The Trump administration is ramping up military pressure on Nicolás Maduro. Is he a threat to the U.S.?

Why is the U.S. targeting Maduro?
The Trump administration has accused the Venezuelan president of waging war on the U.S. through “narco-terrorism.” Many experts dispute whether that label is appropriate, but what is clear is that Maduro, 62, is a foe of U.S. influence in Latin America and a strongman who has pushed Venezuela deeper into dictatorship and economic decline. A stolid former Caracas bus driver, Maduro claims to be continuing the socialist mission of his predecessor Hugo Chávez. But, lacking Chávez’s charisma, he has resorted to rigging the last two presidential elections and using security forces to persecute, torture, and, in some cases, kill opponents. The U.S. is offering $50 million for information that will lead to Maduro’s arrest—the biggest reward of its kind—and has labeled him “one of the world’s largest drug traffickers.” In recent weeks, the U.S. has deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean that includes some 4,500 Marines and sailors, destroyers, an attack submarine, and 10 F-35 stealth fighters. And it has used air strikes to destroy at least four alleged drug-smuggling boats off Venezuela— killing 17 people—without a legal process. Maduro calls President Trump’s claims of drug trafficking a lie, saying the U.S.’s real goal is regime change and the installation of a “puppet government” so it can “take control of Venezuela’s oil.”

How did he gain power?
While working as a bus driver, Maduro rose through the ranks of the trade union movement. He entered Chávez’s inner circle in the early 1990s when he began dating his now wife, Cilia Flores, a lawyer who helped secure Chávez’s release from prison following the former tank commander’s failed 1992 coup attempt. After Chávez won the 1998 presidential election, both Maduro and Flores took top posts in government. In December 2012, a cancer-stricken Chávez used his final speech to urge Venezuelans to vote for then–vice president Maduro in the upcoming election. Chávez died three months later and Maduro—who claimed his mentor’s spirit visited him in the form of a songbird—won the presidency that April by a slim 1.5-point margin. Many supporters of Chávez boycotted the vote to protest worsening economic conditions.

What policies did Maduro pursue? 
He continued Chávez’s campaign of nationalizing industries, expanding social programs, and cracking down on the fast-growing opposition. Maduro used El Helicoide—a futuristic, uncompleted 1961 mega-shopping mall in Caracas—as a prison and torture center for hundreds of political detainees. “We would hear the screams all night,” said former Venezuelan lawmaker Rosmit Mantilla, who was detained there from 2014 to 2016. “I heard about people raped with blunt objects, others given electric shocks.” Like Chávez, Maduro raided the coffers of the state-owned oil company—Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves—to pay for the social programs that kept the working class loyal. Then, in 2014, global oil prices crashed, a catastrophe for a petrostate that relied on oil for 95% of export earnings.

What happened to the economy? 
It cratered, shrinking 80% from 2014 to 2020. Three-quarters of Venezuela’s roughly 30 million people fell into extreme poverty, and 8 million fled abroad, including 800,000 who headed to the U.S. Inflation hit 800% in 2016 and zoomed past 1 million percent two years later. Maduro responded with price controls, but that only worsened food shortages. In 2017, Maduro nullified the opposition-controlled National Assembly by creating a new regime-controlled Constituent Assembly, which granted itself wide powers to write and pass legislation. Dozens of opposition supporters were killed in protests and hundreds more were arrested. Maduro was re-elected president in a rigged 2018 vote that triggered economic sanctions from the U.S. Today, a new Maduro-allied elite splashes money around Caracas gained through regime connections, as well as through criminal activity such as smuggling gasoline and minerals, and drug and human trafficking.

Does that make Maduro a ‘narco-terrorist’? 
Regime insiders are involved in the drug trade: About a quarter of the world’s cocaine passes through Venezuela, and narco-trafficking generated $8.2 billion in profits for Venezuela last year. Two of Maduro’s nephews were arrested in a 2015 DEA sting in Haiti, after attempting to transport 800 kilos of cocaine to the U.S.; they were later released in a prisoner swap. In 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and high-ranking Venezuelan officials and military officers, accusing them of leading Cártel de Los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”), a “narco-terrorism” network that works with Colombian guerrilla groups and Mexican cartels to ship cocaine to the U.S. Some regional experts doubt there really is such a cartel. “There has never been clear evidence that such an organization exists,” said Phil Gunson of the nonprofit International Crisis Group. And despite the Trump administration’s claims, there is no evidence that Venezuela is smuggling the deadly opioid fentanyl to the U.S.

Is the U.S. trying to topple Maduro?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has hinted as much, saying last month that “Maduro is not a government or political regime” but a member of a “terrorist organization and organized-crime organization.” A source close to the administration told NBC News that officials hope the boat strikes will lead cartel bosses inside and outside Venezuela to turn on Maduro, so they can return to business as normal. One administration official told Axios that wasn’t the goal, saying, “This is 105% about narco-terrorism, but if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.” But experts warn that this campaign could end up aiding Maduro, who now portrays himself as a defender of Venezuelan national sovereignty. “If their intention is to topple Maduro, it’s not working,” said former U.S. diplomat Brian Naranjo, who served in Caracas. “It’s bolstering him.”

A lifeline from Beijing 
“Ni hao!” Maduro said during an August speech, pretending to greet Xi Jinping on a Huawei phone that the Chinese president had personally gifted him. That’s not all China offers Maduro’s regime: It buys around 90% of Venezuelan oil and has invested more than $67 billion in the country since 2007, including military aid. Last year, Xi congratulated Maduro on winning a third presidential term, though international observers presented evidence showing that opposition candidate Edmundo González had won by a wide margin. But would Xi support Venezuela in a war with the U.S.? China’s Foreign Ministry has denounced U.S. “coercion and bullying” against Venezuela, but experts are skeptical that China will offer anything more than words of support for Maduro. “In Beijing,” said Ryan C. Berg of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “they probably consider him to be a clown.”

For the first time in more than three decades, “attacks by far-left extremists are outpacing far-right violence,” said Zachary Basu in Axios. That’s the finding of a new study from the nonpartisan Center for Strategic & International Studies, which looked at 750 domestic attacks and plots from 1994 through this summer. For almost all that period, far-right terrorism was “more frequent and more lethal”; in the past decade alone, right-wing extremists killed 112 people in the U.S., while leftist attacks killed 13. But “America’s domestic terrorism landscape has undergone a remarkable inversion since President Trump returned to office,” with at least five leftist attacks or plots recorded in the first six months of the year compared with one right-wing attack. And we’ve seen a flurry of suspected leftist violence in recent weeks. Fourteen days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a suspect who considered the conservative activist’s views “hateful,” a gunman sprayed bullets at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees. The gunman, who killed himself, may have been targeting federal agents—he wrote “ANTI-ICE” on a bullet. 

The Left’s dangerous rhetoric is contributing to this wave of political violence, said Ryan J. Rusak in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Democrats can’t expect to keep telling their supporters that Trump is a dictator and ICE agents are the “gestapo” and “not expect some portion of them to take serious action.” It’s true that a “frightening new pattern” has emerged, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. It seems to have begun in December, when Luigi Mangione allegedly shot dead the CEO of UnitedHealthcare on a Manhattan street. But while Mangione, Kirk’s suspected killer, and the Dallas shooter espoused “leftish motives for their alleged crimes,” none was a registered Democrat or involved in activism. Instead, they were “men of the internet,” who stewed in the toxic soup of social media and online chatrooms. They are “loners lashing out, cloaking their personal grievances and homicidal impulses in political rationales.”

That hasn’t stopped Trump from using “these events to paint all left-wing dissent as an existential threat to America,” said Ryan Zickgraf in UnHerd. The recent surge in political violence is indeed “troubling,” but so is the president’s vow to crack down on liberal donors and progressive foundations, which he accuses without evidence of funding and fomenting anti-Right hate. The reality is that the modern Left is “weak and fragmented,” unable to even mount a unified response to Trump’s authoritarian project. “There’s little revolutionary fervor, just a climate of disaggregated rage, and a government eager to exploit it.”

Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is still hurting over his final conversation with his father, said Sam Anderson in The New York Times. It was in 2019, and Rocky Johnson—a professional wrestler like his son—had just published a memoir. It was, as Johnson had expected, largely a work of fiction intended to cash in on his son’s Hollywood fame. “Growing up with my dad, I know the truth to all these stories,” he says. “If the truth is blue, this story is red.” Johnson, 53, could live with tall tales. What “crossed the line” were a series of fabricated quotes from Johnson about how he owed his father—a sporadic presence in his childhood— for all his own success both in the ring and on screen. It was a sign, he says, of his father’s “narcissism.” They fought over the phone, and Johnson got the book pulled from stores; Rocky died the next year before they could reconcile. 
Rocky’s funeral was attended by the greats of the wrestling world: Hulk Hogan, the Bushwhackers, Triple H, the Wild Samoans. All were full of kind words and stories about Rocky. “Wildly enough, my old man was just this amazing friend. Complicated husband. Complicated dad. But an awesome friend to everyone else. I think my dad’s capacity to love was very limited. He was kicked out [of his home] when he was 13. Imagine that pain. That was my dad.”