Glenn reacts to Trump's bombing of Venezuela and the removal of Maduro. ------------------------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| 2026 is barely three days old, and the United States already has its first new war. | |
| Congratulations to all Americans for your new war. | |
| This one is in Venezuela, and yes, that's exactly what it is. | |
| Overnight, the United States bombed multiple locations in Venezuela, including major bombing in its capital of Caracas. | |
| There are all kinds of verified videos that you can find online of this bombing. | |
| Both the Trump administration and the Venezuelan government have confirmed the bombing, as have multiple media outlets, both in the region and the United States. | |
| Beyond that, Donald Trump on True Social early this morning said that U.S. forces had captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, as well as his wife, and have already taken both of them out of the country. | |
| Maduro was indicted in 2020 by the United States government on charges of drug trafficking. | |
| There was a $50 million bounty placed on the head of Maduro during the first year of the Trump administration. | |
| Regime change in Venezuela is something that many neocons and especially warmongers that emerge out of the Cuban and Venezuelan communities in South Florida, people like Marco Rubio, have long craved. | |
| There was a lot of pressure on Trump during his first term, principally from Marco Rubio and John Bolton, to order regime change operations in Venezuela. | |
| Trump actually tried it. | |
| It didn't succeed. | |
| Trump was angry with Bolton. | |
| That's what led to Bolton's departure from the White House, namely that Bolton had promised him it would be easier than Trump thought. | |
| So now Trump's back in the second term, not even a year in office, and he already began bombing Caracas last night, removed Nicolas Maduro from the country, presumably from power. | |
| And there, of course, there's very little known beyond that in terms of what comes next, what the motive is, what the objectives are. | |
| And part of the reason is that there has been no public debate or discussion, either in Congress, which the Constitution says is required to authorize new wars. | |
| Of course, that has not happened for a long time in Washington and continues not to happen any longer. | |
| And there's been very little debate in the media as well. | |
| Donald Trump didn't campaign on a platform of bombing Venezuela, of engineering regime change in Venezuela. | |
| The only proposed military action with respect to the flow of drugs into the United States was Trump's promise to bomb cartels, drug cartels in Mexico, which is actually the source of where fentanyl comes from in the United States, not Venezuela. | |
| And so this all comes after a two-month, very half-hearted propaganda campaign to first try and tell Americans, oh, Maduro is shipping drugs into the country. | |
| And then following that, we're going to free the peoples, the repressed peoples of Venezuela. | |
| And it's very easy to feel good. | |
| And most Americans often do feel good when they're told someone is a bad guy that the United States killed or the United States detained or found and arrested. | |
| Oh, look, we went into this country of Venezuela and our heroic armed forces captured Nicolas Maduro. | |
| Yeah, he's a bad guy. | |
| He's a communist. | |
| He's a narco-trafficker. | |
| And now we feel good about ourselves. | |
| And of course, the questions that always have to be asked, but rarely are in this kind of climate of intoxication and war propaganda and war celebration is what are the consequences of all of this? | |
| What is the point of it? | |
| Who benefits from it? | |
| If anybody. | |
| So I think, first of all, one of the things we have to start off by saying is that it is a very common plank, a common tactic of U.S. war propaganda, probably the most common and pernicious propagandistic tactic whenever a new war has to be sold, to tell anybody who questions the U.S. war, their U.S. regime change war, that if they question it or even especially oppose it, | |
| it means that they're on the side of the government or the regime who is the ostensible target of the bombing campaign and the war. | |
| We've seen this for decades. | |
| People who were opposed to invading Iraq were accused of being pro-Saddam Hussein. | |
| People who were opposed to Obama's regime change bombing campaign in Libya were accused of being pro-Gaddafi. | |
| People who oppose Obama's CIA dirty war in Syria were accused of being pro-Assad. | |
| People who oppose U.S. financing of the war in Ukraine are accused of being pro-Putin. | |
| People who oppose U.S. regime change in Venezuela are accused of being pro-Maduro. | |
| It's just, you wind up the U.S. media, the U.S. government on a bipartisan basis, and that's the accusation that comes out. | |
| And it's, of course, very effective because nobody wants to be perceived as siding with any of these governments that most Americans have been trained to believe for so long are evil, repressive, dictatorial, et cetera. | |
| It should go without saying that you can oppose a war against a country without favoring or supporting that country's government. | |
| Huge numbers of people were opposed to the war in Vietnam, not because they supported Ho Chi Minh. | |
| Huge numbers of people were against the war in Iraq, not because they supported Saddam Hussein. | |
| This is so basic, but it's logical, it's rational, and it doesn't really compete with this visceral tribal instinct that's purposely fueled and cultivated and fed whenever it comes to the war propaganda about our grand victories and the field of battle and we captured the bad guy. | |
| Should also point out that if you want to find the best comparison in terms of what the United States thus far has done in Venezuela, you should look to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, where under Bush 41, the United States invaded Panama with the ostensible goal of removing its leader, Manuel Noriega, who had long been a close ally of the United States and the CIA, the CIA when run by former President Bush when he ran the CIA. | |
| Noriega had been a close U.S. ally. | |
| And then at some point, he started defying the U.S. | |
| And so the U.S. indicted him for drug trafficking, claimed that he was shipping drugs to the United States, invaded Panama, killed several thousand Panamanians. | |
| A couple of dozen or a few dozen American troops were killed. | |
| Hundreds were injured. | |
| We removed Noriega from power, brought him to Miami, put him on trial. | |
| He was convicted of drug trafficking. | |
| He went to prison. | |
| Who benefited from that? | |
| Did the flow of drugs into the United States stop? | |
| Was the flow of drugs into the United States impeded? | |
| Do you think in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of that operation, Americans had difficulty getting cocaine or other drugs who wanted it? | |
| Obviously not. | |
| The drug war is nothing but a whole history of failures. | |
| It led to a lot of instability and violence in Panama, but it achieved very little. | |
| Bush 41 was heralded on the cover of the New York Times for having gotten rid of his wimp label that had been attached to him. | |
| But other than that, very little good was done. | |
| The other thing I should say is the fact that you remove a leader from a country doesn't mean you've actually changed anything in that country or even done anything good for it. | |
| All you have to do is go back to 2003, a couple months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, when the U.S., when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein. | |
| He was videoed coming out of his little spider hole with a big beard. | |
| Americans celebrated it as though the war was over. | |
| Oh, look, all the naysayers were wrong. | |
| The war ended so quickly. | |
| We got Saddam Hussein. | |
| And the war raged on for another six, eight, 10 years. | |
| Same when the U.S. succeeded in bombing Gaddafi out of his presidential palace in Tripoli to be raped and killed on the streets of Libya. | |
| We all celebrated the A, and then it led to nothing but massive anarchy and violence and civil war and a migration crisis and the return of ISIS and slavery to Libya. | |
| This has been what these regime change wars have constantly generated, not stability or freedom and democracy, the way we're all told today to believe it will happen in Venezuela, but instead instability and violence and all kinds of internal strife, migration crises, destabilization of the region. | |
| And this is to say nothing of the fact that Donald Trump ran on a platform, three separate elections of opposing regime change wars. | |
| Supposedly, our U.S. military was only going to be used to defend our country, defend our homeland, only attack people who were threatening to attack the United States or had attacked the United States. | |
| Maduro poses no threat of any kind to the United States. | |
| That's beyond obvious. | |
| There's been a migrant crisis from Venezuela like there has been from most or many Latin American countries. | |
| Supposedly, the southern border is now closed. | |
| So that threat, even if you want to blame Maduro for it, no longer exists. | |
| And really, the migration crisis was due to the fact that there was economic suffering in Venezuela, in large part due to the fact that the United States had imposed so many strangling sanctions on that country that they had difficulty selling their oil. | |
| They had difficulty monetizing their resources. | |
| But you can blame Maduro for economic difficulties if you want. | |
| That was the reason why so many migrants had come to the United States, but the southern border is now closed. | |
| So that certainly doesn't provide any just cause for this war. | |
| There's an untold number of Venezuelans that we killed, including civilians, according to the government. | |
| Hard to believe if you look at that strike, the video of the strikes, the massive amount of firepower we dropped on that country, that that's not true. | |
| And so now the question is, what was attained? | |
| And I guess we have two options. | |
| Number one, we have the possibility that all this was about was removing Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, bringing him to the United States to stand trial on drug trafficking charges or some other agreement pursuant to which he voluntarily left Venezuela, as some opposition sources are claiming. | |
| But he left Venezuela either voluntarily or involuntarily. | |
| Hard to believe it was voluntary. | |
| Who would purposely put themselves in the custody of the United States government that way? | |
| But either way, he's out of Venezuela. | |
| And so the Trump administration is signaling to Republican senators and others that this is the end of operations. | |
| That's all we're doing in Venezuela. | |
| Let's assume that that's true. | |
| We don't do anything else in Venezuela. | |
| Right now, the Maduro government is still in power. | |
| The officials running Venezuela are the same officials who a week ago under Maduro were running Venezuela. | |
| We haven't changed the government. | |
| We just removed the leader. | |
| So if that's really all we do and that's the only outcome, what was the point of it? | |
| It was kind of like symbolic effort. | |
| Was it designed to attract, distract Americans' attention from all the reasons they're angry with the U.S. government and the Trump administration? | |
| It's hard to believe that will be the end of it, but that's one option. | |
| Okay, we just got Maduro out. | |
| We're not really planning on doing anything else. | |
| We're not going to install a new government. | |
| We're not going to force elections on it. | |
| We're just going to take out Maduro. | |
| In which case, what was the point of all the bombing and the killing and the precedent it sets? | |
| And the second option, obviously, is that no, we actually do. | |
| This is the first step in regime change. | |
| We want to bring down the Venezuelan government, replace it with the puppet government, which has already said that its leaders have said that it will be highly deferential to the United States, will open Venezuelan oil to Exxon and Chevron and other American oil companies on much more favorable terms. | |
| But if that's the case, we really want to change the government of Venezuela, put in a pro-U.S. puppet government, it will mean that we are now responsible for Venezuela, just like we were responsible for Iraq all those years when we changed its government, when we temporarily removed the Taliban from Afghanistan, we were responsible for that country. | |
| Is that anything remotely like what Donald Trump promised to represent the forgotten men and women of the United States? | |
| We're now responsible for the governance of Venezuela and the civil war and the unrest and the destabilization. | |
| Any regime change is certain to provoke, which is why people like Tulsi Gabbard, who's now Donald Trump's director of national intelligence, spent years in laying against a regime change war in Venezuela while it was neocons like John Balton and Markarubi who wanted it. | |
| Is that something the United States really should be doing? | |
| Is that where we should be expending our resources? | |
| While Donald Trump also threatens Iran, that we will go back to war with it if they redevelop its nuclear program, which seems odd given that the facilities we were told are obliterated, or if they develop new ballistic missiles to defend themselves against Israel, or even if they use violence against protesters, where Donald Trump said yesterday the United States will intervene on behalf of the protesters. | |
| So while we're threatening Iran, while we're still financing the war in Ukraine, while still at Israel's side doing everything it asks, now we're going to be responsible for the internal governance of Venezuela as well. | |
| It is remarkable that Americans constantly say in so many different ways through polling, through elections, through the embrace of new leaders, that they don't want new wars. | |
| They're sick of wars. | |
| They're sick of regime change wars. | |
| They're sick of bombing campaigns. | |
| And yet every time a new one is offered, oh, we're going to go bomb Yemen, Trump said a year ago. | |
| After criticizing Biden for bombing Yemen, oh, we're going to go bomb Yemen. | |
| We're going to kill the Houthis. | |
| We did that for about a month, killed a bunch of people. | |
| Now we're going to go bomb Iran and bomb their nuclear facilities for Israel. | |
| We just bombed Nigeria and multiple other countries. | |
| And now we're bombing Venezuela. | |
| Despite how often many people say they don't want more wars, we want to concentrate our resources at home. | |
| It's so easy to get people to just cheer because you feel like, oh, yeah, we got the bad guys. | |
| It's kind of like very primitive, tribalistic, easily manipulated craving that's within all of us to see our side killing and conquering and shedding blood. | |
| But one thing we've learned over and over is that it doesn't benefit anyone other than the tiny slave of elites inside the United States, and it comes at great cost to our country, to people's welfare who live in our country, to citizens of our country. | |
| And of course, then there's the precedent it sets for the rest of the world, seeing the United States yet again bomb and invade another country whenever it feels like it, a country that hasn't attacked the United States, no congressional authorization, no UN resolution, no international approval, no even pretext for a just cause for the war. | |
| And I really hope there's nobody who believes, just please, if whatever else you think, do not come with the argument that the United States did this because Maduro didn't respect the integrity of elections or because he was undemocratic or a repressive dictator. | |
| The United States doesn't care in the slightest about whether countries have governments that repress its citizens or ignore electoral results. | |
| Some of the Trump administration's closest allies are the world's most tyrannical anti-democratic regimes, whether in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates or Egypt or Jordan, all countries on whom Trump has lavished all sorts of praise. | |
| We're obviously not going to go around the world and change repressive governments. | |
| We love repressive governments. | |
| In fact, the Trump National Security Strategy issued at the end of the year specifically, explicitly said, we don't care what kind of governments other countries have. | |
| That's not our business. | |
| We're going to stop lecturing to other countries that they have to have governments like ours. | |
| That's not our concern. | |
| We're not there to free the Venezuelan peoples and bring freedom and democracy. | |
| That's not why we fight wars. | |
| We far more often remove governments that are democratic in order to replace them with dictators than we do remove dictators in order to replace them with democracy. | |
| We don't want democracies in other parts of the world. | |
| We want United States interests to thrive. | |
| And often that's contrary to democracies. | |
| So that's not the reason we're doing it. | |
| That has nothing to do with the reason we're doing it. | |
| Traditionally, when we remove dictators, they don't get replaced with good liberal democrats who give freedom and democracy to their people. | |
| They just are equally dictatorial but serving other interests. | |
| So you can debate why this is. | |
| There's a lot of war hawks who hate the governments of Venezuela and Cuba and have long wanted the United States to remove them. | |
| And these immigrant communities in the United States, including especially the ex-Cuban, the Cuban immigrants and the Venezuelan immigrants concentrated in Florida, have long wanted the U.S. military to go and fix what they consider the part of the world that their families are from. | |
| Just like many Jews who are trained to love and worship Israel want the U.S. government to go serve Israel. | |
| It's a very common dynamic. | |
| That is part of it. | |
| But also, obviously, Venezuela is rich in oil. | |
| Although, why do we need to control the government? | |
| We could just buy their oil. | |
| We prevent them from selling their oil. | |
| That's why they don't sell their oil, because we prevent them from selling their oil. | |
| What this is, is just the U.S. military industrial complex constantly needing new wars. | |
| We constantly need to kill people. | |
| It's just the identity of the United States. | |
| You can elect candidates who promise to put an end to it, like Donald Trump did over and over and over again. | |
| And no matter what, you're going to get bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. | |
| People like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are all going to be cheering this. | |
| Marco Rubio, same mindset, the same dogma, the same foreign policy. | |
| Imperialism and warmongering that has dominated Washington for decades is still very much the governing ideology. | |
| And again, either the outcome is we removed Maduro and don't plan to change anything else, in which case, what was the point? | |
| Other than perhaps creating a precedent, why can't Russia now go and just remove Zelensky? | |
| Why can't Beijing now just go and remove top Ti-Wanese leaders and say, oh, they're accused of crimes and bring them and put them in a Chinese prison if this is the precedent that we've now set? | |
| So either we did that, we just removed Maduro and don't intend to do anything else as Trump officials are signaling to their allies in Washington to allow them to defend and justify this, in which case, what was the point of killing the people we just killed, of invading and bombing and the rest? | |
| Or we're really going to change the regime in Venezuela. | |
| We're now responsible for the governance of Venezuela, in which case that seems even to be a lot worse. | |
| Trump ran on a platform, obviously everyone heard it, of not engaging in these kinds of wars. | |
| Yes, Venezuela is in our hemisphere. | |
| I don't think that means that we can or should be invading countries to make sure that the governments that they have are ones that serve our interests and that we like. | |
| Those were the kinds of wars we saw in the 1980s throughout the Cold War that never ended, that resulted in all kinds of atrocities. |