Only a few hours after the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was removed from his palace, his job and his country by US special forces, Donald Trump was still marvelling about how it felt to monitor a live feed of the raid from his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
He shared his feelings with Fox News.
“If you could see the speed, the violence, they call it that… It was amazing, amazing work by these people. No one else could do something like this.”
The US president wants and needs quick victories. Before he took office for the second time, he boasted that ending the Russia-Ukraine war would be a single day’s work.
Venezuela, as presented in Trump’s statements, is the quick, decisive victory that he has craved.
Maduro is in a prison cell in Brooklyn, the US will “run” Venezuela – and he has announced that the Chavista regime, now with a new president, will turn over millions of barrels of oil and that he will control the way the profits are spent. All, so far anyway, without an American life lost and without the long occupation that had such catastrophic consequences after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
For now, at least, Trump and his advisers, publicly at least, are ignoring Venezuela’s complexities. It is a country bigger than Germany, still run by the regime of factions that has embedded corruption and repression into Venezuelan politics.
Instead, Trump is enjoying a geopolitical sugar rush. Judging by their statements as they flanked him at Mar-a-Lago, so are US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Since then, they have repeated that Trump was a president who does what he says he is going to do.
He’s made it clear to Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland – and Denmark – that they need to be nervous about where his appetite will take him next.
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