What Trump Wants in Venezuela

I have one question right now. What is America doing in Venezuela? Over the weekend on January 3, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela. We have heard a lot of reasons from the Trump administration of why they decided to do this. Maduro, not a good person, not a good guy, a repressive, brutal dictator who has made the lives of many, many people miserable. But there are a lot of brutal, repressive dictators in this world. Venezuela is not a leading source of America's drug crisis. We have a fentanyl crisis, not a cocaine crisis. Venezuela's oil reserves, which we should not be invading other countries for anyway, is not an easy source of future wealth or power for The United States. President Donald Trump ran for office promising fewer foreign entanglements. He wanted to be remembered as a peacemaker. What are we doing? Watching president Trump stand on that stage and say America is now running Venezuela. The people standing behind him are now running Venezuela. Watching secretary of state and national security adviser Marco Rubio then try to walk that back, say, no. No. We're just running policy in Venezuela. Do we have a plan? This was a profound gamble from an administration to a very large extent ran for office this time promising an end to these kinds of gambles, criticizing those the previous presidents had made in the past. So what is the collection of arguments, views, interests, factions that led America to this point, and what comes after it. Joining me today is Jonathan Blitzer, who has covered immigration and the Trump administration in Central America for the New Yorker. He's profiled Stephen Miller and gone deep into the drug boat bombings the Trump administration has been executing. He's also the author of the excellent book, Everyone Who is Gone is Here, The United States, Central America, and the Making Making of a Crisis. As always, my email is reclineshow@nytimes.com. Jonathan Blitzer, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Who is Nicholas Maduro? How should we understand what he represents and and was? Maduro has always been, to my mind, kind of middling figure who attached himself to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who was a transformative, obviously highly controversial figure in Venezuela, who nationalized the oil industry, who made improving the lives of the poor kind of central plank of his political agenda, but also consolidated power in all kinds of ways, flirted with violating the constitution and so on. Maduro was essentially a member of that administration and became Chavez's appointed successor when Chavez became sick with cancer and died. And so Maduro took power in 2013 and never had the charisma of Chavez. And almost immediately, when he took office, you had things start to change the fortunes of the country. You had the price of oil drop. There was an economic crisis. You started to have an increase …