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    Home»Opinions»Opinion | The Spectacle of Trump’s Venezuela Strike
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    Opinion | The Spectacle of Trump’s Venezuela Strike

    Team_Benjamin Franklin InstituteBy Team_Benjamin Franklin InstituteJanuary 7, 2026No Comments3 Mins Read
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    It seems to me what they wanted to do was something that was spectacle, that there is a certain amount of governing or propagandizing or signal sending through spectacle and the release of the drone videos — then you see the eradication and killing of these people on these boats — that they were looking for something that was televisual. They were looking for something that worked as vertical video on X. I mean, the photos of the makeshift Situation Room at Mar-a-Lago during this operation, and they have a huge screen showing X with a search for Venezuela on it … the whole thing seems so built around spectacle. Maduro, I mean, the photos they released of him, that I mean I think you have to see this as — this might have actually been one of your pieces or certainly in somebody’s piece that I read in preparing for this — but propaganda through force. That’s exactly it. It was a phrase used by a former Trump administration official in describing this. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s also worth pointing out what was happening in the United States at the time at the start of these boat bombings. There was also an increased militarization in American cities related to this immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, in Chicago. And one thing that a number of officials have made the point to me about, and I think it’s well taken, part of the general logic here, and as you say, it’s visual, it’s kind of atmospheric, is making military action a daily presence in American life in every sense. So this was all happening simultaneously. I think the strangeness to my mind about how Venezuela emerges as this particular target that serves all of these different — the political ends primarily — is that there were different factions within the Trump administration that actually had different views on how the United States should engage with Venezuela. It’s a genuinely complicated question. I mean, you have a repressive, dictatorial president who does have ties to the drug trade, there’s no question, who refused to recognize a democratic election, who’s done all of these, obviously, horrific crimes, how do you engage with him? There are longstanding sanctions. Those sanctions seem to be immiserating the population, but haven’t really dislodged Maduro himself from power. Previous diplomatic efforts have all run up against just the bottom line that Maduro would never negotiate his own ouster. That’s always been a kind of diplomatic catch in any broader design for the region. And so, there was an element within the Trump administration early on that favored a more conciliatory approach. It was epitomized by Ric Grenell, special envoy, who flew down to Caracas, met with Maduro, achieved some small successes — for example, got the Venezuelan government to release Americans held in Venezuelan prisons, convinced the Venezuelan government to start accepting deportation flights from the United States. So there were these kind of incremental, I don’t know what you would call them, achievements or gains made from that more conciliatory approach. But someone like Grenell was quickly outgunned by the combination of Rubio and his ideological vision for the region and regime change, and then people like Miller, who brought to the issue these other concerns. And so it’s kind of a weird confluence of the different interests of people at play.



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