Anne Applebaum

This is not a bunch of elites or a bunch of rich people or a bunch of outsiders.

Machado represents...

very large part of the country, and she has enormous respect.

She is widely admired among all kinds of people, all kinds of demographics in all parts of the country.

And so the people were horrified by that.

People were also horrified by the initial impression is that Trump intends for the country to be run by the Maduro regime.

which is still in place and its own paramilitaries and its own police force are still in place, and somehow intends to monitor it from the outside through blockades, somehow controlling oil revenue.

And it's very unclear how that's going to happen and how that's going to work and what it's going to mean for ordinary Venezuelans.

And, you know, the people I talk to go kind of way up and down, you know, like one day, maybe it's going to be all right.

You know, maybe this is a transition phase and eventually we'll have our own legitimate leaders.

And then they seem more, you know, a lot more worried.

Very hard for me to tell you what direction this is going.

It's not unprecedented for the U.S.

to be involved in some kind of leadership chain in Latin America, but it's

the way this is happening and the language that Trump is using is totally unprecedented.

I mean, he's talking about Venezuela very much as we're taking their oil.

You know, the point of occupying Venezuela or blockading Venezuela is to take their natural resources for the purposes of Americans.

So he sounds not just like an imperialist.

I mean, he sounds like a kind of... I mean, you'd have to go back, you know, before the British Empire.

I mean, it's a kind of rapacious, extortionate...