No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump plunges the US into a new regime change war.

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Trump plunges the United States into a new regime change war in Venezuela to start off the new year. Brian interviews Pod Save the World co-hosts Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor about the move.Shop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Trump plunges the United States into a new regime change war in Venezuela to start off the new year. And I interview Pod Save the World co-host, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes about the move. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Just days into 2026, Trump has engaged the United States into a brand new regime change war, exactly the kind of war that the quote-unquote America First President promises supporters he wouldn't do when he was running for office to get a second term. And certainly not that he would do a George W.B. Bush redux by launching a war expressly for oil. And yet, this was Trump in the immediate aftermath of his

attack. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so. We actually assumed that a second wave would be necessary, but now it's probably not.

In other words, it's for oil. That's it. Trump supporters thought they were getting an isolationist president and said they got 2002-era neocon policies. Now, most of the commentary on the left has been around the fact that this was an illegal incursion into Venezuela. And to be clear, that's correct. The strike was unauthorized.

It requires congressional approval. And that's a point, by the way, that Trump's own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, herself conceded in the Vanity Fair piece just about a month ago. But from a political perspective, I actually think that we risk making a mistake if we make this about process. And this is what Democrats do.

We think that we're in office to defend process, as if all we want here is for Trump to have gotten like the requisite stamp of approval. And then after that, engaging in a foreign war to pilfer their oil for U.S. companies would have been totally fine.

It is so like the Democrats to be to be like, well, what did the parliamentarians say? Well, rule 10.2, subsection F says this. No, the argument here is not merely that we didn't follow proper process, that we didn't get requisite approvals from Congress. The argument here is that Trump vowed to focus on Americans. He vowed to make life more affordable. He vowed to finally pay attention to forgotten people.

And yet here we are, not even a full year into his second term, and he's presiding over a regime change war in Venezuela. Does that help anyone's rent, their mortgage, their groceries, their eggs? Does it lower the cost of clothing or cars or toys or electronics? No. But you know who it does help? Here's a hint. Last year, Trump told oil executives during the campaign that if they donated a billion

dollars to his campaign, that they would get a, quote, deal because of the taxation and regulation that they would avoid thanks to him. Well, here we are a year later, and those oil executives were gifted, the country of Venezuela, otherwise known as the quo to his quid pro quo. So this is a gift to his wealthy pals who helped him win the election. That's who's being helped here. That's who's always being helped. It's never the little guy who wins out in these instances.

Trump's not looking to help regular people. If he was, he wouldn't have engaged in a trade war that sent the cost of everything surging. He wouldn't have gutted food assistance to the tune of $186 billion. Wouldn't have stripped Medicaid away from 17 million Americans. Wouldn't have sent ACA premium. for 24 million Americans, two, three, four, five times higher this year. But he did all of that because it was never about delivering for working class Americans.

It was about delivering for his donors, his friends, his family. And this is a continuation of that exact policy. Trump promised to be like a different kind of president, but in reality he is all of the things Americans hate about politicians, standard politicians, rolled up to one. He is corrupt, self-serving, duplicitous and shameless. man to the highest order. So as this situation evolves and plays itself out, we're going to hear a lot of reasons for why this is bad. And frankly, we're going to hear a lot of reasons why this is good. But aside from the minutia of the day to day, it's already clear from a 30,000 foot view

that Donald Trump is breaking his promise to usher in an America First agenda. This is not what America First looks like. This is what a kleptocracy looks like. This is what imperialism looks like. This is what Bush-era neocon policies look like. And all the while, it's Americans who are left holding the bag, Americans who believed Trump, only to watch him fail to lower prices, fail to tackle inflation, fail to protect to earn benefits, fail to make IVF free, fail to end the Russia-Ukraine war, failed to usher in a manufacturing renaissance, failed to preside over a job boom, and now fail to adhere to the America First Agenda that he himself promised when he said no new wars on the campaign trail.

Trump is clearly a salesman, but the product he sells best is the con of giving a shit about regular Americans. Next up are my interviews with Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vitor. No lie is brought to you by better help. I know I'm not alone in saying

that the last year has been really tough and with the new year comes a lot of introspection about what we'd like to see done differently. But I'm here to say that the new year doesn't require a new you, maybe just a less burdened you. And therapy can help more easily

identify what weighs you down and holds you back by offering an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, your motivations, and your emotions. I am a big advocate for therapy and I'm a big advocate for BetterHelp. Here's why. BetterHelp has quality therapists. Their therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. Better helps therapists match commitment. They do the initial matching work for you so that you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps you identify your needs and preferences and their 12-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate

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under President Obama and the co-host of POTSafe of the World, Ben Rhodes. Ben, thanks for joining me. Good to see you, Brian. Obviously, with the whole situation unfolding right now in Venezuela, just a couple of questions on this in particular. To what extent do you think that this whole intervention, this is a little bit of a political question, first and foremost, To what extent do you think all of this intervention, Trump going in, kidnapping Nicholas Maduro, bringing him back into the United States, was his effort to distract from this overarching issue that's been, you know, dragging his presidency down, which is the Epstein files.

I don't think so because actually if you look at Trump since he was elected, he's pretty consistently foreshadowed these types of military operations, right? Right after the election, he was talking about taking back the Panama Canal, taking Greenland, the administration's national security strategy. kind of talks about returning to Latin America being essentially a sphere of influence in the United States where we can pick and choose leaders. He intervened in Argentina with a $20 billion bailout for Javier Miele, who he likes. He's also buddied up to Naid Bikale in El Salvador, sending people down to the gulag there. So he's clearly tried to pick winners down there. And look, we've been building up to this in Venezuela.

This took months to plan to assemble all the military resources there, the 15,000 U.S. troops in the Caribbean. So I actually think it makes it worse because I actually think that this is here to stay, this kind of foreign policy where this might not be the last place in which he chooses to use the U.S. military for regime change purposes with no legal basis to kind of run this hemisphere like his own private empire. Well, how do you square that? And I ask you as if, you know, but channeling Trump's America First Agenda, how is that squared with the fact that this guy ran on on a platform of non-interventionism. Like this, his whole thing was that this is an escape

from the neocons that had led the Republican Party for years and years and years prior to this. Yeah, no, it's a fascinating question. And look, I mean, we don't know what's in his head. I will say, part of what we're learning is that that whole posture of being against forever wars, of being America first, was bogus. I mean, if you look in just the last year,

you know, in addition to the usual suspects, Trump has bombed. Iran, Nigeria, and now Venezuela. Those are three pretty big countries where the United States had never done that before. I think what we're looking at, Brian, where we have to learn from this first year, including the last couple of days, is that Trump is motivated above all, not by any MAGA ideology. Some people around him are, certainly like Stephen Miller.

He's motivated by power and money. And both of those things intersect here in Venezuela. He gets more power. He gets to be the strongman. He gets to be the guy who's without any legal basis. like deposing a leader, now that it kind of de facto leader of Venezuela, and there's a lot of money involved. He was very clear today that what this was really about, not drugs, it was oil.

And he talked a lot in his press conference about sending the U.S. oil companies down there. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves. So he sees money in this, too, for, you know, his cronies. And so this is something that gets empowered money. And if it's inconsistent with MAGA, if it's inconsistent with ending forever wars, and if it's frankly not what the people voted for him want. And this is a big political opening. I wish it didn't exist, but it does.

For Democrats, it's it, you know, we're going to be spending money rebuilding Venezuela. We've spent already probably billions of dollars on the military deployments to support this thing. And so this is running directly counter to what people want, including his own supporters. I mean, in theory, if he was, and this is all assuming perhaps naively that Trump is going to follow the regular course of order, but if he wants money to rebuild Venezuela, doesn't that have to be allocated by Congress? And so isn't there some bulwark to his, to his, you know, wanting to do more nation-building this time in South America? Yeah.

I mean, there are places, there are ways in which Congress could assert itself if it chose to. But that would require the Republicans to get involved. Because what we've seen, Brian, is it will cost money. Look, he talked in the press conference, for instance, too, about having boots on the ground, potentially in Venezuela, raises the prospect of we might actually literally be looking at U.S. oil companies going down to rebuild Venezuelan oil fields with U.S. troops is their kind of protection. Now, normally, you would need Congress to kick in some money for the kind of cost that would go along with the United States rebuilding Venezuela and oil infrastructure like you talked about, certainly any troop deployments. But so far, what we've seen

them do is take these giant pots of money that exist in places like the Pentagon, you know, and just pull out of one pot and put it in this pot in ways that normally would be illegal. Normally, Congress appropriates some money. It's meant to be spent on certain things. They've shown time and again that they're willing to ignore that. So the question going forward, is, will Congress assert itself, he already basically went to war and removed a leader without seeking any authorization in Congress. This is already an unconstitutional action. The money question, I think, is going to present itself in the weeks ahead. So on that issue in particular, there have been a lot of Democrats rightfully decrying the illegality and the extrajudicial nature of what

we've seen and the fact that Congress wasn't involved. And I think that Republicans are, you know, obviously the ones who've come out in support of it, there's this dichotical. here, where Democrats, a lot of the elected officials seem to be disparaging the process, like the fact that Trump didn't go in and get approval from Congress, but not necessarily talking about the issue at hand. And so I'm just curious if you've seen that and what your reaction is to that, that, like, it's more focused for the left on the fact that, that, like, not necessarily decrying what happened in Venezuela, but more the fact that it wasn't, you know, through the regular course of order.

Yeah, I hear the same thing. And look, I'm sympathetic. They're in Congress, right? So they feel it. They feel ignored. They feel like their constitutional responsibility was taken away from them. They were not notified even before the operation went forward. That's incredibly unusual. That said, I think you're right. That's a bit of a rabbit hole here. Like the things that are dangerous about this and the things that are wrong about this, you know, number one, Americans don't want us to be doing this anymore. They want their politicians. and Washington be focused on affordability, not on conquering foreign countries or deposing foreign leaders, no matter how odious. And Maduro is not a good guy. I think number two, where is this all going to cost in Venezuela? What happens if there's some kind of further conflict in Venezuela, which is quite likely? Or where else is Trump going to do this? Are we looking at him going to Panama? We're looking at him. He threatened Colombia today. Is the Greenland stuff going to come back on the table. So it's that combination of Trump, he cares about his power and he cares about wealth. He does not care about you, right? You, the American voter. I mean, that to me is the

core point here. And it's, and you can add the, you know, people like me are concerned about the danger of an autocratic leader turning to war, which we've seen, you know, Vladimir Putin did this in Ukraine. That's never a good situation. But I actually think, you know, there's just that simple point that Trump is not working for you. This is not what anyone elected the U.S. President to do. Is this a question of, you know, Republicans like Ted Cruz, for example, tried to make this very reductive and brought up this point when he was responding to Zoran Mamdani, who decried, you know, foreign interventionism into South America. He basically said, oh, you know, Zoran is aligning himself with a fellow communist dictator and birds of a communist

feather flocked together. And so he's basically trying to, you know, he's basically trying to to make it that if you are in any way against what's happening in Venezuela, then you are for the communist dictator. So can I have your reaction to that? Because that's a lot of what we're seeing from the right. If you're not cheering this on, then the de facto position that you have to take by, like, by transitive property is that you supported Maduro and that you want him to continue ruling over Venezuela.

Yeah, and it's no surprise that they're doing this, but look, I mean, two things come to my mind. The first is, we've seen this movie before, right? I mean, for those of us who are old enough to remember the invasion of Iraq, for instance, a lot of the people who are raising questions about it is this really good idea, what the Republicans are to say is, oh, you're supporting Saddam Hussein, right? And that's just not the case. There are other ways of supporting democratic change or civil society in other countries other than going to warn them.

And the U.S. track record of regime change wars on behalf of removing autocratic leaders, it doesn't usually end better than it was at the beginning. Yeah. I mean, we've got plenty of history to show us that. And so I feel like Democrats can't, like, get defensive about this. Because the other thing I'd also say is, look, I know Venezuelans who hate Maduro, who have friends and loved ones who are in prison down there, right? And some of them are happy today. But the tragedy to me is that Trump doesn't give a shit about them. Right. Like, he's already dealing with the remnants of the Maduro regime. Like, he's already said he's not going to try to support putting the opposition in power. Now that, you know, not that that would be easy either, but he's making no pretense. This is about democracy or a better life for Venezuelans. It seems to me like his only priority here was that Maduro was too much of a bulwark against him being able to consolidate natural resources. But then the next guy in line, who I think is his female vice president, if I'm not mistaken, you know, she won't be as much of a barrier. And so, okay, she can stay because it was never, to your point, about human rights or anything like that.

it was just about who's going to give him the, you know, the clearest one runway into consolidating natural resources, which, of course, you know, he and his cronies derive some financial benefit from. I think that's right. And I even take it a step further, Brian, and say, you know, maybe Maduro because Maduro is, you know, widely disliked. He's widely seen as having thrown the last election. Maybe he was the convenient pretext for, well, everybody can agree this is a bad guy. So this will be my way in to kind of get him out of there. But what I really want to do is get my claws on the oil. And again, if you think I sound like a lefty conspiracy theorist, that's what Trump said today. Like he was like, we need the oil back. It's our oil. They stole it. And we'll deal with

the vice president. And then he basically said, and if she doesn't deal with us in the way that we like, we'll come after her too, right? It's just about, you know, it's like we're going back to the early 1900s here. It's about finding any form of a vassal state government that will just kind of defer to Donald Trump and his administration and the U.S. oral companies in terms of what they're doing. So it puts the lie to that argument from these Republicans that, oh, you know, you support Maduro. No, what we don't support is an illegal war that has no nothing to do with democracy that could lead to worse outcomes. We don't know how things are going to play on Venice well, but also can lead to a world, Brian, I think this is really important, where there's just no

rules anymore, you know? What lesson does Vladimir Putin take from this about what he's allowed to do? What lesson does China take from this about what they might, be allowed to do in Taiwan. And so there's just all these traps ahead. And so I think we can't, I hate it when there's like so much throat clearing defensively about, well, it's good Maduro's gone. Because you either think this is a good idea or a bad idea. And I think this is clearly a bad idea. I mean, does it seem like this could be the gateway into a second round of imperialism by big, you know, autocratic countries of which I would include the United States under Trump's administration? It feels like we're already there because it feels.

to me, like Trump views the Western Hemisphere, like Putin views the former Soviet Union, like China views its neighborhood, the South China Sea in Taiwan. And he's comfortable in the world in which these big powers basically do order they want. And there's no more respect for sovereignty. There's no more respect for any rules. And, you know, unfortunately, that usually ends poorly. Like, the reason we made all the rules against big countries doing that is that. We went through two world wars. Now, I'm not suggesting we're like on the precipice of that yet, but it just, this is a dynamic that you don't want to play with here.

And we'll see if they can land the plane in Venezuela. There are a lot of questions about whether the remnants of the Maduro government will go along with this, what the Chinese and Russians will do in Venezuela because they have a lot of people there themselves or a lot of influence there, you know, whether there'll be more violence, what the U.S. troops will be on the ground. But in any case, you just don't want to open up this Pandora's box of, of returning to imperial, ruleless geopolitics. What about Maria Carino Machado? Her decision to kind of heap praise onto Trump

to dedicate her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. And the moment that there's an opening where she could rise up and presumably become the next leader of Venezuela as the opposition leader, Trump basically just swats her down and says that she doesn't command enough respect. not strong enough to be the leader. And so, you know, that's the end of that. I thought this was extraordinary. And you have to remember that Maria Machado,

she was not allowed to run in the last election, but the candidate that she supported by all, you know, independent monitor accounts won the last election. So the point is she does have support in Venezuela, you know? But I think what she's learned is the same thing that everybody else has learned at some point who thought that the way to get Trump to do what you want was to suck up to him, right? She said, said all the right things about how wonderful Trump was, about how she wanted this to happen. But frankly, she's not relevant to Trump's plans down there. The plans are, like, make a big show, getting rid of Maduro and get our hands on the oil. And when he says she's not someone who's

supported or respected in the country, I think what he means is he should not support or respected by kind of the power brokers, by the military. Of course, she's not supported by the military. She's been in a political opposition to the kind of military regime that Maduro was leading. But he tossed her overboard right away. He didn't even make a pretense. I thought he would at least say, of course, she's going to be a part of Venezuela's future and we'll be talking to her.

He just kind of dismissed her out of hand. So again, spare me the rhetoric about, you know, caring about democracy and human rights. It's not what this is about. Pete Higgseth's comments right after Trump had announced what he'd done, they held this press conference and he did this the usual like chest beating macho man where he said that Maduro effed around and he found out.

Just, I'm curious what your, what your takeaway was from having watched Pete Hegseth do the usual, you know, bro routine. You know, on the one hand, you can roll your eyes and think about how juvenile analysis is. And, you know, you had Trump saying that Petro, the leader of Columbia, Gustavo Petro, should watch his ass. You had Rubio echoing the kind of, he didn't, you know, he didn't say fuck around and find out, but he said, mess around and find out or something. But it's like, okay, on the one end, it's kind of juvenile.

Like, we've never really had presidents and national security leaders talk like this. But then you think about it, and you're like, well, it's actually more than that. It's scary because Pete Hex-F runs the United States military. You know, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Like, Marco Rubio is, by my count, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and the archivist, put the archivist's bit aside. Yeah. But, I mean, at what point is the thing that we, is it?

This is always something interesting with Brian, or Brian with Trump, because you've been covering this. At what point is he actually doing the thing that we were afraid he might do? Yeah. Because he normalizes this stuff along the way. We're all like a frog bowling and water.

If I had told you a year ago, hey, Trump's going to like invade Venezuela, remove the leader and say he's running the country, you'd be like, holy shit, this is the worst case scenario. This is like fascism come to America. But because there was this kind of ramp up to it and they were blown up the boats and he was, you know, making threats. Now it just kind of feels like this thing that happened.

And I think we have to start to take these guys seriously when they're threatening people and fuck around and find out, like, that this is, this is not just juvenile. It's pretty frightening, actually. And so I guess the question here is, and this is like, you know, the million dollar question is if you have a lawless executive branch, if you have an impotent legislative branch and a judicial branch that's contracted all of its autonomy over, you know, to the administration. And a White House that's just acting

completely illegally, and you have the rest of the world that obviously isn't going to, you know, stand up to, unless they're willing to engage in war. Like, I guess what happens at that point when, I mean, it doesn't feel like it's the same. I mean, this is a little bit going back to what we were talking about originally, but it doesn't feel like we're in the same world order than we were yesterday or 11 months ago. That's how it feels to me. It feels like we're, in dangerous new terrain, and the question is, how far does this go, right? Does it go to other countries? Like, what does it mean to run Venezuela? What do the Russians and Chinese do? And I think to try to be constructive about this, look, Congress has chosen not to assert itself to date.

It's going to take political pushback. It's going to take a change in the political dynamic. And what I mean by that is actually, if you look at the fractures in MAGA on these issues, like that's an opening because if Trump starts to lose support broadly among the American people and there's a mobilized and activated kind of democratic base, their independents are unhappy with what he's doing, but then there also start to be some cracks inside of that Republican coalition because their voters are like, you know, even if today all the Republican congressmen are putting out statements about how tough Trump is, you know, their constituents are like, what are we doing down in Venezuela?

Right. Why is this guy always hanging out with like foreigners and billionaires? I actually think there needs to be a decisive political turn against Trump so that then you can try to get the pushback from Congress. Then it starts to feel like he has lost room for maneuver. Because right now, like, you know, he's, I mean, to go all the way back to your distraction point, you know, he may, I don't think this is a distraction

because I think this is something that they wanted to do. But, you know, he's once again trying to drive the conversation, drive events and make everybody react to him. And there needs to just be more pushback when he goes. to do that. Yeah. And frankly, in terms of him engineering a situation where he's basically, I don't know how else you would broadcast to the American people that you were not interested in the very thing that they put you into office to do. I mean, from shipping away health care, from gutting food assistance, from making everything more expensive by engaging in these trade wars

that everybody said was going to raise the prices of everything, then to encrusting the Oval Office in gold, buying Gulfstream jets, you know, hosting a, you know, hosting a, you know, let them eat cake party at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, every single day we see something that, again, is scientifically engineered to broadcast to Americans that he does not give a flying fuck about you and engaging in, you know,

a regime-change war in Venezuela is just the cherry on the cake. Yes. He can't even pretend to be interested in issues of affordability. Like, he likes this part of the job. Yeah. He likes where he has the power. He likes hanging out with rich oligarchs. He likes having foreign leaders,

be scared of him. But look, none of this is what anybody here is interested in the United States. And that's his vulnerability. And that's why, to your earlier point, the argument should not just be about, oh, he didn't get Congress's authorization. The argument should be like, what the hell is he doing? He doesn't care about you. He cares about the oil companies. Like, he just launched this war and said it was for the American oral companies, right? I mean, to your point, that was designed in a lab to be a message that Democrats should be able to prosecute a case against Trump on. Right. Well, look, you know, as everybody who watches my show knows, I generally stay with domestic politics.

And so I highly recommend for everybody who's watching right now, if you're looking for excellent, excellent coverage of international affairs, Pod Save the World is my go-to source with Ben and Tommy. So I'm going to put the link to Pod Save the World right here on the screen and also in the post. description of this video. If you're not yet subscribed, please go ahead and subscribe. Ben, thanks so much for the time. Thanks. Great talking. Appreciate what you're doing at there, too. I'm joined now by co-hosts of Potsave America and Potsave the World, Tommy, Tami Vitor. Tommy, thanks for joining me. Right. Good see it.

Obviously, some major news as it relates to Venezuela. First and foremost, I have to ask, why is this happening? Why is Donald Trump engaging in this operation where he's taken the president, Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela, into custody into the U.S.? Well, I mean, we've heard like three different explanations. I mean, for a while, they were saying that these airstrikes off the coast of Venezuela were about drugs, particularly fentanyl. But everyone who studies this issue knows that fentanyl doesn't get traffic through Venezuela. So that can't be the case. Now it seems like Trump is just overtly saying that he thinks that Venezuela stole U.S. energy assets, specifically oil fields and oil infrastructure.

And now he wants to take it back. So he launched this regime change operation to send a. bunch of Delta Force guys in, along with the FBI, to arrest Nicholas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, who's a bad guy who stole the 2024 election, like insert all the caveats here about how he's a tyrant and a dictator. But for some reason, we have now chosen that tyrant and that dictator to be the one that the U.S. deposes with a bunch of special forces service members. Okay, so a few questions here. First and foremost, this was Trump's response when asked who would run the country. We're going to run the country until such time.

as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious. So that was obviously Trump saying that the U.S.,

that he would be running Venezuela. Can I get your reaction to that idea that the President of the United States is going to run not only this country, but a foreign country as well? Brian, it was like the craziest thing I've heard in this whole 90-minute press conference today or however long it was.

I mean, look, I've been watching this buildup in the Caribbean for a long time. I mean, Donald Trump sent something like 15,000 U.S. service members to the Caribbean area, to the Venezuela region. There were a couple aircraft carriers in there. It was clear to me that the United States, States was planning some sort of military action in Venezuela and it might be a regime change operation. I was surprised that they chose this super risky option of this extraction of Maduro

and taking them to New York. But this announcement that the like dudes behind Trump were now going to be running the country is the craziest thing I have ever heard. I mean, it sounds like Pete Higgseth and, you know, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller are now going to be overseeing the management of a foreign country. We have no idea how that is going to work in practice. Trump seemed to suggest in his press conference that the former vice president, now president of Venezuela, was on board with this plan. But then she just gave a speech denouncing the invasion, calling it regime change, saying Maduro is the rightful president. So we just don't know what's going to happen now. What about Maria Machado, who, by the way, was given the Nobel Peace Prize, dedicated it to

Trump. And then Trump, of course, comes in and says that she's not strong enough to lead the country. So by the way, just as a caveat for any other world leaders looking to throw themselves at the feet of Donald Trump, you gain nothing by doing that. We watched her debase herself and try to try to give this, you know, to dedicate this award, the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump, look at what that's gotten her. But what about this idea that instead of offering this up, if we're going to do regime change from the United States into Venezuela, instead of offering this up to the person who would presumably be the rightful heir to this seat, the opposition leader, he's instead of. decided that she's not worthy of this spot and that instead should be, you know, Pete Hegeseth and the rest of the U.S. delegation. Yeah, so Maria Machado is seen as the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. She was not allowed to run in the 2024 election. So this guy named Edmondo Gonzalez ran in her stead. He is widely believed by all international observers to have won

that election and to have won with like 70% of the vote. So it wasn't close. But then Maduro stole the election. Now, as you mentioned, she is incredibly brave. You know, she has fought against the Maduro regime at great personal risk to herself. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She actually snuck out of the country, did this like daring, you know, ocean escape of the country to try to get to the ceremony in time and then dedicated the Peace Prize to Trump. But it is remarks today. Trump sounds like he is eager to just hand leadership over to Maduro's handpicked vice president and the kind of current leadership of the country, whether it's political or military. And what I think that tells us is that he doesn't give a shit about human rights.

He doesn't care about the opposition. He doesn't care about the Venezuelan people. He cares about the fact that Venezuela has something like 17% of the world's known oil reserves. And he thinks he can make a lot of money by taking control of those. And that is exactly what it sounds like he is now doing. In other words, it's that Maduro was a bulwark against his efforts to basically nationalize Venezuela's oil assets, but that the vice president won't necessarily be as big a barrier as Maduro was? Yeah, I mean, look, Maduro had two things kind of going against him. One, I mean, he was sitting on a lot of energy resources.

And two, he's a leftist. And the only criminals that Trump likes in Latin America are the right-wing ones, like Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who was put in jail for trafficking like 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. and then pardoned by Trump. So what it sounds like Trump is doing here, I mean, look, we're learning about this in real time. Trump himself said that Maduro wanted to negotiate. Maduro did interviews right before he was, you know, picked up by the U.S.

suggesting that, like, he would cut basically any deal Trump wanted. But Trump seemingly just wanted to take the guy out and work with, you know, the people around him. And so there's some reporting maybe that the CIA had penetrated Maduro's inner circle and that there was someone on the inside kind of working. to make this outcome happen. We don't know. We're kind of still learning. But, yeah, I mean, Trump, again, he doesn't care about human rights.

He doesn't care about who won the election. What he cares about in the near term is getting that oil flowing and making his friends a lot of money off it. I want to throw to a clip of Trump being asked about the hypocrisy of pardoning the former president of Honduras and yet, you know, running this whole operation under the pretext that he was doing it to hold a narco-terrorist to account. You said that Maduro is responsible for drug trafficking. You recently pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of many drug trafficking.

Can you explain how these two situations are doing? Well, I endorsed, as you know, the winning president, the man who won in Honduras. I endorsed the man who won in Chile. I endorsed the man who won in Argentina. And we are doing very well with that whole group. What the man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated. like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump. That didn't work

out too well for them. This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country. He was persecuted very unfairly. And there are a number of them. And we felt that it was a very unfair situation that happened to him. He's also a party member of the man

who won. So obviously the people liked what I did. And one of the reasons that was done is because of the fact that the party in power felt very strongly, that that man was treated very badly. I started it very quickly and then I started it in great detail.

I went to a lot of the people standing behind me and they felt that that man was persecuted and treated very badly. That's why I gave him a pardon. So obviously that did not answer the question. It was kind of this freewheeling response where he delved into some rationale for his distorted rationale

for pardoning the former president of Honduras but didn't explain the hypocrisy here if you claim to want to stand against narco-trafficking of drugs, then that doesn't explain why you would, you know, pardon somebody but then run an entire operation, kidnapping operation to take this president out. Can I just have your reaction to that answer that Trump gave? Yeah, I mean, you're right, but nothing about this is coherent. One Orlando Hernandez is a actual real deal, like right-wing political leader connected to a drug kingpin. But the difference is he was right-wing and Trump was left-wing,

and Juan Orlando Hernandez could hire people like Roger Stone to help facilitate a pardon, and that's seemingly what he did here. I mean, none of this policy makes any sense. Like, if you are worried about fentanyl, fentanyl is made in Mexico from chemicals that get shipped in from China, right? So that's not coming out of Venezuela. There is like, you know, I think between 8 and 11 percent of the world's cocaine is trafficked through Venezuela, which is significant, but the majority of it is going through Ecuador and Colombia and is produced or grown in Columbia. So again, if you were kind of like looking at the challenge of drug trafficking to the United States, the idea that your first move would be to depose Nicholas Maduro and

then let this corrupt monster Juan Orlando Hernandez out of prison in the United States makes absolutely no sense. Tommy, what about this posture from the American delegation, including Pete Hagseth, that suggested that this may not be the last, you know, the last incursion at the hands of the United States, that Mexico should be on guard? Just your reaction to that. Yeah, I mean, Trump pretty overtly threatened both Cuba and the Colombian government in his remarks, as did Marco Rubio. That's pretty ominous.

I mean, we know from a lot of reporting that Marco Rubio has been driving this regime change policy in Venezuela, in part because, you know, his family ties to Cuba, his family left, and, you know, they hate the. you know, the regime that's there in place, the left-wing communist regime. And they think that taken out Maduro was the key to, you know, toppling the Cubans. And, you know, it's another new domino theory thing. But yeah, I mean, my fear with this, Brian, is like, Donald Trump is going to look at what just happened in Venezuela. He's going to look at the Iran strikes and the adulation he got for both from around the world in this sense that it was kind of cost-free for him.

Yeah. And what if he decides, like, I don't know, he's just the emperor. of the Western Hemisphere now, and he's going to depose whatever leaders he wants. I mean, this is pretty ominous stuff. Not to bury the lead here, but what about the fact that he ran an entire campaign literally called America first, and now he's engaging in regime change wars la George W. Bush? I mean, is there, is the hypocrisy not lost on anybody that the exact thing that he decried as he was running for office, this idea that we're too focused on, you know,

American imperialism and getting engaged in these endless foreign wars? that's exactly what he does, not a year into his second term? Yeah, I mean, look, there was some polling done before this all went down. This is, I think, in December. I think they found, like, 65% of voters opposed a regime change operation in Venezuela, 25% were pro it. I think there will probably be a lot of MAGA voters who are waking up today thinking this is not what I voted for.

I didn't vote to send Delta Force troops into Venezuela. Now, like, we're still learning. Trump made it sound like this was totally cost-free. There's now some reporting that some guys maybe have suffered, you know, bullet injuries or shrapnel wounds. Like, we just don't know what happened yet. And there is this question of like, okay, he said at this press conference that like Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and Rubio are now going to run Venezuela. How, right? Like, they're sitting in Washington or Mara Lago.

Like, are we going to send U.S. troops to the ground there? I mean, Venezuela is a huge country. It's the size of like France and Germany combined. How are we going to run this place? from Washington if people on the ground aren't on board with this plan and the current president doesn't sound like she is. We don't know where the military is. We don't know where their security state is. So, you know, Trump in this speech was like, oh, well, we had one wave planned of airstrikes. There was another wave we could have done, but we didn't that would have been bigger. Well,

like, what happens if things go south? Like, are we going to send troops there to occupy parts of the country? Are we going to send U.S. troops there to occupy this oil and gas infrastructure that Trump says we are now going to take back that was stolen from us? Like, none of the questions that matter have been answered here. Remember, like, regime change operations look great on day one. It's like day 100, six months, a year, you have to wonder. And I say this with total humility, having worked in the Obama administration during the Libya operation when NATO forces took out Gaddafi and it led to a disaster that was not just

a disaster for people in Libya, but all throughout the Middle East and North Africa. So, like, we're just, it's going to take a long time for this to play out. In the immediate aftermath of this morning's attack, Mayor Mamdani in New York issued a statement condemning, basically an American incursion into a sovereign country, as Venezuela is. And Ted Cruz came online afterwards and basically saw his statement and condemned it by saying, you know, like birds of a communist feather flocked together in so many words. I'm paraphrasing. Cool.

Just this, just your reaction here to the idea that, that, I mean, It does seem like the Republicans are going to rally around this idea of the United States getting engaged in a regime change war. And so just kind of your reaction to what we're seeing from Ted Cruz here. I mean, look, Ted Cruz put his balls in a purse and handed to Donald Trump in sometime around 2016 and has never gotten him back. So I'm not really surprised by it. I think that what I want to see from Democrats is statements like Mamdani's or Tim Keynes, like,

This isn't a legal war, like we, none of us know how this is going to play out. Maybe it will lead to peace throughout Venezuela, free and fair elections, oil flowing, like all the best things. We just don't know the outcome, right? And I'm like, I'm saying this with humility. I have no idea how this is going to go. But there was no congressional authorization. There is no legal basis to invade Venezuela.

And we know that senior levels of the Trump administration thinks there needs to be some sort of congressional authorization. Because remember that disastrous interview or series of interviews with Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff? She said in that interview that if they were air strikes on land in Venezuela, they would need to go to Congress first. They did not. They didn't do that. They didn't even brief Congress ahead of these strikes because Marco Rubio was like, oh, this is, you know, this is like an ongoing operation. Congress might leak it, etc. And then Trump jumps in and was like, yeah, I mean, they kind of knew it was coming anyway, but, you know, we don't want it to leak because Congress leaked. So like, Congress needs to reassert its role.

Like, they are the ones that declare if we go to war. And again, I realize my hypocrisy is an Obama official and drone strikes and that history. What I'm trying to say to people is, let's learn from those mistakes and realize that, like, the United States military can win any battle you ever put them up against. The problem comes when we ask the U.S. military to solve other countries' political problems. And that is what there was on the ground in Venezuela. You had a corrupt dictator who stole an election and didn't have broad popular. support and was running the country into the ground. But that doesn't mean we should fly 150 aircraft into their airspace and kill a bunch of people. Like, that's crazy. Last question here, Tommy.

The idea of doing this because we want to seize control of their oil assets, does that go to the United States or does it go to the oil companies, which may not even necessarily bring oil into the United States? Because like ExxonMobil, for example, a great American oil company sells to the rest of the world. It's not like any oil that they're refining, any oil that they're dealing with just goes right back into the United States, otherwise we have the cheapest oil in the world.

Oftentimes that oil is then sent overseas, even though it's being refined at the hands of an American company, doesn't necessarily mean it's just coming back into the United States. Those companies might find it more profitable to export that oil, and so they do. And so isn't this just helping

not even the United States oil prices per se, but just the companies that emanate out of the United States whose bottom line depends on, yes, the American consumers, but the rest of the world as well. Yeah, I mean, look, we should just be clear at the front end. We have no idea how any of this is going to work. Like, it sounded like Trump was suggesting that U.S. taxpayers might have to foot the bill on the front end

to get the infrastructure, the energy infrastructure rebuilt or like more modern, and then they'll get reimbursed by the oil companies. like again we heard a similar kind of promise that the oil would pay for the whole operation itself with the rock war right so like set that one aside yeah to your broader point though like yes these global energy markets um are fungible like i like it's a global market um if if if there's more supply sent to the united states and the price goes down that means that you know international shipments to the u.s will go someplace else like i like none of this none of this makes sense um There isn't, like, Trump, I don't think there's any way for him to promise that there will be some direct pipeline from Venezuela only to the U.S. only to U.S. consumers. And even if there was, like, what would that mean for domestic production? So yes, I mean, it's just like a facile, stupid way to view the world. And it just seems like they're kind of making this policy on the fly. They don't really know how the country is going to be governed. They don't know what's going to happen with the oil assets. And they're just like making it up as they go along. But, you know, what's new, right? One political question here, what does it say to Trump voters who thought that they were voting for lower grocery prices, housing prices, rent prices? Finally, we have a president who will focus on such granular affordability issues that he was touting the price of eggs on the campaign trail.

And now you've got somebody who is just installing his own cronies to run foreign countries and that's where his focus is, even as prices are rising, even as food stamps are getting gutted, even as Medicaid and ACA coverage is also getting gutted, that this is a where their priority is. Yeah, I mean, like, the price of, like, healthcare premiums for 20-some-odd million people are about to double. Yeah.

And he's focused on deposing Nicholas Maduro. That seems crazy to me. I think that President Trump has figured out that dealing with inflation is really hard. Getting prices down is really hard. You know, like getting people health care is really hard. So he's going to focus on things that feel easier to him. And in his book, toppling,

some sort of like two-bit dictator, that is easier and that is where he's going to focus. Or, you know, demanding credit for the Nobel Peace Prize as he invades another country, like that is going to be his focus. So I think you're starting to hear from a lot of Trump voters that they're like, this isn't actually what we voted for. We wanted the border hardened. We wanted the economy better. We wanted prices down.

Like, we're just not getting all the things we want it. We're seeing, like, ice rampaging through the streets of major cities. We're seeing prices go up. We're seeing health care prices about. to skyrocket. I don't think any of these guys voted for regime change in Venezuela. And you also have to worry, like, look, if Trump likes the press covers he gets from this, he likes all the praise he's getting, he's going to look to see, like, which country is next. Or maybe we'll be back in Iran, right? So, like, this is pretty ominous stuff. Well, obviously, we haven't seen

the last of whatever international incursions Trump is engaged in. So highly recommend for everybody who's watching right now. If you want to learn more about what's happening in the international space, subscribe to Pod Save the World. I'm going to put the link to that channel right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to put the link to Pod Save the World's podcast in the show notes as well. Tommy, as always, thanks so much for the time. Thanks, buddy. Great to see it. Thanks again to Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vitor. A quick reminder to everybody listening right now. I'll be doing two episodes per week, so check out Wednesday's episode in the same feed.

Thanks, everybody. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, produced by Sam Graber, Music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to Brian Tyler Cohen.com to learn more.