By Kenneth Tiven
As President Donald Trump and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s former leader, share striking personality traits and political behaviours—making Maduro’s military kidnapping by US Special Forces all the more extraordinary.
The irony is inescapable. Trump governs from the White House; Maduro is confined to a Federal Detention Facility in New York City. Maduro retained power with military backing after losing re-election. Trump, having escaped conviction for insurrection, lost an election—only to return to office four years later.
Trump is now on what can only be described as a global and national retribution tour. Unlike the Taylor Swift tour—musical, disciplined, and inspirational—Trump’s is improvisational, punitive, and likely doomed. History offers warnings. When President George W Bush captured Saddam Hussein in 2003, the act itself was decisive; the aftermath was catastrophic. There was no coherent plan to stabilize a nation fractured by decades of internal conflict.
Trump insists the Maduro extraction is about oil—reviving production from fields originally developed by American companies and later nationalized by Venezuela. In his first post-kidnapping speech, Trump mentioned oil 27 times, yet said nothing about democracy, civil governance, or the Venezuelan people’s future. He dismissed Opposition leader María Corina Machado as ineffective—despite her Nobel Peace Prize—while implying the United States would administer Venezuela directly.
Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, Trump said, could remain “if she behaves”. That behaviour, according to Trump, includes halting drug flows, expelling Iranian and Cuban influence, severing oil sales to China, and accepting Washington’s authority. When Trump warned that failure would bring consequences “bigger than Maduro,” Rodríguez responded sharply: Venezuela, she said, would “never again be a colony of any empire”. Far from weakening the regime, Trump’s threats are likely to consolidate nationalist resistance.
Venezuela’s 30 million citizens stand on the brink of social and economic collapse. Chavista loyalists dominate urban slums; drug cartels and armed gangs control jungle corridors. Trump’s assurance that no US ground troops will be deployed reveals
a dangerous misunderstanding of asymmetric conflict. Naval deployments off the Venezuelan coast suggest the “drug interdiction” narrative may be little more than cover.
Crucially, Trump sought no Congressional authorization and offered no international legal justification. His newly fortified presidential immunity—and a compliant Republican Congress—enabled action without planning. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense has been reshaped into a Department of War, focused narrowly on execution rather than consequence.
Vietnam veterans—long-time MAGA loyalists—may prove an unexpected source of backlash. They believed Trump’s pledge to avoid foreign entanglements. If US troop levels escalate and casualties mount, body bags will arrive home just as Republicans face the 2026 mid-terms.
Globally, the implications extend far beyond Venezuela. Trump envisions American dominance confined to the Western Hemisphere, ceding Asia to China and Europe to Russia. India, Brazil, and South Africa—pillars of BRICS—are watching closely.
This strategic retreat was foreshadowed in the administration’s National Security Survey. Stephen Miller inadvertently revealed the end-game when he remarked that “nobody is going to fight the US militarily over Greenland”—a statement that disregards Danish sovereignty and hints at dissolving NATO itself. Such a move would be a geo-political gift to Vladimir Putin.
The State Department has been sidelined. Congress ignored. Law reduced to executive impulse.
For months, Maduro and his wife will exist in legal limbo—detained, processed, litigated—with no expectation of return. Having been forcibly imported, they may receive better treatment than migrants held by ICE.
Most chillingly, Trump’s audacious operation has served another purpose: to eclipse global remembrance of the fifth anniversary of his own failed insurrection. It is a marketing gamble—and a reckless one. The Epstein files, implicating Trump and others, are not going away.
FROM CARACAS TO MINNESOTA
How extrajudicial power abroad echoes lethal force at home
The fatal ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old white American mother of three in Minneapolis, is not an isolated tragedy. It is a domestic mirror of the same culture of force, immunity, and narrative control now shaping US conduct abroad.
On January 7, 2026, ICE agents conducting a federal immigration enforcement operation confronted Good in a residential Minneapolis neighbourhood. Video footage shows armed agents surrounding her vehicle. Within moments, an ICE officer fired multiple rounds at close range. Good was killed instantly.
Federal authorities immediately claimed that Good attempted to strike officers with her vehicle and framed the killing as an act of self-defence. President Trump went further, publicly characterizing the incident as domestic terrorism. Yet, local and state officials—including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey—flatly rejected that account, stating that available video evidence contradicted the federal narrative.
What followed deepened public alarm. Minnesota investigators were abruptly denied access to evidence after the US Attorney’s Office transferred the case exclusively to federal control. Body-camera footage, ballistic reports, and officer interviews were sealed from state review. Cooperation between federal and state authorities collapsed. Protests erupted across Minneapolis as residents demanded transparency, chanting that ICE had become “a law unto itself”.
Good was not an undocumented immigrant. She was a US citizen, a poet, and a mother whose youngest child is six years old. Her death stripped away a central justification often used to excuse aggressive immigration enforcement: that such force is necessary to protect citizens from “outsiders”. Here, the victim was the citizen.
This is where Minnesota intersects with Venezuela. In both cases, the Trump administration asserted unilateral authority, deployed force first, controlled the narrative afterwards, and dismissed external oversight as unnecessary or illegitimate. In Caracas, it was a military kidnapping without Congressional authorization. In Minneapolis, it was lethal force without independent investigation. The pattern is unmistakable: Power exercised immunity invoked accountability resisted.
When executive authority treats law as optional abroad, it inevitably reshapes enforcement culture at home. ICE agents, emboldened by political rhetoric that labels dissent as threat and grants pre-emptive absolution, operate with expanding latitude. The message—implicit but clear—is that outcomes matter less than obedience.
The Minnesota shooting also reveals the fragility of federalism under strain. State governments are constitutionally empowered to investigate killings within their borders. When federal agencies block that role, the balance between national authority and local accountability erodes.
This erosion mirrors the administration’s global posture: sidelining Congress, marginalizing allies, hollowing out the State Department, and redefining legality as loyalty.
In both Minnesota and Venezuela, the victims—one a detained foreign leader, the other a suburban American mother—became symbols of something larger: the replacement of rule-based governance with executive impulse.
The consequences are cumulative. Each unexamined killing, each unchallenged operation, normalizes the next. Lawlessness does not arrive all at once. It advances incident by incident, justified by fear, cloaked in patriotism, and shielded by immunity.
Renee Nicole Macklin Good did not die in a vacuum. She died at the intersection of power, politics, and a government increasingly comfortable acting first and answering later—if
at all.
That is why Minnesota matters to this story. And why Venezuela is not as far away as it seems.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels
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