Updated 1-10-26
• The Latest. (Journalism Institute summary of news, National Press Club, 1-5-26)
'The Latest' column is an outstanding resource.
(Here is a summary of headlines, minus links. Scroll down for headlines with links to the stories.)
"The Trump administration is trying to control its Venezuela message by funneling info through the White House. Pentagon beat reporters tell me they're not getting answers from military spokespeople. Press officers are regularly referring questions to the WH.' (Brian Stelter) / New York Times, Washington Post held off on reporting Venezuela raid (Semafor) / Disinformation floods social media after Nicolás Maduro's capture (WIRED) / Behind the scenes of our Nicolás Maduro front page (New York Times) / How a New York Times reporter got a phone interview with Trump after Maduro's capture (New York Times) / 'The Washington Post editorial board comes out in favor of the Venezuela attack/operation to capture Maduro' (Max Tani) etc.
More on those stories (where that column's links led):
--- The Trump administration is trying to control its Venezuela message by funneling info through the White House. Pentagon beat reporters tell me they're not getting answers from military spokespeople. Press officers are regularly referring questions to the WH. Images of Venezuela attack flooded social media. Reporters struggled to get answers on U.S. military questions. ~Brian Stelter, Chief Military Analyst, CNN, on Blue Sky, NY Times and Washington Post, 1-5-26
---Comment: (Pat Az @pataz1.bsky.social): Because they’re trying to force everyone to report on it as a law enforcement operation”, which @cnn.com dutifully used as their framing the day it happened.)
---News organizations held off on reporting Venezuela raid (Max Tani and Shelby Talcott, Semafor, 1-3-26)
First in @semafor.com: NYT, WaPo learned of the secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin but held off publishing what they had at the administration's request to avoid endangering US troops.
--- Disinformation Floods Social Media After Nicolás Maduro's Capture. (David Gilbert, Politics, Wired, 1-3-26) From seemingly AI-generated videos to repurposed old footage, TikTok, Instagram, and X did little to stop the onslaught of misleading posts in the wake of the US invasion of Venezuela.
---Behind the scenes of our Nicolás Maduro front page (New York Times, 1-4-26)
After President Trump’s surprise ouster of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, a team of New York Times editors set to work redoing the front page.
---Why I Cold-Called President Trump at 4:30 in the Morning (NY Times, 1-3-26) How a New York Times reporter got a phone interview with Trump after Maduro's capture.
---‘The Washington Post editorial board comes out in favor of the Venezuela attack/operation to capture Maduro’ ~max tani @maxtani.bsky.social
***
• Fact-checking Trump's claims after U.S. strike on Venezuela and capture of Maduro
(Louis Jacobson and Maria Ramirez Uribe, from story originally published on PolitiFact, PBS NewsHour)
One of several facts checked:
Trump: Each U.S. boat strike off the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 people.
Pants on Fire!
"The Trump administration has struck at least 32 vessels killing about 115 people in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September. Trump said previously that the boats were carrying drugs en route to the U.S. and during the press conference he said the drugs on each boat would kill "on average, 25,000 people."
"However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S. And the administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of the drugs could have been destroyed.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 73,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That means the drugs on 32 boats would have been responsible for 800,000 deaths, nearly 11 times the number of U.S. overdose deaths in one year."
Even when Trump plays a winning hand his patent falsehoods and exaggerations make him lose credibility.
• David Ignatius on Donald Trump, Venezuela, Greenland and Iran (A Charlie Rose Global Conversation, 1-11-26)
"The use of military power is just exhilarating. You can hear in Donald Trump's voice the sense of what it's like to command the greatest military in the world....He's high on it and it invigorates him to think: Okay, what am I going to do next....
"At bottom Trump does have a 'might makes right' vision of how the world should work and he is in the process of implementing that and people generally are acceding to it....You can see him thinking now What am I going to do next?...Machiavelli would look at what Trump is doing and would shake his head. A wise prince does not gamble on uncertain outcomes. A wise prince is more careful about how he uses force....
"Increasingly the rest of the world has to think about how to contain U.S. power and they will find ways to do that that we won't like.... [Do listen to this interview.]
• What Will Become of Venezuela’s Political Prisoners?
(Stephania Taladrid, New Yorker, 1-7-25)
Jésus Armas, a prominent opposition leader, has been in prison in Caracas for the past year. With the country in turmoil, his mother worries about his fate. From the beginning, Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro raised numerous questions about the fate of Venezuela’s political prisoners.Trump’s silence on the subject had only raised more doubts. In public, the President had seldom mentioned political prisoners. In the eyes of many Venezuelans, his endorsement of Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s second-in-command, was proof of his disregard for Venezuela’s democracy.
“The fact that Delcy has been sworn in as President is, in itself, a flagrant violation of our sovereignty,” said Saimar Rivas, a longtime civil-rights activist.
• Audacious Maduro raid relied on months of preparation, surprise strike (Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, Warren P. Strobel, Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe, WaPo [aka Washington Post], 1-3-25)
"Under cover of darkness, highly trained Delta Force troops arrived by helicopter and descended into a compound to grab the Venezuelan president and his wife. The audacious move makes good on Trump’s long-held desire to remove the Venezuelan strongman, but was done without congressional authorization, is in apparent violation of international law and leaves open questions about Venezuela’s future.
• US plans to ‘run’ Venezuela and tap its oil reserves, Trump says, after operation to oust Maduro
(Regina Garcia Cano, Konstantin Toropin, Eric Tucker, AP News, 1-3-26)
Hours after an audacious military operation that plucked leader Nicolás Maduro from power and removed him from the country Saturday, President Donald Trump said the United States would run Venezuela at least temporarily and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations. The dramatic action capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on the South American country and its autocratic leader and months of secret planning resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
• U.S. strikes Venezuela and captures Maduro; Trump says "we're going to run the country" for now
(Jennifer Jacobs, Joe Walsh, James LaPorta, Tucker Reals, CBS News, 1-3-26)
President Trump said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were "captured and flown out of the Country" early Saturday morning amid a "large scale strike" by the U.S. Mr. Trump said in a press conference that the U.S. would "run" Venezuela on a temporary basis during the transition, and "get the oil flowing."
The U.S. Army's Delta Force, an elite special forces unit, carried out the operation to capture Maduro, officials told CBS News. Maduro and his wife landed in New York Saturday afternoon to face federal charges related to drug trafficking and working with gangs designated as terrorist organizations, which Maduro denies. Attorney General Pam Bondi shared a superseding indictment similar to one filed against Maduro in 2020. The strikes follow months of U.S. military buildup in the region, with the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and numerous other warships positioned in the Caribbean, and a series of deadly deadly strikes on more than 30 boats the administration says were carrying drugs.
• ‘Blind Into Caracas’ (James Fallows, Breaking the News, 1-3-26)
Less than 24 hours in, members of the Trump team are celebrating victory. None of them seem to have wondered what happens a day, a month, a decade from now. Trump has assumed one-man authority to disrupt the world economy with tariffs, launch lethal assaults on other nations, and declare a “boots on the ground” military occupation.
This is an overthrow of a foreign government. It’s an act of war. It is an open-ended declaration of foreign occupation. And as all at the microphone either proudly declared and reluctantly admitted, it was pulled off without consultation with anyone outside their little circle.
[Is this impeachable?]
• Donald Trump wants to run Venezuela, and dominate the western hemisphere (The Economist, 1-3-26)
WHEN ASKED what he sought to achieve with his military campaign against Venezuela, Donald Trump used to offer only vague answers: stopping migrants and criminals from reaching the United States; halting the flow of drugs from Venezuela; and, latterly, reclaiming oil reserves that Venezuela, like many other countries, nationalised decades ago. Rarely, if ever, did he mention regime change, perhaps because he knew that his base was wary of another foreign entanglement after decades of “forever wars” in the Muslim world. Snatching Nicolás Maduro and attempting to take control of Venezuela and its oil is an extraordinary display of the new “Donroe doctrine.”
• The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation (New Yorker, 1-3-26)
Isaac Chotiner, a scholar of international law on the implications of the U.S. arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.
• To Trump, on Venezuela: You Break It, You Own It (Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, 1-3-26)
'In a news conference on Saturday, President Trump seemed to recognize that — and did not shy away from it. He said, “We are going to run the country until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” going on to say that “we can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over.”
'He added that the U.S. was “ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so....We are not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to.”
'How the Trump administration is going to run Venezuela is simply not clear. Does it have an arrangement with the remnant of the Maduro regime to step aside? Does Trump plan to pose to Maduro’s rump team an ultimatum to leave and then the U.S. will organize elections? What is clear is that America running Venezuela would be a huge job, and there will be a significant portion of Trump’s isolationist MAGA base that is not likely to embrace that task.'
• Venezuela live updates: Maduro arrives in New York after capture by US forces, AP source says
(From AP News's Live Updates on Venezuela and the United States, 1-3-26)
Follow the news on Venezuela and the United States
• Regime Change in America’s Back Yard (Jon Lee Anderson, The Lede, Reporting and Commentary, New Yorker, 1-3-26)
What comes after Nicolás Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela?
Trump insisted in Saturday's press conference that, by deposing Maduro, he had removed the "kingpin of a vast criminal network" that trafficked huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. Ironically, just weeks before, he had extended a full pardon to the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who in 2024 was convicted in the Southern District of New York of cocaine trafficking and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. Trump's reasoning was that, like him [Trump], Hernández had been "treated very harshly and unfairly" by political opponents.
FROM ANOTHER ANGLE:
• Supreme Court allows Trump to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans who risk deportation
(Associated Press, 5-19-25)
The high court’s order appears to be the “single largest action in modern American history stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the attorneys for Venezuelan migrants. “This decision will force families to be in an impossible position either choosing to survive or choosing stability,” said Cecilia Gonzalez Herrera, who sued to try and stop the Trump administration from revoking legal protections from her and others like her.
“Today we are all exposed to being imprisoned in Venezuela if the U.S. return us,” said Moleros, a 44-year-old Venezuelan attorney who lives in Florida. “They should not deport someone who is at risk of being assassinated, tortured and incarcerated.”
• Inside the notorious Venezuelan jail run by prisoners (video, Stuart Ramsay, YouTube video, Sky News, 8-13-20)
'Guns, sex and drugs are readily available to inmates in this notorious Venezuelan jail, where "the prisoners are in charge." One of the inmates — flanked by an entourage of armed "bodyguards" — makes $5500 every week.'
• Thug World (Robert Reich, Opinion, Eurasia Review, 1-4-26)
"America’s takeover of Venezuela — because it’s in our “backyard” and we didn’t like its leader — strengthens Putin’s claim over Ukraine, Xi’s over Taiwan, and Netanyahu’s over the West Bank and Gaza.
"Make no mistake: Venezuela’s Maduro was a vicious dictator who harmed Venezuela and its people. But the world is populated by many vicious dictators. We don’t take over their countries.
"The postwar order was supposed to stop thugs who use aggression to take over their “backyards,” as Hitler had done in Europe and Japan in East Asia.
"But Trump is now reverting back to the pre-World War II, might-makes-right, spheres-of-power, order.
"For more than 80 years, America’s moral authority has rested on our claim to be on the side of democracy. That claim was often belied by American aggression that bolstered dictators — in Vietnam in the 1960s, in Latin America in the 1970s, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq — but it at least gave a patina of legitimacy to our alliances and to our “soft power” through USAID and the United Nations."
MORE RESOURCES ON TRUMP VS. VENEZUELA