Letters from an American - January 4, 2026

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

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January 4th, 2026. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the administration's message about its strikes on Venezuela to the Sunday talk shows this morning. It did not go well. Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC's this week, under what legal authority the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, as Trump vowed to do, Rubio served up a lot of words, but ultimately fell back on the idea that the U.S. has economic leverage over Venezuela because it can seize sanctioned oil tankers. Seizing ships will give the U.S. power to force the Venezuelan government to do as the U.S. wants, Rubio suggested. This is a very different message than President Donald J. Trump delivered yesterday when he claimed that the people standing behind him on the stage, including Rubio, would be a very different message. be running Venezuela. When Stephanopoulos asked Rubio if he was indeed running Venezuela, Rubio again

suggested that the U.S. was only pressuring the Venezuelan government by seizing sanctioned oil tankers and said he was involved in those policies. When Kristen Welker of NBC's Meet the Press also asked if Rubio was running Venezuela, Rubio seemed frustrated that people are fixating on that here's the bottom line on it as we expect to see changes in Venezuela. Historian Kevin Cruz commented, yeah, people are fixating on a cabinet secretary being given a sovereign country to run because the president waged war without congressional approval and kidnapped the old leader. Weird that they'd get hung up on that.

When Stephanopoulos asked why the administration thought it didn't need congressional authorization for the strikes, Rubio said they didn't need congressional approval because the U.S. did not invade or occupy another country. The attack, he said, was simply a law enforcement operation to arrest Maduro. Rubio said something similar yesterday, but Trump immediately undercut that argument by saying the U.S. intended to take over Venezuela's oil fields

and run the country. Indeed, if the strikes were a law enforcement operation, officials will need to explain how officers managed to kill so many civilians, as well as members of security forces. Mariana Martinez of the New York Times reported today that the number of those killed in the operation has risen to 80. Rubio highlighted again that the Trump administration wants to control the Western Hemisphere, and he went on to threaten Cuba. Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles articulated the extraordinary smallness of the Trump administration's vision

when he wrote, we must also marvel at the titanic idiocy of our new Don Roe doctrine, for it turns America from a global power into a regional one by choice. I still can't really believe they are going through with this, for it is so bad-h-h-eat-each-eat-eafing.

crazy and does so much lasting harm to our interests. Shortly after Trump told reporters yesterday that Venezuela's former vice president, now president, Delci Rodriguez, is essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again. Rodriguez demanded Maduro's return and said Venezuela would never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature. Indeed, U.S. extraction of Maduro and threats to run Venezuela are more likely to boost the Maduro government than weaken it. In a phone call today with Michael Scherer of the Atlantic, Trump threatened Rodriguez, saying that if she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro. Tonight, on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that the U.S.,

not Rodriguez, is in charge of Venezuela. Trump also told Sherer that he does indeed intend to continue to assert U.S. control in the Western Hemisphere, telling Scherer that we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense. Greenland is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, meaning it is already part of U.S. national defense. Although he ran for office on the idea of the idea of getting the U.S. out of the business of foreign intervention. Trump embraced the idea of regime change in Venezuela, telling sure, you know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it,

is better than what you have right now. Can't get any worse. He continued. Rebuilding is not a bad thing in Venezuela's case. The country's gone to hell. It's a failed country. It's a totally failed country. It's a country that's a disaster in every way. At Strengthen Numbers, G. Eliot Morris noted that military intervention in Venezuela is even more unpopular with the American people than Trump's tariffs and health care cuts. In September, only 16% of Americans wanted a U.S. invasion of Venezuela, with 62% against it. A December poll showed that 60% of likely voters opposed sending American troops into Venezuela, to remove President Maduro from power.

Only 33% approved. Even support for strikes against the small boats in the Caribbean could not get majority support. 53% opposed them, while only 42% approved. By the time American forces touched Venezuelan soil early Saturday morning, Morris writes, Trump had already lost the public. But officials in the administration, no longer appear to care what the American people want. Instead, simply gathering power into

their own hands for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, trusting that Republican politicians will go along and the American people will not object enough to force the issue. The refusal of the Department of Justice to obey the clear direction of the Epstein-Files Transparency Act seems to have been a test of Congress's resolve, and so far it is a gamble the administration appears to be winning. Morris notes that a December CBS poll showed that 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, correctly believed a president must get approval from Congress before taking military action against Venezuela. The president did not get that approval. By law, the president must inform the gang of eight before engaging in military strikes.

But if an emergency situation prevents that notification, then the president must inform the gang of eight within 48 hours. The gang of eight is made up of the top leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as the top leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat of Canadian, who, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, is a member of the Gang of Eight, told CBS's Margaret Brennan this morning that neither he nor House Minority Leader and fellow Gang of Eight member, Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat of New York, had been briefed on the strikes. Himes said, I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence

Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I've had zero outreach and no Democrat that I'm aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we're now in a world where the legal obligation to keep the Congress informed only applies to your party, which is really something. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, also a member of the gang of eight, told reporters that he hadn't been briefed either and that the administration had deliberately misled Congress in three classified briefings before the strikes. In those briefings, officials assured lawmakers that the administration was not planning to take military action in Venezuela and was not pursuing regime change. They've kept everyone in the

total dark, he said. Nonetheless, Himes told Brennan that he thought Trump's Venezuelan adventure would not go well. We're in the euphoria period of acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely. incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2003, when our military took out Saddam Hussein. And in 2011, when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. These were very, very bad people, by the way, much, much worse than Maduro in Venezuela, which was never a significant national security threat to the United States. But we're in that U.S.

euphoria phase, and what we learned the day after the euphoria phase is that it's an awful lot easier to break a country than it is to actually do what the president promised to do, which is to run it. Let's let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they're going to wake up tomorrow morning knowing what? My God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya. Representative Ted Liu, a Democrat of California, was more direct. The U.S. attack on Venezuela is illegal, he posted. Congress never authorized this use of military force.

I will vote to stop it. This is insane. Healthcare costs and food prices are surging. Trump's response is, we're going to run another country. Bad- crazy. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.