Back to Business
If you’re a long-time reader, you know I struggle to avoid work during vacations. I love my job. This year, I really did try to unplug as best I could. It wasn’t completely possible, but I tried.
And I’m really thankful the President waited until this weekend to deal with Venezuela. But Venezuela needed to be dealt with. I’ll dive into this and a ton more on the show today. As always, you can listen live right here starting at noon Eastern time.
I do have some thoughts right now, though.
First, what comes next is obviously the big issue. The President, as is his habit, spoke unscripted and said we’d control Venezuela. That would actually take an act of Congress to be involved with. Instead, Marco Rubio says we will be working with the existing socialist government and using an oil embargo and other pressure points to get what we want.
What we want is the restoration of the lawful government. It appears there will be a transition period. It is also abundantly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that parts of Maduro’s regime were working against him. The Delta forces had a detailed schematic of both Maduro’s compound and his travel.
A smart guess would be that the acting President, who is, among other things, blaming the Jews and attacking Trump, is doing so internally to prevent further chaos. But, behind the scenes, she is cooperating with the United States.
Over the weekend, one of the commenters here suggested that even the enemies of Maduro in Venezuela should start shooting at us because of what we did. It was a pretty ignorant reaction because Maduro lost the last election and refused to leave power. The people of Venezuela voted him out of office. The celebrations in the streets of Caracas should tell you everything you need to know. Not since Dorothy threw water on the Wicked Witch of the West have a captured people celebrated so joyously. Again, we clearly had internal cooperation with portions of Maduro’s regime.
The reality on the ground is also complicated. Maduro has controlled Venezuela with the help of Iranian-backed guerrillas, narcoterrorists, and criminal gangs. We have not wiped those people out, which means they are still a threat to both the lawful government and any Americans who enter the country to help. That all puts the acting president’s comments into context. We actually blew up a Hezbollah drone manufacturing facility in Venezuela as part of the operation.
This is just the beginning of something, not the end.
There is also an additional aspect of this.
Before leaving office in his first term, then President Trump mobilized the Organization of American States against Maduro. He built up a diplomatic presence in Central and South America to obstruct and oppose Maduro. The project remained uncompleted when he left office.
Biden, as Biden was prone to do, insisted he knew better and scrapped the whole diplomatic effort, deciding to rebuild it in his own image. This is also the man who famously thought partitioning Iraq into three pieces was a winning idea, even as the Iraqis, Turks, Saudis, and Israelis assured him it would lead to more war. Biden always presumed he knew best.
The result was a retrenchment of Maduro’s regime, Maduro giving land to Iran and Hezbollah, Maduro inviting in the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian navies to train with his navy, and the expansion of Maduro’s global drug trafficking operations.
Trump now, instead of rebuilding what Biden let crumble, just jumped ahead to arrest. While we can all scream about the constitutionality of it, there are precedents from Reagan in Grenada to Bush 41 in Panama. Congress could intervene, but we all know it won’t, so the precedent will stand.
Arresting Maduro has provoked American progressives to take to the streets to support the narcoterrorist regime. Maduro is not just the first illegal alien the Democrats do not want in America, but another communist dictator they want preserved in power. Had Trump arrested Benjamin Netanyahu, the left would be celebrating in the streets. Instead, they are upset because Maduro has been toppled.
The left is, yet again, exposing itself as anti-American. They can hide behind the constitutionality of the issue, but in the streets of our nation’s cities, they are praising Maduro and attacking Trump. In Venezuelan communities from New York City to Miami to Madrid, there are celebrations and Venezuelan and American flags flying. From Minneapolis to New York City, white progressives are burning the American flag, denouncing Donald Trump, and demanding the release of Maduro.
Don’t think this won’t have an impact on Hispanic voters.
In Chicago, the teachers’ union, which organized a No Kings protest, is now urging people to take to the streets in support of an actual dictator who actually murdered his citizens, shut down opposition newspapers, and all the other things they claim Trump might do.
Donald Trump is not a popular President. But people still prefer him to Democrats. Seeing progressives cheer for a dictator who has murdered his own people, all while claiming Donald Trump is an authoritarian threat, is a bit too much for normal people.
What comes next remains an open question. For now, Maduro needed to be toppled. Joe Biden claimed he would build pressure to make it happen. Donald Trump actually did it. That is a good thing.
It also separates Trump from a part of the “America First” base that is actually America last. Additionally, let us not be distracted from what is happening in Iran. The people have risen against the Mullahs. When this last happened, Barack Obama turned his back on them. Let’s hope this President does not. They do not need direct military help. But they could use the encouragement of the leader of the free world, which they have so far gotten.
Against the Kooks
Had the situation in Venezuela not happened, I would have started this morning here, but it has provided me a great way to move forward.
Tucker Carlson is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.
Steve Bannon, who worked to rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s image, is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.
Candace Owens is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.
Marjorie Taylor Green is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — they are all on the side of the Woke Reich in opposition to what Donald Trump did.
If we could ignore all of them, we should. But they do have large followings and shape a lot of online conversations. I say that because I know few people offline who really pay attention to them. But a lot of online conversations drift offline.
The problem for the right these days is that the fringe of the right online is loud and assertive and risks placing much of the right in a bubble in the way the loud online left got Democrats in a bubble, such that they still believe boys can magically become girls.
It is important to note that these people hate America. They hate a robust military that is capable of doing what ours did. They hate a President confidently steering global foreign policy to the benefit of the United States. They hope you are too ignorant to know that a strong American foreign policy and our engagement in the world make America safer.
They want America off the world stage. They want Iran and Qatar propped up in the Middle East, Russia dominant in Europe, and China unchallenged in the world. I would not be surprised that, at some future date, we find Qatar and China have been funding much of this. We know already that Code Pink has financial ties to China.
We must be against the kooks. Whether it is the online pastors who demand Christian Nationalism as a proxy for white superiority or the people who claim to be on the right, but hate America, we must not give in to the kooks. By the way, many of them sound like Maduro’s Vice President, who, as I mentioned above, is today blaming the Jews for what happened. No, seriously.
Rush Limbaugh once humorously referred to many of these sorts of people as the keepers of odd knowledge society. And, to a degree, we should laugh now. They put Trump in the White House, thinking they could shape his tenure. It turns out, they, no more than we, can control a man who clearly is not listening to their podcasts. They should be the butt of jokes. They believe they can steer an unsteerable President and he keeps snatching the football away from them. Their reaction is to blame the Jews.
If Trump is not listening to them, neither should we, but we should also make clear they do not speak for us, our movement, or our values. They hate America as it is and wish to remake it in their own image — in the image of cranks and kooks.
Welcome back! Was very kind of Trump to wait until after the peak holiday season to take Maduro. 😀 Trump is Trump - one step forward take Maduro, two steps back “Greenland is next…” Thank goodness for Marco Rubio, and what an amazing and impressive mission by our military, CIA, DEA and whoever else was involved.
The Democrats are showing their butts (hate Putin, but love his puppet Maduro), and the woke right have become jokes amongst normal conservatives. MTG is a full blown clown. Thank goodness she’s retiring! 2026 is going to be a great, fun and memorable year. Go Iranians!
That trusty old shibboleth: When reasoned argument fails, just blame the Jews.