The Fallout from the Capture of Nicolás Maduro
From the daily newsletter: making sense of the Venezuela operation, and what might come next.
Photograph by Adam Gray / Reuters
Donald Trump came to power, in part, by calling out his party’s modern foreign-policy failures. “America First” would also mean America in fewer places—an end to the military adventurism, nation-building, and forever wars that marked the Bush era after 9/11. In his second term, Trump has styled himself as “the President of peace” (accepting an invented peace prize from the world soccer organization FIFA and openly campaigning for the real one from the Nobel committee) while pursuing military action in Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, and, now, Venezuela. After the capture of Nicolás Maduro over the weekend, Trump said that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela, and stated that America is “not afraid of boots on the ground.”
As with all Trumpian contradictions, the question was not if prominent members of the MAGA movement would back the latest abrupt change in plans but how eagerly they would get in line. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is now making ominous threats to Cuba. And Stephen Miller, the President’s No. 1 adviser, is laying new rhetorical groundwork for an imperial seizure of Greenland. Yet, notably, Vice-President J. D. Vance appeared largely absent from the planning of the Venezuela operation and has been more measured in his support of it, as our political correspondent Benjamin Wallace-Wells explores in a new piece today. Vance’s political identity was formed by his feelings of betrayal as a young soldier in Iraq—and his own America First bona fides have been central to his political ascension. In his public comments on the attack, which he posted on X, Vance “sounded faintly lawyerly and quietly anguished,” Wallace-Wells writes, and even acknowledged that there had been “a lot of criticism about oil.” Was the Vice-President sidelined, beat out by the hawks around him? Or, as Wallace-Wells suggests, is he making his own calculations as the best-positioned heir to Trump’s political movement, waiting to see how this plays with the base?
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the fallout from the attack is still being felt in real time. Javier Corrales, an expert on Venezuelan politics, tells Isaac Chotiner about the autocratic methods that Maduro used to maintain power, and what might happen to the regime in his absence. The country is now being led by the former Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, who is trying to appease Trump and fend off internal challenges, as our foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson explains on the latest episode of the Political Scene podcast. “I guess she’s expected to keep the heads of the military and the intelligence services from doing any power grabs or displacing her,” Anderson says. “But there may be mutual suspicions there. So it’s kind of a knife-edge situation.”
Here in the U.S., Maduro was arraigned yesterday in federal court in Manhattan. The legal writer Cristian Farias attended the hearing, and reports on the scene that unfolded in the courtroom. Maduro tried to give a statement (“I consider myself a prisoner of war”) before being cut off by the judge, the ninety-two-year-old Alvin Hellerstein, who clearly wanted matters to proceed in their normal, subdued course. Farias lays out why certain elements of this case may eventually reach the Supreme Court. But, for now, this “simultaneously dramatic yet profoundly quotidian hearing” was the first phase in a fraught prosecution by the government, which, as Farias points out, has been pursuing an aggressive detention-and-deportation program against Venezuelan migrants for the past year. “By forcibly bringing Maduro and his wife into the jurisdiction of the federal courts,” Farias writes, “the Trump Administration will now have to accept, if only tacitly, that at least two Venezuelans deserve the basic human right to be heard before the government attempts to take their life or liberty.”
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P.S. Nancy Kerrigan has her own not so great memories of January 6th. After all, it was on this day, in 1994, that a man working with the ex-husband of Tonya Harding, her chief American rival, bashed Kerrigan’s knee with a police baton. ⛸️
Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.