Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the Trump administration’s capture of Nicolás Maduro — Venezuela’s illegitimate president, who completed the consolidation of power initiated by Hugo Chávez and is accused of drug trafficking and organized criminal activity — was Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). Until the story broke, national attention had been focused on the sprawling welfare fraud scandal that has allegedly cost taxpayers in his state billions of dollars.
Not the Bee put it so well: “I have whiplash right now watching the dems pivot from supporting Somali fraudsters to cartel kingpins and illegitimate dictators.”
At any rate, as the people of Venezuela and neighboring countries celebrate the fall of Nicolás Maduro, the Left has been busy spinning a new narrative. The latest talking points center on the claim that President Donald Trump lacked the authorization to initiate a new war, that he once again trampled the Constitution, and that his actions were motivated not by concern over the dangerous drugs Maduro’s narco-state was funneling into the U.S., but by Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Protests have followed in American cities from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., and from Portland, Oregon, to San Antonio, Texas, with demonstrators calling on the president to “free Maduro.”
Democrats have once again prioritized ideology over reality, which leaves them in the unenviable position of defending a narco-state.
Weighing in on X Saturday night — because, apparently, no debate is complete without her interjection — former Vice President Kamala Harris managed to echo each one of these claims.
Unfortunately for Harris, X users quickly reminded her of the reasons she lost the 2024 election.
Likewise, the X post below compares remarks from former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg after Maduro took over the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2020 to his reaction to news of Maduro’s capture this weekend. His show of solidarity with opposition leader Juan Guaidó and the Venezuelan people as they “strive[d] to regain their democracy” in 2020 suddenly falls by the wayside because Trump was the one behind Maduro’s loss of power.
The shifting statements from Harris and Buttigieg are a fair representation of what we have heard from Democrats over the past two days, raising serious questions about just how deeply held their convictions truly are. In the age of Trump, principle too often appears to have given way to reflexive opposition: if Trump supports it, they reject it — substance notwithstanding.
[For more examples of the sheer lunacy coming from the Left after Maduro’s capture, see Congress Reacts as Trump Details Maduro Capture in Interview.]
In the X post below, the author zeroes in on the Left’s lack of conviction:
most political issues nowadays can be explained by understanding that american leftists don’t have positions, they have oppositions.their entire belief system is defined by negation of whatever the right supports.this is why portland chants “free maduro” while actual venezuelans celebrate in the streets.they’re not pro-venezuelan or pro democracies, or pro tyrant, or pro maduro, they’re simply anti-american-right.they’ve outsourced their worldview to institutional narratives for so long that genuine self-reflection would require questioning everything.for them it’s much easier to just oppose. the beliefs arent coherent because they were never meant to be coherent. they only need to signal tribal membership, and leftist membership is gained by opposing the right….no coherent word model. no logic. pure oppositionat some point you just have to stop engaging with it as if it’s a real political position. it’s not. it’s aesthetic opposition wearing the costume of ideology
Last month, The Dallas Express published a letter written by Hugo Carvajal Barrios, “a former three-star Venezuelan general and once one of the most powerful figures within the Caracas socialist regime.”
According to The Miami Herald, Carvajal, who once served as Venezuela’s director of Military Intelligence, “defected from the Maduro government in 2017 and fled” to Spain before being extradited to the U.S. in 2023. He recently pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges and is now awaiting sentencing in a U.S. federal prison.
His stated reason for writing the letter was to warn “the American people about the reality of what the Venezuelan regime truly is — and why Trump’s policies are not only correct, but absolutely necessary to the United States’ national security.”
He noted that under Chavez, the Venezuelan government “became a criminal organization,” and has remained one ever since. “The purpose of this organization, now known as the Cartel of the Suns, is to weaponize drugs against the United States. The drugs that reached your cities through new routes were not accidents of corruption nor just the work of independent traffickers; they were deliberate policies coordinated by the Venezuelan regime against the United States.”
“This plan was suggested by the Cuban regime to Chávez in the mid-2000s and has been successfully executed with help from FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], ELN [Colombia’s National Liberation Army], Cuban operatives, and Hezbollah. The regime has provided weapons, passports, and impunity for these terrorist organizations to operate freely from Venezuela against the United States,” Carvajal explained.
Carvajal detailed how the Tren de Aragua criminal gang was methodically organized and expanded under Chavez, including the “recruitment of criminal leaders inside and outside prisons” to build its ranks. Chávez, he said, began “exporting this criminality and chaos abroad” — a strategy that was continued under Maduro.
It appears Trump’s accusation that Venezuela was emptying its prisons and sending these individuals into the U.S., long ridiculed by the Left, is accurate.
Carvajal’s perspective was fascinating, and I highly recommend reading the whole letter.
If his allegations are accurate, then the narco-state’s leadership has effectively been at war with the U.S. for decades, and the Trump administration’s intervention has neutralized a very serious threat to our national security. Maduro’s connections to U.S. adversaries, including the leadership of Cuba, Iran, Hezbollah, and others, made him a very dangerous man, and his removal from leadership will have worldwide repercussions.
I will leave you with the following message from a Venezuelan national who is interested in setting the record straight:
This is a message for my American friends watching the news today in English. There is a serious inaccuracy in the coverage. Venezuela is not undergoing a regime change. Venezuela already has a democratically elected president. Edmundo González. He is the president. Nicolás Maduro is not the president. He never was. He stole the last election and led a criminal organization linked to terrorism and drug trafficking. El Cartel de Los Solis. And today, thanks to the vision and courage of the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the decisive leadership of President Donald Trump, and the actions of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the United States has finally recognized a fundamental truth: Protecting our hemisphere from terrorism, drug cartels, and authoritarian ideologies is a matter of national security for the United States.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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