The 3 Keys to Understanding Trump’s Retro Coup in Venezuela

The region’s instability and authoritarian regimes were aided by elite training from the US military. The Defense Department trained tens of thousands of Latin American military, intelligence, and law enforcement at its infamous School of the Americas in Georgia; many went on to be accused of terrible human rights abuses, including alumni who, according to a Duke scholar’s investigation, went on to be “dictators, death squad operatives, and assassins,” including Manuel Noriega himself, Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez, Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras, Pinochet’s secret police leader, and even the general who this weekend was Maduro’s defense minister, among other so-called “Hall of Shamers.”

For decades the US and president after president justified these interventions and political support for dictatorships through the lens of the Cold War—arguing that supporting terrible regimes was better than allowing the risk they might fall to communism. Indeed, ironically, it’s the very strength, dominance, and exquisite skill of the US military and intelligence community to achieve their tactical victories that make such interventions look so much more alluring than they should be to presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan to Trump. You can almost always win the short term—depose, overthrow, or kidnap the leader—and then the long term is a gamble.

But the unintended long-term consequences of these actions have ricocheted through American domestic politics for decades. Indeed, their second- and third-order effects have done more to shape US politics today than most Americans understand.

There have been obvious links: For instance, it was while planning the Bay of Pigs operation that Hunt met the four Cubans he would later recruit to burglarize the Watergate. And less obvious ones: Most notably, the US meddling in places like the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador unleashed destabilizing forces that contributed to waves of migration northward to the US border—millions of would-be immigrants whose arrival in the US over the last decade has exacerbated nativist fears and helped power Donald Trump first to the presidency in 2016 and then back to the White House in 2024. Many of them were driven north as climate change and deforestation affected agriculture and caused the collapse of local farms and economies; some of that destabilizing deforestation, in places like Guatemala, came after the military burned highland regions to remove the remote sanctuaries of rebel groups. As Jonathan Blitzer outlines in his award-winning study of Latin American immigration and the US, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, after El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s—a war Reagan once called “the front line of the battle that is really aimed … at us,” more than a quarter of that country’s population ended up living as refugees in the United States.

Which brings us to:

2. Donald Trump has no plan.

Back in November, in the midst of a fall campaign by the US military to conduct lethal strikes on what it described as drug-smuggling boats—strikes that ultimately killed more than 100 people and were by almost any international standard illegal—I interviewed Ambassador John Bolton at the Texas Tribune Festival. Bolton, the hawkish neoconservative who was Trump’s longest-serving White House national security adviser during his first term, had advocated for regime change in Venezuela for years and worked in the first term to support opposition efforts to overthrow Maduro. He told me, “I think that our failure to overthrow Maduro in the first term was our greatest failure.” (Some of those efforts were stunningly ham-handed, as a WIRED investigation by Zach Dorfman later uncovered.)

But Bolton said he nonetheless has been puzzled by how poorly Trump laid the groundwork over recent months for operations against Maduro. The boat strikes came with no effort to build support with Congress or even develop deep partnerships with the Venezuelan opposition. (Indeed, over the weekend Trump casually dismissed the Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who beat Trump out this fall for the Nobel Peace Prize—and, according to The Washington Post, may have been sidelined precisely because of that.) “There’s just no comprehension, I think, of what it takes to replace the Maduro regime,” Bolton said.