Trump makes FATAL MISTAKE with Venezuela invasion

I'm joined now by the Deputy National Security Advisor under President Obama and the co-host

of Pod Save the World, Ben Rhodes. Ben, thanks for joining me. Good to see you, Brian.

Obviously, with the whole situation unfolding right now in Venezuela, just a couple of questions on this in particular. To what extent do you think that this whole intervention, this is a little bit of a political question first and foremost, to what extent do you think all of this intervention, Trump going in, kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, bringing him back into the United States, was his effort to distract from this overarching issue that's been, you know, dragging his presidency down, which is the Epstein files?

I don't think so, because actually, if you look at Trump since he was elected, he's pretty consistently foreshadowed these types of military operations, right? Right after the election, he was talking about taking back the Panama Canal, taking Greenland. The administration's national security strategy kind of talks about returning to Latin America being essentially a sphere of influence in the United States

where we kind of pick and choose leaders. He intervened in Argentina with a $20 billion bailout for Javier Mille, who he likes. He's also buddied up to Nayib Bekele in El Salvador, sending people down to the gulag there. So, you know, he's clearly tried to pick winners down there.

And look, we've been building up to this in Venezuela. This took months to plan, to assemble all the military resources there, the 15,000 US troops in the Caribbean. So I actually think it makes it worse because I actually think that this is here to stay, this kind of foreign policy where this might not be the last place in which he chooses to use the US military for regime change purposes with no legal basis to kind of run this hemisphere like his own private empire.

How do you square that? And I ask you as if, you know, but channeling Trump's America first agenda, how is that squared with the fact that this guy ran on a platform of non-interventionism? Like his whole thing was that this is an escape from the neocons that had led the Republican Party

for years and years and years prior to this.

Yeah, no, it's a fascinating question. And look, I mean, we don't know what's in his head. I will say part of what we're learning is that that whole posture of being against forever wars of being America first was bogus. I mean, if you look in just the last year, you know, in addition to the usual suspects, Trump has bombed Iran, Nigeria, and now Venezuela.

Those are three pretty big countries where the United States had never done that before. I think what we're looking at, Brian, what we have to learn from this first year, including the last couple of days, is that Trump is motivated above all, not by any MAGA ideology. Some people around him are, certainly like Stephen Miller. He's motivated by power and money. And both of those things intersect here in Venezuela. He gets more power.

He gets to be the strongman. He gets to be the guy who's, without any legal basis, like deposing a leader now that a kind of de facto leader of Venezuela. And there's a lot of money involved. He was very clear today that what this was really about, not drugs, it was oil. And he talked a lot in his press conference about sending the US oil companies down there. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves. So he sees money in this too for his cronies. And so this is something that gets him power and money. And if it's inconsistent with MAGA, if it's inconsistent with ending forever wars, and

if it's frankly not what the people who voted for him want, and this is a big political opening, I wish it didn't exist, but it does for Democrats, it's that we're going to be spending money rebuilding Venezuela. We spent already probably billions of dollars on the military deployments to support this thing and so this is running directly counter to what people want including his own supporters. I mean in theory if

he was and this is all assuming perhaps naively that Trump is gonna follow the regular course of order but if he wants money to rebuild Venezuela doesn't that have to be allocated by Congress and so isn't there some bulwark to his to his you know, wanting to do more nation building this time in South America?

Yeah, I mean, there are places, there are ways in which Congress could assert itself if it chose to, but that would require the Republicans to get involved. Because what we've seen, Brian, is it will cost money. Look, he talked in the press conference, for instance, too, about having boots on the ground, potentially in Venezuela, raises the prospect of we might actually literally be looking at US oil companies going down to

rebuild Venezuelan oil fields with US troops as their kind of protection. Now, normally you would need Congress to kick in some money for the kind of costs that would go along with the United States rebuilding Venezuelan oil infrastructure, like you talked about, certainly any troop deployments. But so far what we've seen them do is take these giant pots of money that exist in places like the Pentagon, you know, and just pull out of one pot and put it in this pot in ways

that normally would be illegal. Normally Congress appropriates the money that's meant to be spent on certain things. They've shown time and again that they're willing to ignore that. So the question going forward is, will Congress assert itself? He already basically went to war and removed a leader without seeking any authorization from Congress. This is already an unconstitutional action.

The money question, I think, is going to present itself in the weeks ahead.

So on that issue in particular, there have been a lot of Democrats rightfully decrying the illegality and the extrajudicial nature of what we've seen and the fact that Congress wasn't involved. And I think that Republicans are, you know, obviously the ones who've come out in support of it. There's this dichotomy here where Democrats, a lot of the elected officials seem to be

disparaging the process, like the fact that Trump didn't go in and get approval from Congress, but not necessarily talking about the issue at hand. And so I'm just curious if you've seen that and what your reaction is to that. It's more focused for the left on the fact that, not necessarily decrying what happened in Venezuela, but more the fact that it wasn't

through the regular course of order. Yeah, I hear the same thing. And look, I'm sympathetic. They're in Congress, right? So they feel it. They feel ignored. They feel like their constitutional responsibility was taken away from them. They were not notified even before the operation went forward. That's incredibly unusual. That said, I think you're right. That's a bit of a rabbit hole here. Like the things that are dangerous about this and the things that are wrong about this,

you know, number one, Americans don't want us to be doing this anymore. They want their politicians in Washington to be focused on affordability, not on conquering foreign countries or deposing foreign leaders, no matter how odious and Maduro's not a good guy. I think number two, where is this all going? What's this going to cost in Venezuela?

What happens if there's some kind of further conflict in Venezuela, which is quite likely? Or where else is Trump going to do this? Are we looking at him going to Panama? Are we looking at him, he threatened Colombia today? Is the Greenland stuff going to come back on the table? So it's that combination of Trump, he cares about his power and he cares about wealth.

He does not care about you, right? You the American voter. I mean, that to me is the core point here. And it's and you can add the people like me are concerned about the danger of an autocratic leader turning to war, which we've seen Vladimir Putin did this in Ukraine. That's never a good situation.

But I actually think, you know, there's just that simple point that Trump is not working

for you. This is not what anyone elected the US president to do. Is this a question of, you know, Republicans like Ted Cruz, for example, tried to make this very reductive and brought up this point when he was responding to Zoran Mamdani, who decried, you know, foreign interventionism in to South America. He basically said, oh, you know, Zoran is aligning himself with a fellow communist dictator and birds of a communist feather flock together. And so he's basically trying to make it that

if you are in any way against what's happening in Venezuela, then you are for the communist dictator. So can I have your reaction to that? Because that's a lot of what we're seeing from the right. If you're not cheering this on, then the de facto position that you have to take by transitive property is that you supported

Maduro and that you want him to continue ruling over Venezuela.

Yeah, and it's no surprise that they're doing this. But look, I mean, two things come to my mind. The first is we've seen this movie before, right? I mean, for those of us who are old enough to remember the invasion of Iraq, for instance, a lot of the people who are raising questions about, is this really a good idea? What the Republicans would just say is, oh, you're supporting Saddam Hussein, right?

And that's just not the case. There are other ways of supporting democratic change or civil society in other countries other than going to war on them. And the US track record of regime change wars on behalf of removing autocratic leaders, it doesn't usually end better than it was at the beginning. I mean, we've got plenty of history to show us that. And so I feel like Democrats can't get defensive about this. Because

the other thing I'd also say is, look, I know Venezuelans who hate Maduro, who have friends and loved ones who are in prison down there. And some of them are happy today. But the tragedy to me is that Trump doesn't give a shit about that. He's already dealing with the remnants of the Maduro regime. He's already said he's not going to try to support putting the opposition in power. Not that that would be easy either, but he's making no pretense that this is about democracy

or a better life for Venezuelans.

It seems to me like his only priority here was that Maduro was too much of a bulwark against him being able to consolidate natural resources, but then the next guy in line, who I think is his female vice president, if I'm not mistaken, she won't be as much of a barrier.

And so, okay, she can stay because it was never, to your point, about human rights or anything like that. It was just about who's going to give him the, you know, the clearest one runway into consolidating consolidating natural resources, which, of course, you know, he and his cronies derive some financial benefit from.

I think that's right. say, you know, maybe Maduro, because Maduro is, you know, widely disliked. He's widely seen as having thrown the last election. Maybe he was the convenient pretext for, well, everybody can agree this is a bad guy. So this will be my way in to kind of get him out of there. But what I really want to do is get my claws on the oil. And again, if you think I sound like a, you know, lefty conspiracy theorist, that's what

Trump said today. Right.

Like he was like, we need the oil back. It's our oil. They stole it, you know, and we'll deal with the vice president. And then he basically said, and if she doesn't deal with us in the way that we like, we'll cut after her too. Right. It's about finding any form of a vassal state government that will just kind of defer to

Donald Trump and his administration and the U.S. oil companies in terms of what they're doing. So it puts the lie to that argument from these Republicans that, oh, you know, you support Maduro. No, what we don't support is an illegal war that has nothing to do with democracy that could lead to worse outcomes.

We don't know how things are going to play out in Venezuela, but also can lead to a world, Brian, I think this is really important, where there's just no rules anymore. What lesson does Vladimir Putin take from this about what he's allowed to do? What lesson does China take from this about what they might be allowed to do in Taiwan? And so there's just all these traps ahead. And so I think we can't, I hate it when there's like so much throat clearing defensively about, well, it's good Maduro's

gone because you either think this is a good idea or a bad idea. And I think this is clearly a bad idea.

Does it seem like this could be the gateway into a second round of imperialism by big autocratic countries, of which I would include the United States under Trump's administration?

It feels like we're already there because it feels to me like Trump views the Western Hemisphere like Putin views the former Soviet Union, like China views its neighborhood, the South China Sea in Taiwan. And he's comfortable in a world in which these big powers basically do whatever they want. And there's no more respect for sovereignty. There's no more respect for any rules. And,

you know, unfortunately, that usually ends poorly. Like, the reason we made all the rules against big countries doing that is that we went through two world wars. Now, I'm not suggesting we're like on the precipice of that yet. But it just, this is a dynamic that you don't want to play with here. And we'll see how they, if they can land the plane in Venezuela. There are a lot of questions about whether the remnant remnants of Maduro government go along with this,

what the Chinese and Russians will do in Venezuela. Cause they have a lot of people there themselves or a lot of influence there, you know, whether there'll be more violence, what the US troops will be on the ground. But in any case, you just don't want to open up this Pandora's box of kind of returning to imperial, rule-less geopolitics.

What about Maria Carina Machado? Her decision to kind of heap praise onto Trump, to dedicate her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump and the moment that there's an opening where she could rise up, you know, and presumably become the next leader of Venezuela as the opposition leader, Trump basically just swats her down and says that she doesn't command enough respect, she's not strong enough to be the leader. And so, you know, that's the end of that.

I thought this was extraordinary. And you have to remember that Maria Machado, she was not allowed to run in the last election, but the candidate that she supported by all independent monitor accounts won the last election. So the point is, she does have support in Venezuela. But I think what she's learned is the same thing that everybody else has learned at some point, who thought that the way to get Trump to do what you want was to suck up to him. She said

all the right things about how wonderful Trump was you want was to suck up to him, right? She said all the right things about how wonderful Trump was, about how she wanted this to happen, but frankly she's not relevant to Trump's plans down there. The plans are like make a big show, get rid of Maduro, and get our hands on the oil. And when he says she's not someone who's supported or respected in the country, I think what he means is he's not supported or respected by the power brokers, by the military. Of course she's not supported by the military.

She's been in a political opposition to the military regime that Maduro was leading. But he tossed her overboard right away. He didn't even make a pretense. I thought he would at least say, of course she's going to be a part of Venezuela's future and we'll be talking to her. He just dismissed her out of hand. So again, spare me the rhetoric about caring about democracy and human rights.

It's not what this is about.

Pete Hegseth's comments right after Trump had announced what he'd done, they held this press conference and he did this, the usual like chest beating macho man where he said that Maduro F'd around and he found out. I'm curious what your takeaway was from having watched Pete Hegseth do the usual bro routine.

You know, on the one hand, you can roll your eyes and think about how juvenile this is. And you know, you had Trump saying that Petro, the leader of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, should watch his ass. You had Rubio echoing the kind of, he didn't say fuck around and find out, but he said mess around and find out or something.

But it's like, okay, on the one hand, it's kind of juvenile. Like we've never really had presidents and national security leaders talk like this. But then you think about it and you're like, well, it's actually more than that. It's scary because Pete Hexeth runs the United States military. You know, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Like, Marco Rubio is, by my count, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor,

and the Archivist, but put the Archivist bit aside. But I mean, at what point is the thing that we, this is always something interesting with Brian, with Brian with Trump, because you've been covering this. At what point is he actually doing the thing that we were afraid he might do? Like if, because he normalizes this stuff along the way. We're all like a frog boiling in water. If I had told you a year ago, hey, Trump's going to like invade Venezuela, remove the

leader and say he's running the country, you'd be like, holy shit, this is the worst case scenario. This is like fascism come to America. But because there was this kind of ramp up to it and they were blowing up the boats and he was making threats, now it just kind of feels like this thing that happened. And I think we have to start to take these guys seriously when they're threatening people and fuck around and find out like that this is, this is not just juvenile, it's pretty

frightening actually. And so I guess the question here is, and this is like, you know, the million dollar question is if you have a lawless executive branch, if you have an impotent legislative branch and a judicial branch that's contracted all of its autonomy over, you know, to the administration and a White House that's just acting completely illegally and you have the rest of the world that obviously isn't gonna, you know, stand up to it unless they're willing to engage in war.

Like, I guess what happens at that point when, I mean, it doesn't feel like it's the same. I mean, this is a little bit going back to what we were talking about originally, but it doesn't feel like we're in the same world order than we were yesterday or 11 months ago.

That's how it feels to me. It feels like we're in dangerous new terrain and the question is how far does this go, right? Does it go to other countries? Like what does it mean to run Venezuela? What do the Russians and Chinese do? And I think to try to be constructive about this, but Congress has chosen not to assert itself to date. It's going to take political pushback. It's going to take a change in the political dynamic. And what I mean by that is actually, if you look at the fractures in MAGA on these issues,

like that's an opening. Because if Trump starts to lose support broadly among the American people, and there's a mobilized and activated kind of Democratic base, their independents are unhappy with what he's doing. But then there also start to be some cracks inside of that Republican coalition because their voters are like, you know, even if today all the Republican congressmen are putting out statements about how tough Trump is, you know, their constituents are like, what are

we doing down in Venezuela? Why is this guy always hanging out with like foreigners and billionaires? I actually think there needs to be a decisive political turn against Trump so that then you can try to get the pushback from Congress. Then it starts to feel like he has less room for maneuver. Because right now, like, you know, he's, I mean, to go all the way back to your distraction point, you know, he may, I don't think this is a distraction because I think this is something

that they wanted to do. But here he's once again trying to drive the conversation, drive events and make everybody react to him. And there needs to just be more pushback when

he goes to do that. Yeah. And frankly, in terms of him engineering a situation where he, you know, he's basically, I don't know how else you would broadcast to the American people that you were not interested in the very thing that they put you into office to do. I mean, from shipping away healthcare, from gutting food assistance, from making everything more expensive

by engaging in these trade wars that everybody said was gonna raise the prices of everything, then to encrusting the Oval Office in gold, buying Gulfstream jets, hosting a let them eat cake party at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, every single day we see something that again,

is scientifically engineered to broadcast to Americans that he does not give a flying fuck about you and engaging in, you know, a regime change war

in Venezuela is just the cherry on the cake. Yes, he can't even pretend to be interested in issues of affordability. Like he likes this part of the job. He likes where he has the power. He likes hanging out with oligarchs. He likes having foreign leaders be scared of him. But look, none of this is what anybody here is interested in the United States. And that's his vulnerability. And that's why,

to your earlier point, the argument should not just be about, oh, he didn't get Congress's authorization. The argument should be like, what the hell is he doing? He doesn't care about you. He cares about the oil companies. Like, he just launched this war and said it was for the American oil companies, right?

I mean, to your point, that was designed in a lab to be a message that Democrats should be able to prosecute a case against Trump on. Right.

Well, look, you know, as everybody who watches my show knows, I generally stay with domestic politics and so I highly recommend for everybody who's watching right now, if you're looking for excellent, excellent, excellent coverage of international affairs, Pod Save the World is my go-to source with Ben and Tommy. So I'm going to put the link to Pod Save the World right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video.

If you're not yet subscribed, please go ahead and subscribe. Ben, thanks so much for the time.

Thanks. Great talking to you. Great talking to you.

Appreciate what you're doing out there too.