Ep. 1883 - Trump Kidnaps A Venezuelan Communist Dictator REACTION
America invades Venezuela and captures Nicolás Maduro, libs lose their mind over the operation, and Canada better be on its best behavior.
Ep. 1883
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If you put your phone down for an hour and a half over the weekend, you might have missed the war in Venezuela, in which President Trump and the U.S. military invaded the country, arrested the communist president, and put him on a ship to be tried in New York City, which itself is currently being run by a communist mayor.
Now, everyone is speculating on the implications of this action, what it means for U.S. foreign policy, what it means for America first, what it means for the global order.
But I would first like to offer an observation on the obvious next steps from here.
Step one, depose Maduro in Venezuela.
Step two, send him to New York to be tried for his crimes.
Step three, depose Momdani in New York.
Step four, install Maduro as mayor of New York City.
Step five, and this is the strangest part of all, both Venezuela and New York would improve as a result on Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
At least Maduro is not a Muslim, right?
I mean, look, I'm not saying neither are ideal.
You don't want communist dictators anywhere, but I'm just offering something that I haven't seen other people float.
The real question for a lot of people right now is what happens now?
Are we headed into some 20-year occupation like Afghanistan?
Are we heading into some years-long occupation like Iraq?
What does this mean for America first?
What does this mean for the so-called non-interventionist crowd?
And we'll get into all of that because this was really, really artfully done by the president.
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The operation was over in 88 minutes.
When I say if you put your phone down for an hour and a half, you missed it.
That doesn't even tell you the whole story because it happened in the middle of the night.
It happened at 2 o'clock in the morning Eastern time or local Caracas time.
It happened while we were all asleep.
From the time that the U.S. forces got to Maduro's compound to the time they were out of the country, back in international waters with the president of Venezuela, it was 88 minutes.
Now, how did they get from the sea into Caracas?
They just turned off all the power and the defense systems in the country because apparently we can do that.
And then we sent in a team of like a dozen special operators and they just took the president without incurring any casualties.
It was, I don't care if you are the most isolationist right-winger.
I don't care if you're the most anti-American leftist.
You got to be impressed because I think what this military action leaves a lot of Americans thinking beyond thoughts of Western hemispheric hegemony and American imperialism and the drug trade and the international order.
What it makes us think first is, man, we still got it.
You know, we still got it.
We're back-to-back World War champs.
And then we went through kind of a malaise and we kept losing like every war after that.
The Korean conflict was sort of whatever.
And then we lost Vietnam and then Iraq, we won and then we lost.
And then Afghanistan, we won and then we lost.
And it just, we're just in this malaise.
And then America does something like this.
And you just think, oh, wow, man, there is no other military on earth that can project power in any way, even slightly comparable to this.
Like, this is just a totally different thing.
And it's awesome.
Here is President Trump describing the operation.
All the way back, it dated to the Monroe Doctrines.
And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot.
They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.
I don't know.
It's Monroe Doctrine.
We sort of forgot about it.
It was very important, but we forgot about it.
We don't forget about it anymore.
Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.
Won't happen.
So just in concluding, for decades, other administrations have neglected or even contributed to these growing security threats in the Western hemisphere.
Under the Trump administration, we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way in our home region.
And our home region is very different than it was just a short while ago.
So first, you know, I'm a sucker for a good pun.
Monroe doctrine to Don Rowe doctrine is awesome.
I want this applied to many other world historic events.
I like the idea of Trump taking credit for the Roman Empire giving terrestrial power to the popes.
They call it, look, some people call it the donation of Constantine.
We call it the Donation of Constantine, okay?
We're giving secular power to the popes.
Love that.
Love the Donroe doctrine.
And that line alone answers a lot of worries and questions that people have.
Is this like Iraq?
No, because the Iraq war was a matter of trying to extend neoliberal ideology all around the world.
It was a 21st century neo-imperialist endeavor that had all the downsides of imperialism without any of the upsides.
What happened in Venezuela is as American as apple pie.
Deposing Latin American dictators is an American pastime more traditional than baseball.
Okay.
We've done it zillions of times over the years.
It is based on the cornerstone of American foreign policy, which is the Monroe Doctrine, which says that other nations need to get out of our hemisphere.
They need to stop messing around in our backyard.
We will not tolerate that.
And that's what this is really about.
The predicate for the action was not a regime change war.
It wasn't a war.
The predicate was the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, who the United States did not recognize as the legitimate leader of Venezuela because he lost an election.
A lot of the international community didn't recognize him as legitimate.
And he was arrested for the crime of narco-terrorism, which is what he's going to be tried for in New York.
That was the predicate for it.
So you say, okay, we want to cut off the drugs coming from Venezuela.
He was effectively just the head of a cartel.
And so we're going to arrest this cartel guy, just the same way we'd arrest Pablo Escobar or do a little worse than arrest Pablo Escobar.
That was one of the predicates.
However, there are other interests, obviously, as well.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.
So some people are pointing out this is a war for oil, a war for securing resources.
To some degree, that's true, though that's overstated.
But really what this is about is that Venezuela was allied with hostile regimes.
Venezuela was chummy-chummy with China and with Russia and with Iran and with a bunch of countries that don't like us.
And they had resources in Venezuela and we're not going to tolerate that.
Regardless of what you think about the operation, though I think most people are very impressed by it, you'd have to say that is very, very traditional.
It's very much in the American national spirit.
Okay, so what actually happened?
Here we turn to chairman of the joint chiefs, General Raisin Kane.
Every component of our joint force was soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians working in unison with our intelligence agency partners and law enforcement teammates in an unprecedented operation.
We leveraged our unmatched intelligence capabilities and our years of experience in hunting terrorists.
And we could not have done this mission without the incredible work by various intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA, and NGA.
We watched, we waited, we prepared.
We remained patient and professional.
This mission was meticulously planned, drawing lessons from decades of missions over the last many years, decades of many missions over these last many years.
This was an audacious operation that only the United States could do.
It required the utmost of precision and integration within our joint force.
And the word integration does not explain the sheer complexity of such a mission.
An extraction so precise, it involved more than 150 aircraft launching across the Western hemisphere in close coordination, all coming together in time and place to layer effects for a single purpose, to get an interdiction force into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise.
Failure of one component of this well-oiled machine would have endangered the entire mission, and failure is never an option for America's joint force.
It's just insane.
There was a Reddit post going around where in the lead up to this Venezuela operation, which has been telegraphed for months and months and months, which makes it all the more impressive, actually, because Maduro was expecting it, and they still got him out in 88 minutes without any American casualties.
But there was this Reddit post going around that said, this is totally ridiculous.
What?
You think U.S. Special Forces are just like space Marines who can just beam into a place, take the nation's president, and get out of there?
Come on, that's ridiculous.
A lot of American servicemen would be killed.
This would go on for days or weeks.
And this was just, you know, you guys have unrealistic expectations.
And then they had to edit the Reddit post.
I said, actually, never mind.
Delta Force is just Space Marines.
You're right.
It is totally insane what they did.
And you hear this, 150 aircraft, obviously huge military buildup in the sea, the coordination of all these agencies.
And this, I think, is what is so heartening for a lot of Americans.
There are two views on the CIA.
One view says the CIA is James Bond, Jason Bourne, controls the world.
The other view of the CIA is that the CIA is burn after reading.
It's the Cohen brothers movie.
They can't do anything right.
Every time they try to do anything, they bungle it even further.
They make a whole mess of the world and they should probably be disbanded.
These are the two views of the CIA.
And then when an operation like this takes place, you saw John Ratcliffe, CIA director with the president while it's going on, president and Marco Rubio.
You realize the CIA was deeply, deeply involved, as they always are in overthrowing regimes in Latin America.
You say, man, the CIA is pretty good at its job.
Then people's objection to the CIA would be that the CIA just does a bunch of like gay stuff.
Then people's objection to the CIA is that the CIA is just this element of this liberal bureaucracy, deep state that exists to expand transgender rights in the Philippines.
And that's stupid and it's a waste of money and it's actually bad.
And that's why we should stop these clandestine operations.
But when the CIA is good at its job, not incompetent, not burn after reading, and when the CIA is doing stuff that is good for America, like defending America's core national interests, especially closer to home, you know, with proximity, kicking out bad people, securing oil fields, like that kind of stuff.
That's a big boost in confidence for the CIA, for the American military, for the American government generally.
Very, very impressive.
And so then Marco Rubio steps in.
Marco Rubio, a man with a thousand jobs, about to be a thousand and one.
Rubio comes in and gives us the geopolitical implications.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and the head of USAID and future Presidente de Venezuela, Marco Rubio, tell us the geopolitics.
The other message here is the following.
You have a guy, like many people around the world, they like to play games.
You have a guy who decides he's going to invite Iran into his country, is going to do the confiscation of American oil companies, is going to flood our country with gang members, is going to take Americans prisoner and try to hold them for hostage and trade them like he was able to do with the Biden administration.
Basically likes to play games all this time and thinks nothing's going to happen.
And I hope what people now understand is that we have a president.
The 47th president of the United States is not a game player.
When he tells you that he's going to do something, when he tells you he's going to address a problem, he means it.
He actions it.
I can tell you, I've watched this process now for 14, 15 years, been around it.
Everybody talks.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that.
When I get there, we're going to do this.
We're going to take, this is a president of action.
Like, I don't understand yet how they haven't figured this out.
And now, if you don't know, now you know.
What's the next word when I heard Marco Rubio quoting Biggie Smalls?
And if you don't know, now you know.
Fellas.
Is it fellas?
Is it what is that word that comes after?
Very impressive stuff.
And an important point on the geopolitical implications.
The operation in Venezuela, practically speaking, was as much about Afghanistan as it was about Venezuela.
We say it was about China.
It was about Iran.
It was about Russia.
It was also about Afghanistan because we keep losing wars and we keep bungling.
And why we, I mean, mostly Democrats, but some Republicans too.
And we look weak and we maintain the global order.
So we can't look weak.
There is a very high cost to America looking incompetent and weak.
And the Afghanistan withdrawal was probably the apotheosis of bungling, stupid American foreign policy.
We just couldn't get anything right.
We alternately stayed in Afghanistan way too long.
We didn't have a clear objective of what Afghanistan was going to do.
And then we got out in the worst way possible.
It was just a complete catastrophe.
And Venezuela is the anti-Afghanistan in every way.
Where it was, what the interests were, how long it went, how efficiently it was carried out.
It was just, it was the anti-Afghanistan.
And that sends a message that we're serious and we're going to do stuff.
Trump's America First, as I've contended for years at this point, is not the America first of just retreating into our own shores.
It's not the America first primarily of nationalism.
Another N-word that could have followed, if you don't know, now you know.
Trump's America First is the America First of power, of world order, of empire, a recognition that we are a great power and we're not going to deny that.
We're not going to deny that in the left-wing way of opposing colonialism or something, hating our own national history.
But we're not going to oppose it in the left-wing or the right-wing way, rather, which is the isolationist, libertarian, Republic of Yeoman Farmers kind of way, which is just as divorced from reality as the left-wing view.
In some ways, more divorced from reality.
No, we're going to be great and we're going to secure our interests.
And in so doing, that will conduce to the common good of the whole world because the world relies on the American order.
So who is going to run it?
Who is going to run Venezuela?
President Trump gives us a pretty clear answer.
What was the group you mentioned that would run Venezuela?
It's largely going to be for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me.
Pause.
Pause it.
Hold on.
Give me.
Can we get a screen grab?
Yeah, there it is.
There, this poor man.
I was in the cabinet meeting when, right before Labor Day, it was going around the table, all the cabinet secretaries, and the president gets to Marco Rubio and he says, you know, this is a very important Labor Day for me as a man who has four jobs.
Well, ad number five or six or seven.
Trump says right there, right at that very moment, for at least a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me will be running Venezuela.
You look at Rubio's face, just here we go again.
Ayayaya.
Oh, cayate, senor presidente, por vavor.
No, no.
But it's going to be him.
That's great.
The way people are going to be debating this issue.
is going to be very, very silly.
I'm saying even on the right, because on the right, you have this divide between the interventionists and the non-interventionists.
And the pejorative term for interventionist is neocon.
And the pejorative term for non-interventionist is isolationist.
You never hear someone say, I'm a proud isolationist.
It's always the other guy who accuses you of being an isolation, or vice versa.
You never hear someone say, I love being a neocon.
They say, no, no, I'm an interventionist or whatever.
That debate is very, very stupid.
I need, people are not sufficiently paying attention to this point.
There is no real debate between interventionists and non-interventionists.
No serious person over the age of 19 describes, and 19-year-olds are not serious people, just as a matter of definition.
No serious person says, I'm an interventionist or a non-interventionist.
That is completely silly.
That is like history 101 freshman year of college silly.
Nations have interests and nations have power and sometimes have to project power and they have interests all around the world.
Nations always are intervening in various affairs.
That doesn't mean that you have to go spread democracy around the world like the neocons.
And it doesn't mean that you have to just retreat into your own borders that will never change.
Borders are going to change because peoples grow, peoples die.
History happens.
Okay.
There is no, do not, if anyone presents this to you as a debate between interventionism and non-interventionism, if anyone comes and says, I'm an interventionist, I'm a non-interventionist, just tune them out.
It's so silly.
That is an admission of I am not a serious person.
The question of what Donald Trump did in Venezuela is so much more interesting than that.
So get that out of your head.
Obviously, that's not in Trump's head.
And anyone who is surprised by Trump intervening in Latin America just hasn't been paying attention, doesn't know what he means by America first, doesn't know what he means by make America great again, doesn't know a thing about American history or policy.
Okay.
That, of course, does not stop the left from whining about this.
But the way the left is whining, it is chef's kiss.
I've never seen a more beautiful setup, frankly, by the president.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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Kamala Harris.
Here she is, the woman who would have been president.
Donald Trump's actions?
All right, no, I won't do the Kamala voice.
It would be too unbearable, especially given what she says.
She says, Donald Trump's actions in Venezuela do not make America safer, stronger, or more affordable.
Just put a pause right there.
Kicking our chief geopolitical adversaries out of the hemisphere, stopping the chief source of mass migration, which is itself a crime, the illegal immigration and always involves the cartels through the southern border, and securing oil fields that had been stolen, oil properties that had been stolen by the Chavez and Maduro regimes.
That even if you hate the action, it certainly makes America safer, stronger, more affordable.
But wait, she goes on.
The American people do not want this and they're being tired.
They're tired of being lied to.
I promise you, public opinion polls of this operation will reflect that it was very popular.
Of the operation itself, who knows what happens after that, but of the operation, I promise you, people think it's awesome.
Third, and this is the key.
America needs leadership whose priorities are lowering costs for working families, enforcing the rule of law, strengthening alliances, and most importantly, putting the American people first.
Okay, just let's take it right in a row, lowering costs for working families.
The things that drive up costs are energy, chiefly, and mass migration.
Mass migration, which is responsible for 100% of the increase in rent demand in New York and California, 60% nationwide.
Mass migration, which is responsible for screwing up the labor market and wages, which is responsible for drains on our welfare system, which downstream because of food subsidies end up raising the cost of groceries.
It is the chief driver of unaffordability.
So if you want to lower costs for working families, getting rid of Maduro is a pretty smart thing to do.
Second, enforcing the rule of law.
Maduro was the head of a cartel.
Maduro was broadly considered the illegitimate president of Venezuela.
Maduro undermined the law, strengthening alliances.
Maduro was allies with all of our enemies.
So if you want to strengthen alliances, getting rid of the guy who is bringing our enemies into the hemisphere is probably a smart thing to do.
And most importantly, putting the American people first.
Yeah, well, the predicate for this was Venezuelan drugs are killing Americans, Venezuelan migrants are killing Americans, and the terrorists and adversaries that Venezuela is lying with target Americans.
So that would put the American people first.
But forget about all that.
The criticism is of Trump's action, Trump's action to arrest Maduro and try him for his crimes.
And Kamala Harris says, this is completely unacceptable.
Rewind to the Biden-Harris administration earlier this year, January 10th.
Sorry, earlier within the last 365 days.
It was early last year, but still within the last year, condemning Nicolas Maduro's illegitimate attempt to seize power in Venezuela and announcing new actions against Maduro and his representatives to support the Venezuelan people.
Where is my, here it is.
In solidarity with the Venezuelan people, the U.S. government and our partners around the world are taking action today.
The Department of State is increasing the reward offers to up to $25 million each for information leading to the arrests and or convictions of Nicolas Maduro and Maduro's Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello.
The Department of State is also adding a new reward offer up to $15 million for the defense minister, on and on and on.
The Biden-Harris administration offered $25 million of your money, of your taxpayer money, to do exactly what Trump just did.
Trump just did the Biden-Harris policy, the policy that they said was their policy, but they were too cowardly to do it.
He just did the thing they promised to do, except he did it for $25 million cheaper.
Actually, well, depending on what happens to the rest of these Apparatchs, possibly $40 million cheaper than Biden even tried to do it.
So now Kamala Harris just looks like a complete dope because not only were they not able to carry out the policy that Trump carried out magnificently, she didn't even know what the policy was.
So Trump has now trolled the libs into defending a narco-terrorist communist and a man that the left had been begging to remove from power for years and years and years, which exposes the left not merely as communists or defenders of anti-American figures or defenders of, I don't know, narco-terrorism, whatever.
It reveals the left to be purely reflexive, purely reflexive.
They previously criticized Trump for being soft on Maduro.
Now they're criticizing Trump for arresting Maduro, for doing exactly what Biden-Harris wanted to do.
They previously wanted to suck up to Russia during the Hillary Clinton great reset, the first great reset.
Then they attacked Trump as being a Putin stooge.
They're purely reflexive.
I'm not saying that that reflexiveness doesn't exist at all on the right.
It does.
It's politics.
You gauge your reactions based in part on your adversaries.
But I think that the right has a firmer grasp on its own principles and even on objective reality than the left does.
The left at this point, I think, is purely reactionary.
And I don't think it's merely a coincidence that the left is self-consciously unmoored from an objective moral order or even objective physical reality, as you see quite clearly in the transgender ideology.
The fact that the left is relativistic and subjectivistic about everything makes them more susceptible to being purely reactive when it comes to policy, such that now they're attacking Trump for doing the thing that they themselves wanted to do 360 days ago.
So what, what, what happens now?
What happens now is our adversaries take note.
I mentioned the Russia-Iran-China connections.
Also not a coincidence, I think.
Chinese diplomats had just arrived in Venezuela to negotiate with Maduro.
So our chief geopolitical adversary arrives in Venezuela to negotiate with this guy.
America then comes in while they're waiting to eat their canape and drink their champagne.
The American military flies in and just takes the president, just yoinks him right out of the palace.
The Chinese are still in Venezuela.
They're still waiting on that meeting.
They're going to be waiting a long time.
So that sends a very, very clear message.
And then the question becomes, was this defensible?
I think this is defensible any way you slice it.
When it comes to the question of persuading conservatives that this is defensible, because they don't want to have another replay of Iraq, we've already gone into that.
This is not Iraq.
This is kind of like the opposite of Iraq.
It's kind of the opposite of Afghanistan as far as foreign policy interventions go.
But what about from the perspective of international law?
Some conservatives are going to say, there's no such thing as international law.
And we all joke about that a little bit because the UN is a joke and a lot of those international institutions are jokes.
But in principle, there is such a thing as international law.
International law is an extrapolation from the natural law, which, like international law, we can't quite see it.
We can't quite touch it.
There's not exactly a terrestrial authority that can perfectly exact justice about it.
Nevertheless, it exists.
And it certainly exists in as much as the different nations of the world come together and say, we're going to recognize certain treaties.
We're going to recognize certain privileges.
We're going to behave in a certain way.
There is such a thing as international law.
But from the perspective of international law, this was defensible.
Many nations do not recognize Maduro as being the legitimate president of Venezuela.
This was a law enforcement action, therefore, against an illegitimate leader of a nation.
The Monroe Doctrine is pretty firmly established in international law and geopolitics.
And because of the Monroe Doctrine and because of the proximity of Venezuela to the United States, it's much more defensible to say, look, there were seriously threatening actions being taken very near to our borders and out of self-protection, which is a key aspect of the natural law and the international law, we had to go in and take this action in a prudent way.
I think just about any way you slice it, this is defensible.
Even down to the point that you can hardly call it a war.
In what way was it a war?
Nevertheless, the liberal activist groups, notably including the Chicago Teachers Union, are protesting the war.
The Chicago Teachers Union is protesting the war in Venezuela after the war already finished.
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I want to tell you about my favorite comment on Friday.
This is from Abe Breen339 who says, I would say voting for Gavin Newsom is the downside to hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.
This is from, I had a very interesting interview with a young streamer named Clovicular.
I really enjoyed speaking with him.
Very interesting guy.
You can catch that.
I interviewed him just a few days before he ran a guy over in his cybertruck, allegedly.
Anyway, you can catch the interview on my YouTube channel.
He said, though, that I was wasting my time in politics.
He said that all the time I wasted in politics, I could have been bone smashing.
I could have been hitting myself in the head with a hammer.
I said, is there any downside to doing that?
He said, no.
Looked at me like I was the stupidest guy in the world.
He said, of course there's no downside to hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.
But then later in the interview, he endorsed Gavin Newsome.
So you're right.
Maybe that's a downside.
Emergency Chicago protest.
No war on Venezuela.
Stop the bombings.
Saturday, January 3rd, federal plaza, 5 p.m.
This came out from the Chicago Teachers Union.
Why is the Chicago Teachers Union organizing foreign policy demonstrations?
Yeah, great question.
However, in this case, I think it's really a win-win.
Just like I said, you extract Maduro from Venezuela, you bring him to New York, then you depose Momdani in New York, you make Maduro the mayor of New York.
It's not ideal in any case, but both places would improve.
That's a win-win, I think.
Well, so too here, it's a win-win.
The Chicago Teachers Union demands no war on Venezuela.
Hey, guys, good news.
There's no war on Venezuela.
Good news.
By the time you are gathering for your protest, there's no war on Venezuela.
Stop the bombings.
Oh, hey, guys, even more great news.
There are no bombings.
You missed it.
The war, such as it is, was so efficiently fought and won that you didn't even have time to complain about it.
You didn't even have time to whine.
And you guys are really good at whining.
You guys are the Michael Jordan of whining.
You're the Delta Force of whining.
So you should have, if anyone was going to whine in time, it was going to be you, but you missed it because of how efficiently this military operation was carried out.
It's even better than the precedents for it in American history because we've done similar, I mentioned, we've intervened in Latin America a zillion times.
But even recently, you think of George Bush, George Bush I in Panama.
That intervention where we took out Noriega, that lasted a relatively short period of time.
Or Ronald Reagan in Grenada.
Same thing.
So of relatively recent vintage, you had two pretty good Republican presidents, Reagan especially good, carry out similar operations.
Trump did it even better than they did, even better than they did.
Ronald Reagan, the man who won the Cold War, and George H.W. Bush, widely considered one of the great foreign policy presidents we've ever had.
Trump actually was even more efficient than them.
The Chicago Teachers Union would have had time to protest Reagan and Bush, not Trump.
So who's going to take over Venezuela?
Everyone's been talking about this lady, Maria Karina Machado.
She's the opposition leader right now.
And yet all these neuralgic, neurotic kind of people on the right saying, oh, no, this is bad.
She's a globalist.
It's all about Israel or something.
I guess she likes Israel.
It looks like it's not going to be her because she just doesn't seem to have the support.
So for right now, Marco Rubio is going to help run it.
Donald Trump's going to help run it.
But they are going to leave part of the government intact.
This is also why the Venezuela intervention is quite different from Iraq.
In Iraq, they dissolved the Iraqi Baath Party, one of the crucial strategic blunders of the Iraq war.
But in Venezuela, they're going to leave a lot of the government in place.
They're leaving the vice president, Delce Rodriguez.
They're leaving her in place.
And then Trump is simply saying, look, we're going to leave you in place, but if you do anything that we don't like, we're going to kill you.
That's what he said.
He said, in a telephone interview, Trump apparently said, quote, if she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.
Maduro was kidnapped and is awaiting trial in New York City.
What's the bigger price?
He goes, yeah, look, we're going to leave your government basically in place.
We don't want chaos.
We don't want insurgency.
We don't want the place to dissolve into civil war.
We're going to leave your government in place.
This isn't about spreading democracy or liberalism or whatever.
We're going to leave it in place.
And if you mess up, we're going to kill you.
And then the next guy's going to be in place.
Khabish?
You understand?
According to the New York Times, it was Maduro's constant dancing that was the last straw for Trump.
Maduro's dancing.
He was singing imagine.
That was for me.
That was it.
It's a take him out.
And so they're going to put Delsy in.
Apparently, according to the reporting, her ability to increase oil output under sanctions impressed some members of the Trump administration.
The fact that she was able to perform her job very well, even amid U.S. pressure, was impressive.
So they say, okay, look, we don't like you.
We don't agree with you.
We don't obviously, you know, but you seem relatively competent.
So anyway, run the country.
If you get out of line, we're going to kill you.
We're going to go to the next guy.
Good?
All good?
Okay.
This is political realism.
The neocon early 2000s spread democracy around the world, guys.
They would have put in Maria Carina Machado or what, or I don't, I don't know enough about Machado, but they would have put in one of these brave opposition leaders as this.
They would have installed Greta Thunberg or something, right?
No.
We're going to deal with real tough people because this is a real tough situation because we're focused primarily on American interests and long-standing U.S. foreign policy.
That's realism.
Realism and fortitude do not need to be opposed to each other, which is why President Trump's already threatening Cuba.
Now has no income.
They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil.
They're not getting any of it.
And Cuba literally is ready to fall.
You have a lot of great Cuban-Americans that are going to be very happy about this.
Marco Rubio has really.
Okay, there we go.
Cuba might fall because Venezuela was propping up Cuba.
So this is another consequence.
You had Cuba, which has been inviting our enemies into the hemisphere for 60 years because of a Democrat, because of Kennedy.
And Trump says, yeah, we're going to see about that.
How about Colombia?
Mr. President, what about Colombia?
Colombia is very sick, too.
Run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.
And he's not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you.
What does that mean?
He's not going to be doing it very long.
He's not doing it very long.
He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories.
He's not going to be doing it very long.
So there will be an operation by the U.S.
It sounds good to me.
Sounds good to me.
Now, notice, he's not saying we're going to go invade Colombia.
He's not saying we're going to go invade Cuba.
He's saying we could.
Maybe we will.
What do you think about that?
He's saying this not just about Latin America.
He's saying this even when it comes to Greenland, a territory that Trump has long desired, that the U.S. State Department has long desired now for over 150 years.
We need Greenland for national security.
Not for minerals.
We have so many sites for minerals and oil and everything that we have more oil than any other country in the world.
We need Greenland for national security.
And if you take a look at Greenland, you look up and down the coast, you have Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.
We need Greenland and we're going to have it.
That's what he's saying.
He's not angry.
He's not ideological.
He's just saying, look, we need it and we're going to have it.
You know, so we can do it the easy way or the hard way.
I'm just telling you.
I'm describing.
I'm not even prescribing.
I'm describing.
We're going to have it.
Politics is getting real again.
This is the real sign of the times that comes out of the Venezuela operation.
Politics has not been real.
Geopolitics has not been real for 35 years now.
Really since the end of the Cold War.
After the Cold War, we had unquestioned American hegemony up until 9-11.
9-11 started to shake the ideologues, the ideologues who said that liberalism had won, history had ended, there would be no more history.
There would be no more conflict.
We would all just kind of kumbaya.
There would be global trade.
We'd all focus on material prosperity.
And that was it.
And then 9-11 shook that a little bit because Muslim fanatics waged a crusades-like campaign to attack that liberal, materialist, American-led West.
And then what did we do?
We responded with even more surreal, abstract, hyper-real politics, where we said, we're going to double down.
We're going to super duper spread our ideology now.
And we're going to plant freedom seeds all over the Middle East.
And we're going to have Madisonian democracy spring up.
And that didn't happen.
It was part and parcel of the same silly surreal politics that we had since the end of the Cold War.
And now politics is getting real again.
And now Trump is coming out and he's not talking about the sweet sound of freedom that all American ear, all the ears of all human beings perk up for, the longings of our hearts for the writings of John Rawls.
And oh, if we could only drop copies of the second treatise of government down on all, no.
He says, hey, look, this guy, he stole our oil properties and he was inviting our enemies in.
And so we took him.
We just came in the middle of the night and we took him.
And we're going to do that to you too if you do it again.
So get in line.
Hey, Colombia, you saw what we just did to him?
Get in line.
Hey, Cuba, get in line.
We're not playing around.
Hey, we need Greenland.
Sorry, we need it.
China and Russia are threatening us.
We need it.
It's ridiculous that Denmark controls it.
Most of the Greenlanders want to be part of America anyway, in some way.
Probably we don't want the 51st state, but in some kind of terror.
Anyway, we're going to get it.
Somehow we're just going to get it.
Okay.
We need it.
Capisch?
That kind of realism, I think, is refreshing for a lot of people.
Because the America First impulse, certainly not for Trump and not for me, was never about just burying our heads in the sand or something.
The America First Impulse was about recognizing reality and recognizing that governments have a responsibility to their own constituents first, to their own citizens first.
We need to put our interests first, in accord with justice, in accord with national law, in accord even with international law.
But we just got to, we got to know whose team we're on, folks.
That's what America First certainly has meant to Trump and has meant to me.
I think it has meant to most Trump supporters.
Some people were a little confused about it, I think.
And that's what Trump is doing.
Okay.
This return of reality, I think, is even part and parcel with the domestic agenda.
The fact that Trump won, the Republicans won on opposing transgenderism or opposing DEI or what.
What unites all of those apparently disparate things is a recognition of reality over the fantasies of people who have become too abstract in their ideology.
That's what unites all of those things.
That's what Trump is bringing back.
Meanwhile, we're importing communists to go run New York City who are extolling the warmth of collectivism, who are talking about transitioning, speaking of transitions, transitioning from private property to the collective good, appointing fire chiefs who have never served in fire departments, but at least the new fire chief is a lesbian.
That's what matters, of course.
So you're seeing a lot of surreality.
You're seeing a clear distinction, which will very likely help Trump in the midterms, help the Republicans in the midterms, might help the administration even into 2028.
One story I really, really want to get to.
I don't have time, though.
This will be a little tease.
Scott Adams, you know, the great Dilbert cartoonist, who's also been a marvelous broadcaster over the years, made great observations about the Trump phenomenon, especially early on.
Just a delightful figure in politics.
He's dying.
He has cancer.
He thinks he'll die this January.
And he says he's going to convert to Christianity.
And weirdly, some Christians are upset about that.
Anyway, we'll have to get to it tomorrow because today's Music Monday, the rest of the show continues now.
You don't want to miss it.
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Oh, this is an illusion.
An echo of a voice that has died.
and soon that echo will cease they say that merlin is mad They say he was a king in Dovid.
The son of a princess of lost Atlantis.
They say the future and the past are known to him.
That the fire and the wind tell him their secrets.
That the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command.
They say he slew hundreds.
Hundreds, do you hear?
That the world burned and trembled at his wrath.
The Merlin died long before you and I were born.
Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.
Vortigen is gone.
Room is gone.
The Saxon is here.
Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty.
And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne.
And he will have it.
If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope.
A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand.
A high king who would be the wonder of the world.
You to a future of peace.
There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust.
Men of the island of the mighty!
You stand together!
You stand as Britons!
You stand as one!
Great darkness is falling upon this land.
These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.