Special Episode: Is Trump now President...of Venezuela?

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

0:30transition. Not satisfied with regime change and the arrest of the president, Nicolas Maduro, who's on his way now to America, Donald Trump is now running Venezuela, as he seeks to make Venezuela great again. Donald Trump has organised a coup in a foreign country, and he has kidnapped a foreign head of state. Even for Trump, this is audacious. What does it mean for Venezuela, for the United States and for the world. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:08The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. It's Emily from Patagonia, where even at the end of the earth, the news is still of what is happening right now in Venezuela. Yeah, it has been the most extraordinary, unbelievable, jaw-dropping, head-spinning, 24 hours, well 12 hours really since we first heard that American troops had moved in, there had been strikes in Venezuela. Then the next jaw-dropper came that Nicolas Maduro and his wife were in custody and they were on the US warship Iwo Jima on their way to New York to face indictment. And then came the Donald Trump news conference, where, as you heard in that clip, that America is now running Venezuela.

2:02So is President Trump effectively, de facto, the president of Venezuela as well? And it has been a stunning military operation in terms of the way it's been laid out to us. Not an American serviceman killed. All the military equipment came back they managed to execute this seemingly flawlessly but massive questions about what follows it is truly astounding that we although there has been a long history which we can talk about of the united states getting involved in latin america in south america in advocating regime change sometimes covertly sometimes not covertly it is hard to think of a comparison to what has happened in the last 12 hours when a president of the United States has authorized basically a coup in plain sight in a Latin American country in Venezuela and basically been entirely explicit about two things.

2:59One, that this is at least partly about oil and about the United States wanting oil interests in Venezuela. And also, and this is the real, another gobsmacking thing about the entire thing when you think about Donald Trump's personal history, which is a candidate, a politician who basically probably couldn't have become president, couldn't have become the Republican candidate, were it not for the disaster of Iraq and his campaigning against American forever wars and foreign entanglements and boots on the ground. What is President Donald J. Trump saying tonight? He is saying that if necessary, boots will go in.

3:34American troops will be deployed on the ground in Venezuela to run the country. 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.

4:06We could have lost a lot of people last night. We could have lost a lot of dignity. We could have lost a lot of equipment, the equipment is less important. The attack came at about one o 'clock in the morning, US or Venezuelan time, we should say. And within hours of the capture of Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, Trump was back on Fox News. He actually called into the station to speak to the anchors. And he described in detail where he'd been because he's, you know, it's New Year's, it's still the holidays. He's at Moro Lago. He's not in the White House. But he watched the whole maneuver. He said it was like watching a television show.

4:43There was speed and there was violence. And I do think that puts you in the sort of right frame of mind to understand what this has been for Trump. You know, whether it's kind of Call of Duty, Black Ops 2, whether it's that he feels he's right in the middle of some kind of video game. There isn't a crisis room in Mar-a-Lago. There isn't a control center. He was literally watching it live through the television in a room. I mean, they did the press conference from the tea room just now. And Trump's first response is to call in and say, we did it with speed and violence. And he said, there's no other country on earth that could do that maneuver.

5:22Well, he's probably right. But it does beg the question, is there another country on earth that would want to do that maneuver, that would think, frankly, it could get away with a maneuver like that, as Lewis was saying, nominally about seizing drugs or stopping drugs cartels, but very clearly about something entirely different, which is seizing back oil reserves, which they believe have been taken from America. He basically laid out in that press conference, along with the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, that they feel hard done by with Venezuela's approach to oil. Venezuela has a lot of oil, the biggest oil reserves in the world, but it exports very little.

6:03And so that essentially is what lies at the heart of this entire military operation overnight. You know, this brings us to another comparison between the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Lewis, you alluded to just a moment ago, which again, people were saying then it was all about oil, it was never about regime change just for its own sake and democratising Iraq so that the people could live freely and live in a liberal democracy, that it was all about oil. If it was, this is much more a black and white case of it all being about oil, despite the indictments about the use of cocaine. But, you know, just one word, if we're comparing this to Iraq, and I think it does make it worth comparing to, you know, the Iraq military operation was also brutally efficient.

6:55The way that they got rid of Saddam, who was a very well-equipped army, and the way that they toppled Saddam Hussein was extremely well done. It's what came next that was disastrous. The running of the country, the debathification of the military, all the rest of it. The same could happen in Venezuela. What happens if those loyal to Maduro don't accept American rule in the way that Donald Trump is proposing? How many tens of thousands of American troops will need to be on the ground, including policemen, to maintain public order? How many civil servants will it take to run Venezuela? And these questions, Donald Trump will say, look, we're going to do it thoroughly.

7:36We're going to do it very well. This is a massive undertaking that Donald Trump is just committing America to right now. Yeah, and that is, as I say, particularly striking and extraordinary when you consider Trump's own political pedigree on these issues. You know, he has basically undergone a transformation. And I think it was quite a revealing moment just thinking about his motivations for a minute. I think it was quite a revealing moment in that press conference where he started to cite some of what he considers to be other extremely successful expeditions on a smaller scale than we've seen up to now.

8:07Whether it is action he's taken in Iran, violent action he's taken in Iran, whether it is stuff that he's done in Gaza, Afghanistan, elsewhere. This is a man, I think, who is increasingly convinced of his own abilities and his own strategic calls and is, as we've discussed on the show before, looking for a legacy. I think it's worth just like just rewinding a little bit, because I think for a lot of people, although this has been going on for some months now, American military build up in the southern Caribbean around Venezuela. For a lot of people, for a lot of you, it may well be the case that it comes as a complete surprise.

8:39And there's probably some justification for that, partly because, as we say, it is so unprecedented. just to go back to exactly what in the past Trump has why Trump has got such beef with Maduro it is true to say that Nicolas Maduro who has been basically the dictator in Venezuela for some years he succeeded Hugo Chavez who is a sort of left-wing firebrand figure in Venezuela historically the US had good relations with Venezuela in a cold war that changed when Chavez came to office No one should mourn Maduro's removal and his passing dictator of Venezuela. He was a bad guy, a nasty guy, a dictator, brutal regime, thousands of Venezuelans killed.

9:18But it is true to say that Trump in particular has had a fixation with him for some time. And as Emily was saying, the sort of public justification for all of this has been about drugs and has been about fentanyl and has been about cocaine. saying that basically, and this is the legal basis, a flimsy one which we can discuss, this is the legal basis that they've gone after Maduro. They're basically in a US court, which wouldn't have jurisdiction in this matter in Venezuela, but in a US court, he's been done for narco trafficking and for having firearms and being part of the drug trade. But that over time, over the last few weeks and months, what the US has been doing is seizing, attacking, almost certainly illegally, ships off the coast of Venezuela.

9:58And the rest of the world has sort of responded. Certainly the West, European powers have responded with a bit of a shrug of the shoulders and sort of gone, well, that's Trump's affair. But he has taken this up a notch now by not just bullying and trying to suggest and trying to bully and force Maduro out, but by actually physically removing him from the country. And he is now on his way, presumably to a New York jail. It is stunning. Yeah. And our listeners will remember that two months or so ago, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded not drumroll to Donald Trump, but to the Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Machado.

10:34Now, this came as, I think, quite a surprise to many who sort of thought that, you know, there are a lot of opposition leaders around the world, but she had really been considered the rightful leader of Venezuela. that Maduro, as we know, had basically screwed up the election, clung to power, wouldn't let her in. He was not democratically elected. But again, to put this in context, Donald Trump doesn't normally care about whether dictators, tyrants are democratically elected or not. He doesn't actually have a problem with undemocratic states or countries. So it is unlikely that he had Maria Machado's best interests at heart when he removed Maduro and his wife.

11:17And yet the interesting question is now, does this then go to Maria Machado? Does she become the rightful inheritor? She won the election. Does she take over? Is she waiting in the wings? Now she has, in the last couple of hours, sent her supporters notes and she has made very clear that they have to prepare for power. They have to get ready. They have to do whatever it means to prepare for power. Then comes Donald Trump's press conference, where he makes absolutely clear that he is now in charge, that the row of men behind him are now running Venezuela. And when he was asked whether she would be a part of the new government or the sort of new regime or whatever you want to call it, he said, oh, she understands what we have to do.

12:00That is not a ringing endorsement of the opposition leader. And the other thing I just want to mention is where this all came from, because just two days ago, Maduro did an interview with a Spanish journalist where he was sitting in a car. It honestly looked like a sort of James Corden carpool karaoke scene where they're both sitting together in the front seat. and the Spanish journalist, whose name is Ignacio Romero, is interviewing Maduro. And Maduro says, look, I understand what Trump wants. He kind of wants to do a deal. He wants to do a deal on oil. He wants to have an agreement on drugs.

12:34I get that. I will help. You know, I understand what's coming. So he said on tape to a Spanish journalist that he was expecting some kind of deal to emerge, some kind of plan to emerge. and yet suddenly in the middle of the night he's arrested, he's taken away, he's removed from the country, he's kept in custody with his wife and he's now going to fight charges of drug trafficking and all the rest of it and so something doesn't add up here, something does not add up between the story that Maduro is telling and the story that Trump is telling because I don't know whether that regime change came from something very fast happening.

13:16And I don't know, Marco Rubio pushing for something more than what Trump was going for, or whether there was some change that happened between that Maduro interview and what happened last night. Well, according to Rubio, the talks have been going on for some time. And in America's view, Maduro was mucking around and wasn't taking the conversation seriously. And so that is why they did what they did. Look, the buildup had been intense militarily. But going back to something else you were talking about, Emily, was about, you know, Donald Trump saying the groups behind me and talking about how they were going to run the country.

13:49There was a book ages ago during the Nixon era about the imperial presidency. I've never heard anyone sounding so much like an emperor as Donald Trump was this evening when he was being asked about who was going to be running Venezuela. That would run Venezuela. It's largely going to be for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me. We're going to be running it. We're going to be bringing it back. It's a 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. John, I think you've summed it up perfectly.

14:26This was a display of imperial power. America is always wielded like any great power, enormous power. And sometimes we can get too dewy eyed about the so-called, you know, rules based order. The truth is, yeah, to some extent that existed after the Second World War. But the truth is great powers largely have tended to bend the rules and shape the rules. And do what they like. And do what they like. But, and you made an interesting comparison with the 2003 Iraq war. That also you could construe, and many people did, as an imperial adventure. Also potentially, among other things, about oil and about American commercial interest in the Middle East.

15:00It is interesting that the change that has happened in that 20 year interregnum is that even George W. Bush, who was considered obviously extremely hawkish, you know, the leader of this neoconservative movement in the United States, someone who didn't much care for kind of international order, the international order, multilateralism, whatever. He still, partly because Tony Blair was advising him to, he still went through the process of trying to obtain UN resolution, of saying this was legal because the UN previously had given him authorisation to do so. Where's the UN today? There is no even conversation about the UN, right?

15:36Or the legal basis for this happening, right? Let's just get this straight. The US has essentially invaded a sovereign nation without United Nations permission or authorisation. It has kidnapped a sitting head of state and it has done so on the basis not of international law, but on the basis of its own national law, which has no jurisdiction. Now, as I say, you can make an argument to say maybe great powers have always behaved in this manner, but never so brazenly, never so openly and never in such an openly imperial manner as Donald Trump was talking about there and saying basically they will decide.

16:13That's the other comparison with Iraqis to say Bush was saying we'll have elections in Iraq and the Iraqis will decide who governs them. Trump wasn't saying that. Trump was saying we'll decide basically who governs Venezuela as long as it's someone to our liking. Sure. Then it's OK. But you miss one thing out, which is not only where is the UN, but where is Congress in all of this? Where is this body, the elected body that is meant to be a check on presidential power, where you're meant to be discussed, you are meant to be consulted over decisions taken by the president on matters of war and arguably invading another country and seizing the president of that country is pretty close to an act of war when you've amassed an armada off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela to carry this out.

17:01and Congress has not been consulted a jot over any of this. So not only is it acting with imperial power, he's acting as though he has absolute power. Even within the United States. Even within the United States itself. The question, just to come back to this whole idea of empire, I think is quite important because Trump was asked in the press conference if he was prepared to do a second wave. And he said, yes, and it would be much bigger. And then he was asked about other leaders. He was asked, for example, about Colombia's president, Gustavo Pedro, who he calls a sort of cocaine trafficker, a cocaine sort of maker.

17:36And he said, yeah, he should be watching his ass. And then he talked about Cuba and he said, well, Cuba's not such a great place. So this is the Monroe Doctrine sort of on Viagra, sped up in real time, with Trump basically telling us that anyone who is acting in a way that he or America doesn't like is in for trouble. And if you go back to where Marco Rubio comes to all this from, which is son of a Cuban immigrant, hates the communism of Cuba. yes, maybe this is a Rubio doctrine, which is, I don't like these regimes. I don't like what these regimes are doing. I don't like Venezuela. I don't like Cuba.

18:17Get rid of the sod. Let's go. It is worth saying that, I mean, I think what Trump is doing and the way certainly Trump is talking about this, as ever with Trump, is exceptional. As Emily, as you refer to, there is this long history in American politics, going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine, which is basically about, you know, two centuries old, which was basically about saying Europe do not interfere in our hemisphere. This is an American affair. We reserve the right to basically police the Western Hemisphere as we like. And, you know, there are, of course, endless examples, whether it's, you know, Roosevelt or whether it's the Bay of Pigs with Eisenhower and Kennedy or whether it's Reagan and Nicaragua, you know, there have been endless interventions, some covert, some more explicit.

18:54I think, though, that what we're seeing here is something in a different order of magnitude in the sense that what Trump is saying, and again, we've just got to listen to him and listen to what he's been saying for the whole year. Trump has been saying, and we've talked about it on this show so many times over the course of this first year of his presidency, that he has been completely explicit in saying that he regards the Western Hemisphere basically as America's personal playground, not just policing in America's interests, but potentially in terms of actual territorial expansion. Now, you know, I wouldn't be sleeping so easily if I were in Nook tonight, right, in Greenland.

19:28The whole point of what is potentially, I think I'm hoping at least what this sort of reveals, at least to some extent, is that European leaders are going to finally have to, again, something we've been talking about a lot over the last year, wake up to this new set of realities. because Donald Trump is clearly in the mood, is in expansionist mood, he's in imperial mood. He is not in the mood to be told that there aren't inhibitions on his power. And what he is doing is he is making America behave like all the other great powers of the world, whether it's China or whether it's Russia. He wants to do stuff because the poor will suffer what they must and because he is stronger than everybody else.

20:08And he is making that hard power. Hard power now is the only thing which matters in 2026. And Europe needs to wake up to those realities. Look, it can't be overemphasised that this is not about drugs, despite what the indictments of the Maduros says. It is about oil. And oil means that this has got huge geopolitical significance, what has unfolded in the past 12 hours. Because Venezuela's biggest export market for oil is China. Russia is involved. Iran is involved. So all the countries where relations have been difficult and fraught are involved in this. And so they will be looking at what America has done in Venezuela with increasing concern.

20:55And they will be thinking, well, where does this leave our oil supplies? Will we be able to get as much oil from Venezuela as we were getting? Because we now know that Venezuela is going to be American run. oil companies from America will be pouring in to invest in Venezuela now. This is our backyard. This is where we will have power. And it has consequences that will ricochet. In Iran, where they've got their own protests at the moment. In China, where Donald Trump has been quite waspish in terms of trade deals. And of course, China will be thinking, well, hang on, if it's OK for Donald Trump to go in and get rid of the ruler of Venezuela, can I go into Taiwan and just do exactly the same thing?

21:41Because frankly, if the rules-based order, which you rightly say we've talked with rose-tinted lenses about, has never been that real, I'm sure China feels emboldened now to maybe act. And, you know, where does this leave Russia? So the geopolitical pieces of this are enormous as well. I guess that takes us on, really, to what on earth our own leaders are going to do about this. I mean, Keir Starmer, who had an interview before Trump's press conference, just kept on saying we had nothing to do with this. We had nothing to do with this. Britain wasn't a part of this. And then a sort of wait and see.

22:17Well, we don't know the facts. Well, we're going to hear from Trump later. I mean, if you cannot condemn, as you say, the kidnapping of another head of state, however deeply unpleasant they are, then what is your role? What is your role on the global stage? Are you just a friend to Trump at that point? Do you have a spine that tells you that you can speak to your own country and call it out? Or do you just sort of hide from the facts as they are? I don't know what Starmer does. I think we'll probably get a stronger response from von der Leyen. I think we should get a strong response from Macron in France.

22:57But we are at a place, and we were just sort of talking about it before we came on air, where, you know, as you were saying, Lewis, you're going to be interviewing members of the cabinet and saying, is this a good thing? You know, is this the right thing? Can you condemn what has just happened overnight in Venezuela? And they can't just carry on talking about Maduro endlessly. They're going to have to criticise Trump's action at some point if they want to remain at all credible with the population, right? Well, look, I mean, clearly, if Russia tried something like this, or if China had tried something like this, we'd all be talking about sanctions and we'd all be talking about prosecuting that through the UN or wherever it happens to be.

23:33The Hague. Well, yeah, potentially. I mean, like, what's obviously invidious for Starmer? And in some ways, I have sympathy for how he tries to calibrate this position because, you know, the truth, the brutal truth is, then just talking about the hard politics of it or the hard power of it, we have very few strategic interests in Venezuela. It's not part of the world which matters terribly to the UK or to Europe, we've obviously got big asks of Trump at the moment, which matter far more to us. And if we come out criticising him and condemning it, which is obviously deep down, I'm sure what Starmer believes, and he'll think it's a deep violation of international law and wrong, then clearly that puts all of that in jeopardy.

24:08That said, as I said before, you know, I think what is clear, I mean, there've been some people today, as you said, John, who've said, you know, well, what message does this send to China? What does it send to Russia? Now, the truth is, of course, if China really wants to take on Taiwan, I'm not sure it matters very much what Trump does in Venezuela. But what it certainly does is I think it reinforces the idea of something that we did try to move away from in a post-war order of, and certainly the post-Cold War order, of trying to move away from spheres of influence. And I think what this does is reaffirm the idea, and Trump has talked about this again openly over the past year, that basically the Western Hemisphere is his, he's perfectly comfortable with Eurasia basically being Russian, and he's pretty comfortable and probably not that bothered, probably a bit more bothered, but not that bothered, about areas of South Asia being in the Chinese sphere of influence, right?

24:54That is the world, the great power order, that I think this today reaffirms we are moving back to. And I think for us in Europe, I just think that is just we find ourselves completely squeezed between it. And Starman's going to have a very, very direct decision to make. He's not going to be able to obfuscate for very long because you can guarantee that China and Russia are going to put a motion of censure before the UN condemning the US at the Security Council. And we, as a permanent Security Council member, are going to have to decide how we vote. Yeah, and I just think there's a much simpler thing in this as well, which is it's about hypocrisy.

25:27It's about moral authority. So Starmer cannot go to Putin. He cannot go to Xi Jinping. He cannot go to other tyrants around the world and say, what are you doing invading these sovereign countries if he's not prepared to say the same thing to his mate Trump? And I think that is where it gets awkward. Yeah, we don't have big interests in much of Latin or South America, but it's about your moral authority at this point. You can't have one message for one person that you call a dictator and another message for somebody who's actually been quite useful to you. Look, we've considered the geopolitical aspect of all of this.