Apple News Today
Trump didn’t take military action against Venezuela in his first term. Here’s what changed.
10 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamitza Basu. Today, how to make sense of the U.S. 's operation in Venezuela. It's been just about a week since the world learned of the U.S. special operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores. It came after months of mounting U.S. military pressure on the country. Trump has said that the U.S.
will run Venezuela for as long as necessary, years even, though what exactly that means remains unclear.
Chapter 2: What triggered the recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela?
Any kinds of moves like the ones the administration has made in recent days— have just immense consequences that can ricochet in countless directions. That's New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer.
Just the degree of uncertainty and confusion at a time when the actual human and political consequences are as grave as they are, I think has made the situation absolutely astonishing to try to follow. Jonathan has been reporting on immigration and foreign policy for years.
And the way he sees it, Venezuela sits at the nexus of so many interconnected Trump administration priorities, from stemming migration to addressing drug trafficking to amassing natural resources. I sat down with Jonathan to ask him to untangle the reasons why he says Venezuela has long been an obvious target for Trump and for the people in his orbit. A few factors at play.
To begin with, you have people like Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, who have long had designs on ousting the current regime in Venezuela for a whole host of reasons. And to be clear, the Maduro regime in Venezuela was a brutal, repressive, dictatorial regime. There was never any question about that. And it was, in very obvious ways, illegitimate.
Most specifically, in July of 2024, there were national elections in Venezuela. Maduro lost, declared himself the winner, and that was that. And since 2013, for instance, there have been 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country as it's essentially collapsed. economic failures, repression. Just the country has really been completely upended in the last decade plus.
So given that backdrop, you have someone like Rubio, who has always had this ideological position about the need to topple the Venezuelan regime as a way of eradicating the wider region of the kind of scourge of socialist dictatorships. Specifically, what is the main obsession for Rubio is the regime in Cuba.
And so Venezuela, the thinking goes, is basically propping up the Cuban regime by giving them oil, essentially providing them with some sort of lifeblood to prop up a failing government in Cuba. And so the logic always was that if you could remove that piece in Venezuela... Then the Cuban regime is, you know, on borrowed time.
The socialist regime in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, is also extremely vulnerable. And so for someone with that kind of design for the region, Venezuela has always loomed large. Then you have the element of Trump and what he represents. Trump is actually a somewhat complicated figure in all of this.
In his first administration, he did a lot of saber rattling about the need for regime change in Venezuela. He talked about the idea that Maduro had to be ousted. He tried to use strong rhetoric as a way of scaring or pressuring members of the military in Venezuela to break ranks with the Maduro regime and instigate some kind of coup or transition. None of that worked.
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Chapter 3: Why was Venezuela considered a target for the Trump administration?
officials with expertise in the region who all told me to a person how struck they were by the fact that the first boat bombing consisted of an attack on a boat with 11 people on it. Everyone with kind of knowledge of these sorts of operations said to me,
Very suspicious, very strange that there'd be that many people on one of these boats, because typically, drug smuggling operations, every person you have means drugs you can't transport because of the weight. These are small vessels.
And so a lot of people said to me immediately after that very first bombing, like, there's something that doesn't add up here, which, again, just speaks to the fact that we know next to nothing. And traditionally, what would happen is if the U.S. government thought that there were boats smuggling drugs to the The Coast Guard would intercept them. It would apprehend them.
And some sense would be made of what they were actually doing. And that would be that. Obviously, that did not happen in any of these cases. And so I think it had much more to do with... the administration's interest in flexing its muscles and in propping up a narrative of drugs overtaking the United States when the administration initially offered its justification for those strikes.
What it said was this was an action taken in national self-defense because the presence of drugs in the United States was causing massive overdoses. The lion's share of overdoses in the United States in recent years, which very much should be a source of concern for any American administration, are the result of fentanyl, not cocaine.
Fentanyl does not come from Venezuela or travel along these particular routes. The Coast Guard has never seized fentanyl in the Caribbean Sea. So right out of the gate, the pretense kind of unraveled.
So it's hard to even really think about those boat bombings in specific relation to the rationale given by the administration, because no actual factual element of that rationale made sense, I will say, alongside all of that.
this happened a little bit later at the end of November, the president pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Nendez, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States on the charges of narco-terrorism.
So the idea somehow that the Trump administration would be concerning itself with Venezuela and the wider region out of concern for drug smuggling and drugs reaching the United States And then at the same time, have the U.S.
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Chapter 4: What factors influenced Trump's initial reluctance to intervene in Venezuela?
He's not recognized by the European Union and multiple countries around the world. He is a fugitive of American justice with a $50 million reward. He was trying, again, to, in the face of all the evidence that we were seeing, portray this operation as something that was more limited and more localized around a law enforcement objective. And Trump obliterated that line right there on the podium.
Let's talk about this regime change, even the phrase regime change being used here, right? I mean, we've seen now Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, is leading the country. You recently wrote that now she finds herself in this strange position of really having to...
Please, two distinctly different audiences, one being the Trump administration and the other being the regime that she now helms, really the Maduro regime. Can you speak to how that dynamic is playing out in real time and some of the risks that lie ahead for her? Absolutely. So a few thoughts on it.
First, just speaking in relation to Delcy Rodriguez herself, this is someone who has been one of the staunchest loyalists to Maduro from the very beginning. Her political fortunes are tied to Maduro's rise. She was vice president at the time of Maduro's ouster. She was vice president because Maduro had picked her personally to that role. Her brother was Maduro's chief political strategist.
He presided over the National Congress. He was responsible for ramming through the fraudulent 2024 election. Now, this is someone who is implicated in all of the misdeeds of the Maduro regime. And so if the administration, the US administration, comes out and says Maduro was illegitimate, And there's good reason to say that of Maduro.
It is a head scratcher to then name his number two who participated in all of the illegitimacy of that regime to this new position of power. The regime has always been able to persist without Maduro. Those elements remain in place. And this has always actually been a legitimate political conundrum for anyone who has advocated any sort of regime change or intervention in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan opposition has a broad popular mandate. It won national elections in 2024, but it is viewed with hostility and hatred by the very people who control the country, members of the military, members of the government as it is now. And so there was always going to be this question of what you do.
And so it seems like the Trump administration threw up its hands, cast the Venezuelan opposition to the side, and decided to allow for Maduro's number two to take power. And then Trump, in his characteristic way, said the day after she was sworn in that if she doesn't do what we say, then she'll suffer a fate worse than Maduro's. You know, what does this mean for Venezuelans living in Venezuela?
It means horrible, unsettling things. One of the things that Maduro had done... before he thought he was actually going to be captured, but when it was clear that the U.S. administration was ramping up pressure to dislodge him from power, was he did what most strongmen would do under the circumstances.
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