We are stuck in one helluva mess now. Trump may have aspired at one point to be the next Ronald Reagan, but it looks like he landed on Dick Cheney. And as to the “No New Wars” policy of MAGA, it looks like it took very little time for that directive to fade and go up in smoke. Rick Wilson parses through the madness of this weekend.
In the small hours of January 3–4, 2026, the finest military in the world followed orders and pulled off the kind of cinematic, chest-out, flag-snapping operation that makes cable news producers reach for the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” lower-third: U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and hauled them to the United States to face narco-terrorism / drug-trafficking charges.
And yes, of course, we could do it. I know the MAGA horde wants to think Trump fast-roped down from a Chinook with Delta and personally kicked down the door, but who’s surprised this worked?
No one, that’s who.
It is adorable that anyone thinks a paranoid petro-dictator in a crumbling police state had much of a chance against the United States when Washington decides to reach out and touch someone. If you have the world’s most capable special operators, aviation assets, intelligence services, and logistics, you can grab a man. You can always grab a man.
But here’s the part the MAGA fireworks brigade doesn’t understand:
Snatching the bad guy is the easy part.
The hard part is what happens next: when the cameras leave, when the speeches fade, and when reality shows up with the butcher’s bill.
And this is where the danger starts, because the Trump administration is built to win new cycles, not outcomes.
Regime change doesn’t work if you’re not offering something better. And a nation in Trump’s name and image isn’t selling anything that works.
Maduro is a bad actor. From my assessment, he has exactly zero defenders. Brutal, corrupt, illegitimate, pick your adjective, you’ll still be understating it.
But as we’ve learned at significant cost of pain and treasure in the past 30 years, ridding the world of bad guys is only step one. Step two is the part where you build something that doesn’t instantly collapse into chaos, revenge, sectarian hatred, corruption, and another strongman with better PR.
Right now, we seem to be offering the current Maduro Administration without the big boss, but no turn to democracy or prosperity for Venezuela, just an American Viceroy in the form of Marco Rubio and a claque of oil company executives. It’s like the Marshall Plan, without a plan. Or Marshall.
Regime change doesn’t work when you’re not offering an order that looks like democracy. Even when you are offering democracy, it’s dicey.
When you’re offering… whatever this kleptocratic ad-hocracy is, it’s going to be a clustertrump from day one. Trump openly talking about the U.S. “running” Venezuela “for now,” and hinting at an oil-centered “rebuild” that smells like an American-managed petrostate, it stops being dicey and becomes reckless.
This is the core problem with Trumpism in foreign policy: it confuses force with legitimacy and plunder with strategy.
It was a core critique of the Old GOP by Trump and the MAGA movement that regime change and nation-building were the antithesis of America First. But now we’re going to “run Venezuela.” Right.
One should never underestimate the moral flexibility of MAGA, so of course, they’re cheerleading madly now, urging Trump to topple Cuba, then Colombia next, and Mexico thereafter, all-in on building satrapies on the southern border.
Because that worked out so beautifully at the end of the last century, and because Venezuelans, who have endured decades of propaganda about Yankee imperialism, are going to greet “temporary American control of your oil industry” like it’s the second coming.
We didn’t remove the regime. We removed one man.
True enough. The regime is still there and while it may temporarily lack a head, hydra-like, it has others and it can grow more. Trump proceeds from some naive, fantasy world that all will be calm in Venezuela and his oil-imperialism will enrich the coffers he wants to enrich and it will all be fine. It will not all be fine. We are in for one ugly situation that will rival both Iraq and Vietnam for messiness and longevity.
The stupidity of trump is absolutely appalling. There’s no way in hell he can run Venezuela. He can’t even run his own administration. Venezuelans are going to say, “Thanks for getting rid of Maduro. We’ll take over from here. We’ll run our own country. If you want to help modernize our oil industry, we can talk. Otherwise FO.”
Reminds me of that old calypso song:
Trump drilled her,
Trump spilled her,
Trump filled her,
and took our money to
Run Venezuela.
(With apologies to the late, great Harry Belafonte)
I hope Little Donnie Jr is eying a highfalutin’ position in the Venezuelan government as their new Cartels Director, aka Cocaine Kingpin. It would suit him to be able to snort every hour of the day without having to pay for it, and white powder paradise might finally finish him off.
Happy New Year, Ursula! I enjoyed ushering in the New Year with the witticisms of Rick Wilson’s sarky derision. That man is the Sultan of Satire, and I’m here for it!