On this episode of the Muckrake Podcast, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman confront what may be one of the most audacious and disturbing moments of the Trump era, which is saying something. The United States uses special forces to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while bombing Caracas, then casually announces it will run Venezuela and seize its oil. No congressional authorization. No real pushback. No consequences.
They break down how this operation could have happened, why it almost certainly required months of planning, and what it means when the most powerful military in human history is fully under the control of an authoritarian regime. The conversation explores the legality, or lack thereof, of the abduction, the hollow narco trafficking charges, and the chilling precedent being set for global politics.
Jared and Nick also examine the implications for international law, NATO, and the postwar liberal order, drawing lines from the war on terror to Ukraine, Venezuela, and the emerging world of authoritarian spheres of influence. They discuss Mark Kelly’s warning to the military, the targeting of dissent, the role of oil companies, and why this feels fundamentally different from Trump’s first term.
This is a bleak, furious, and deeply unsettling conversation about state power, fascism, and the collapse of norms that once pretended to restrain empire. If you are asking how far this can go, the answer may already be unfolding.
Support the show by signing up to our Patreon and get access to the full Weekender episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Nick, I don't know. really totally what to say right now.
We have a full show today talking about one of the most audacious and disturbing moments of the era of Trump, which is really saying something.
I don't know how else to get into it.
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Nick, you know, this weekend, early Saturday morning, I assume it was this way for you.
I woke up and the first thing that I saw was that the United States of America used special forces to kidnap the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, while the military bombed Caracas.
Maduro was brought to America.
He is going to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.
And we now apparently are in total and utter control of Venezuela, depending upon who you're listening to.
There are rumors that we are going to do this to other countries now.
There's a lot to talk about here, Nick.
I got an email from a listener and they were like, are you going to do a special episode?
Are you going to do an emergency podcast?
And I thought about talking to you about it, but I was so I'm dejected right now.
Like everything feels really bad in general.
And for something like this to take place, it is so not just audacious.
It's so disgusting.
And there are so many elements of this that really bother me.
I guess I want to start by asking, what was your initial reaction?
We texted a little bit about this, but like we haven't been able to talk about it.
This is wild shit all the way around.
I think also it may be a bit more prudent to have waited till our normal recording time to do it because there was more stuff that's trickled in.
It makes it easier to analyze or more full of an analyzation, analysis.
So I think one of my initial reactions, I think I even texted you was, I'm just amazed that they pulled this off militarily as easily as or as efficiently as they did.
I mean, if you're going to get into that, you might as well give the military credit for pulling this off and doing this as well as they did, especially in the context of, you know, I'm thinking about sand and the helicopter engines when Carter tried to get rid of, like, say, the hostages or in Black Hawk Downs, Somalia.
All manner of these kind of things almost never go right.
Even when they got Bin Laden, they had at least, you know, one of the helicopters crashed.
So that was probably one of the more shocking things.
And again, I think we're just so conditioned to a certain level of ineptness in this administration and with someone like Hegseth that it just seemed like this would have leaked.
It would have all sorts of things happened.
So for them to have even gotten that done from a logistical standpoint was shocking to me.
Well, I think it highlighted, and this is the really frightening thing, I think, and we'll get into the different aspects of it.
You're right.
It's the strongest military in the history of the world is under command of a fascist and a group of assholes who can do whatever they want whenever they want at any given moment.
I think what you're talking about is something that has really gotten to me.
And it's really, I want to be honest.
We've been doing this show for a while.
You know, I really want to be honest with the audience.
Like this has me down.
Like general, general life right now is tough, but like this has me down.
And it has me down because it's seeing the might of state power.
They went to Venezuela and they grabbed Maduro in the middle of the night, basically and put a bag over his head and drug him to New York.
And nobody's saying shit about it.
And nothing's happening.
And that is, it's really wild to see state power in the control of people like this.
I think that's sort of the feeling that I had as I initially started really taking this in.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's that's certainly a reaction.
And people are saying things.
There are people.
People are saying things, sure.
Yeah, but that's that helpless feeling of like, what are you supposed to do?
They have the guns.
They have the military behind them, which is exactly how authoritarians take over.
Now, you want to push back on this, but like I'm convinced that this is why Mark Kelly et al. made that video six weeks ago, you know, exhorting the military not to do unlawful orders.
Now, we can go back.
We're going to pull this apart a little bit as we go into how this all got, how this happened, because again, you don't pull this off by just coming up with it.
And then the next day you do this mission.
You have to train for months.
So it seems very plausible to me that, you know, Mark Kelly, who is a member of the military, you know, still, got wind of this training, realized what the ramifications were, because I don't think there's a lot of legal scholars that are going to argue that this is a legal abduction, right?
There's not a real strong legal basis for what they've done.
And so the only scary thing about that is if it wasn't what he was talking about, then in my mind, there's another mission that he had heard about that they're planning, which again is now out as we hear the reporting that might mirror this as well, but worse.
So you don't, but you don't, that doesn't resonate with you?
No, I don't think.
And here, there are a couple of reasons why.
And it very well could be.
You might be right about that.
I don't know what Mark Kelly knows or doesn't know.
It feels like the Democratic Party got caught with their pants down here.
Like they're just like, oh my God, I can't believe he did this.
And probably somebody should say something about it.
I think the other aspect of it that really bothers me, I mentioned, you know, Nick, it was when we were covering Hegseth and Trump's address to the military that authoritarian capture is usually determined by whether or not the military will follow orders.
Well, here we are.
They went to Venezuela and they grabbed Nicholas Madora in the middle of the night.
And, you know, some people, I'm the guy, like, I know my job.
My job is to be like, oh, well, it's like in Panama with Noriega.
Like, that's my job.
And it's, yeah, it has elements of that, but it's not the same thing.
It's like Panama plus Iraq, plus throw in some other authoritarian shit and mix it up.
Like it's, it's like a whole different level.
And I don't, I don't know if Kelly knew about this or not, but I think the feeling that has been germinating is that these people with the military and state power at their control, and this is a completely different animal than Trump won.
I mean, I had a moment yesterday where I was really sitting there thinking about like how different this is from the first Trump administration, but the idea of them having this type of power without pushback, because there are no guardrails.
We're so far past guardrails that it's hard to remember what guardrails felt like.
Yeah.
You know, so I think it is largely the feeling of, wow, these fascist gangsters have control of the United States military and they're really starting to feel themselves and want to flex with it.
Yeah.
And if you look at this from an American standpoint, you might say, even if you were, you know, only watching certain news sources, you might feel like, well, this is a terrible dictator, good riddance, glad that we got rid of him.
I had a long conversation a few months ago with someone who's from Venezuela, who actually, while they can recognize that having authoritarian is a real problem in the country, it was better than it had been before, because before the fear of violence and the fear of crime was so prevalent that at the very least, they had gotten some manner of control over normal civilization.
But, and then there's all sorts of, you know, everyone's trying to spread sort of AI of cheering that he's gone.
No one seems to really know what the actual Venezuelans think about this, I would suspect.
But I do think that the Kelly thing is interesting, especially in the context of Pete Hegseth initiating an investigation on him and wanting to now punitively punish him for, well, probably demote him and remove his retirement benefits.
And that also makes it reveal to me that that's why Kelly, that's what they're telling us.
Kelly knew about this.
This is what he was talking about.
Here's a successful raid we did.
He was trying to do it.
Now, remember, Kelly lawyered it was very lawyerly in that video where he made all everybody's names, everybody's language is very specific about what they were saying.
Nobody said to disobey legal orders.
And that's what they're going to try and bring charges on him for.
Right.
And he knew that if he had mentioned anything about a specific mission like this, that would be treasonous.
So that would be a problem.
So at any rate, that's the whole worry because what you're talking about, unfettered control over everything like this, extends into now what they're going to do is try and silence Kelly with that with that investigation.
Let me ask you this, though.
There's a whole bunch of other lawmakers that were all in the military that were on that video as well.
I don't think they knew about this.
What's that?
I don't think they knew about this.
But how come they're not targeted like they're targeting Kelly?
That's a great question.
And I'm not particularly sure why Kelly is the one they're going after versus other people, but Congress didn't know.
Like this wasn't Congress had no idea that this was going on going on.
And by the way, Nick, that's something that we have to mention.
He didn't tell the gang of eight.
He didn't tell Congress at all.
Who did he tell?
He told, well, first of all, I told the oil companies.
He told the oil companies.
And the press found out as well.
Yes.
The press found out.
And quote unquote, to their credit, they didn't reveal anything because they didn't want to put anybody in harm's way.
So the press knew about it.
Oil companies knew about it, but none of the Democratic leaders knew about it.
And I believe them when they say they didn't know about it, right?
I do too.
I 100% do too.
And I think the reaction immediately after this took place, the Republicans were reacting to this shocked as well.
Like he didn't tell anybody.
And this also, this goes into the larger thing.
You know, we've talked about how Korea and Vietnam were police actions, right?
We've talked about like how that was like a sort of a formula for making these things happen.
That's what they did here is that they pretended this was a police action.
And what did he do, Nick?
The president of the fucking United States of America took over another country without telling anybody except for the people that he was going to go into business with.
I mean, I really want to like focus on that for a second.
I want people to really let that sink in.
That is, that is a level of horror.
Yeah.
That the president of the United States of America just decided to take over a country, didn't ask anybody for permission, anything, just did it.
Did you read the indictment?
I did, I did, yes.
Because a big piece of that indictment is that he, I believe, it says he had machine guns.
Yeah, he trafficked, which by the way, they're charging him with being in charge of like a fictional cartel that doesn't even actually exist, much like Antifa, and he had machine guns.
And as a result, they created this completely, pardon the expression, trumped up charges against Maduro, who, by the way, not a good person.
I'm not saying I'm not, you know, a Maduro stan or something, but this person, and they created trumped up charges and then took over a country with tens of millions of people in it.
Yeah.
And basically said, and I mean, not basically, did say in so many words, their oil is now ours.
Period.
That's legal.
That's apparently legal.
That's apparently something you can do now.
Yeah.
Oh, crap.
I forgot I was going to say, but well, the thing I'm glad that you mentioned Vietnam and Korea, because remember, the reason behind that was the domino theory, right?
They were afraid that communism is going to take over the world and we have to fight back against that.
It's worthy, you know, against the communism, fascism, whatever you want to say.
So how spicy is this that they're basically saying, by the way, the basis of the legal claim is going to be that Maduro was not really the president of Venezuela.
He had stolen the election.
Isn't that like just sweet irony?
And so they didn't really abscond with the or abduct a head of state.
Like they said, that's going to be their main legal argument.
And it kind of turns out that remember when like when George Costanzo quit and then he like just pretends it didn't happen, he goes back and continues to go work there.
And then he's still working there.
Nothing changed.
If a guy is in a role like the head of state like long enough and is actually doing the job of what a head of state is doing, guess what?
He's the head of state after enough time.
And that's sort of like the international law perspective on this one.
So there really isn't going to be a way to illegally argue that he was not the president.
But a country can't just unilaterally decide to go in and grab a person and say, oh, he stole an election.
Right.
Which, by the way, the entire illusion of the post-war liberal American order was that shit like this couldn't happen.
Yeah.
That's what the United Nations is there for.
That's what it was supposed to be there for.
People in Maduro's position have immunity from things like this, from pressure like this.
And so that's what the argument is.
Well, he really wasn't president.
So that's why we can do this.
Like that's going to be an interesting thing.
But again, this 92-year-old judge in a southern district of New York who's going to rule on this as a real old school guy.
Like, who knows what the hell he's going to do or say or rule on this?
Because again, it's like now, how do you enforce that?
Like, you know, Netanyahu is, we're waiting for him to be arraigned on, you know, war crimes in The Hague.
But like, no one is going, he's not going to, I mean, you'd have to have the Netherlands literally do what the United States just did in Israel, right?
Well, and by the way, while we're on the subject, just hypothetically, are we now saying that if a country came in and took Donald Trump in the middle of the night, that that would be legal?
Yeah.
Well, again, I want to point out that hypothetical that I just threw out real fast, Nick.
Right.
Because they'll say, well, Trump didn't really win 2024.
He stole the election.
They could say he stole it.
They could whip up charges against him.
I mean, God knows he's got more than enough crimes again, you know, that he has committed.
And here's my point, Nick.
That hypothetical I threw out, the entire basis of society is based on fictions that we all agree on, right?
Like there is no actual thing as a nation state.
It's just something that we all have to.
I call it the Tinkerbell principle sometimes.
It has strength if you believe in it.
Right.
But that's the whole point is that the order of things is breaking down.
And I've been thinking about it a lot over the past couple of days since this happened.
You know, people are going to say, oh, Ukraine set this in motion.
I don't think so.
I think the war on terror set this in motion.
I think the ability to just go into another, I mean, America basically carried out warfare against over 100 countries, killed, you know, millions of people.
And that sort of, it was all of that bartering over definitions and what's legal and what's not legal.
That opened up, it's almost like it opened up the portal for this next post-liberal order world to be born, in which Vladimir Putin could go into Ukraine and steal part of it.
And then the United States can go and take part of Venezuela or Venezuela in general.
It feels like a breakdown of everything because it is a breakdown of everything.
The basis of the world order is starting to crumble.
That doesn't mean that the world order was good or correct or perfect, but the people who are deciding what the next order looks like are criminal fascists.
That's the problem.
And it's perfect that you use like the analogy of Trump, like someone doing this to Trump, because we should be looking at this from the other perspective of non-Americans, right?
And that's the thing.
I think that these exceptionalists in this country would think, well, they're all below us.
What would it be?
Yeah, white American supremacy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But in reality, it's like, look at from any other country's perspective.
And this is why it'd be so concerning because it's again, they could just go in and, well, then they'll go grab Trump.
But what I want you to picture, though, is a few helicopters flying below radar, whatever, in the middle of Caracas, a major, major city, one of the biggest cities in the world, through, you know, residential neighborhoods, just pulling up, dropping down, and within 30 minutes, have the president of a country in their midst or in their control and then take him out.
You can't like that would, that can't happen.
That wouldn't happen in DC, right?
No one would ever make it out a lie.
It would be a very short movie if you tried doing that.
Who knows?
So I'm thinking that militarily wise, the Venezuelan military let them do this.
I don't think that's, I don't think that's the case.
I don't think the military let them do that.
I think it actually, I think the faith that you just had in the defense of a president is like not true.
I think you could do this.
If you really wanted to, I think you could do this.
Well, but maybe that the sub sublying tone there is they weren't loyal to him.
But no, the larger thing here is the thing, which is the United States of America might be the only country that could pull something like this off.
It might makes right.
And that is the fascist creed.
If you have the weapons, you can do this.
Why would any country, by the way, why would any country that doesn't have nuclear weapons right now, why would you not be trying to make nuclear weapons?
Right.
Literally.
Deterrence.
Okay.
Why?
Why in the world would any country at this point, first of all, trust the United States of America?
And we'll get to some of that in a minute.
But like, the only countries that have any rest anymore are, and that was supposed to be on the other side of the liberal order.
You weren't supposed to have all of this warfare and all of these threats and all of these extra legal actions.
All right, we got to get to the next part of this.
Okay, go ahead.
We got, it's so fucking ridiculous.
So then you find out in the morning that the United States dropped into Caracas and took Nicolas Maduro.
And you're like, what the hell is going on?
This is so strange.
And you're waiting for the president of the United States of America to host a press conference from Mar-a-Lago.
I can't believe these words are coming out of my fucking mouth.
And by the way, Nick, he was a half hour late to it because he was too busy posting about the military operation, right?
He was too busy on Truth Social.
So he comes out, looks terrible, by the way.
He comes out, starts speaking.
Nick, completely out of nowhere, he drops this on us, which is great.
We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.
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 because that's what we're all about.
Oh, God.
So the president of the United States of America, completely out of nowhere, there's no information even circulating, circulating about what's going to happen, announces four or five times that we are going to run Venezuela for the foreseeable future, gives no details about that whatsoever, but the details he can give is that the United States and its private oil companies are going to take every last drop of oil out of Venezuela while they're in charge.
Right.
And again, there's no way for us to run that country without boots in the ground and a whole bunch of.
Oh, he says, he says they're not against putting boots on it.
Right.
But like, you know, they're talking about, you know, overnight.
Like, you know, they're going to be in the same position they are, which is again, why this has nothing to do with protecting our sovereignty or protecting our national security, right?
This is all about oil.
And every time everything that comes out, again, it accentuates that.
The fact that they told oil companies, oh, hey, you guys got to get your oil back.
Now, remember, before they nationalized oil, you had a bunch of oil companies down there running oil and just basically stealing money from Venezuela for decades and decades.
So, and by the way, when they nationalized it, they did pay the oil companies.
I believe that there was penalties that monetarily they had to pay whatever.
But this just reeks of, this is like, remember the, remember the show Guys and Dolls?
You ever see that TV movie or that?
This is like the sequel where in terms of Venezuela had to be substituted for Cuba, but like they had this great thing going on, right?
Where they were just using these other people in the other countries for all their resources.
And why change that?
And when they stood up to these people, this is their fever dream to finally, you know, get it back.
And then they actually have the temerity to think that this is justice, which is like insane to me.
It is insane.
And again, it's my job to point out that this is yet another example of gunboat diplomacy.
This is something that the United States of America has done multiple times.
It just so happens that we haven't done it like this in a while.
You know, Iraq was one thing, Afghanistan was another thing.
And there are parallels here.
But I need to drill down on something, Nick.
We're in charge of Venezuela now.
And you know what I was thinking about over the past couple of days?
At least Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and those assholes, at least they pretended to care about the people.
They didn't care about them and they wanted their resources, but at least they paid lip service to it.
All Trump is doing is basically saying we're going to go in and get their oil and it belongs to us.
They do not care what happens to this country.
And the more research I do about this, it looks like at some point, unless this turns into like a complete banana republic type situation, like there's probably going to be something akin to a civil war in Venezuela.
And at that point, who's going to be safe in that country?
The oil companies.
The only people who are going to make money off of this are the oil companies, the people they employ, and mercenary armies that are going to be paid to protect their oil derricks and their oil drilling operation.
We just, we went into a country with tens of millions of people and have just taken it over.
And they haven't given two thoughts about how they're going to run this country.
By the way, did you put Rumsfeld in that list of Taney and I might have to leave if you want to give Rumsfeld any credit for anything?
I'm not giving them credit.
I'm saying at least they performed care.
Rumsfeld, okay, me.
Yeah, he was one of those that are going to welcome us as liberator guys.
Okay.
At least they bothered to lie.
Right.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
And by the way, the administration tried to lie a little bit, right?
They tried to make it seem like it was narco-trafficking.
And by the way, good luck in a court of law proving that a head of state somehow was running a cartel as well.
Like, I suspect there won't be much legitimate evidence that are going to come up with anything to prove that anyway.
By the way, what was really fascinating was that Machado, this woman who had come up because she had won the Nobel Prize recently, right, in Venezuela.
Did you see like she was, by the way, this goes into your fever dream of like W, if you remember, she was part of a group that W was propping up to take over Venezuela back in 2004.
And so, of course, let's slide her in and have her take over.
She's sympathetic.
She'll run the country the way the United States wanted to do it.
But I've seen the reporting.
I'm choosing to believe this.
Do you know why she became persona non grada and was not going to be the person that the United States was going to rule?
The rumor is that she didn't turn down the Nobel Peace Prize.
Not only did she not turn the Nobel Priest Prize down, she didn't sort of say it must go to Trump.
And because of that, even though she's been full-throatedly supporting Trump this whole time, which remember, we thought that was a little strange.
It was weird that she'd won the Nobel Peace Prize and then was talking so nicely about Trump.
It was because she, I don't know what she sensed at that point, because it was right around when he started attacking Venezuela.
But how about that for a very on-brand decision-making by Trump?
Well, I think, again, we're talking about what's going on.
We're trying to give deeper context.
I just want to speak to the horror and the depressive part of this.
Nick, that wouldn't shock me if that's why they're not wanting to put her in power.
I think they made a deal with the vice president to basically play a little bit of professional wrestling.
She's going to say, we hate America.
We want Maduro back.
And meanwhile, do what they want her to do.
I think it's a little bit of a wink-wink, nod, nod kind of thing, unless they, you know, get rid of her and kill her.
And basically, I've already said they'll put boots on the ground or there will be more strikes if they don't do what they want them to.
I wouldn't be shocked if that's why they passed her over.
And for the record, Nick, I don't know if you watched this presser the entire time.
And maybe our listeners didn't.
I want to paint a picture for them.
Donald Trump, as president of the United States of America, unilaterally ordered a strike against a sovereign nation, kidnapped their leader, took it over.
One of the most despotic acts imaginable.
He couldn't stay awake during the press conference about it.
He was drifting off to sleep on his feet during the damn thing.
And the whole point is, not only are these people evil, but the special level of stupidity and venalness that is there is shocking to me.
It really, I'm not one of those people.
How do I put this?
I'm not one of those people who believes in what I would call an organizing principle of good.
Like, I don't think that the moral arc of the universe is bending towards justice, you know?
But any part of me that believes that, watching these people, it breaks that belief.
Yeah.
Well, you know what's interesting about this is on Friday night, I must have sensed something going to happen because on Friday night, I had a nightmare that China and Russia had merged.
And for some reason, in my adult dream, that meant that every dissident in America was being rounded up.
Sure.
I mean, I was on that list and I was like, you know, I have a small little Twitter account.
No one sees whatever.
And I was allowed to be, I was like making peace with all my family as I had to then.
I knew I was going to be rounded up and taken away.
But I think that that notion that like the Monroe doctrine, which we can get into a little bit, has been referenced.
By the way, it took me the Donrock document.
It took me a few minutes to even understand what that was about.
But the point being that like, this is what we are seeing.
This is what is coming up in real time, which we'd warned about, but now it seems really sort of organized.
Like if you're living in Taiwan, I would recommend getting out of there as quickly as you can.
But this is a notion of the carving up of the world.
And the Western hemisphere is going to be for America, for the United States, and Russia and China can have the rest.
Well, and on that note, so real fast, and because there's something important there, Nick, they've also mentioned the possibility of doing this to Cuba, Colombia, Greenland, Mexico.
They're looking at all the, basically every country that is in the Western hemisphere along with the United States.
And what we can talk about the larger thing of what that means in just a second and the ramifications of it, including the possibility of the death of NATO.
Nick, Alexander Dugan, who was the main ideologue behind Putinism and, you know, basically, you know, is the godfather of the ideology of the present moment.
I did research when I was writing The Midnight Kingdom.
I read all Dugan shit.
This is exactly what he wanted.
He said, we need to break the global order, the global American order, because liberalism is degenerate and decaying.
It is corrupted and miserable.
People are ready for something new.
All we have to do is give it a little bit of a push, and then we're going to have spheres of influence.
The United States, China, and Russia will all sort of create their own spheres of influence around them in order to put together their own sort of situations.
And eventually they'll have it out, right?
That's eventually the thing.
I'm shocked by how much that's taking shape.
And I've watched it now for years as an analyst, and I was afraid because I saw a lot of his predictions and a lot of his strategies coming to pass.
Now we're looking at literally every country in the Western hemisphere has a target on it from the United States of America.
That is such a wild development.
Yes.
Now, wasn't the Monroe doctrine the idea that they wanted to keep European colonization efforts away from the Western hemisphere?
Yes, and that they were going to be the influence over the countries in North and Southern America.
Well, we were going to be the mafia.
We'll have to protect.
Oh, yeah, no, and we were the mafia.
Yes.
Because again, it's like, you can't do that to those people.
We can.
Like, that's sort of what the irony here with what's going on.
I am concerned because, again, yes, if you were like, here's the thing.
I know, whatever.
The Venezuela thing is interesting because, again, you can't just waltz into a country.
I don't care what kind of military you might have.
It shouldn't be 30 minutes in and out without any casualties on anything, unless I believe there had to be some sort of collusion involved because it wasn't like, okay, if they went into Guatemala or Argentina, you know, okay, that would have been a shocker.
Like, no one would have been ready at all.
But Venezuela should have been on high alert.
They've been threatening this for weeks.
They've been murdering their own people off the coast.
Like, that's what sort of makes no sense to me.
It was the middle of like the busiest city in the world.
Like, I can't believe that they wouldn't have had extra influence, which draws us to the connection that you're making in terms of Russia and what Russia has to do with this.
Because I think we do need to talk about how all these permissions are being given here.
And it seems like the chessboard is moving on purpose as it's being planned.
You know, we can't forget that.
How long do you think it would have taken to plan this raid on Maduro?
How long do you think it might take?
I mean, it depends.
I have to assume that the plans have been drawn up for a couple of months.
Yeah.
So maybe around August, perhaps?
Maybe, maybe around August.
Is it possible that maybe Putin and Trump had met at some point, maybe around that time?
Well, and by the way, Hegseth made a comment about how about that Russian air, you know, air defense system in Venezuela.
And I think there very much could be a situation because as I think that you're alluding to, there are rumors that Putin offered Venezuela in exchange for Ukraine, basically to make a trade off the old chessboard.
Yeah.
And that makes sense because remember, Venezuela and Russia were closely aligned.
They had a lot of interest oil-wise as well.
So why would they just sort of stand by and let that happen unless there's another deal and Fiona Hill in 2019 testing?
Well, and Nick, one thing that you haven't mentioned yet is that the main importer of Venezuelan oil is China.
And so we're talking about China losing their oil supply if there isn't some sort of a plan in place.
Meanwhile, by the way, Nick, I don't know if you keep track of this.
Last time I checked, Greenland is owned by a country in NATO, Denmark.
And Denmark has even said that if anything happens in terms of Greenland, that will be the end of NATO.
And I think that's true.
And so I think what we're watching now, and we got to talk about the fact that I don't know why they wouldn't do it to these countries.
Right.
I don't know why they wouldn't.
I don't know why they wouldn't do it.
Nobody's doing anything about it.
No one's stopping them.
Right.
Well, let's just unpack that for a second because what they're referring to is one member of NATO attacking another member of NATO, United States attacking Greenland, attacking Denmark, right?
Which has never happened before.
There's no precedent for that.
And yes, you would suddenly form the kind of alliances that don't necessarily exist right now.
You'd have to have someone, you'd have to have the UK pick sides, right?
And whose side would they be on at that point in theory, right?
Now, we also know Denmark has been arming Greenland with more, you know, more armaments to be able to fight this.
They better probably ship some more.
They bought a whole bunch of F-16s.
Like they're trying to militarily ramp up a little bit to protect themselves.
But I would imagine they would be next because it probably is the softest target of all, aside from, you know, right?
It would probably be easiest to take over Greenland than it would take over Cuba.
Yeah, probably.
And now, so analysis-wise, Nick, we've been talking a lot about the end of the American order leading into a potential World War III.
And we've talked about how weird a World War III would be at this point.
Now I'm looking at it.
And the more that we're talking about it, it feels like we might actually avoid World War III simply because all of the major powers get on the same authoritarian side.
And then everybody below them is just like, well, what are we going to do?
You sort of have to get in line.
Yeah.
And then you have a situation where literally the United States of America is taking over Cuba, Colombia, Greenland, and possibly Mexico.
And they're licking their lips over this.
They really, really want it.
If you put on your thinking cap for a second, and okay, let's picture that.
Let's play this out a little bit longer.
And we really start to solidify.
I want to do that.
Can we just take a moment as friends and co-hosts and just be like, can you believe we're fucking talking about this?
Yeah, I cannot believe this.
I mean, but we should have known.
I mean, ever since Trump started projecting in 2017 or 2016, saying, what would be so wrong with being friendly with Russia?
That was his whole take.
Why not?
It also makes you think that the whole China thing that we had with them could have also been some sort of wrestling.
Oh, I think there's like an actual rivalry there.
But at the same time, like, I mean, if they're on the same page and the president of the U.S. doesn't actually care about the U.S. or law, it doesn't really matter at that point.
But let me, okay, it's like the five, the mafia families in New York, right?
And they divide up New York into different parts.
Did that really work?
I mean, it worked for a minute until they didn't.
But there's always eventually someone.
There's always eventually someone wrong person.
They end up getting in a big war.
It's bloody.
It's horrible.
All these innocent people are caught in the crossfire.
I mean, it would be very easy, no matter what you'd see, if they somehow pretended to agree to peacefully separate the world into their freedoms, how that would run a foul pretty quickly too.
I completely agree.
Can you do me a favor?
Do you finally agree with me that the American liberal order failed?
If it got us here, it failed.
I mean, I kind of want to say if it gets to us invading Greenland, I mean, that's certainly the failure.
But you're right.
I mean, you know, I don't even think that they're going to run Venezuela at this point.
I just think it's.
Oh, no, they're going to go in and steal the oil and they don't care what happens to everybody at the same time.
Yeah.
And so, right, because it's like, in theory, in my mind, in my adult mind, it would have to be, okay, we actually did take over the government and we're running like literally it's a part of the United States at this point.
No, it becomes a client state.
That's it.
Yeah.
But they'd have to take over Mexico then because we need a bridge.
So we have a continuous land.
I mean, that's what's going to happen.
You're looking at it.
The thing that hasn't been talked about very much over the past couple of days, there have been multiple spy planes like going over Mexico over the past couple of days, like sizing it up.
Well, here's the thing.
If you really are, you know, if we're talking about narco-terrorism, well, Mexico would be the place you're supposed to be going.
And you're not going to be pardoning the president of Harduras.
So again, they keep proving to us why it's not nothing to do with narco-trafficking.
It's simply resources.
And that's what, again, makes me worried why there's a sudden grab for as many resources, rare earth and oil as possible.
Because you can.
That's the thing.
All bets are off at this point.
It's smash and grab.
The fall of American-led globalism, it's smash and grab.
And not to mention, I mean, climate change is another aspect of this.
Like it's really going to influence when it comes to resources.
But if there are no consequences, and we got to talk about that, Nick.
Like, literally, the president of the United States of America took over a country and was basically like, I'm going to take their oil.
I mean, not basically.
He said it.
The Democrats, oh, Nick, they're very concerned about it.
They're not going to talk about impeachment, but they, you know, they're very concerned.
They've written a couple of letters about it.
But they also want to let everybody know that they think Maduro was a bad guy.
Got to make sure to say that.
The GOP is completely fine with it.
They were shocked at first, then they're completely fine.
The conspiracy theorists have all been won over by two ideas.
One, this was an attack on the deep state, and Maduro is going to spill all the beans that he's been part of a plot with the Democrats.
There is nothing in what I just told you outside of a lot of people like us who are like, this is fucked and this is dangerous.
There is nothing even approaching a logical response to this.
Right.
Nothing serious.
There is no pushback.
Trump is not in trouble.
No one's actually talking about impeachment.
No one's talking about doing anything.
I cannot believe that this happened.
And that the, I can't believe I'm about to say this.
The response is what the response was.
Nothing.
Yeah.
Well, at least we're not heading into like an election year or anything, which, by the way, if you're running for Congress should be central to your platform is we're going to impeach him on day hour one, wouldn't you say?
If they had any courage, sure.
The Democratic Party has none.
None.
I mean, I suspect once we start ramping up into the season, listen, there's something wrong if that's not one of the first things you're saying on the stump.
I don't think it will be.
I'm telling you, I think I've lost all faith in the Democratic Party.
And it was, I was holding on by my fingernails for a minute.
I don't think they can do it.
Well, and they've been beaten down.
If you couldn't impeach Trump for January 6th, then it's like, you know, if we couldn't get a gun law passed after Sandy Hook, it's like, I get it, which by the way, goes to your question about the liberal order.
You know, we're kind of like, if none of those things could hold, right?
Even though with the best intentions, and it seemed pretty smart at the time, NATO was a good idea, wasn't it?
I mean, maybe for a minute.
The UN, that was a good idea, right?
Maybe for a minute, although it got lost behind these like, you know, veto permanent members.
Yeah.
But at least you had one area where they all were in the same room, right?
At least they tried.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A little pat on the back, but, you know, so same thing here, I guess, right?
Like that, that's where you get to.
And they need that.
Again, remember, we used to say, I haven't talked about this in a long time, but this could very well be the natural evolution of civilization, you know, as a whole, like globalization.
At some point, it's going to culminate in assholes taking over.
And that's an insult to all assholes around the world, but what I'm talking about, authoritarians eventually, you know, that's a long, long game for them.
And they can win that long game.
I mean, and they're the only ones playing the game right now.
But let me ask you this.
The way that we would stop would be because America was the one place with the power they had that wasn't authoritarian, perhaps.
But the problem is that America has been authoritarian.
Like throughout its entire history, it's had more authoritarianism than democracy and sometimes more democracy than authoritarianism.
But the post-war order.
By the way, Nick, just for historical context, we've done this to every country in South America in the past.
Yeah.
The CIA has done it through coups, right?
They, you know, and occasionally they would run the military down there and do these types of things.
We don't stop at South America, but yes, we'd certainly.
Right.
But that's what I'm saying is like, you look at a list of the operations in South America, it's been constant.
So it's not like, it's, it's not that this is unprecedented.
It's that the way that it's being done now is unprecedented, right?
Like just going in and knocking them over and just being like, yeah, we fucking knocked them over.
Are you going to do anything about it?
As opposed to, oh, disturbances in Venezuela.
We're not sure where they came from, meanwhile, the CIA is doing it.
It's that it's becoming more overt.
So the U.S. was always going to play a role in the authoritarian takeover.
And so they're going to play on that cowboy mentality, right?
Sure.
And that's a powerful thing.
Again, Maduro wasn't someone who deserved to be in power.
And so it doesn't necessarily a bad thing.
We're going to wring our hands about precedents, I suppose, or are we going to wring our hands about the worry that what other countries are going to end up doing?
Because like you said, nobody else has the military might.
Apparently, you know, while we were hanging around the border of Venezuela with our some certain kind of planes, they were mapping out the entire radar, you know, system of Venezuela, which significantly helped them get in and get out like that.
Do other countries have that technology?
I don't know, but certainly we do.
Well, and again, the precedent of this, it's a dinner bell, man.
It's a dinner bell for powerful countries to gobble up whatever they can.
I've said this over and over, and I'm going to say it again.
I don't know why the fuck China isn't going after Taiwan right now.
Right.
Like, it just has to be a logistical thing at this point.
It's just got to be getting ducks in a row.
Like, why not?
It's the question of why didn't they go into Ukraine in like 2019 when Trump was in the office, White House?
These are great questions.
I think you're right.
I think logistical weather, like there's all sorts of things.
There's all kinds of things like that.
But I'm just, I'm shocked.
And by the way, like the media, it's just like they can't even ask basic questions.
The Washington Post is like lauding this.
They're like, this is great.
It's absolutely wonderful that Trump did it.
I mean, completely bought and completely corrupted.
It's just CBS had Hegseth on and devoted like the entire CBS news to, you know, government propaganda.
We're, we're sprinting into real dark times.
Yeah.
We are.
We are.
We're sprinting into real dark times.
And they sent Marco Rubio out there, who's just absolutely horrible at this.
And he does, actually, he does a really good imitation of that Martin Short character on Saturday Live used to be interviewed like 60 Minutes spoof.
He's smoking a cigarette nervously the whole thing.
I know that.
That's what he sounds like.
He sounds like a spoof character who doesn't even like he's the guy.
Like, so if you're a betting man, are you a betting man, Jared?
No, I stay away from betting.
Go on the polymarket, whatever, Calci.
Oh, by the way, somebody made hundreds of thousands of dollars betting on the Maduro operation, which is a great little detail on all of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And somebody knew our like a significantly amount of hours beforehand.
It's a non-coincident.
A few people, I think three or four.
So yeah, again, that level of corruption, you know, has been going on with the Trump administration this entire time.
It's disgusting.
But you have to, you can take bets on which cabinet member is going to be out first, right?
And, you know, this is going to be a good one because as the rhetoric ratches it up against, I mean, people are against this.
It's going to cause a backlash against the administration, I think, overall.
Do you really think so?
Because I don't see it right now.
The early returns I had seen was the approval rating was ticking down, but it's yeah, I don't think it's going to help the approval rating.
Right.
And so as a result, at some point when they in their back pocket, they need to have a sacrificial lamb.
It's been Marco Rubio before he even agreed to be the secretary.
I don't know if that's true, man.
I think that this thing is largely Rubio's baby.
I think it's Rubio and Stephen Miller who want this.
Oh, well, I don't think he care.
Well, the Venezuela thing, I don't know if I feel like, but I can guarantee you he wants Cuba.
Oh, no, he wants Venezuela because of their relationship with Cuba.
Okay.
So he, oh, wait, so you're saying that he understands that that's a domino.
Again, the domino theory is now right back in our lexicon.
Yes, Rubio, Rubio is happy as hell, and his main target has always been Cuba.
It always has been.
And they're going, well, who's next?
Is it Cuba or is it Greenland?
Oh, God, I can't believe we're nobody.
I can't believe we're fucking talking about this.
Yeah.
Or, you know, again, maybe they don't do anything more.
Maybe they should.
I don't think Greenland happens next.
If they actually do, I can't believe we're fucking talking about this.
I would say it's either Mexico or Cuba.
Yeah, because logistically it's closer.
God, I cannot, I just want to state again.
I cannot believe we're fucking talking about this.
Right.
But let's not forget Cuba.
It's his flashpoint.
And by the way, this is our specialty, right?
We get into the historical context.
Cuba is the flashpoint of like, you know, the blockade and we had 13 days.
It has been.
In a way that, you know, Russia, the Soviet Union was willing to go to World War III over Cuba, right?
And had to be backed down, thank goodness, because of the leadership.
We'll give JFK some credit there.
Would they just be willing to step out of the way?
I think so.
I think that they're so wounded by what's going on in Ukraine and how hard it was been for them that they need any kind of deal they can get to get to just to have Ukraine done and take well.
I think Russia, going back to what I was saying about Alexander Duke, and I think Russia and China are absolutely fine with the United States doing whatever.
I think the one that sort of like ruffled the feathers was Iran a little bit.
And that is because it's in their backyard, more or less, and it's like a larger ally.
I think they would let Cuba go.
What would you make of Trump offerings, I guess, sympathy toward Iranian protests, which are going on in unprecedented ways?
Oh, yeah.
He said, he said they're locked and loaded in case they kill protesters in Iran.
Yeah.
I mean, we're, by the way, looking at the possibility of, I don't know how many wars.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Israel and Russia have both shown you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Yeah.
Nobody's nobody's going to do shit.
Yeah.
It turns out, yeah, it's just like that, uh, that movie where the guy kills somebody and nobody does anything.
It's incredible, you know, like a Schwarzenegger movie.
Anyway, um, yeah, I think that so we had thought that there was guardrails, so maybe we were lucky this whole time, is what you're saying, that the new world order had kind of held together for as long as it did, even though it was really kind of papier-mâché the whole time.
Yeah, I mean, at least we had, listen, I'm not going to give credit to the post-war leadership in this country, they've been absolutely factless quizzlings and they have been selfish and they have destroyed this world.
But at least they at least they were handcuffed by the need to pretend to care.
Are you going as far back as Eisenhower?
Sure.
Okay, because he's the one who even warned us about all this, didn't he?
No, I mean, he helped construct it and then he warned us about it.
And that's what happens.
This is what happens when an organized crime family gets hold of state power.
Right.
They're all crooks.
They're all just, they are all gangsters and crooks.
But you know what?
When I hear that, and a lot of people use that term, it's not strong enough, right?
No, it's not.
Crooks is a quaint little thing.
Oh, you're watching the movies, whatever.
And that's the thing, Nick, is that's how petty they are.
Yeah.
That's how they're treating this.
We're looking at this as an existential crisis, which it is.
I cannot believe we're having this fucking conversation.
All right.
Well, that's going to do it for this episode.
I'm going to, I don't know, dunk my head in cold water.
Everything sucks right now.
Everything sucks.
Okay.
Great podcast.
All right, everybody.
We will be back with the weekender on Friday.
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