Trump Invades Venezuela; Arrests President Maduro and Wife

US President Donald Trump speaks at press conference at 
Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, January 3, 2026.
(Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images) 
"We are going to run the country," Trump said.

Trump Declares U.S. 'In Charge' of Venezuela

Democrats Offer Weak Response

Netanyahu Calls Trump 'Bold and Brilliant'

Commentary

UPDATED - Madison, Wisconsin — President Trump launched another illegal U.S. regime-change war and invasion of a sovereign country — Venezuela.

Israel's radical Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar praised the invasion that followed the latest U.S. visit by Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu with Trump, and Christian Zionists.

Netanyahu dubbed Trump a leader for Peace this week.

Congressional Democrats' reaction is muted, often veering into legality and calls for Congressional movement, avoiding moral condemnation prominent among the American people.

Wisconsin's Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin (D) is silent today, obeying her political instinct to gauge the political terrain first before commenting.

Jake Johnson in Common Dreams reports on exceptions to Baldwin's timidity:

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said he will force a Senate vote next week on a bipartisan War Powers Resolution to block additional US military action in Venezuela.
'Where will this go next?' Kaine asked in a statement. 'Will the president deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies? Trump has threatened to do all this and more and sees no need to seek legal authorization from people’s elected legislature before putting servicemembers at risk.'

Quagmire Seen

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin), an AIPAC political foe, writes:

Trump continues to ignore the US Constitution and lie to Congress and the American people. Bombing and occupying Venezuela is an illegal act of war against a sovereign nation.

Only Congress has the ability to declare war, but Speaker Johnson and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have rolled over and gave up our Article One powers. 

Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth told Members of Congress their illegal attacks on boats was not about regime change, but capturing a sitting leader is the literal definition of regime change. Trump and his band of misfits seem to have no endgame to this potential quagmire.

— Rep. Mark Pocan (@RepMarkPocan) January 3, 2026

House Democrat Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Israel-first supporter, put out a mealy-mouthed statement this morning.

This is so fucking weak. https://t.co/rwOQsqt0wQ

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) January 3, 2026

Mainstream corporate press and social media have blacked out Israel, which controls U.S. foreign policy, and its political work with Trump for this latest military action.

🇻🇪 Venezuela President Maduro on Israel:

“They have sown an ideology more dangerous than Nazism.

They justify raids, extermination, genocide, and atomic bombs"

they'll come for the Christians, Catholics."

This is why he had to go.
pic.twitter.com/lyFDd60kxG

— ADAM (@AdameMedia) January 3, 2026

The Democratic governor of Colorado joins several Democratic House members in praising Trump's regime change operation in Venezuela.

Nothing unites the two parties like new wars and regime changes. It's beautiful DC bipartisanship at its most inspiring: https://t.co/9TL5KENuaj

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 3, 2026

Congratulations, President @realDonaldTrump for your bold and historic leadership on behalf of freedom and justice. I salute your decisive resolve and the brilliant action of your brave soldiers.

— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) January 3, 2026

 

Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.

See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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Presidents

U.S.-backed Pakistani Pervez Musharraf rules the country as a "President," according to American corporate news broadcasts and the Bush administration.

Though Musharraf seized power in 1999 through a military coup, has suspended the Pakistan Constitution twice, and cancelled elections, Bush has held steadfast with Musharraf.

Compare this relationship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who Bush and Condi Rice regularly chide for not being "democratic," and destabilizing.

After all, Chavez is giving Venezuelan oil money to the people of Venezuela, and holding elections and referendums, so Chavez must be a threat to Bush and Rice's idea of a democracy.

On democracy and freedom, Bush and Rice have less credibility in the world than they do in the United States, and that's very low and appalling to people who are concerned with such matters. Bush is simply another in the line of numerous American presidents who sing the praises of democracy while subverting it abroad, and in Bush's case at home.

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NYT' s Roger Cohen Pens Imperialistic Column on Hugo Chávez

With no sense of irony, Roger Cohen pens an op-ed this morning in the New York Times telling President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela to shut up, and halt that economic model to which Cohen objects.

Cohen was quoting the paragon of democracy, King Juan Carlos of Spain, who "got it right when he recently interrupted Chávez’s trademark verbal diarrhea with a brusque: "Why don’t you just shut up?"

To democratic minds, it's monarchs like Carlos who are repulsive and obscene, an assault on the very notion of democracy. [Democracy etiquette tip: When in the presence of monarchs like Juan Carlos, politely interrupt and remind them that they are grotesque anachronisms.]

So it comes as no surprise that Chávez, elected, re-elected, and committed to using the spoils of oil to spread the wealth around to the poor should be such a pain to the monarch Carlos and the imperialist-minded Cohen, who take it as an assumption that they have a right to tell the people of Venezuela and its president how to conduct themselves.

Cohen notes: Venezuelans will vote Sunday in a referendum that would remove all limits on presidential re-election, grant Chávez direct control over foreign currency reserves, allow him to censor the media under a state of emergency declarable at his discretion, expand his powers to expropriate private property, and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s.

The reality is a bit more complicated. As Mark Weisbrot writes in the New Statesman (via Z): In any case, the voters will decide, with a far stronger opposition media than exists in the United States proselytising against the government. Venezuelans have not lost civil liberties the way people in the U.S. (or even the UK) have in recent years, and ordinary citizens continue to have more say in their government, and share more in its oil wealth, than ever before. It is doubtful that the referendum will reverse these changes, regardless of the outcome.

One fact one ought to emphasize is that the Venezuelans will vote, just like they voted for Chávez. [Cohen does allow that "Certainly, the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods (at the expense of an oil industry suffering chronic underinvestment) has reduced poverty. "]

As for Cohen (and King Juan Carlos - yuck!), if you do not like Chávez, don't vote for him, or for his proposed Constitutional amendments in the next election.

Wait a minute; you're not citizens of Venezuela, are you?
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