Trump plunges the US into a new regime change war.

23:28Like, yeah, I guess what happens at that point when I mean, it doesn't feel like it's the same. I mean, this is a little bit going back to what we were talking about originally, but it doesn't feel like we're in the same world order than we were yesterday or 11 months ago. So that's how it feels to me. It feels like we're in dangerous new terrain. And the question is, how far does this go? Right. Does it go to other countries? Like, what does it mean to run Venezuela? What are the Russians and Chinese do? And I think to try to be constructive about this, but Congress has chosen not to assert itself to date.

24:00It's going to take political pushback. It's going to take a change in the political dynamic. And what I mean by that is actually, if you look at the fractures in MAGA on these issues, like that's an opening. Because if Trump starts to lose support broadly among the American people, and there's a mobilized and activated kind of Democratic base, their independents are unhappy with what he's doing. But then there also start to be some cracks inside of that Republican coalition because their voters are like, you know, even if today all the Republican congressmen are putting out statements about how tough Trump is, you know, their constituents are like, what are we doing down in Venezuela?

24:36Right. Why is this guy always hanging out with like foreigners and billionaires? I actually think there needs to be a decisive political turn against Trump so that then you can try to get the pushback from Congress. then it starts to feel like he has lost room for maneuver. Because right now, like, you know, he's, I mean, to go all the way back to your distraction point, you know, he may, I don't think this is a distraction because I think this is something that they wanted to do. But, you know, he's once again trying to drive the conversation, drive events and make everybody react to him. And there needs to just be more pushback when he goes to do that.

25:10Yeah. And frankly, in terms of him engineering a situation where, you know, he's basically, I don't know how else you would you would show broadcast to the American people that you are not interested in the very thing that they put you into office to do. I mean, from from stripping away health care, from gutting food assistance, from making everything more expensive by engaging in these trade wars that everybody said was going to rise, raise the prices of everything. Then to encrusting the Oval Office in gold, buying Gulfstream jets, you know, hosting a let them eat cake party at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, every single day we see something that, again, is scientifically engineered to broadcast to Americans that he does not give a flying fuck about you.

25:49And engaging in, you know, a regime change war in Venezuela is just the cherry on the cake. Yes. He can't even pretend to be interested in issues of affordability. Like he likes this part of the job. Yeah. He likes where he has the power. He likes hanging out with oligarchs. He likes having foreign leaders be scared of him. But look, none of this is what anybody here is interested in the United States. And that's his vulnerability. And that's why, to your earlier point, the argument should not just be about, oh, he didn't get Congress's authorization. The argument should be like, what the hell is he doing?

26:25He doesn't care about you. He cares about the oil companies. Like he just launched this war and said it was for the American oil companies. Right. I mean, to your point, that was designed in a lab to be a message that Democrats should be able to prosecute a case against Trump on. Right. Well, look, you know, as everybody who watches my show knows, I generally stay with domestic politics. And so I highly recommend for everybody who's watching right now, if you're looking for excellent, excellent, excellent coverage of international affairs, Pod Save the World is my go to source with Ben and Tommy.

26:59So I'm going to put the link to Pod Save the World right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. If you're not yet subscribed, please go ahead and subscribe. Ben, thanks so much for the time. Thanks. Great talking to you. Appreciate what you're doing out there, too.

27:13I'm joined now by co-host of Pod Save America and Pod Save the World, Tommy Vitor. Tommy, thanks for joining me. Right, good to see you. Obviously, some major news as it relates to Venezuela. First and foremost, I have to ask, why is this happening? Why is Donald Trump engaging in this operation where he's taken the president, Nicolas Maduro, of Venezuela into custody into the U.S.? Well, I mean, we've heard like three different explanations. I mean, for a while, they were saying that these airstrikes off the coast of Venezuela were about drugs, particularly fentanyl. But everyone who studies this issue knows that fentanyl doesn't get traffic through Venezuela.

27:46So that can't be the case. Now it seems like Trump is just overtly saying that he thinks that Venezuela stole U.S. energy assets, specifically oil fields and oil infrastructure, and now he wants to take it back. So he launched this regime change operation to send a bunch of Delta Force guys in along with the FBI to arrest Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, who's a bad guy who stole the 2024 election, like insert all the caveats here about how he's a tyrant and a dictator. But for some reason, we have now chosen that tyrant and that dictator to be the one that the U.S. deposes with a bunch of special forces service members.

28:24Okay, so a few questions here. First and foremost, this was Trump's response when asked who would run the country. 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 we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious. So that was obviously Trump saying that the U.S., that he would be running Venezuela. Can I get your reaction to that idea that the president of the United States is going to run not only this country, but a foreign country as well?

29:12Brian, it was like the craziest thing I've heard in this whole 90-minute press conference today or however long it was. I mean, look, I've been watching this buildup in the Caribbean for a long time. I mean, Donald Trump sent something like 15 ,000 U.S. service members to the Caribbean area, to the Venezuela region. There were a couple of aircraft carriers in there. It was clear to me that the United States was planning some sort of military action in Venezuela and it might be a regime change operation. I was surprised that they chose this super risky option of this extraction of Maduro and taking him to New York.

29:44But this announcement that the like dudes behind Trump were now going to be running the country is the craziest thing I have ever heard. I mean, it sounds like Pete Hegseth and, you know, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller are now going to be overseeing the management of a foreign country. We have no idea how that is going to work in practice. Trump seemed to suggest in his press conference that the former vice president, now president of Venezuela, was on board with this plan. But then she just gave a speech denouncing the invasion, calling it regime change, saying Maduro is the rightful president.

30:20So we just don't know what's going to happen now. What about Maria Machado, who, by the way, was given the Nobel Peace Prize, dedicated it to Trump, and then Trump, of course, comes in and says that she's not strong enough to lead the country. So, by the way, just as a caveat for any other world leaders looking to throw themselves at the feet of Donald Trump, you gain nothing by doing that. We watched her debase herself and try to give this, you know, to dedicate this award, the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. Look at what that's gotten her. But what about this idea that instead of offering this up, if we're going to do regime change from the United States into Venezuela, instead of offering this up to the person who would presumably be the rightful heir to this seat, the opposition leader, he's instead decided that she's not worthy of this spot and that instead should be Pete Hegseth and the rest of the U.S.

31:08delegation. Yeah, so Maria Machado is seen as the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. She was not allowed to run in the 2024 election, so this guy named Edmundo Gonzalez ran in her stead. He is widely believed by all international observers to have won that election and to have won with like 70 % of the vote. So it wasn't close. But then Maduro stole the election. Now, as you mentioned, she is incredibly brave. You know, she has fought against the Maduro regime at great personal risk to herself. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She actually snuck out of the country, did this like daring, you know, ocean escape of the country to try to get to the ceremony in time and then dedicated the Peace Prize to Trump.

31:50But it is

31:56leadership over to Maduro's handpicked vice president and the kind of current leadership of the country, whether it's political or military. And what I think that tells us is that he doesn't give a shit about human rights. He doesn't care about the opposition. He doesn't care about the Venezuelan people. He cares about the fact that Venezuela has something like 17 % of the world's known oil reserves. And he thinks he can make a lot of money by taking control of those. And that is exactly what it sounds like he is now doing. In other words, it's that Maduro was a bulwark against his efforts to basically nationalize Venezuela's oil assets, but that the vice president won't necessarily be as big a barrier as Maduro was?

32:39Yeah, I mean, look, Maduro had two things kind of going against him. One, I mean, he was sitting on a lot of energy resources. And two, he's a leftist. And the only criminals that Trump likes in Latin America are the right-wing ones, like Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who was put in jail for trafficking like 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. and then pardoned by Trump. So what it sounds like Trump is doing here, I mean, look, we're learning about this in real time. Trump himself said that Maduro wanted to negotiate. Maduro did interviews right before he was picked up by the U.S.

33:12suggesting that he would cut basically any deal Trump wanted. But Trump seemingly just wanted to take the guy out and work with the people around him. And so there's some reporting maybe that the CIA had penetrated Maduro's inner circle and that there was someone on the inside kind of working to make this outcome happen. We don't know. We're kind of still learning. But yeah, I mean, Trump, again, he doesn't care about human rights. He doesn't care about who won the election. What he cares about in the near term is getting that oil flowing and making his friends a lot of money off it. I want to throw to a clip of Trump being asked about the hypocrisy of pardoning the former president of Honduras and yet, you know, running this whole operation under the pretext that he was doing it to hold a narco-terrorist to account.

33:56You said that Maduro is responsible for drug trafficking. You recently pardoned the former president of Honduras who was convicted of many drug trafficking. Can you explain how these two situations are? Well, I endorsed, as you know, the winning president, the man who won in Honduras. I endorsed the man who won in Chile. I endorsed the man who won in Argentina. And we are doing very well with that whole group. What the man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump. That didn't work out too well for them. This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly.

34:35He was the head of the country. He was persecuted very unfairly. And there are a number of them. And we felt that it was a very unfair situation that happened to him. He's also a party member of the man who won. So obviously the people liked what I did. And one of the reasons that was done is because of the fact that the party in power felt very strongly that that man was treated very badly. I started it very quickly and then I studied it in great detail. I went to a lot of the people standing behind me and they felt that that man was persecuted and treated very badly. That's why I gave him a pardon.

35:09So obviously that did not answer the question. It was kind of this freewheeling response where he delved into some rationale for his distorted rationale for pardoning the former president of Honduras, but didn't explain the hypocrisy here. If you claim to want to stand against narco trafficking of drugs, then that doesn't explain why you would, you know, pardon somebody, but then run an entire operation, kidnapping operation to take this president out. Can I just have your reaction to that answer that Trump gave? Yeah, I mean, you're right, Brian. Nothing about this is coherent. Juan Orlando Hernandez is a actual real deal, like right wing political leader connected to a drug kingpin.

35:50But the difference is he was right wing and Trump was left wing. And Juan Orlando Hernandez could hire people like Roger Stone to help facilitate a pardon. And that's seemingly what he did here. I mean, none of none of this policy makes any sense. Like if you are worried about fentanyl, fentanyl is made in Mexico from chemicals that get shipped in from China. Right. So that's not coming out of Venezuela. There is like, you know, I think between 8 and 11 percent of the world's cocaine is trafficked through Venezuela, which is significant. But the majority of it is going through Ecuador and Colombia and is produced or grown in Colombia.

36:23So, again, if you were kind of like looking at the challenge of drug trafficking to the United States, the idea that your first move would be to depose Nicolas Maduro and then let this corrupt monster Juan Orlando Hernandez out of prison in the United States makes absolutely no sense. Tommy, what about this posture from the American delegation, including Pete Hegseth, that suggested that this may not be the last, you know, the last incursion at the hands of the United States, that Mexico should be on guard? Just your reaction to that. Yeah, I mean, Trump pretty overtly threatened both Cuba and the Colombian government in his remarks, as did Marco Rubio.

37:06That's pretty ominous. I mean, we know from a lot of reporting that Marco Rubio has been driving this regime change policy in Venezuela, in part because, you know, he has family ties to Cuba, his family left and, you know, they they hate the, you know, the regime that's there in place, the left wing communist regime. And they think that taking out Maduro was the key to, you know, toppling the Cubans. And, you know, it's another new domino theory thing. But yeah, I mean, my fear with this, Brian, is like Donald Trump is going to look at what just happened in Venezuela. He's going to look at the Iran strikes and the adulation he got for both from around the world in this sense that it was kind of cost free for him.

37:48Yeah. And what if he decides like, I don't know, he's just the emperor of the Western Hemisphere now. And he's going to depose whatever leaders he wants. I mean, this is pretty ominous stuff. Not to bury the lead here, but what about the fact that he ran an entire campaign, literally called America first, and now he's engaging in regime change wars a la George W. Bush? I mean, is the hypocrisy not lost on anybody that the exact thing that he decried as he was running for office, this idea that we're too focused on American imperialism and getting engaged in these endless foreign wars, that that's exactly what he does not a year into his second term?

38:24Yeah, I mean, look, there was some polling done before this all went down. This is, I think, December. I think they found like 65 % of voters opposed a regime change operation in Venezuela. 25 % were pro it. I think there will probably be a lot of MAGA voters who are waking up today thinking, this is not what I voted for. I didn't vote to send Delta Force troops into Venezuela. Now, like we're still learning. Trump made it sound like this is totally cost free. There's now some reporting that some guys maybe have suffered bullet injuries or shrapnel wounds. Like we just don't know what happened yet.

38:57And there is this question of like, OK, he said at this press conference that like Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and Rubio are now going to run Venezuela. How? Right. Like they're sitting in Washington or Mar-a-Lago. Like, are we going to send U.S. troops to the ground there? I mean, Venezuela is a huge country. It's the size of like France and Germany combined. How are we going to run this place from Washington if people on the ground aren't on board with this plan? And the current president doesn't sound like she is. We don't know where the military is. We don't know where their security state is.

39:29So, you know, Trump in this speech was like, oh, well, we had one wave planned of airstrikes. There was another wave we could have done, but we didn't. That would have been bigger. Well, like what happens if things go south? Like, are we going to send troops there to occupy parts of the country? Are we going to send U.S. troops there to occupy this oil and gas infrastructure that Trump says we are now going to take back that was stolen from us? Like none of the questions that matter have been answered here. Remember, like regime change operations look great on day one. It's like day 100, six months, a year.

40:00You have to wonder. And I say this with total humility, having worked in the Obama administration during the Libya operation when NATO forces took out Gaddafi and it led to a disaster that was not just a disaster for people in Libya, but all throughout the Middle East and North Africa. So like we're just it's going to take a long time for this to play out. In the immediate aftermath of this morning's attack, Mayor Mamdani in New York issued a statement condemning basically an American incursion into a sovereign country as Venezuela is. and Ted Cruz came online afterwards and basically saw his statement and condemned it by saying, you know, like birds of a communist feather flock together in so many words.

40:41I'm paraphrasing. Cool. Just your reaction here to the idea that, I mean, it does seem like the Republicans are going to rally around this idea of the United States getting engaged in a regime change war. And so just kind of your reaction to what we're seeing from Ted Cruz here. I mean, look, Ted Cruz, like put his balls in a purse and handed to Donald Trump sometime around 2016 and has never gotten him back. So I'm not really surprised by it. I think that what I want to see from Democrats is statements like Mamdani's or Tim Kaine's like this is an illegal war. Right. We none of us know how this is going to play out.

41:18Maybe it will lead to peace throughout Venezuela, free and fair elections, oil flowing, like all the best things. We just don't we don't know the outcome. Right. And I'm like, I'm saying this with humility. I have no idea how this is going to go. But there was no congressional authorization. There is no legal basis to invade Venezuela. And we know that senior levels of the Trump administration thinks there needs to be some sort of congressional authorization. Because remember that disastrous interview or series of interviews with Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff? Yeah. She said in that interview that if there were airstrikes on land in Venezuela, they would need to go to Congress first.

41:54They did not. They didn't do that. They didn't even brief Congress ahead of these strikes because Marco Rubio was like, oh, this is, you know, this is like an ongoing operation. Congress might leak it, et cetera. And then Trump jumps in and was like, yeah, I mean, they kind of knew it was coming anyway, but, you know, we don't want it to leak because Congress leaks. So like Congress needs to reassert its role. Like they are the ones that declare if we go to war. And again, I realize my hypocrisy is an Obama official and drone strikes and that history. What I'm trying to say to people is let's learn from those mistakes and realize that the United States military can win any battle you ever put them up against.

42:29The problem comes when we ask the U.S. military to solve other countries' political problems. And that is what there was on the ground in Venezuela. You had a corrupt dictator who stole an election and didn't have broad popular support and was running the country into the ground. But that doesn't mean we should fly 150 aircraft into their airspace and kill a bunch of people. Like, that's crazy. Last question here, Tommy. The idea of doing this because we want to seize control of their oil assets, does that go to the United States or does it go to the oil companies, which may not even necessarily bring oil into the United States?

43:04Because like Exxon Mobil, for example, a great American oil company, sells to the rest of the world. Like, it's not like any oil that they're refining, any oil that they're dealing with, just goes right back into the United States. Otherwise, we have the cheapest oil in the world. oftentimes that oil is then sent overseas, even though it's being refined at the hands of an American company, doesn't necessarily mean it's just coming back into the United States. Those companies might find it more profitable to export that oil, and so they do. And so isn't this just helping not even the United States oil prices per se, but just the companies that emanate out of the United States, whose bottom line depends on, yes, the American consumers, but the rest of the world as well.

43:46Yeah. I mean, look, we should just be clear at the front end. We have no idea how any of this is going to work. Like it sounded like Trump was suggesting that U.S. taxpayers might have to foot the bill on the front end to get the infrastructure, the energy infrastructure rebuilt or like more modern. And then they'll get reimbursed by the oil companies. Like, again, we heard a similar kind of promise that the oil would pay for the whole operation itself with the Iraq war, right? So like set that one aside. To your broader point though, like, yes, these global energy markets are fungible. Like it's a global market.

44:23If there's more supply sent to the United States and the price goes down, that means that, you know, international shipments to the US will go someplace else. Like I like none of this, none of this makes sense. There isn't like Trump, I don't think there's any way for him to promise that there will be some direct pipeline from Venezuela only to the U.S., only to U.S. consumers. And even if there was, like, what would that mean for domestic production? So, yes, I mean, it's just like a facile, stupid way to view the world. And it just seems like they're kind of making this policy on the fly. They don't really know how the country is going to be governed.

44:59They don't know what's going to happen with the oil assets. And they're just like making it up as they go along. But, you know, what's new, right? One political question here. What does it say to Trump voters who thought that they were voting for lower grocery prices, housing prices, rent prices. Finally, we have a president who will focus on such granular affordability issues that he was touting the price of eggs on the campaign trail. And now you've got somebody who is just installing his own cronies to run foreign countries. And that's where his focus is, even as prices are rising, even as food stamps are getting gutted, even as Medicaid and ACA coverage is also getting gutted that this is where their priority is.

45:37Yeah. I mean, like the price of like healthcare premiums for 20 some odd million people are about to double. Yeah. And he's focused on deposing Nicolas Maduro. That seems crazy to me. I think that President Trump has figured out that dealing with inflation is really hard. Getting prices down is really hard. You know, like getting people healthcare is really hard. So he's going to focus on things that feel easier to him. And in his book, toppling some sort of like two bit dictator, that is easier. And that is where he's going to focus or, you know, demanding credit for the Nobel Peace Prize as he invades another country like that is going to be his focus.

46:16So I think you're starting to hear from a lot of Trump voters that they're like, this isn't actually what we voted for. We wanted the border hardened. We wanted the economy better. We wanted prices down. Like we're just not getting all the things we wanted. We're seeing like ice rampaging through the streets of major cities. We're seeing prices go up. We're seeing healthcare prices about to skyrocket. Like, I don't think any of these guys voted for regime change in Venezuela. And you also have to worry, look, if Trump likes the press coverage he gets from this, he likes all the praise he's getting, he's going to look to see which country is next, or maybe we'll be back in Iran, right?

46:50So this is pretty ominous stuff. Well, obviously, we haven't seen the last of whatever international incursions Trump is engaged in. So highly recommend for everybody who's watching right now, if you want to learn more about what's happening in the international space, subscribe to Pod Save the World. I'm going to put the link to that channel right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to put the link to Pod Save the World's podcast in the show notes as well. Tommy, as always, thanks so much for the time. Thanks, buddy.

47:17Great to see you. Thanks again to Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vitor. A quick reminder to everybody listening right now, I'll be doing two episodes per week, so check out Wednesday's episode in the same feed. Thanks, everybody.

47:52Thank you.