The New Yorker:

As Secretary of State, the President’s onetime foe now offers him lavish displays of public praise—and will execute his agenda in Venezuela and around the globe.

By Dexter Filkins

Just after midnight on January 3rd, as American commandos surged into Caracas to seize President Nicolás Maduro, large sections of the city went dark. Blackouts are common in Venezuela, but the blasts that followed confirmed the arrival of the United States military, which for weeks had kept thousands of troops poised offshore. The sky filled with helicopters—some skimming the rooftops—along with fighter jets and B-1 bombers. They had been dispatched to protect a Delta Force team heading to the Fuerte Tiuna military complex, where Maduro and his wife were hunkered down. There, the commandos undertook an operation that they had spent months practicing at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky: they shot their way past the defenses and, as the Maduros struggled to shut a heavy metal door, took them into custody. More than fifty of Maduro’s guards were killed, but the Americans left nearly untouched. President Donald Trump told Fox News afterward that it was like “watching a television show.”

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the morning after the attack, a similar sense of gleeful unreality prevailed. Trump boasted of “an assault like people have not seen since World War Two,” and said, “We’re a respected country again . . . maybe like never before.” But his account of the motivation for the attack shifted. For years, he and his supporters have maintained, with little public evidence, that Maduro was a narco-trafficker on a global scale, bringing vast amounts of cocaine into the U.S. From the podium, Trump insisted that Maduro had “waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States,” adding that he was responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths. Though Trump spoke of America’s interest in safeguarding “the good of the Venezuelan people,” he mentioned the country’s oil reserves—the largest in the world—no fewer than twenty times. The infrastructure needed fixing, he said: “It’s, you know, blowup territory. Oil is very dangerous. It’s a very dangerous thing to take out of the ground. . . . We’re going to be replacing it, and we’re going to take a lot of money out so that we can take care of the country. Yeah.”

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