What if Trump Pulls This Off?
There has been a huge amount of groupthink on the part of critics of Trump’s smash-and-grab operation to capture and prosecute Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. The critics make the obvious point that the incursion violated Venezuela’s sovereignty and international law; that Trump’s reversion to 19th-century colonialism and spheres of influence is an invitation for Putin and Xi to do likewise in their spheres; and that America’s adventures in nation building, long disparaged by Trump himself, have seldom worked out well.
There is also near-universal commentary to the effect that Trump has no clear plans for the morning after. As Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times in a column subtitled “You Break It, You Own It”: “Trump did not shrink from suggesting that we are undertaking the biggest nation-building project America has engaged in since Iraq and Afghanistan. Does he have any idea what a daunting and open-ended project that could be?”
But reading slightly between the lines, it’s evident that there is the concept of a plan, to use Trump’s idiom. For two days, the Trump administration has been sending not-so-subtle signals that they grudgingly admire acting President Delcy Rodríguez and want to work with her.
Trump went out of his way to disparage the opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who made off with his Nobel Prize. He rejected working with her ally, Edmundo González Urrutia, who strong evidence shows actually won the 2024 election (a government-controlled council later called it for Maduro, in an outcome that has been called illegitimate). He has both spoken well of Rodríguez and threatened her if she refuses to cooperate.
A deal with Rodríguez could include U.S. recognition of her regime and an end to sanctions; cooperation by Rodríguez with Trump’s war on drugs; respect by Rodríguez for civil liberties and free elections in a year or two; substantial U.S. government money, matching infrastructure investment by Chevron, to get Venezuelan oil output back to the roughly three million barrels a day that was being pumped before 2006; and plans to allow the return of émigrés.
All that, in turn, would revive the Venezuelan economy and allow Rodríguez to claim credit for a boom. With this scenario, she wins, Trump wins, and he can claim that Venezuela wins. So what if she’s a Marxist?
This is exactly the kind of deal that Trump loves. Yesterday’s adversary is tomorrow’s partner. All it takes is the right price.
Those who have followed Trump’s repeated pratfalls assume that the administration has no clue about what comes next. But think again. After all, the military part of this operation was carefully planned over several months. And while Trump is typically impulsive and ignorant, the CIA presumably has a pretty good sense of who Rodríguez is.
Reporting Trump’s Saturday remarks, the press has had a field day with the fact that he went off-script, taking about “running” Venezuela and “putting boots on the ground.” On Sunday, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to awkwardly walk all that back. But then again, there was a script for Trump to go off.
Rubio, of course, has been backing the Venezuelan opposition for years, and stage-managing this war. He is probably steaming at an outcome that keeps Chavismo in power. But he could be hoping that Rodríguez will resist Trump’s wishes enough to get another bite at the apple down the road. And anyway, this decapitation of a head of state prepares the ground for the regime change he truly wants in Cuba, his ancestral homeland, where a similar flock of right-wing exiles sits waiting in Florida. “They’re in a lot of trouble,” Rubio said of Cuba on Meet the Press. “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.”
Of course, it’s entirely possible that Trump, with his extreme vanity and penchant for half-baked boasts and impulsive actions, could screw this up. Having dissed Machado, Trump really doesn’t have a Plan B. That gives Rodríguez some leverage over the terms of a deal. She could also decide that she would rather lead a patriotic resistance to Trump than be party to a deal that requires trusting him. We are talking about the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, after all.
But it’s also possible that two months from now, Trump will be able to claim that the military exfiltration operated like clockwork; that he rid Venezuela of a widely detested dictator who ran the economy into the ground; and that he brought greater stability, a modicum of greater liberty, and an economic revival.
Our president is a thug, a grifter, an opportunist, and a liar. He is also consistently underestimated.
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