January 7. 2026
Trump didn’t gaslight us. He was brutally frank about his reasons for extracting Nicolas Maduro, the quasi-legitimate ruler of Venezuela, who uses his programmed voting machines – now in 70 countries including the US and Europe – to steal elections. According to Trump, it’s all about Venezuela’s oil.
Here is the Department of Justice indictment of Maduro and his wife, unsealed in 2020, almost 6 years ago:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1422326/dl
The U.S. legal position is that it is one of more than 50 other countries that do not recognize Nicolas Maduro as the legitimate President of Venezuela, and that the extraction operation was not regime change but a law enforcement arrest.
Here’s an alternative take on the Venezuela operation, which has a much larger focus: the corrupt international banking system that is kept afloat with of billions of liquid illegal drugs money.
— Thanks to my ex-Navy brother John for sending me this one.
My personal opinion is that Maduro and Trump negotiated a settlement.
Why would the US also take his wife? Why is Maduro doing a Trump dance? (You may have seen the vid of this. It’s hilarious and a bit surreal.) Why would a picture be taken of Maduro in a chair, giving two thumbs up, surrounded by DEA agents who are posing for the picture?
Seriously folks, we are watching a movie. Dude looks like an athlete who just finished a good workout.
Here’s our man Nicolas Maduro with his DEA buddies.
From GhostOfBasedPatrickHenry, my favorite international political commentator:
“I do think that this was a negotiated surrender between Maduro and Trump, not because Maduro is some ruthless dictator, but because Maduro is actually a cooperating witness who needs to be protected. I also think that Trump’s claims of the oil companies paying to rebuild the infrastructure of Venezuela could be reparations that are legitimately owed related to the lawsuits that were filed back in 2018 against dozens of the world’s most powerful oil executives, accusing them all of corruption and stealing Venezuela’s wealth. The lawsuit was filed by the Venezuelan oil company, PDVSA.”
Here is Ghost’s analysis of the situation as of 1/7/26:
There was also a larger, separate military objective to the extraction of Maduro: Showing Russia and China that the U.S. military is not a paper tiger:
“The U.S. mission—code-named Operation Absolute Resolve—has quickly become more than a political shockwave. Analysts have said it was also a real-world test of U.S. military power against a country that has spent years buying Chinese- and Russian-made air-defense systems and showcasing them as proof that it could deter Washington.
“The raid raised uncomfortable questions for Beijing about the limits of the Chinese-supplied systems that Venezuela has leaned on—especially “anti-stealth” radar that China advertised as capable of spotting and stopping U.S. stealth aircraft, a military analyst said.
“The analyst told The Epoch Times that the most damaging takeaway for China isn’t the failure of a single piece of equipment—it’s what the operation suggested about deeper weaknesses: corruption in China’s defense industry and lack of reliability of the technology and command structure meant to tie those systems together.”
— “How Chinese-Made Radar Defense Systems Failed in Venezuela,” the Epoch Times, Jan 7, 2026
The extraction of Maduro is typical Trump: Action on the big stage.
What can we conclude so far from all of this?
I conclude that Trump is working with Maduro and the President of Columbia to wreck the drug cartels and their corporate sponsors in some kind of kayfabe (fake) pro wrestling soap opera against the Deep State. If so, why Maduro was arrested is a mystery to me, unless he was in trouble with the cartels and needed a safe place to stay.
The easy explanation is that Trump is just a fascist and an imperialist who wants to aggressively enhance the declining American Empire.
However, after all the foaming and gnashing of teeth in the media, the Venezuelan government is still in place. During the operation, 32 Cuban operatives from the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior were killed while defending Maduro. Analyst and former Special Forces Michael Yon says, “The extraction of Maduro and his wife was like taking the top leaf off the tree. The whole structure is still there, the whole Army, the government, all the gangsters, all the business people, is still in place.”
I also think Trump wants to troll the people who have tried to kill him three times and who have impeached him twice. The same group who developed the post-WW2 “Rules-based International Order,” which is and has always been a corrupt structure that enabled war and conflict for the benefit of the powerful.
And finally, the arrest of Maduro has to look good on the street and allow President Petro and Maduro – who have been waging war on the cartels for years – to save face by calling him a fascist and a dictator and an unprincipled barbarian (along with media all over the world). IMHO Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and the threats against President Petro of Columbia, and Petro’s response, is all part of the act.
It’s all thumbs-up, apparently.
Final Thoughts
In three years at the end of Trump’s term we will see who wins the economic war between the Chinese Communist Party and the US, and the Trump legacy will have been written. The CCP is active in every country in South and Central America – including Venezuela and Columbia – one of the reasons for the Trump 2.0 Monroe Doctrine. The CCP has insinuated itself within every sector of U.S. society from our national scientific laboratories to our universities. It won’t take longer than three years to see more clearly whether the surveillance/slave staters or the freedom lovers will win the minds and souls of the human race on this planet.
One thing is certain: The extraction of Maduro shows us once again that international law is what it has always been for the past four centuries: the powerful take what they want.
