BREAKING: Special Military Operation in Venezuela

President Trump orders a U.S. military operation in Venezuela, claims Maduro captured, and says America will “run the country” indefinitely.

We’re starting off 2026 with warfare.

President Trump — echoing Vladimir Putin’s description of the invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” — has labeled the overnight bombing of Venezuela an “operation.”

The president claims U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flew them out of the country, saying that was the purpose of the strike.

Maduro has now been indicted as part of a long-running federal drug-trafficking case. The Justice Department has pursued the case for roughly fifteen years, with Maduro named as a defendant for the past six.

Attorney General Pam Bondi released a new indictment that rewrites the narcoterrorism charges first filed in Manhattan federal court in 2020. Those charges stem from cocaine-trafficking allegations originally brought in 2011.

But just 5 weeks ago, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of drug trafficking charges.

Congress — the only branch with the constitutional authority to declare war — did not do so, even though Trump has repeatedly used the word “war” to describe the situation. And according to at least one Republican senator, Congress wasn’t notified in advance.

Senator Tom Cotton said today that the Trump administration did not notify congressional leaders before carrying out the operation to arrest and remove Maduro, though he defended that decision. Cotton argued the administration wasn’t required to do so.

“Congress isn’t notified when the FBI is going to arrest a drug trafficker or cybercriminal here in the United States,” Cotton said, “nor should Congress be notified when the executive branch is executing arrests on indicted persons.”

That argument sits uneasily alongside the president’s own use of the word “war.”

There are already serious questions about the conduct of the operation itself — including U.S. forces destroying fishing boats off the coast, and at least one incident in which survivors may have been signaling for help when they were targeted, potentially in violation of international law. In the only confirmed cases where alleged narcoterrorists were captured, they were later returned — not arrested, not brought back to the U.S. to face charges.

The president has also declared that the United States will “run the country” until some unspecified future date. As of now, there are no signs of actual U.S. control on the ground.

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition — and it has to be judicious.”

Trump later posted a photo on Truth Social purporting to show Maduro being held aboard the USS Iwo Jima.

The president appeared to enjoy the operation. He called into Fox News this morning to boast that he watched the attack in real time from his resort, comparing it to watching television.

“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” Trump told Fox & Friends. “And if you would have seen the speed, the violence — it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.”

“We watched it from a room,” he added. “We had a room, and we watched every aspect of it. We were surrounded by lots of people, including generals, and they knew everything that was happening. It was very complex — extremely complex.”

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the Americas, so the old adage naturally comes to mind: it’s always about the oil.

But it may also be about Epstein — and falling poll numbers.