodies themselves like self-awareness bereft white Lefties!
PWS
So what is the legal justification for kidnapping Majuro’s wife?
Is she under indictment, sorry, “pending” indictment, too?
Meanwhile, the actually convicted narcotics warlord who was in US custody has been pardoned and released, 1 year into a 45 year sentence.
As for the oil assets being purloined now by the US, what is the legal justification for that?
It’s one thing to do an abominable act because you have to, and then claim necessity – as with Mers el Kebir or Narvik, but another to try to claim it’s all legal and nice, as Molotov did with the invasions of the Baltics and Finland.
1.The U.S. government’s legal justification for the capture of Cilia Flores, the wife of Nicolás Maduro, is a
sealed federal indictment from a New York grand jury that charges her with involvement in a narco-terrorism conspiracy and other related crimes. Thus it is legal.
2. You know that what has been done with X is irrelevant to whether what is done with Y is appropriate or not.
3. Venezuela “nationalized” (as in “stole”) US owned oil fields.
You got in before me. Took me too long to look up the federal court records. I could weasel out with the “I was just asking questions” defence, but that would be intellectually dishonest. You deserve better, and frankly, it would be beneath me too. I screwed up and you deserve my thanks for giving me a courteous reply.
Federal docket 1:11-cr-00205-AKH went through Manhattan federal court (SDNY) under Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein. His wife, Cilia Flores and son are also on the indictment.
Rumours of a ham sandwich also being on the indictment have not been confirmed at this time. The indictment is sealed.
There is no plan apparently to install any democratically elected leader. It will be a colony ruled from, by, and for the Trump cartel pro tempore. Trump has just stated that all the oil was stolen, and all will be returned to the US.