Trump’s Venezuela takeover... everything you need to know

0:00Anthony:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com.

0:36Anthony:One incredible 48 hours. The president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, in American captivity, captured by American special forces, being held now in Brooklyn, New York, and Donald Trump saying of Venezuela this. We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So many questions raised by what he said at that news conference. Number one, of course, what happens in Venezuela itself and to the Venezuelan people.

1:18Anthony:But number two, what does it mean for law? What does it mean for international law? What does it mean for the United States position in the world? And what does it mean for Donald Trump's coalition, this coalition of people who elected him thinking that he would not involve the United States in foreign wars. Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests.

1:56What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

2:06Anthony:Hello, it's Justin at home in South London. And it's Anthony at home in Arlington, Virginia. Hey, Justin. Very good to talk to you, Anthony, and good to be doing another of these emergency podcasts. Can we start, I suppose, by just saying where we are time-wise? So it's three o 'clock in the afternoon in London, and people here very much still trying to make sense, I suppose, of what has happened. And European leaders, including Keir Starmer, kind of scrambling to find what they would regard as a reaction to all of this that doesn't upset Donald Trump too much, but also keeps them within the parameters of what they thought, at least, was European law or international law until at least recently.

2:48Anthony:So let's work out first how we got here, what actually happened. because the details are pretty extraordinary, aren't they? They are extraordinary. It was a coordinated effort, air, land and sea by the US military with all of those forces they had built up in the Southern Caribbean. And they essentially knocked out the air defences of Venezuela, went into Caracas, found the compound where Nicolas Maduro had been with his wife. And they had been training on this compound. They knew where it was. Apparently they had a source on the inside that told them he was there. Special forces, a team of special forces went in there, grabbed him and his wife, loaded them onto helicopters, flew him to a helicopter ship off the coast, flew him from there to Guantanamo Bay, put him on a plane and took him to New York.

3:39It was a remarkable series of events and a carefully laid out plan, apparently worked out over months to do this. and there were no American casualties, some injuries, but no deaths, and no American military hardware was significantly damaged.

3:55Anthony:Yeah, and the thing that really struck me about it is the degree of planning, and it reminded me in many respects of what they did with Osama bin Laden back in Obama's time in power, because it's the groundwork that has to be done, isn't it? So you've got this kind of, they actually built a mock-up, didn't they? of the compound. And they sent CIA operatives who were keeping an eye on him for some time. So, you know, there's something about Donald Trump, isn't it? On the one hand, we think of him as being impulsive and capricious. And he is both of those things, it's fair to say. And also, in a sense, unserious sometimes about the things that he wants to achieve.

4:41Anthony:And yet this seems like something he really did want to achieve and has wanted to achieve it for some time. Right. This was months of planning. As you mentioned, the compound was built in Kentucky and they were training there. And then there were also practice missions being run in the Caribbean once it got closer to this. The CIA, as you mentioned, was on the ground in Venezuela for months. And the U.S. doesn't even have an embassy in Venezuela right now. So they were there without any kind of diplomatic protection. So it was risky for them to be on the ground. But but all of this was set up and then apparently Donald Trump signed off on it in late December.

5:21And then they were just waiting for a combination of good weather and Maduro to be in this one location where they had trained for. And that is when ultimately Trump pulled the trigger on Friday night, gave the final authorization. And all of this took place overnight in the early hours of Saturday morning. So those of us here in the U.S. and Washington, D.C., woke up Saturday morning to see that our phones had exploded with all the news of what was happening. Actually, Donald Trump talked about it for the first time, not in the press conference that we heard a little clip of earlier, but with Fox News.

5:57Here is Donald Trump calling into Fox News a few hours before that press conference on Saturday. We were going to do this four days ago, but the weather was not perfect. The weather has to be perfect. And we had just the perfect weather. And we said go. And I'll tell you, it was just amazing. And what was he doing? He was in a very highly guarded, like a fortress, actually. He was in a fortress. It had steel doors. It had what they call a safety space where it's, you know, solid steel all around. He didn't get that space closed. He was trying to get into it, but he got bumrushed so fast that he didn't get into that.

6:39We were prepared. We had, you know, massive blowtorches and everything else that you need to get through that steel, but we didn't need it.

6:46Anthony:And just to kind of emphasize the extent of this operation, he'd been rotating, hadn't he, between, I think, six or eight, according to the New York Times, six or eight separate locations, Maduro. So he hadn't spent a night in the same house, two nights running, and he had quite a few of these homes he went between. So the CIA people who were on the ground had been watching him and got a kind of sense of the pattern. But there was any one compound that they'd practiced to attack. So they had to wait until he got to that compound. In other words, all of this is not off the cuff by any means. I mean, it is the complete opposite of that.

7:31Anthony:It really is a well-planned and it seems incredibly well-executed thing. And then we get to that incredible picture that then emerged of Maduro blindfold, handcuffed on board a warship. And then other images that have emerged of him as well. I mean, it just, as these operations go, and you think back to the various operations that have been around the world through time to capture individual leaders and take them out of their countries, this is going to go down in history, actually, isn't it? as at least initially, and we'll get to some skepticism about it in a second. Right. You could easily see how this could go sideways.

8:16You know, a helicopter crashes, there are American casualties. Maduro ends up being able to escape his compound or go into the safe room where he was trying to get to with these big metal doors, and then it taking much longer to wrangle him out. And while that raid on Osama bin Laden is a good example of how things can go well and have gone well in the past, you don't have to go back too far to see how things could go really wrong. I mean, you remember the Iranian hostage crisis where Jimmy Carter ordered a rescue mission where a helicopter crashed and nothing went off the way it should have been.

8:52There were American deaths and the hostages were still in the embassy in Tehran. It was a horrible embarrassment for Jimmy Carter or even a little more recently. the plan to get Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who George H.W. Bush launched a military operation to arrest, very similar circumstances, actually, to arrest him on drug charges and bring him to the United States. Well, you know, we sent the military in there and weren't able to get him in the initial wave. He ended up at, I believe, the Vatican embassy. And there was a standoff for weeks as the US military waited for him to come out and eventually did.

9:31But it was it was a much more kind of a muddled mess. This was precision and it was over in a matter of hours. So the combination of preparation, planning and good fortune and a willingness by Donald Trump to really roll the dice and take a chance on this.

9:47Anthony:Yeah. So Maduro and his wife held in a detention Centre now in Brooklyn, facing, we hear, drug trafficking charges, which brings us then to the reasons why, Anthony, doesn't it? Why now and why him and what the specific issue is that Donald Trump, number one, is using as a reason publicly to do it, but then possibly we might explore as well some other reasons that there might be that he's not so public about. So on the face of this, it's about drugs, isn't it? That's what Donald Trump and the Trump administration has been saying for months. They say that Maduro is a kingpin, that he's running this massive drug operation out of Venezuela.

10:35Also accuses him, Trump has directly accused him, of encouraging Venezuelans to come to the United States. He says he's opened up his insane insane asylums and his prisons and sent the worst Venezuelans to the United States. Again, no evidence of this and no real evidence that he is central in a kind of a global drug operation, particularly not involved in fentanyl production, which is one of the things that the Trump administration has accused him of, one of the biggest drug problems here in the United States. If you look at the indictment that was unsealed for Maduro and his wife, actually what the indictment kind of grounds itself on is cocaine trafficking, as well as arms trafficking or arms violations.

11:22So it doesn't even the official reason why he is being charged in New York doesn't quite jibe with some of the explanations that the Trump administration has made.

11:30Anthony:Yeah. It's interesting about the other reasons then, isn't it? So I mean, the obvious one, and in a sense, Trump himself is pretty open about this, we should listen to him in a second. But the question of oil, And the longstanding suggestion from Donald Trump that actually the way that the Venezuelan oil industry was nationalized was disadvantageous to the United States because the United States initially helped through its private companies, helped build that industry up. So that is another beef, isn't it, if I could put it like that. And that's a kind of open one because he did mention it at the press conference.

12:10Anthony:Let's listen to what he said about oil. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. We're going to be rebuilding, and we're not spending money. The oil companies are going to go in. They're going to spend money.

12:55We're going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We're going to get reimbursed for all of that. We're going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend. Use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are going to be the people of Venezuela. And also, I can't stress this strongly enough, the people that got thrown out of Venezuela that are now in the United States. And frankly, some want to stay and some probably want to go back. Making money for the country and also making money for American oil companies and for the United States, because Trump has said that oil revenue is going to help bankroll some of these reconstruction efforts.

13:35So where have we heard that before? That this operation will essentially pay for itself with oil revenue, which has caused a lot of critics to say, you know, here we go, blood for oil. Or, you know, this is just another U.S. adventure to try to secure oil supplies, much like what we saw in the invasion of Iraq 20, 25 years ago.

13:56Anthony:He also mentioned at the news conference, and this, I think, goes to another thing, that he's not suggesting this is the reason, the central reason, but it sure comes into it, doesn't it? That there are millions of Venezuelans, and this is, again, factually the case, millions of Venezuelans have left Venezuela, because it is at the moment, under Maduro, a pretty awful place to live. and many of them have settled in the United States and there was a sort of suggestion from him at that news conference that well hey maybe if Venezuela is in this place they might like to go back. I mean he said they would want to go back, it didn't say necessarily they would force them out but this has been something we've talked about Anthony repeatedly haven't we that when it comes to deportations of people in the United States the Venezuelans most of them are under this slightly emergency legislation aren't they which allows them to stay temporarily.

14:49Anthony:But this is a pretty large group of people who could be leaving the U.S. And when it comes to telling the MAGA base that this is something that should be important to them, it strikes me that that potentially could become really quite a big deal. Yeah. And, you know, we're talking hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States, but a lot of them are at this point, one, celebrating the fact that Maduro is gone because they did view him as a dictator. And the reason they left for many of them was because of, as you mentioned, those conditions, economic, social, political conditions in Venezuela.

15:26But some of them also are wondering, are they going to be forced back now? Is this just the first step towards having their protected status, temporary protected status, revoked by the Trump administration? But I was struck in that press conference. And one, yes, talking about immigration again, two, directly talking about oil, because that hadn't been pushed forward as a justification for the buildup of the United States outside of Venezuela over the past few months. And then, you know, direct talk about removing Maduro and regime change, because the Trump administration, when they had been talking to Congress, when in their public statements had said time and time again, no, we're not doing this for regime change.

16:11We're doing this because Venezuela is pushing all these drugs out and we're protecting the United States and we're blowing up these boats off the coast because of all these drugs that are heading to the United States. But there we are, Donald Trump in that press conference, saying oil, saying regime change. I mean, he was, you know, it was definitely honest. If nothing else, he was very open about, you know, what he saw as the motivations.

16:34Anthony:And then saying something that Steve Bannon, the great MAGA leader, former advisor, of course, to Trump, it's a bit more informal now, but very much a big figure still in this world. I was listening to his podcast. In fact, I listened to the Trump press conference on Steve Bannon's podcast. and at the end of it, Bannon uses the word bombshell. He says, you know, he's very approving of the success of the operation, at least in the short term, and the bravery of the military and all the rest of it. But then he says, words to the effect of, goodness, the president has dropped a bit of a bombshell there, and that is over this, which we should listen to now, which addresses the issue of what happens in Venezuela now and who runs it.

17:21The Press, Mr. President, does the U.S. running the country mean that U.S. troops will be on the ground? How will that work? Well, you know, they always say boots on the ground. Oh, so we're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have. We had boots on the ground last night at a very high level, actually. We're not afraid of it. We don't mind saying it. But we're going to make sure that that country is run properly. We're not doing this in vain. This is not, this is a very dangerous attack. This is an attack that could have gone very, very badly. Could have gone very badly. We're going to run the country right.

17:53It's going to run very judiciously, very fairly. It's going to make a lot of money. We're going to give money to the people. We're going to reimburse people that we're taking advantage of. We're going to take care of everybody. Can you explain the exact mechanism by which you're going to run the country? Are you going to designate a U.S. official to coordinate? Yes, it's all being done right now. We're designating people. We're talking to people. designating various people and we're going to let you know who those people are. What's the group you mentioned that would run Venezuela? Well, it's largely going to be for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me.

18:30We're going to be running it. We're going to be bringing it back. It's a dead, you know, I talk about a dead country. A year and a half ago, we were a dead country. Now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world. Are you saying that Secretary Hegseth and Rubio are going to be running Venezuela? and will you be sending in U.S. military troops to provide? There's going to be a team that's working with the people of Venezuela to make sure that we have Venezuela right. Because for us to just leave, who's going to take over? I mean, there is nobody to take over. Are you going to work with the vice president of Venezuela or how do you foresee the relationship going?

19:03I understand she was just sworn in, but she was, as you know, picked by Maduro. So Marco's working on that directly. Just had a conversation with her and she's essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again. Very simple.

19:19Anthony:Oh, my goodness. I mean... Yeah, a lot to unpack there. A lot to unpack there. I mean, number one, just the sheer shock that will be felt across the MAGA world at the idea that he is now just insouciantly saying, yeah, we can run it. We're not afraid of boots on the ground. And also we can run it. And you think back to Iraq and that guy, Paul Bremer, who they put in charge for a bit and all the rest of it. And it was all going to be wonderful. And everyone was going to be happy. And there we go. And as you say, Anthony, it was all going to be paid for by the oil. And oh, my goodness, it didn't work out like that.

20:03Anthony:And people, you know, this is the prime thing, isn't it, that Donald Trump used to point out in a sense is why he came to power in 2016 in the Republican Party, why he knocked all the others for six when he was doing those primaries, because he said, you're all idiots, you all supported the Iraq war, and look where it got us. And now, I mean, I was really struck by that language, as you could hear the reporters too were, weren't they? Yeah, Donald Trump had criticized the Bush administration for nation building, And now here he is talking about how we are essentially going to rebuild Venezuela.

20:40We're going to be running the country. He said the people behind me and the people behind him were Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, Stephen Miller, who is the deputy chief of staff of the White House, Dan Cain, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They're going to be the people running the country. I guess Paul Bremer is probably in retirement. They can't dig him up from wherever he is now. But but that that was stunning. You know, the the idea of casually saying boots on the ground, you know, is fine when he would boast about bringing American troops home.

21:15That was stunning. I mean, I was trying to think, you know, because my job was on the ground when I heard all that, because I had been saying before, it's like Donald Trump seems to have no interest in, you know, an extended involvement in Venezuela leading up to that press conference. And afterwards, I'm deleting whole paragraphs of my article because it's all totally wrong. And, you know, I'm not sure what I was more stunned with, the MomDotty love fest in the White House a few months ago, or, you know, Donald Trump standing up there and saying the United States was nation building. But just another example of how you can't count on Donald Trump.

21:51And every time you think you haven't figured out, he will do a U-turn and leave you just kind of slack-jawed.

21:58Anthony:I just want to say it's not the most important thing, but it is worth noting when whenever Anthony gets anything occasionally slightly wrong, because it's not often. And it's just it's wonderful to hear. I'm not necessarily saying that we approve the operation because of it. But my goodness. Yeah, it's it is one. And the thing is, you know, to be a bit more serious about it. I think what you had said, which is he doesn't seem to have any obvious enthusiasm for boots on the ground or indeed political cover for it, was also the view of pretty much the whole MAGA world, wasn't it? And it is going to be fascinating.