So now we know why Trump launched an attack on Venezuela on Saturday morning. He snatched President Nicolás Maduro Moros and his wife from a secure compound in Caracas in what looks like a textbook operation involving multiple ships and 150 aircraft. Goodness knows how much it all cost. Anyway, Maduro and his wife are now being held in some New York prison with an indictment published accusing him of drug smuggling offences and "possession of machine guns and destructive devices." But, Trump’s Maduro problems are just beginning.
He claims the US will somehow be ruling Venezuela by proxy, with no plan of how he’s going to do it, beyond more threats. There is little evidence that anything will change very much, although some think there is a risk of the county falling into some kind of civil war.
But forget that for a moment and consider the problem of getting a conviction against Maduro.
Only last month, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in mid 2024 on almost identical charges. In June, Hernández was given a 45-year sentence after a US federal jury found him guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and committing related firearms offences.
Despite the long sentence reflecting the seriousness of the charges, on November 28 last year, Donald Trump announced on social media that he would issue a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, an announcement that immediately raised eyebrows.
Just three days later, on December 1, Trump formally granted the pardon, and Hernández was released that day.
At the moment, several cases in US courts are on the brink of being declared “vindictive” prosecutions. These are cases brought by Trump against his political enemies, like former FBI chief James Comey, or against the Venezuelan Filmar Abrego Garcia, shipped off to a harsh prison in Honduras last March without due process and had to be returned to the US. Trump’s administration is still trying to convict him.
All these cases are likely to be declared vindictive and dismissed because Trump has been quite open and explicit about getting these people convicted, no matter what and without ever producing any real evidence.
Maduro’s lawyers will be looking now at the Hernández pardon, and they will no doubt be using it to defend Maduro. We can look forward to years and years of litigation.
This is in no way to suggest Maduro is innocent or is anything other than a brutal dictator, only that this is another example of Trump not thinking anything through beyond that day's headlines. And of course, the terrible irony is that Trump himself is guilty of equally heinous crimes, and if there was any justice, he would be serving time now.
Trump also threatened Maduro's Vice President, who was sworn in on Saturday, Mexico, Cuba and Greenland. This is just at the weekend. The success of the mission will only embolden the White House to do more of the same.
For a baby boomer like me, brought up to view the US as our ultimate protector and guarantor of peace in Europe, this is beyond imagination and totally unthinkable. The whole world is now at the mercy of the orange moron, narcissistic, senile, vindictive, cruel and incompetent. We can never look at America in the same way again.
