It would be hard to blame someone who woke up Saturday morning — seeing the news that the United States had invaded Venezuela and exfiltrated its dictatorial ruler — and thought he or she might still be dreaming.
A hard pinch and a cup of coffee later, and reality set in. But questions remain.
So what does this mean politically, and what should Americans make of what happened?
Here are some takeaways as the dust settles on Caracas:
1. It was an audacious and surprising move for a president who campaigned against American intervention.
Donald Trump, the "America First" candidate and president, has turned out to be rather hawkish. In less than 12 months in office this second time around, he's conducted strikes in seven countries — Iran, Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and, this weekend, oversaw a daring middle-of-the-night raid in Venezuela. U.S. forces captured the country's president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, sending them to New York to stand trial for drug trafficking.
To call the action surprising and eye-opening doesn't quite do it justice, especially considering Trump made his bones in opposition to neoconservatives' "endless wars" and nation-building in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Saturday, Trump said the United States is going to "run" the country until he finds a suitable leader.
"Well, we're gonna be running it with a group," Trump said, "and we're gonna make sure it's run properly."
He noted that "people that are standing right behind me" are going to run it. That included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Rubio on Sunday tried to walk that back some, describing what the U.S. is doing as a "quarantine," meant to effect "policy."
2. Like Iraq, there have been shifting justifications for removing Maduro.
As the United States was about to commit to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein from Iraq 20-plus years ago now, the Bush administration made different arguments and justifications for intervention that seemed to shift like the sand of the Middle East.
Was it that Saddam Hussein was funding the kinds of terrorists who were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks? Was it getting rid of a dictator who didn't align with American values? Was it creating a democracy that could be a model for the rest of the Middle East to follow? Or was it that he had weapons of mass destruction that he couldn't be allowed to keep before they resulted in a "mushroom cloud," as then-President George W. Bush warned in 2002?
In the case of Maduro, is it regime change because of a dictator who again doesn't align with American values, combating drug trafficking, leveraging oil or some version of all of the above? Each of those has had their moments as the justification for the Trump administration's saber-rattling.
During Saturday's news conference, Trump stressed oil as a key motivator. He said American oil companies would be going in and modernizing the country's oil production and refinement capabilities. He said the companies would invest billions and "use that money in Venezuela." He said that the "biggest beneficiary are going to be the people of Venezuela" and Venezuelan ex-pats in the U.S. It's unclear how that would be managed.
Trump has a long history of saying the United States should "take the oil."
"You're not stealing anything," Trump said of taking oil from Iraq in a 2011 interview with ABC. "We're reimbursing ourselves."
Fast-forward to 2023, when Trump was out of office, talking about Venezuela.
"We're buying oil from Venezuela," Trump said during an event in North Carolina. "When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door. But now we're buying oil from Venezuela, so we're making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe it."
On Sunday, the administration was out in full force defending its actions, pinning the reasoning on drugs, primarily. The White House has repeatedly claimed to be stemming the flow of fentanyl by striking alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, despite the fact that fentanyl isn't largely produced in Venezuela.
Vice President Vance, who has been a vocal critic of U.S. intervention abroad in other cases, took on that critique on social media.
"[C]ocaine, which is the main drug trafficked out of Venezuela, is a profit center for all of the Latin America cartels," he wrote on Sunday. "If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall. Also, cocaine is bad too!"
He noted that "a lot of fentanyl is coming out of Mexico," a reason that Trump "shut down the border." That raises questions about what's next, too.
Vance also referenced the oil: "I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?"
Rubio, meanwhile, said that this was a law enforcement action to recover fugitives, because of a 2020 indictment of Maduro for the trafficking of cocaine. That, by the way, seems to be part of the administration's rationale for not seeking authorization from Congress.
These explanations are likely more politically palatable to the MAGA base than saying the United States is at war with Venezuela or, as Trump said, that the United States is now running another country — with no clear goals for an exit.
3. Speaking of Rubio, this action certainly seems to point to his increased influence with Trump.
Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, has always been more hawkish than Trump on foreign policy, particularly when it comes to Latin America.
During this Venezuela operation, Trump seems to be leaning on Rubio. Rubio was a central figure in the administration's announcement on Saturday and did the rounds on the Sunday shows to defend the action.
In this second term, Rubio has taken on quite a few roles. After the hollowing out of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, Trump made him director of that program, as well as acting archivist of the National Archives, he's Trump's acting national security adviser and the secretary of state, which is also fourth in line to the presidency.
It's all evidence of how far Rubio has come to be able to burrow into Trump's inner circle. That's quite the turnabout from the bitter campaign a decade ago when Rubio was likening Trump to "third world strongmen" and a "con artist" with "small hands," while Trump was dismissing him as "Little Marco."
4. Right-wing authoritarians are OK, but left-wing dictators are not?
Trump referred to Maduro as a "dictator" four times during his news conference Saturday (an "outlaw dictator," "illegitimate dictator," "now-deposed dictator" and "dictator and terrorist").
But there are lots of other dictators, authoritarians and strongmen in the rest of the world, many of whom Trump has praised through the years.
Trump has allied himself with people like Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Argentina's Javier Milei, rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, seems deferential to Russia's Vladimir Putin, and, during his first term, made overtures to North Korea's Kim Jong Un.
Couldn't there be justifications for those leaders' overthrow, too, that an American administration could come up with, following Trump's logic?
It's not a far leap to suggest the difference is politics (and oil).
5. Don't expect MAGA to abandon Trump.
Yes, there's undoubtedly an irony in Trump campaigning against intervention and what he's done in Venezuela. There will be — and already are — voices of opposition in Trump's base.
But dedication to Trump among the faithful runs deep — and there's an entire conservative media infrastructure built to insulate him and give the base talking points.
It started in the early moments Saturday morning after the raid. On Fox News, for example, panelists were pointing to Democrats' arguments of the move being illegal as something to mock and knock down. They focused instead on how few in Venezuela were defending Maduro and on the 2020 indictment against him. One network legal analyst said essentially that Trump's action shows that the long arm of American justice doesn't end at U.S. borders.
Given the hyper-partisan ways in which Americans take in their news, don't expect any sort of a wholesale abandonment of Trump. It's more likely to become a rallying point.
Republicans were already tilting toward action in Venezuela before what happened this weekend. A Quinnipiac University poll from December found, overall, that 63% of people said they were against military action in Venezuela. That included 68% of independents. But 52% of Republicans were in favor.
Plus, remember, this is a group of voters that has a lot of practice with being in favor of a tough, hawkish approach to foreign policy. (See: war, Iraq.) The Republican Party, for decades, was held together by a three-legged stool of fiscal conservatism, cultural conservatism and a hawkish foreign policy.
Trump's approach to economics and foreign policy bucked that tradition and seemed to saw off two of those legs, making for some uncomfortable compromises for the GOP, while culture was the main thing gluing together the MAGA coalition.
So, going back to a hawkish foreign policy seems not that far removed from what the Republican Party has been.
6. Democrats have to be careful with their messaging.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries disputed Rubio's insistence that the U.S. actions were "not an invasion" on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
"This was not simply a counter-narcotics operation," Jeffries said. "It was an act of war. It involved, of course, the Delta Force. ... We have to make sure when we return to Washington, D.C., [after the holiday recess] that legislative action is taken to ensure that no further military steps occur absent explicit congressional approval."
But solely focusing on the legality of the move could be a political pitfall for Democrats. Trump and Republicans are very good at trying to put Democrats in a position of seemingly defending drug dealers and bad people.
Remember, the reason Democrats did well electorally in 2025 is because of the economy, specifically the cost of living. If they do well in 2026, it will likely again be because of that — not whether Trump's incursion into Venezuela was legal or violated international norms, as crassly political as that sounds.
Still, Democrats can't ignore Venezuela and solely focus on affordability, either. They might point out the apparent hypocrisy of ousting Maduro because of drugs while pardoning the former head of Honduras, who was convicted of drug trafficking.
They could also pivot to how this is a distraction from the fact that many people are struggling to buy groceries, homes and health care.
It's about "surfacing Republican priorities," said one Democratic strategist, who asked to remain anonymous because of their role with an outside group.
"They're more focused on making warfare than fixing health care," the strategist said.
7. The real test of the politics of this will be with what comes next.
Americans, including Trump and Vance, have been skeptical of U.S. foreign intervention not because the U.S. military can't pull off regime changes but because of what happens on Day 2 and beyond.
Trump was asked Saturday about the United States' "mixed track record of ousting dictators without necessarily a plan for what comes afterwards."
The president gave a nonspecific and incongruous answer.
"Well, that's why we have different presidents, but with me, that's not true," he said. "With me, we've had a perfect track record of winning."
He went on to cite his administration's 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, the former leader of Iran's Quds Force, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former ISIS leader. Neither of them was a head of state. He also talked about the U.S. bombings of Iran's nuclear facilities last year.
But Trump did not lay out the plan for what comes next for Venezuela or his foreign policy.
This is the president's most vulnerable point politically in this second term. He is facing his worst approval ratings, is going to be 80 in June and is inching closer to politically irrelevant lame-duck status.
So it might not be surprising that Trump would try to stay in the headlines, like with this Venezuela action, and shift attention away from other, more negative issues for him politically.
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