Call Trump's power grab in Venezuela what it is

If you want to support The Handbasket’s 100% independent journalism, subscribe for free now. You can also become a premium subscriber or leave a tip.

Shortly after midnight Saturday, I got a text from my friend Juan Escalante, who was born in Venezuela, moved here as a child and is now a US citizen. He was hearing reports of explosions in Caracas from his frightened family members on the ground and wanted to make sure I knew. I then reported it on Bluesky. In the immediate aftermath it wasn’t clear who was responsible for the strikes, but in my gut I knew. We all knew.  

Trump, after weeks of bombing Venezuelan fishing boats, killing more than 100 people, off-handedly admitting a port strike, and openly talking about a lust to escalate the attacks, launched his first large-scale ground attack. After falling asleep around 4am ET, I woke up hours later to find out the true purpose of the operation: To abduct the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife. 

In some ways it feels like we’ve entered a theater where the play is already in progress. In the lead-up to past wars, the government made an effort to sell the premise to the American people so that by the time it began, they would understand the alleged purpose and the main players. This time around, though, there was little stage-setting. By the time the public entered the picture, bombs were already dropping on boats, and soon thereafter, on land. Maduro was kidnapped before the vast majority of Americans knew his name, and people were expected to have an understanding of US history with Venezuela and their oil supply (or know that Venezuela even had an oil supply.) And, oh yea, wasn’t there something about drugs?

Now the average American is being forced to work backwards to understand how we ended up bombing a sovereign nation, all while Republicans rubber-stamp the move and corporate-owned media outlets trip over themselves to celebrate the “tactically precise” nature of the illegal operation. 

“So many in media are ill-equipped to interview officials about what’s happening because they begin with the presumption of legitimacy and don’t know enough about history or U.S. foreign policy to foment intelligent pushback and hold officials accountable,” journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones posted Sunday on Bluesky. She continued, “The questions begin with WILL regime change be successful, not how is it legal or ethical to orchestrate a coup and who are we to decide when leadership must go and who are we to believe we have rights to a sovereign nation’s resources.”

Hannah-Jones pointed specifically to Trump’s claim that the US is “reclaiming its stolen oil” and how there’s little pushback on the framing, or an explanation of the veracity of that claim. 

This exposes a construct from which mainstream journalists have struggled to shake loose since Trump’s first term: If the president says something, then it’s assumed true. After all his criminal convictions, civil penalties, an attempt to overthrow the government and a life-long track record of lies and fraud, because he was able to recapture the presidency, the tendency remains to paint him in the positive light possible. For some journalists and news organizations, leaning on that assumption helps create order during a chaotic situation. (It’s not that other presidents never lied to drum up support for war; they all did to varying extents, though typically made clear after the fact.) From a journalist's perspective, however, it’s much more challenging to figure out how to cover a president who you know is actively lying to you. But it’s a challenge we reject at our own peril.

On Friday afternoon the White House press pool reported Trump was out shopping in Florida for marble to outfit his new ballroom. By late Saturday morning he was holding a news conference from his country club saying the US is now running Venezuela. Just like that, we apparently claimed a new colony. Of course he had no details on what that functionally meant, and since then it’s become clear that by “running” Venezuela he envisions a remote work-type situation where he posts on Truth Social from a makeshift Situation Room at Mar-A-Lago. He’s literally the man behind the curtain.

Very quickly after the strikes, the conversation turned from Trump illegally bombing another country to the ends justifying the means to take out Maduro. There were accusations that Americans condemning Trump’s operation were ignoring how happy Venezuelans at home and abroad were about Maduro’s capture. (We’d later learn that many of the videos of “celebrations in Venezuela” widely shared online were AI or repurposed old footage.) This situation presents an issue that we often struggle with as a society: how to hold multiple, complex ideas true at once. Yes, Maduro is indisputably horrible. But that doesn’t justify the US president circumventing Congress and his own people and defying international law to carry out an act of war which cost at least 80 Venezuelan lives and could set American servicemembers up for a lengthy, deadly deployment.

Just hours after the news conference, the Washington Post Editorial Board (the members of which remain unclear) was ready to hang the “Mission Accomplished” banner. They wrote: “Millions of people around the world, most of all in Venezuela, are celebrating the downfall of the dictator Nicolás Maduro. President Donald Trump’s decision to capture him on Saturday was one of the boldest moves a president has made in years, and the operation was an unquestionable tactical success.”

It’s important to remember that the Editorial Board is separate from the news side, yet it’s difficult to see them as distinct entities when we know how mired Jeff Bezos is in the stew.

In 2024 when Post owner Jeff Bezos defended his decision to block his paper from endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election, I scoffed at the way he tried to act like he understood the challenges facing journalists. I wrote at the time: “While Bezos has a support yacht for his superyacht, I sometimes feel guilty for getting a sandwich that’s too expensive; While Bezos runs an international corporation so grueling that some workers are forced to pee in water bottles and employs more than a million people, I once paid a friend $50 to copy edit a story for me. Bezos owns a space exploration company; I own a space heater. We are not the same.”

Yet in extraordinary moments such as this, too many journalists behave as if they have more in common with billionaires destroying journalism than the 80 or so people killed in Venezuela by Trump’s airstrikes. If we’ve learned anything this past year, it’s that proximity to power does not equal power. 

Saturday evening, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined newly-minted CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil for three entire segments to talk about that morning's operation. This was on the heels of CBS News' announcing last week that under Bari Weiss's right wing leadership, the network would adhere to "five simple principles." One of those principles is "We love America," and they've vowed to "make no apologies for saying so." So while Hegseth's lengthy appearance wasn't particularly surprising, it was no less nauseating. He was given an open mic to perpetuate the administration’s spin, which is not the job of a news organization. 

There will be many efforts to tell us that we just don’t understand; that we need to be grown-ups about all this, and that war is a fact of life. But it’s important to reject this premise. The people who have accepted war as an inevitability are the ones who keep dragging us back into it. 

At every step along Trump’s political journey, there’s been a sense that no matter how bad his current actions were, we were at the very least protected from something worse in the future. When he announced his run for president in 2015, though we were forced to listen to his racist, incoherent drivel, there was no way he would actually be president. When he became president the first time, at least he was surrounded by people who actually knew what they were doing to keep him in check. When he tried to overthrow the government on January 6th, at least he had just lost the presidential election and would be out of power. When he ran for president for a third time, at least Americans would remember very recent history and know not to vote for him again. But when he was elected for a second term, there was a sense that anything keeping him at all in check was rendered obsolete. He’s touched the third rail but instead of electrocuting him, it’s only made him stronger. 

Certainly things could always get worse—and there’s a high probability they will—but it feels as though Trump has at last seized the power he’s always wanted; to kill with impunity. And when he finally leaves office, there will be no consolation. 

It’s easy, as someone who was too young to be a professional journalist at the time, to look back at the shameful media coverage that fed early support for wars past, rightly disparage it and say I would’ve done better—that knowing what we know now, we, the media, would’ve done better. For so many reasons I hoped I wouldn’t ever have to actually prove how much better I could’ve done as a journalist in the face of war meant to further enrich the rich and hurt everyone else. But it appears that time has come.