Robbie Thomas
The Venezuela Situation
The above photo is from the PBS NewsHour.
I’m writing this blog post at 1pm EST on 3 Jan 2026. Things will certainly change after this post, and some things I say here could be proven wrong down the road.
I’ve been watching the PBS NewsHour here and there and tried to keep tabs on this situation. But there is so much bullshit going on in our country and most of the world, it’s so hard to keep up. I have seen the situation with María Corina Machado. I’ve seen her being interviewed by the PBS NewsHour when she was hiding. And I also spoke to a fellow employee at my job who was from Venezuela about her situation at the time, via Google Translate. He also told me about her arrest. Here’s a video of her being interviewed on the PBS NewsHour in August 2024:
I did watchAG and others legally characterize attack in Venezuela as “arrest with military support.”
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 3, 2026
Meanwhile Trump announces he’s taken over the country and will run it until he finds someone suitable to replace him.
Added bonus: says American oil companies will get to exploit the oil.
I did watch most of the press conference by Trump and his staff, and he said that we will be running Venezuela. One would hope the hell not. Now, was it a good idea to remove Maduro from his position, and would that be more helpful for that country? Likely. But we did the same thing with Iraq in 2003 to 2011-ish, and that turned out to be a fucking disaster. I was seriously against that war. We spent lot and lots of money on that war, adding more to the debt.
The United States is at 38 Trillion Dollars in debt as of December 2025. We are paying one trillion dollars in interest on that debt this year. If it is so that Trump is going to go all in on nation-building with Venezuela in the near future, it will add more to the debt. I really hope we don’t do what we did with Iraq in 2003.
This is going to be a short post because I’m no expert on this situation and don’t want to be too much of a political pundit. Yes, this blog is my blog; I can do as I wish, and perhaps bitching about this situation could give me a few extra views and gain me one consistent reader of this blog out of the five or six people who are fans. Just watching all this news here is giving me vibes of our invasion of Iraq.
Obama did things I didn’t like, and the same goes for Biden. But Trump has ordered attacks on seven countries in 2025. Yes, as of this blog posting, 2025 ended three days ago. Just putting 2025 on there for future reads (if I get any!). I’m not a big fan of Trump pushing all these attacks, especially without Congress’s approval on any of them. Seven in one year is alarming!
I’ll end it with this Twitter/X post:
Just amazing to watch so many Americans swoon and cheer as if the US "won the war" in Venezuela so quickly because it captured Maduro: like how the Iraq war ended when the US captured Saddam.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 3, 2026
Either the US is now responsible for Venezuela, or chaos and civil war will reign: https://t.co/w55YlAXCMf