Hey stupid.... They didn't change the Regime....

MAGA’s Messy Defense of Trump’s Venezuela Attack

America First’s factions have offered varying justifications for the Maduro mission.

By Ian Ward

President Donald Trump ran in 2024 on an “America First” platform that promised to steer clear of foreign military engagements and shun costly regime change wars. But in the wake of the Trump administration’s stunning military operation detaining Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro this weekend — and Trump’s still more shocking claim that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela in Maduro’s absence — even the most committed America Firsters have fallen in line behind Trump’s foray into overseas interventionism.

The absence of a broad-based outcry from the anti-interventionist wing of the MAGA movement stands in stark contrast to their reaction to some of Trump’s other recent flirtations with overseas adventurism. This past summer, the administration’s decision to aid Israel’s bombing campaign of key Iranian nuclear sites provoked fierce resistance from prominent MAGA figures like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.

In the days since the Venezuela operation, by contrast, open criticism of Trump’s decision has mostly been restricted to relatively marginal figures within MAGA — like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has very publicly broken with Trump, or Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster who has built a sizable online audience pushing conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing and relentlessly criticizing Trump’s friendliness toward Israel.

For those trying to make sense of this abrupt about-face, the question is glaring: How have the MAGA faithful squared Trump’s “America First” promise with his renewed appetite for foreign meddling?

In recent days, Trump’s backers both inside and outside the administration offered various and sometimes contradictory explanations — or, as Trump’s critics would see them, rationalizations — for the Venezuela operation. Some have pointed to Maduro’s indictment on drug trafficking charges; others have invoked the so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, now clumsily re-dubbed “the Donroe Doctrine.”

The messiness of the MAGA-sphere’s explanations mirrors the indeterminacy of Trump’s own justifications, which have pinballed between expanding American access to Venezuelan oil to asserting “American dominance” over the Western hemisphere. Here’s a breakdown of the leading arguments that have popped up to fill the ideological void:

The “good cop” angle

The primary justification coming from inside the administration itself is that the Venezuela operation wasn’t a military move or a regime-change effort at all. To the contrary, administration officials have maintained that it was a law-enforcement operation narrowly tailored to capturing Maduro, who has been indicted in the U.S. on various drug trafficking charges.

The chief spokesperson for this line of argument has been Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reportedly the leading architect of the Venezuela operation, who took to the morning shows on Sunday to argue that the operation “was, in essence, at its core, a law enforcement function,” as he told Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” That explanation also got a boost from Vice President JD Vance, who posted on social media on Saturday, “PSA for everyone saying this was ‘illegal’: Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism. You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”

At the same time, Trump has largely undercut the argument that law-enforcement functions were the chief justification for the operation. Instead, he proceeded to threaten military action against several other South American countries — many of whose leaders have not been indicted in the U.S.

The “hemispheric defense” deflection

Another emerging line of defense relies primarily on geography: Because Venezuela sits inside America’s sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere, so the thinking goes, Trump’s intervention more directly serves U.S. interests than similar intervention in, say, Iran or Nigeria, where Trump recently ordered strikes on ISIS militants.

That argument, which has gained traction both inside the admin and with Trump’s outside allies in Washington, hinges on Trump’s long-standing claim that the U.S. is the pre-eminent power in the Western hemisphere — meaning that any action it takes in the hemisphere is, almost by definition, “America First.” The administration went so far as to codify that position in this year’s National Security Strategy, which laid out the so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine calling for the “readjustment of [U.S.] global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.”

In addition to that high-level strategic argument, the administration appears to be wagering that voters will look more kindly on military interventions designed to address threats in America’s backyard. Yet as skeptics of Trump’s Venezuela operation have pointed out, proximity is a double-edged sword, since any future fallout of the operation — from economic disruption to a possible migrant crisis — would be felt more directly by Americans.

Regime change, but done right

Other MAGA backers have appeared to concede that the Venezuela operation was an effort at regime change but argue that it was defensible because Trump — unlike, say, George W. Bush in Iraq — pulled it off quickly and without committing American troops. (So far, at least.) As one pro-MAGA account on X put it over the weekend, “George W. Bush needed 170,000 troops that led to over 4,400 US military casualties and an 8-year war in order to capture Saddam Hussein. President Trump captured Nicolas Maduro while we were sleeping overnight with zero casualties.”

At this point, though, that claim seems premature. Now three days after the operation, the Trump administration has not laid out a clear vision of its plans to “run” Venezuela, and Trump himself has said that the U.S. is “not afraid of boots on the ground.” If Dubya offers a cautionary tale, it might be about the perils of declaring victory in a self-generated crisis before the crisis is actual over.

The “law of the jungle” defense

A fourth popular line of defense is perhaps the most likely to appeal to Trump’s dog-eat-dog instincts: If Trump can impose his will on a weaker country like Venezuela, why shouldn’t he? The conservative commentator Matt Walsh offered a particular unvarnished version of this argument on social media over the weekend, writing that while he is “as reflexively non-interventionist as anyone can possibly be,” he nevertheless remains “an unapologetic American Chauvinist” who is eager to see “America to rule over this hemisphere and exert its power for the good of our people.”

“If some shitty little tinpot third world dictator is harming our country or interfering with our national interests, we should do exactly what Trump did to Maduro. Why not?” wrote Walsh. “‘International law’ is fake and gay,” he added, invoking a popular slur among online conservatives.

A slightly more sophisticated version of this argument came over the weekend from Vance, who framed the operation to capture Maduro as a legitimate response to Venezuela’s decision to nationalize American-owned oil assets — a move carried out by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, over two decades ago. “I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?” Vance wrote on social media. “Great powers don’t act like that.”