Trump’s Risky War in Venezuela
By going around Congress, the president is showing contempt for the will of the public.
Updated at 8:44 a.m. ET on January 3, 2026
This morning, President Trump unilaterally launched a regime-change war against Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, ordering strikes on multiple military targets in the country and seizing its leader and his wife. They were “captured and flown out of the country,” Trump stated on Truth Social. “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Attorney General Pam Bondi stated, in something like an inversion of the notion that justice should be blind and impartial.
After Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress and asked it to declare war on Japan. Prior to waging regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush sought and secured authorizations to use military force. Those presidents asked for permission to conduct hostilities because the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, unambiguously vests the war power in Congress. And Congress voted to authorize force in part because a majority of Americans favored war.
Trump says he will speak to the nation at 11 a.m. eastern time and address his rationale for the attack. The president may point to the fact that the State Department has branded Maduro the head of a “narcoterrorist” state, and that in 2020 Maduro was indicted in the United States on charges that he oversaw a violent drug cartel. For months Trump has been seeking the ouster of Maduro, and aligning the United States with opposition figures who contest the legitimacy of his presidency.
