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Jan. 3, 2026 - Rudy Giuliani
52:22
America's Mayor Live (Special Report): Maduro, Wife Arrested by U.S. in Military Strike on Venezuela

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It's a special edition of America's Mayor Live.
Today is a historic day, and it's a historic day because a longtime enemy of the United States, a person who succeeded another enemy of the United States and has done great damage in many, many ways to this country, including causing many deaths in the United States of America,
being involved in massive theft from the United States, and also a national security threat of the highest order to the United States, has been arrested and his wife and cohorts, hopefully also, but his wife with him, in probably another absolutely brilliant law enforcement action assisted by the United States military.
I would venture to say that the president is absolutely right when he says that no other country in the world could have done it the way we did it, including Russia and China.
And I guarantee you that those two animals that run that country, those countries, Russia and China, are frightened tonight.
They murder an awful lot of people.
I don't think either one of them wants to go find out what happens to someone that murders as many people as they do.
And what he showed is that they are completely vulnerable.
Again, consider Nicolos Maduro Moros, which is his official name, is the illegal, illegitimate dictator and therefore head of state of Venezuela, which is a country with a military supported very heavily by Cuba with a military.
He has known for some time that the United States is seeking his removal so that, among other things, the narcotics trafficking to the United States and around the world is cut substantially, he being a cog in that big wheel and a big one.
And also looking at the future and the desire of China in particular, but Russia also, to spread their wings into our hemisphere, which is always a concern of ours, going back to President Monroe, this was our most difficult problem in Latin and South America.
He also is, as Castro was a supporter of Chavez and him, he's been a supporter of Petro and some of the other petty dictators that they have in several of the countries that have gone communist.
So the removal of this man in such precise, complex action is nothing short of remarkable.
Just think of this.
Yesterday at this time, Nicolos Maduro was sitting there ensconced in the, I assume, the most secure part of Caracas, Venezuela, aware of the fact that America is hunting for him in one way or another, trying to make some kind of a stupid deal.
Therefore, he has to be aware that we're after him.
He knows there's been an indictment for some years.
And the president has given him every opportunity to make some kind of a deal and get the heck out of there so that that threat is gone.
He's almost acted stupidly about it, Ted.
He's almost acted stupidly about it, but he remained there.
But the idea that we could go in, take him out as if we were doing this.
Him and his wife out.
And now if Fox and some of the others are correct, they're at a place I'm very familiar with, Stewart Airport, which used to be Stewart Air Force Base when I was in the ROTC of Manhattan College.
That was the base closest to us.
And now it's a civilian airfield, and I believe there's still a National Guard, Air Force National Guard program there.
And it was a smart thing to bring him in there because that is a lot more secure, a lot less open to all kinds of traffic of different kinds.
Even the landing is a much clearer and easier thing.
So now we'll see what has to happen.
What happened to him is he was arrested.
He was arrested because he is under indictment and has been for some time.
What I have in my hand is a superseding indictment.
The original indictment, I think, goes back to, I think it goes back to 2020, Ted.
I don't have the original indictment, but this is a superseding indictment that was signed by Jay Clayton and by the four person of the grand jury in the Southern District of New York, whose name is correctly excised from here.
And this is typical of the best prosecutor's office in the United States.
This is a very informative indictment and a very clean one, very, very tight.
Four counts.
If he's convicted on any one of these, he goes away for the rest of his life.
And most importantly, which most people who review this wouldn't know, but since I was one of the people that developed this, I looked for it right away.
The last couple of pages of the indictment may in many ways be the most dramatic.
And those are the forfeiture allegations.
As a result of his involvement in narcotics, his involvement in terrorism, his involvement in racketeering activities, the United States, if it proves some of this even, will be able to essentially take everything away from him.
Everything we can find anywhere in the world.
I can't make it any simpler than that.
As a result of committing the control substance offenses charged in Count 1, Maduro, Cabello, Rodriguez shall forfeit to the United States any and all property constituted or derived from any proceeds the defendants obtained directly or indirectly from their illegal narcotics business.
It then goes on to cover the other illegal activities.
And then in one of these, his wife is also covered to take all her property away from her.
So the charges are that he was the head of a narcotics organization in Venezuela with a specific Group of people that he work with,
but that he also worked with the FARC, which is the longtime terrorist organization and drug operation, made up now of a lot of, I hesitate to call them retired Colombian cartel owners.
I should tell you, I'm happy to see the FARC in this because they are on the list of one of the groups that threatened to kill me.
In their case, they were very specific about they're going to slit my throat.
Also, also the Sinaloa cartel, the Zetas, Trendaragua, all of these are groups that he has conspired with,
along with his Minister of the Interior, Diosado Cabello, actually Diosado Cabello Rondón, and his former justice minister, Ramon Rodriguez Shaquin, and then, of course, his wife, Celia Adela Flores de Maduro, who is described as the de facto first lady,
because he has been illegitimately in power now for over 10 years.
He superseded the Constitution in 2015.
His elections have been uniformly regarded as completely fraudulent.
The last two, the last one in particular.
And his wife is not a stay-at-home mom.
His wife is as much a rotten communist politician as he is.
She was, in fact, at one point, she's acted as the president of the National Assembly.
And she's also acted as the Attorney General of Venezuela.
She is a member of his Communist Party.
And she is and has been for some time a member of the National Constituent Assembly, again, as part of his communist entourage.
Also indicted is his son, obviously runs in the family, Nicolas Ernesto Maduro Guerra.
Interesting, the word Guerra in Spanish and Italian and Latin means war.
And the son, Maduro Guerra, is also in politics since 2013.
He's been appointed to various roles by his father, another Ner Duell.
He was head of the Corps of Special Inspectors of the Presidency, which means, you know, like the Shah's SAVAC that we were just writing about yesterday.
And that was a position created just for him.
And then the final defendant is Nino Gueira, Hector Rustin Ford Guerrero Flores, who is one of the leaders of Trendaragua.
So it's quite a all-embracing indictment.
It gives you a very, very good history of what he did with each one of these organizations with the FARC, with the ELN, with the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, with the Zetas, also known as Cartel Di Noreste, which is one of the other major Mexican cartels, with Trend di Aragua, which He's also worked with.
And it is a perfect, it's a perfect drug enterprise, racketeering enterprise, criminal action.
And the indictment contains four counts.
It could have one, it could have 100.
And I'm not even sure this is the one they'll go to trial on, because between now and then, I'm sure they're going to pick up if they haven't already a whole group of rats.
And this thing will expand even further.
People want to know if this involves the death penalty.
I don't see that in here, but I'm sure if and when they go to trial, we'll see murder counts in here.
I'm sure he has been responsible for ordering the murder of any number of people.
And the first count is a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
They use narco-terrorism because that enhances the forfeiture, makes it easier to take everything from him.
There's a cocaine importation conspiracy also.
The separate conspiracies, a bit because they were working with overlapping groups.
The third count is possession of machine guns and destructive devices, i.e. bombs.
And then a conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices, which brings into play a whole group of other penalties.
So what does this mean?
Well, I have with me Ted Goodman, my associate, and the guy who started this show with me back when we were doing baseball, Ted Knight.
And Ted was over this morning at Mar-laugh, which you see him back at me.
We're only a mile from it.
And we're going to have dinner there tonight.
We are, which is why I'm all dressing.
And so tell us what you got out of the press conference.
And first of all, we did our show last night.
We packed up.
We did in the middle of the night.
We thought we might or might not do a podcast today.
It was kind of open, right?
It's going to be kind of an open day.
And for some reason, last night, I stayed up all night.
You're up when I called.
Well, I saw it.
I was up when you called at four in the morning, but I had known about it from about two hours before, three hours before.
Yes.
And I noticed you had posted.
Oh, I had already in the middle of the night, right?
Because I was watching and I really wanted to get it.
You know, I got to get a hold of you when this stuff happens.
And I thought I thought I wanted to acknowledge my friend Marco Rubio, because I know in his heart what this means to him.
Now, first of all, all credit to the president.
This doesn't happen without an exceptional president.
Without a president who's a commander, decisive, respected, has the utmost confidence in the team that he's put together.
You look at that team.
I would say all those individual contributions were necessary.
I thought General Kane's description of the actual timetable, the TikTok, you would call, you know, how it happened, could have been like a movie or a television show.
It was unbelievable the way he did it.
And I've been at their special forces training, including training for doing extrications several times.
So I am a very, very strong proponent of extricate when you can.
Their track record, when I say there, I mean our whole group of special forces.
I don't just mean the Rangers or the SEALs or whoever.
I mean a whole group of about seven of our special forces who don't like to be named as the ones who did it, although I think somebody has already named this one.
But this did involve at least three different groups.
And the planning for this had to have been 100%.
And you may find out if they get into it that far, that part of the delay was they wanted to get it just right.
And they wanted them in just at the right spot and just the right time.
Right.
This is played out like a chess, like on a chessboard beforehand, and they want every piece right.
And sometimes they don't have the opportunity to do that.
You just got to move quickly.
But this guy, by dicking around, gave him plenty of time.
That's right.
And so we'll, well, let's start with, this is our question to the president.
And we asked him what his message was to the Venezuelan people.
People of Venezuela.
Mr. President, are you saying that?
Mr. President, thank you.
What is your message to the people of Venezuela today?
Of course, the civilian population specifically, they have a lot of questions.
What is your message to the people of Venezuela?
You're going to have peace, justice.
You're going to have some of the riches that you should have had for a long period of time.
It was stolen from you.
You're going to have peace and you're going to have safety.
You're going to have justice.
You're going to have a country.
You're going to have a real country.
You're going to have potentially a great country.
You know, if you go back 20 years, maybe even a little longer ago, that was a great country and they destroyed it.
Remember, I said that if we lose this election, the United States will be Venezuela on steroids.
That's what would have happened.
Had we lost the election, the 2024 election, we suffered so badly.
When you look at the border from 2020, what they did, what Joe Biden administration did to our country should never be forgotten.
Never be forgotten.
Well, it was quite a professional and really well done press conference from the very, very beginning when the president announced it and also made the very startling announcement, I think, to many, that we're going to remain there until we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transfer.
And he said, like we should do.
And I know there are many people that are worried about nation building and the mistakes that happened during the Bush years.
And let me assure you, this is a very, very different situation.
First of all, just like this country has the very best extrication teams in the world, maybe challenged a bit by Israel, and they train together and they've learned from each other.
Although I might say, and I think Bibi would agree that we may be a little bit better now, but we did learn from them.
We also, probably in the history of the world, you have to go back to the Roman Empire, to find a country that did nation building as well as we did.
I mean, we did it better than Britain because Britain ended up with a great deal of animosity.
Consider the Second World War and consider the tremendous animosities between the United States, Germany, and Japan and Italy, right?
A five-year war, unbelievable number of casualties, barbarity, two atomic bombs.
The United States took over all three countries, or half of Germany, and all of Japan and all of Italy.
Within a very short period of time, they became allies.
And now I would list them probably among the five or six or seven strongest friends and allies of the United States.
And that's after we defeated them in war and occupied them with the brilliant work of General MacArthur, particularly in Japan, in turning Japan into a great friend of the United States.
And General MacArthur, you should know, is a hero in Japan.
We know how to do nation building.
We know how to, and I'm going to do nation building here.
We know how to put together Humpty Dumpty better than any nations ever done it.
Why what happened in Iraq happened in Iraq, I can't tell you.
I was a witness to it to some extent.
My partner Bernie Carrick went there and was terribly discouraged about a whole group of things that I'll tell you.
But those aren't in play here.
First of all, just to be fair, this is a much easier place to regularize than Iraq.
This is a potentially very rich country.
So is Iraq, but considerably more advanced than Iraq, considerably more Western in its traditions and its values.
And it's a Christian country.
It's a country in which the upper class and middle class have extremely strong affection for the United States.
This is the place they came to to run away from Maduro to save their families.
Some of them are personal friends of mine, maybe you also.
I mean, there are a lot of Venezuelans in the United States who have been here for 10, 15, 20 years.
And I am very fortunate to have several very, very close friends.
It's a country that, given the way he did this, there should be very little resentment.
He didn't have to kill anybody.
And that's extraordinary.
You take out the dictator of a country, the head of state of a developed country, ready for military defense, and you don't have to kill anybody.
Ted, so tell me your impression of each one of the, I thought the general and of course the Secretary of War.
Luckily, I got that right.
I would probably, first time I probably got Secretary of War right.
I usually say Secretary of Defense.
It takes a while, you know.
And of course, I am so, so happy for my friend Marco Rubio, because I know in his heart that he relates this to Cuba.
He knows that much of what happened here with Chavez was instigated by Castro.
That at various times the two countries propped each other up when Venezuela was very rich.
They kept Castro in power.
And now when they're both poor, still Cuba is able to give them military assistance.
I don't know what happened to it, but they shouldn't do much for him right now.
So Ted, tell me what you thought.
I guess did Pete go right after?
I believe so, and we're going to pull up.
I think Pete went right after the president and made the point very similar to Secretary Rubio.
You don't fool around with this president.
Right.
Just don't.
If he takes a little more time, he's really, you can look at either one of two ways.
I'll tell you what it really is.
You don't want to kill anybody.
He's a good man.
You know, you have to do this.
God forbid, you may have to kill people in doing this.
Even worse, you may lose some of your own people.
But you don't want to.
And you want to do everything to avoid it, like a great American general would for his troops.
This isn't Putin.
This isn't Maduro.
It isn't Castro.
It isn't a communist atheist animal.
Right.
That's right.
So we're going to.
So sometimes people will mistake his giving you time to make a decision for him.
It's not a decision at all.
If you want to look at it another way, sometimes you could look at it as he gives you enough rope to hang yourself, which this guy did.
This guy hung himself.
You can see it actually even in both Pete and Marco Rubio's expressions.
Both of them, I don't think, have come to grips with why the guy stayed there.
Right.
So let's start out with, this is a good one.
This is General Raisin Kane with the table.
Operation Absolute Resolve.
Right.
So we'll play some of that.
Raisin Kane, I love that.
Report of a request from the Department of Justice.
As the President said, the United States military conducted an apprehension mission in Caracas, Venezuela to bring to justice two indicted persons, Nicholas and Cecile Maduro.
This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discreet, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2nd and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake.
What I'd like to do this morning is talk to you through some of the preparation and the details without compromising any of our tactics, techniques, and procedures.
There is always a chance that we'll be tasked to do this type of mission again.
Our interagency work began months ago and built on decades of experience of integrating complex air, ground, space, and maritime operations.
While the past two decades have honed the skills of our special operations forces, this particular mission required every component of our joint force with 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.
Well, that's a great example of what we have defending us and taking care of us and protecting our liberty and making sure we can preserve it, protect it, defend it, and expand it.
And also, there is nothing more satisfying than liberating.
And the president today has to feel in his soul just tremendous, tremendous sense of relief that he's been able to liberate the Venezuelan people.
And I know they do.
All you'd have to do is take a trip to Miami and watch how they are reacting to it.
Why not pay attention to them than the communist bums and slobs that we have in this country, like the new mayor?
I can't even say it.
The communist who's sitting up in New York, who for his first day in office, he decides he's going to criticize this mission because he's on the side of the communists.
I mean, it's absolutely absurd that we have a communist sitting in New York and also a great enthusiastic admirer of Islamic terrorism.
So Secretary Hegstett noted something or said something that I noted because I thought it was boom.
He said, Maduro had his chance like Iran does.
I think there was a message, maybe?
Well, Mayor, if you noticed, that's something else I noticed.
Glad you brought that up.
I believe every single person, maybe minus the general, made a reference to Iran.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, of course, Iran was on their mind.
Iran was on their mind.
You know, you know that.
You know, the president just yesterday said that if they start killing protesters, he's going to take action, military action.
Right.
Notice that General Kane referred to this as an apprehension operation.
Well, that's what this was.
And that's why this is perfectly legal.
You all have heard of the Posse Comitatus Act.
It's an act that prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement, except under certain very narrow circumstances.
But the Posse Comitatus Act just has application within the United States.
It has no application abroad.
None.
The whole purpose of it is to protect America against military interference.
Nobody else.
There are some restrictions on what can be done by the military to help law enforcement overseas, but none of them apply to narcotics enforcement, which is carved out completely.
And among other things, this was a narcotics arrest of a guy who, since the time he stopped being a bus driver, has probably been dealing with narcotics.
I mean, this is, I like Jackie Gleason too much and the character Ralph Cramden to describe him like that.
But I saw that picture of him when they had him in the helicopter or wherever.
And he looked like he was back driving Caracas 401.
Right.
Which is where he never should have left to join the communist murderer Chavez.
This was President Trump was the first one to release this photo this morning.
Yeah, this is the bus driver.
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah, I'd like to get off at Valencia Street, Jackass.
This guy basically has put himself in jail for the rest of his life.
Thank you.
And we're going to take everything he has, everything, every single thing.
I guarantee you.
The president said this case would be either in the Southern District of New York or Southern District of Florida.
I, of course, would have a great preference for the Southern District of New York because I think it's the greatest prosecutor's office in the United States.
The ability to handle a complex case like this is well within their range and competence.
And this will create complications of all different kinds.
There is a little concern with a jury in New York compared to a jury in Miami.
Difficulty with a jury in Miami is there are many Venezuelans there and Cubans.
And it might be hard to pick a jury in Miami.
Now, you say, well, New York is very anti-Trump.
Well, you don't understand.
This is not the New York State Court.
This is New York federal court.
And it's not just Manhattan.
It's Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester, up into Rockland County.
I mean, it contains millions of people in suburbia as well.
It goes all the up to West Point.
And when I was a U.S. attorney, I had the enforcement responsibility for West Point.
So it's a much bigger area than you think.
And I just don't see this as a particularly political, in that sense, a political case.
But you'd have jury issues in either place.
In Miami, picking a jury, they're going to make it possible because there's so much sentiment.
If you just take a look on television, you can see what's going on in Miami.
The Venezuelan people and the Cuban people and their brothers and sisters who have come to know them and love them are celebrating.
They're celebrating freedom.
What better to celebrate?
This involved, the general pointed out 20 bases that we used, 150 aircraft.
The youngest member was 20 and the oldest was 49.
It included, of course, DEA and the FBI, both Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI.
I assume other law enforcement agencies as well, but those two would have the lead on this.
They disabled, the general pointed out, very matter of factly, they disabled all the air defense of Venezuela, which means nobody shot up.
The president sent them off at, what was it, 10?
I wrote down the exact time.
The president sent them off on their mission at 10.50 something or other.
We'll get that time.
We'll get the exact time.
Yeah, I had it right here.
10.46 as saying good luck and Godspeed, the general said.
By 1.01 a.m., they had arrived at Maduro's complex.
They didn't go into the whole description of it, but they eventually got to Maduro's quarters, and he was just about ready.
He and his drug-dealing wife were just about ready to get through a door, which would have put them in a secure area.
And we intercepted him before either one of them got through that door.
The president said, had he gotten through the door, it would have taken 47 seconds to get through the door.
So it wouldn't have done the bus driver much good.
It was a they gave up.
Both Maduro and his wife gave up.
Apparently, there was no shooting that went on.
Nobody protected him.
Nobody really wanted to give up their life for this bomb, right?
And at 3.29 a.m., they were over water and headed for the USS Iwo Jima, presumably with the two narcotics defendants.
And our forces are in the region now and will remain there until we can do an orderly, judicious transfer and are very well protected, the president assured everyone.
Secretary Rubio made it clear that people should understand from this that this is not a president you should disregard.
He did make the very strong point that Maduro is not the president of Venezuela.
He's not recognized by any, even by the United Nations as the president of Venezuela.
He did away with the laws 10 years ago in 2015.
And his last election, uniformly, Machado defeated him.
So we took out a dictator, not a head of state, not recognized by anyone, maybe except a few communist countries as the head of state.
Secretary Rubio said the president, the 47th president of the United States is not a game player.
He's a president of action.
And you know who that was directed toward because the protests in Iran are going on today, heavy, heavy, heavy.
And I assume this will give them further fuel when people see the strength of the United States and the strong support that the president has given to the protesters in Iran and all throughout that country.
When the questions began, Ted, they immediately began with, well, now you have boots on the ground.
You have boots on the ground.
And when I think of boots on the ground, all I think of is Biden saying to Putin 45 times, no boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, no Putin.
Please, no boots on the ground.
I won't put any boots on the ground.
No boots on the ground.
No boots on the ground.
I'm Italian.
These things happen.
No boots on the ground.
As a matter of fact, he said, yeah, we got boots on the ground.
And they're going to stay there.
Right.
I appreciate that.
I appreciated his answer on that.
Yeah.
Yeah, we have boots on the ground and they're going to stay there and we're going to take care of people and we're going to get back the oil they stole from us.
They took it over like we're nothing, he said.
Well, we're not nothing now anymore.
We used to be under the criminal who was our president.
We're going to run it.
And who is going to do it?
He said, largely the people behind me.
And with the help of the good people we pick up in Venezuela, of which there will be many.
The vice president who herself is under indictment and is a criminal and a communist atheist, a horrible human being, is going to cooperate.
She has no other choice because if they can pick him off, they could probably go in with half of what they did or less than half or whatever they have there and just boop.
And I assume she's going to have to make some kind of deal.
Otherwise, she'll be sitting in the Southern District of New York on trial also.
Petro, the guy in Colombia, says he's not worried.
He's another communist slob in Colombia taking that great country that I did a lot of work in and know really, really well.
And it's a tragedy what this communist atheist slob has done.
And he's not worried.
Yeah, this is the guy that wasn't going to take any of the illegal aliens back.
Remember, we've got to remember.
You've got to remember who you're dealing with here.
And the president said, okay, forget tariffs.
We're not going to trade with you at all.
He immediately sent planes himself to pick up the people.
I mean, this guy is going to have to get himself diapers because the president said, well, I guess if I were him, I would say he should watch his ass.
Marco Rubio did point out that it was impossible to really notify the Congress of this.
First of all, they probably acted quickly on a pretty short string.
But secondly, as the president interrupted it and pointed out, they don't need this.
They asked, could Maduro have been killed?
And the president said, yep.
He said, we did get a lot of opposition there.
He ran for the door.
But we'll have to give more about that.
And then Ted at 46 minutes in asked his question about your message to the people of Venezuela.
And I thought the president made it really clear that we're here to help them become a great country as they were on their way to becoming until the communists took them over.
And then another snotty reporter asked, how is running a country outside the United States putting America first?
And the president, very matter of factly and very cordially answered by saying it's to protect the security of the United States.
I know he wanted to say idiot.
And I think the president has completely defined and made clear all this nonsense with isolationism and interfering and whatever.
There's no absolute here.
It would be irresponsible, unpatriotic, un-American, and moronic to be a pure isolationist in a world that wishes you evil.
The Islamic extremists and the Islamics, based on the Koran that that guy in New York took his oath on, are religiously bound to destroy us.
And they have been doing it for 1,400 years.
And they're doing it in big time now.
I mean, they're killing Christians all over Africa.
They're killing Jews wherever they can.
And of course, they pledge all the time to destroy America.
And then we have China and we have Russia and we have the communists, both internally and externally, unfortunately.
So of course we can't be isolationist.
That doesn't mean we should interfere all the time, everywhere, without a great deal of thought and without maximum force, like we just did.
And each time we do score decisive victories, so we scare the living daylights out of these villains.
And the president made it very, very clear that it's America first because we have to provide, first of all, for the safety of the United States.
And that doesn't mean just domestic law enforcement.
It means law enforcement all over the world or military action all over the world.
In this particular case, law enforcement.
And then the question that I know was very dear to Marco Rubio's heart, and that is, what does this mean for Cuba?
Should they be worried?
And the president intervened again and said, yep.
Yep.
They should be worked.
Their inhumane, horrible treatment of their own people and their assistance they gave to this guy for years puts them right in the place where America would be a lot safer if that place wasn't an aider and a better of atheistic communism.
So he clarified, I think, isolationism just with a couple of sentences, which I could have clarified for you a year ago.
But just because the press wants to be idiots, they, you know, isolationism means you're never going to.
Well, of course you're going to defend yourself and you're going to take action sometimes in advance to defend yourself.
And you're not putting America first if you don't intervene at times.
And if you intervene too much, you're being foolish.
The extrication, I want you to note how good we are at it, because this is an option that we should use.
I really thought it should have been done right at the very beginning, except maybe under a Biden administration and with the unbelievably awful Pentagon that he had.
Maybe it couldn't have been done.
I don't know.
But all things being equal, had we had a president and a head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that wasn't a traitor, it would have been an option that should have been utilized at the very, very beginning of their taking hostages in Gaza.
A combination of us and Israel, us and the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force.
Now, the chances of doing an extrication without anybody being killed, that's hard, but it would have been, I am absolutely convinced, it would have been considerably less than ultimately ended up dying in those barbarian conditions in which they were held by the friends of Mayor Mandani.
Right.
So I think this does show you what we can do and it shows the world what we can do.
I sure as that wouldn't feel very safe if I were any of our opponents sitting in their little capitals wherever the hell they are.
I think we can reach anybody anywhere.
And I'm not going to tell you how I have a pretty good idea how we did this.
And all that delay by this idiot was a terrible.
What do you think they were going to do while we were delaying?
Every day that he gave them, he made this mission easier.
The more time they have, the more they go from 90% to 92, 93, 95, and then over 100.
And let them all yell and scream about the legality of it, whatever, whatever, whatever.
This is an arrest based on an indictment with the assistance of the United States military, which is perfectly permissible outside the United States, has been since the Posse Comitatus Act was passed, has been clarified with legislation regarding narcotics.
And I don't know, go, yell, Democrats can go root for Chavez and Maduro and the Ayatollah.
I don't know what side they're on.
But those of us who are Americans very much appreciate what our military and what our law enforcement, what our president has done for us.
We appreciate it very, very much because we are now that much safer than we were yesterday with this guy gone and on our way to being able to carve out a really, really cooperative relationship with Latin America.
We're developing some very strong allies there.
And I credit that to the president and to Marco.
I don't think we've ever had as many strong relationships with Latin American countries as we do now.
And I think pretty soon you're going to see Colombia fall into that category as well.
This place, look at Argentina with Malai.
Malai loves him.
So we're going to get off so we can get ourselves together for dinner and go over to Mar-a-Lago.
And if we see the president, congratulate the great liberator.
And we'll be back on Monday.
And if necessary, tomorrow.
Who knows what's going to happen?
We still have, we thought we'd be coming on this weekend over Iran.
Who knows?
Want the state to be able to do that?
And it's changing the world.
Tomorrow.
It's changing the world.
And America is once again the dominant country in the world.
Nobody can deny that.
No country could do what we just did.
And they know it.
So God bless our law enforcement.
God bless our military.
God bless his administration.
And God bless our president.
And God bless the people of Venezuela.
You've been through a lot.
You're great people.
You are friends already.
You never wanted this guy at all.
Just like the people of Iran want to be out from under the crazy Islamic Koran nutty deocracy.
So we're getting there, piece by piece.
We'll see you on Monday, maybe tomorrow.
God bless America.
It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought to us the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers, in which Thomas Paine explained, by rational principles, the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the kingdom of Great Britain and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, for freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the ability to select the people who govern them.
And he explained it in ways that were understandable to all the people, not just the elite.
Because the desire for freedom is universal.
The desire for freedom adheres in the human mind and it is part of the human soul.
This is exactly the time we should consult our history.
Look at what we've done in the past and see if we can't use it to help us now.
We understand that our founders created the greatest country in the history of the world.
The greatest democracy, the freest country, a country that has taken more people out of poverty than any country ever.
All of us are so fortunate to be Americans.
But a great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we're able to reason.
We're able to talk.
We're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
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