Trump & Venezuela: How Critics Are Falling Into an “Obvious Trap”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, as President Trump mulls staying and running Venezuela for many years, our next guest says his critics are falling into an “obvious trap” with their response to Maduro’s capture and the subsequent fallout. In a new essay, The Atlantic’s David Frum warns that opponents of the administration are getting bogged down in the legalities of the military operation, and he’s joining Michel Martin to explain why he thinks why Trump’s critics are getting it all wrong, and why their message keeps failing to break through. 

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. David Frum, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

DAVID FRUM: Thank you.

 

MARTIN: You’ve been writing extensively about the U.S. incursion, strike into Venezuela, seizing Nicolas Maduro and his wife, bringing him back to the U.S. to stand trial ostensibly for involvement in drug trafficking. Before we dig into a specific piece I wanted to talk about, I just wanted to ask you overall, what’s your sense of that mission? What, what do you think?

 

FRUM: People use the phrase regime change, but what we actually have seemed to have seen here is dictator change. The regime remains intact. Nicolas Maduro is not a charismatic dictator of the Fidel Castro type. He’s an inheritor of a repressive military authoritarian system that was built by his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who took power in the 1990s. So this, this regime has been there for 30 years. Maduro was the second in line he inherited after Chavez died of cancer. And the system preceded him and can outlast him. So by removing him from the system, you don’t necessarily change very much unless you change other things about the system too. But the Trump administration seems quite determined to leave the rest of that system intact, because I think they believe — this seems to be the thread of rationality — is the other people in the system are more amenable to pressure and maybe even more corrupt than Nicolas Maduro as they can do business with them, while refusing to do anything to bring the legitimate democratically elected government of Venezuela back to power. Venezuela had an election a year ago. It was intended to be a fake, but it was, it, it, the will of the people were so strong that it overwhelmed the fake. And we now have a legitimate president of Venezuela recognized by the United States and other democratic countries.

 

MARTIN: So, so, do you buy the administration’s rationale for this? They’re calling it, they’re saying this isn’t a war so they didn’t have to notify Congress or seek congressional approval. They’re saying it’s a law enforcement operation to basically interdict or interrupt a drug trafficking operation. Do you buy it?

 

FRUM: Well, I, I — which one do I buy? Because I think there are at least three explanations of what has happened. And they contradict one another, so I can’t believe them all. And when there are three different ones, I’m probably inclined to believe none of them. But, so the one rationale is yes, this is a law enforcement operation to see somebody who’s been indicted by United States Court. Another is, No, no, no, this is an anti-drug operation intended to stop the flow of drugs from Venezuela to the rest of the world. No, no, no, this is a war for oil intended to seize Venezuela’s oil resources and annex them to the United States. Those can’t all be true — 

 

MARTIN: Or to recover, or to recover oil resources that were improperly taken 20 years ago.

 

FRUM: Or, or that. That’s another, that maybe — that’s now four. So, so different people have a — the vice president has put forth an explanation. The president has put forth an explanation. The Secretary of State has put forth an explanation. The Secretary of Defense — or Secretary of Wars, he likes to style himself — has put forward, forward an explanation. But they’re all contradictory. So which one should I believe?

 

MARTIN: There are a lot of reasons why people object — people, people from across the political spectrum are objecting to what just occurred here. But one of the things that you’re saying in your piece, which got my attention, is you’re saying that, that, that Trump’s critics are falling into an obvious trap. What is the trap?

 

FRUM: Trump wants you to believe is this is a patriotic operation done by the skilled for — armed forces of the United States to serve an American national interest that was heroically and faultlessly executed. And now there’s just a lot of petty carping with international law, which no true American would ever care about, and it’s just a lot of legalistic gibberish that is standing in the way of appreciating the great patriotic achievement. And one of the things I’m trying to say is this, whatever this was, this was not done for the national interest. My guess, and this is only a guess, is that the, this oil talk, it reveals something real. I mean, obviously seizing Venezuela’s oil makes no economic sense for the United States.

 

MARTIN: Well, stop there for a second. Why not?

 

FRUM: So the present price of oil is $58 a barrel. The United States of America is the largest supply — producer of oil in the world. At $58 a barrel, American producers, many of them, have trouble breaking even. Add Canada — which used to be a friend of the United States — and North America produces 28% of all the oil produced in the world. The idea that you need another million barrels a day is, is crazy, especially when you consider how much will it cost to bring Venezuela’s oil to market. The Venezuela oil reserves are located in jungly terrain in the far east of the country. There’s been no meaningful investment there for 30 years. There aren’t enough roads. It’s heavy, it’s heavy oil, which has to be brought to the, it doesn’t bubble spontaneously to the surface. You have to inject steam into the ground to bring the oil to the top. Steam takes electricity. Guess what there aren’t a lot of in the jungles of Eastern Venezuela? Hydroelectric power plants or grids to connect them or pumping stations. There aren’t, there aren’t adequate security. So if there’re insurgencies or guerillas there I mean, the whole thing is just bonkers. 

 

So for the, for the tiny, for a fraction of the cost it would take to bring any Venezuelan oil to market, you can bring a lot more U.S. or Canadian oil to market. And the problem is, the market is saying at $58 a barrel, actually, you know what? We got enough. We don’t need more.

 

MARTIN: You’ve managed to articulate this in, in a very few minutes. You say that Trump’s critics are getting it wrong. Where are they getting it wrong?

 

FRUM: They get, they’re getting bogged down in legalisms. Because when you say this is about how Maduro was arrested, or when you say anything that carries any whiff of defense of this terrible dictator, you’re allowing Trump to stage a false argument as if it were the true one. You’re allowing him to claim that — th what what has happened here is not something done for the national interest. There is some — and we’ll learn more about it — there’s some shady element to all of this. And that’s the place where you need to focus. 

 

And the problem is we’re all kind of conservative in, in a small “c” sense. We all wanna remember arguments we used to have, and to think about a normal American presidency who does things for a normal American way. And, and it’s just hard for people in Congress, a big institution, hard for people in the media to say, You know what, there’s probably a corrupt motive here. And even if it’s not immediately obvious, what that corrupt motive is, just wait 72 hours and it will become obvious. But don’t start with the premise that what you’re seeing here is Iraq, or no — Panama, or one of those previous struggles replayed. This is something different. This is about somebody having a, having a get rich quick scheme. And we just need to, it’ll take a little while to discover who that somebody is.

 

MARTIN: It’s interesting. Who do, who do you think should be articulating that argument? Should it be members of Congress? Should it be public intellectuals like yourself? Who should be saying that?

 

FRUM: I think there are things that members of Congress can think without having to say. Obviously a member of Congress needs to wait to be — if there is a corrupt scheme here. you don’t wanna say that until you have more proof of exactly what the corrupt scheme is. But they need to keep in mind that that’s probably what is going on here. And, and not to allow old habits to drive them into the instinctive response to whatever international law means, that’s what was violated here. Because that will sound to a lot of Americans like just pettifogging and denigrating a great American military victory when that’s not what happened here. We haven’t had a great American military victory. We’ve had a raid that’s apprehended, a genuine wrongdoer, but probably for reasons that won’t bear a lot of public scrutiny when they’re revealed.

 

MARTIN: In their sort of statements, initially, most Republicans were on board. Most Republicans supported it. And Democrats are skeptical. But there are some Republicans who have expressed the same doubts that you have, who said that this doesn’t make sense according to the market. It doesn’t make sense according to past patterns of behavior. I mean, the President just pardoned the former president of Honduras who was convicted of trafficking enormous amounts of drugs into the United States, convicted in an American court. And so they’ve pointed out the inconsistencies that you have pointed out. They’ve pointed out, it makes no sense from a market perspective. Do you think any of those arguments are penetrating?

 

FRUM: No, I think there’s, there’s a habit here. So there is a long tradition going back to George Washington’s time of arguments between more interventionists and more isolationist Americans. There are very com — familiar arguments, complicated arguments, a lot of good faith on both sides. And I think there are people who support, who would like to support Trump, who want to see us revert to the interventionist versus isolationist argument and say, Well, president Trump pretended to be an isolationist. Now he’s acting as an interventionist. He’s contradicting himself. And, and, but at least we’re back in our familiar landscape, and we don’t have to adjust to the strange new world in which we live, where those arguments are not relevant to what’s happening now. Trump is planning apparently — or it’s rumored or reported or claimed by members of the administration — to follow up what he did in Venezuela by doing a Pearl Harbor on Denmark. Now what is going, what, whatever that is, that’s not a part of our old isolationist versus interventionist arguments anymore, because there’s never been an interventionist in American history who said what intervention means is doing a Pearl Harbor on a NATO ally. 

 

MARTIN: So the question then becomes though, if the arguments are as clear as you have articulated them, why aren’t more people making them? 

 

FRUM: Because in the back of what I’m saying, are some really upsetting things that we don’t like to think about. I mean, a lot of people are critical of this administration and say, you know, I — yeah, it’s, it’s corrupt. It’s corrupt. But there are other things going on. If you take that argument seriously, it’s very upsetting. We don’t have a presidency that has scandals. We have a scandal that is running a presidency. That the scandal is the story. And there, there, there are many particular scandals, but there’s one big scandal, which is a president and his family using the office for self enrichment on a scale ne — not only never seen in American history, but never seen in the history of any democratic country at all. You have to look to post-colonial Africa or post-Soviet, Soviet Union to see compar — comparable billion dollar scales of self-enrichment. And we wanna believe that the country we grew up in, that we loved, the institutions we revere, are are there. And it’s, it’s just, it’s just hard. It’s just hard to take on board the scale of what has been done to American institutions, especially in the second Trump presidency, but generally since 2016.

 

MARTIN: Alot of people think that one of the difficulties of America’s culture right now is just a, a sort of a nihilism, a a cynicism about everything. I mean, there’s one sort of theory about the, the loss of confidence in the, in the legacy media, for example. Is this too negative, too cynical? But you’re saying it’s the opposite, is that there’s a sort of a willingness and an unwillingness to really see something as clearly as it needs to be seen — to be as negative as the moment calls for.

 

FRUM: In pro — in pro-institutional America. And especially, I mean, people who watch a program like this, we’re, we’re older. We remember many presidents. We remember an America that for most of us has, has done, has been a good place for us. We remember that America has been a force for good in the world. We remember the coming down to the Berlin Wall. We remember the spread of democracy in the 1990s. We remember the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of the dictatorship in Chile. Taiwan and South Korea becoming democracies, Mexico turning into a multi-party democracy. That’s, for me, that’s yesterday. 

 

And, and we remember a United States in which you know, there’s dignity — and however, foul mouth politicians are in private, when they appear in public, they’re dignified. If someone dies, they don’t mock the dead. We, we, we just, and, and when you have a president who, when someone dies in the most tragic, horrific way, he, his instinct is, Let me go mock that person. Lemme see…the family’s not miserable enough. Let me see if the president of the United States can add a little something to the family’s misery. It’s hard to adjust to that world. We don’t want to be there. And so it’s, it’s easy for those of us in pro-institutional America to say, Okay, the real story here is what Marco Rubio is saying to the German chancellor. Because that feels like America as we knew it.

 

MARTIN: What, what should members of Congress be doing right now? 

 

FRUM: <crosstalk> If I have one, one wish I would have a joint house and Senate resolution saying that any presidential order to attack the territory of a NATO ally is a, it’s a, is by that fact an illegal order and obedience to it is an, is a, is an act of obeying an illegal order. Treaties of the United States are the law of the land according to the Constitution. A treaty is, is very as every bit as much law as any statute of Congress. And if a president orders a general officer to attack a NATO ally without first canceling the NATO treaty. That, that’s, that’s an illegal order. I’d like to see Congress pass that. 

 

I’d like to see Congress pass a resolution, recognizing the winner Edmundo Gonzalez, the winner of the 2024 election, the person recognized by the United States, and almost all of America’s allies and most countries in Latin America as the rightful president of Venezuela. I’d like them to put some muscle behind that. That you don’t wanna send troops to Venezuela, but the goal should be bring Edmundo Gonzalez to the lawful power and in a negotiated way. So that would be the best outcome, but you need to know where you’re going and bringing the proper legitimate president of, of our, of Venezuela to power. That should be the American goal, not empowering the next dictator in line.

 

MARTIN: Why do you think it is that this administration is so reluctant to acknowledge this, this election? I mean, which as you pointed out, most governments around the world have done. 

 

FRUM: Well, there may be a, a lot of petty reasons, but I think there’s one big one. Which is, if you took this idea seriously, you’d be signing up for a big challenge. Bringing — Venezuela was a very successful country from the fifties, 1950s. The 1990s. It fell into disrepair under Chavez and into chaos under Maduro. So bringing Venezuela back to what it used to be, using its oil, resources for the benefit of the Venezuelan people, that’s a big project. 

 

It also means that you’d have to stop, see the quarter of the country that has been driven into exile, 8 million people. By the way, the largest group of ’em in Columbia, but many in the United States. You have to stop seeing them as invaders and threats and criminals who should be sent to torture prisons. And that the act of repatriation is not one that involves a waste off at a torture prison, but involves some way to say, how do we take all the capital and to knowhow that is left Venezuela and encourage it to repatriate, at least in part, and to reconstruct the country, this would be a big project. 

 

And one more thing that one of the reasons they’re reluctant to do it is if you wanna do the project at reasonable cost to the American people, then you need partners. So, you know, this is not going to be an American — we’re gonna work with Mexico and, and Colombia and Brazil — 

 

MARTIN: And Colombia. 

 

FRUM: And, and that we’re gonna do. I mean this, I think, when I think about how this military intervention went, how differently would it have gone if the president had delivered his message, not flanked by his own administration, but flanked by other presidents from Latin America, backed by a resolution of Congress. I think we don’t, I mean that, that that wouldn’t happen from this president, but I think a lot of people think, Yeah. That, yeah. Ending a dictatorship in Venezuela helping that is rejected by his own people in a democratic vote. Where, but where it’s a big reconstruction project. We need partners, we need friends, and we need permission from Congress.

 

MARTIN: Before we let you go, I wanna loop back to where we started our conversation, and here’s where I’m asking you to speculate. Do you have a theory about why this happened? As you pointed out, the administration has given multiple reasons, some of which are contradictory.

 

FRUM: I have a guess. It’s not really a theory. I think the United States has suffered this terrible flow of drug deaths from opioids, not from the drugs that come from Venezuela, which are mostly cocaine. The Trump administration — many of the people there feel those deaths very intensely as they should and want to do something about it. But they wanna do something that blames foreigners, that says, the reason Americans are dying is not because of things that are wrong in American life. It’s not that we need some change in the way we do things here. It’s some, someone else is doing this to us. The urge to blame others. 

 

Now, their first attention was to Mexico which is where actually most of the fentanyl flows from. And before, in, in the year ‘23 and ‘24 there are a lot of talk from people who would become important in the Trump administration about actually using military action inside Mexico. (24:07): And I wrote about this for The Atlantic. Once in power, it became clear this Mexico war scheme was not very feasible. And anyway, the Mexicans went very far to cooperate with the United States and with the Trump administration. But that urge to do something violent, to stop drugs that are blamed on others, not to look inward, but to look outward for a villain, I think that impulse shifted from Mexico to attach itself to Venezuela. 

 

And the irony, of course, is that there genuinely is a big drug flow problem via Mexico. There isn’t such a big flow, drug flow problem through Venezuela. But it was a place where those feelings could go. And instead of looking inward and saying, Why is it that so many Americans are harming themselves in this way and so many more than were harming themselves just 15 years ago? Why? You know, what, what changes need to be made here so that Americans are less inclined to take drugs? They’re bet, they’re met with better care when they get it. That anti overdose remedies are more easily and freely available. Those, those are — all of that requires thinking and planning and not just anger and violence.

MARTIN: Hmm. David Frum, thank you for talking with us.

 

FRUM: Thank you. Bye-Bye.