Venezuela First or America First?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
President Trump shocked both Caracas and Washington when he announced
a brilliant, precise, decisive, nighttime raid that toppled and deposed
Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro and his wife from power.
They were captured in a brilliant raid. Both he and

(00:22):
his wife are now in the United States, in fact
in a district court, Southern District Court of New York,
facing cocaine trafficking and narco terrorism charges. And make no
mistake about it, whatever the administration is saying, and I'm
giving them full plaudits, full kudos on a brilliant tactical strike.

(00:46):
It was legal. There's no question it was legal. It
was surgical, it was extremely well planned, and there is
plenty of precedent for what was done. So when the
Democrats say this was not legal or constitution they're lying
and they're a bunch of hypocrites. But when they say
this is not nation building, when Trump says this was

(01:09):
not an attempt to overthrow the regime, I'm sorry, it's
not true. This clearly is regime change. Maduro is out,
and as Trump himself admitted in his press conference, the
United States now for a significant period of time. It
could be six months, it could be a year, it

(01:31):
could even be several years. Will now be running Venezuela.
He has put together a transition governing team led by
Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and General Dan Kine, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs. Rubio is essentially the viceroy of Venezuela.

(01:52):
We will now be in control of their oil infrastructure,
of modernizing that oil infrastructure, sure of stabilizing and restoring
order to Venezuela. My friends, this is Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya,
Syria all over again. And the hard part is not

(02:15):
poppling the dictator. That's the easy part. The hard part
is governing and administering a basket case. And that's what
Venezuela has become. After decades of communist Chavez Maduro misrule,
corruption and mismanagement. Venezuelans are starving. Meduro was a communist

(02:41):
mass murderer and authoritarian thug who traumatized and shattered that country,
sending eight million Venezuelans as migrants abroad. Because he's so
impoverished Venezuela. They were desperate to leave. They didn't come
to America. They went to Mexico to Brazil, to Argentina

(03:05):
to Chile, all over the region. And so yes, the
Venezuelan people are happy. They should be. The Venezuelan people
are celebrating they should be. But I'm not looking at
it from a Venezuelan perspective. I'm looking at it from
an America first perspective. And here is now what I see.

(03:27):
I see now the United States taking on the massive
undertaking in burden of running a country of thirty million people,
with still the remnants of the Maduro regime intact, with
revolutionary gorillas in the jungles and mountains of Venezuela, with

(03:48):
a cocaine trafficking empire that many generals within the Venezuelan
government have been profiting from. You can see a violent
insurrection or insertency take place where they will slowly pick
off our troops one by one, or god forbid, even
a civil war breakout in Venezuela. And even if we

(04:12):
don't have those dire, more apocalyptic scenarios take place, still
we're going to run Venezuela. How much is this going
to cost US? Trillions and trillions and trillions potentially of
dollars that are going to flow in, whether it's from taxpayers,

(04:33):
whether it's going to be from oil companies. This is
going to further put financial stress on the United States,
and we have to ask ourselves, why would we put
our entire prestige and put American troops at risk in
a country that is ripe for gorilla war and that

(04:57):
ultimately we have no right to run. This is the
road to more entanglements, to a quagmire, to more nation building,
to more imperialism, and that is exactly what brought us
down in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and in Syria.

(05:19):
I understand Trump's motives were noble. I understand he wants
to limit our time in Venezuela. I understand he wants
it to be a quick transition. But intentions are one thing,
reality is another. And ultimately I have to ask this question,
did you vote for this? Because I didn't. If Obama

(05:44):
had done this, if Biden had done it, if Bill
Clinton had done it, if George W. Bush had done it,
most of you and certainly most of MAGA would have
been one thousand percent against it. But Trump has done it.
The base is willing to give him a chance. I

(06:05):
disagree A mistake is a mistake, is a mistake, and
this is a mistake. I didn't vote for Venezuela first.
I voted for America first. And that's why, after this operation,

(06:26):
and now that Meduro is gone, I am strongly urging
the President have quick elections called in Venezuela. Let the
opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, most likely will win, take
over the country and let her and the Venezuelan people

(06:47):
fix the damage inflicted by Maduro Chavez and his despicable regime.
But for the United States, it's time to come home
and focus on our problems here at home, America first,
not Venezuela first. Mister President, don't become George W. Bush

(07:15):
two point zero. War will only destabilize your administration and
derail your agenda. And Trump is now talking about not
just Venezuela, but even toppling the government of Colombia, the
government of the communist government of Cuba, and forcing Denmark

(07:35):
to sell Greenland to the United States. Mister President, we
didn't vote for you to be a foreign policy president.
We voted for you to keep us out of foreign entanglements,
out of endless wars, and to rebuild the United States.

(07:56):
We don't need nation building abroad, We need nation building
at home.