The story the American media is missing about Venezuela right now is not really about Venezuela. It is not about the country’s strongman president Nicolás Maduro, electoral legitimacy, corruption or even oil — at least not in the way Donald Trump pretends it to be. It is about something far more unsettling. The world’s most powerful country is openly asserting the right to invade, occupy and “run” any nation it chooses, and by failing to connect the dots for the American people, the media is helping to normalize Trump’s expansionist project.
What we are watching is not simply another foreign policy crisis; it is the construction of a permission structure for imperialism, built by stenography and deference. Mainstream media coverage of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, has not merely failed to interrogate the Pentagon’s actions, it has actively laundered them, presenting an act of war as a technocratic maneuver, a coup as a “capture” and an invasion as an “operation.” Americans have seen this pattern before, and the consequences were catastrophic.
Like George W. Bush’s regime change operation in Iraq, Trump’s removal of Maduro is premised on a transparent lie. Instead of Bush and Dick Cheney’s weapons of mass destruction, Trump has made a jumble of claims about electoral illegitimacy, corruption and “hemispheric defense” that sound like post-hoc rationalization — and that the administration didn’t care enough to conjure a logical or legal justification for an outcome decided in advance.
The sense of déjà vu is undeniable. In 2003, the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein, triggering a nearly two decade debacle that killed almost 5,000 American troops, cost more than a trillion dollars, destabilized an entire region and helped incubate movements far more violent than the regime it replaced. At the time, the American press largely went along with the Bush administration, amplifying official claims while marginalizing opposition voices.
This time, as Semafor reported, the New York Times and the Washington Post knew in advance about Trump’s unprovoked attack and chose to sit on the story, ostensibly to “avoid endangering U.S. troops.” Yet the administration gave no advance notice to Congress.
The Constitution is unambiguous: Invading a foreign country and kidnapping its president and first lady is an act of war. The president does not have the unilateral authority to launch such actions without congressional approval, which Trump did not seek. That should have been the frame from the first headline to the last chyron.
Media outlets that avoided describing Saturday’s actions as an act of war are actively assisting the administration in changing the facts after the fact of what the Pentagon dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve.
Media outlets that avoided describing Saturday’s actions as an act of war are actively assisting the administration in changing the facts after the fact of what the Pentagon dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve. Language matters because language shapes legitimacy. If it isn’t a war, then it doesn’t require debate. If it isn’t an invasion, then it doesn’t violate international law. If it isn’t a coup, then it doesn’t implicate the United States in overthrowing a sovereign government.
The New York Times editorial board, to its credit, called the invasion “illegal and unwise” and used the term “act of war.” That distinction matters. But the reporting pages of the Times did not follow suit. The Washington Post, meanwhile, now openly drifting into MAGA alignment, published a fawning editorial praising the attack as “one of the boldest moves a president has made in years” and declaring the operation an “unquestionable tactical success” — a chilling phrase to apply to the violent overthrow of a foreign leader, particularly when no one can say what comes next. Trying to track down confirmed details about Venezuelan casualties has been nearly impossible. The Pentagon has not held a press conference. As Reuters’ national security correspondent Idrees Ali noted on X, historically the defense department would have briefed reporters by now. “This Pentagon,” he said, “has been silent.”
On television, viewers were treated to a rotating cast of officials and pundits who helped sell previous disasters. This time is different, they insisted. CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, newly installed by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, conducted a soft, almost reverent interview withPete Hegseth, and pushed back on virtually none of the defense secretary’s claims. On MSNOW, viewers were treated to a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela James Story reminding them — without irony — that the U.S. government considers Maduro’s most recent election illegitimate, as if that assertion itself were sufficient justification for invasion. The same network then put former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton on air to defend Trump’s attack, as though one of the prime architects of the second Iraq War represents sober wisdom rather than institutional failure. On Fox News, host Will Cain suggested that American imperialism is the true meaning of “America First.”
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Trump himself has been explicit about how he views this moment. Gaggling with reporters aboard Air Force One, he argued that the Venezuela action differs from previous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan because “it’s in our area. The Donroe Doctrine.” The phrase is cartoonish, but the ideology is deadly serious. It is a blunt revival of the Monroe Doctrine, stripped of diplomatic pretense and rebranded as personal credo, one that treats the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. possession. The New York Post, one of Trump’s favorite outlets, claims credit for coining the term when it splashed “Donroe Doctrine” across its cover a year ago when Trump’s ambitions for Greenland were making news.
Monday morning headlines attempted to walk back the outlets’ earlier credulity. The Washington Post’s banner headline captured the quiet admission beneath the initial bravado: “Uncertainty clouds U.S. plan to ‘run’ Venezuela.” The Associated Press described events as “a turnaround after President Donald Trump announced a day earlier that the U.S. would be running Venezuela.” But the damage caused by the media’s failure was done. The frame had already been set. As Adam Johnson noted at The Intercept, “when faced with how to frame the first draft of history, the media has simply chosen the words preferred by the Trump administration.”
After a weekend of flattering coverage, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he is open to strikes against Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Iran and Greenland.
Even conservative voices have sounded alarms. George Will reminded readers of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rule: You break it, you own it. Candace Owens blasted the “hostile takeover” as CIA-backed regime change fundamentally incompatible with “America First.” Even Steve Bannon, while praising the operation as “bold and brilliant,” warned on his “War Room” podcast that extracting Maduro without dismantling the rest of his regime could spark civil conflict and regional instability. “So is this part of overall Hemispheric Defense, and we’re going to clean up this mess in Latin America? Or is this just the neocons talking him into it?” Bannon asked. That unease underscores how Trump’s escalation has left even his allies struggling to reconcile spectacle with strategy.
Trump’s invasion has made clear that “America First” now functions less as a restraint on military action than as a justification for wielding it for financial gain. He has openly pledged to dispatch oil companies to “start making money for the country.” With such blatant motives, the press can either interrogate this relationship or help legitimize it. So far, too much of the mainstream media has chosen the latter.
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