The 3 Keys to Understanding Trump’s Retro Coup in VenezuelaNEWS | 07 January 2026Donald Trump is hardly the first US president to look south and conquer. Over the last century, no fewer than a dozen of Trump’s predecessors embraced the belief that democracy and profit in Latin America were only one successful coup d’état away. But the particular strain of imperial ambition that Trump appears to have set loose with this weekend’s raid in Venezuela appears simultaneously to be deeply atavistic and uniquely Trumpian. And it’s one that doesn’t look set to die down anytime soon.
It took only a few hours, following the US military’s daring seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, for Trump’s rationale to shift from hand-waving about democracy and fighting narcotics toward taking control of that nation’s vast oil reserves. “We’re in charge,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to run everything. We’re going to run it—fix it.” And even before Maduro appeared in a New York City courtroom Monday, Trump had begun to celebrate what he’s calling his “Donroe Doctrine,” explicitly threatening a half-dozen other nations, from Colombia and Cuba to Mexico and Denmark’s Greenland, in a talk with reporters on Air Force One on Sunday.
Nicolás Maduro in handcuffs after landing on a Manhattan helipad, escorted by federal agents en route to a New York federal courthouse on January 5, 2026. Photograph: Getty Images
As much as it may seem like we’re heading into a new, dangerous, and destabilizing period of Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime—his actions in Venezuela appear illegal under both international law and US law and happened without any congressional consultation—it’s important to recognize and understand some context. The history of the region—and, more importantly, of how Donald Trump himself operates, how he seems caught in the mindset of 1980s America—make clear that Trump may be embarking on what may someday be viewed as the last war of the 20th century. In fact, there are three main principles that help explain where the US finds itself just days into a new year—principles that make clear how, despite how shocking Saturday morning’s breaking news alerts turned out to be, this moment is actually quite unsurprising:
1. The US is good at coups, bad at what follows.
For a century, the two chief hallmarks of US meddling in Latin America have been short-term tactical military success and long-term strategic failure. These two themes are, in fact, deep, venal strands of America’s political DNA. Case in point: Long, long before he was indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary and meddling in the 1972 presidential election, E. Howard Hunt spent his career as one of the CIA’s best overthrowers of governments.
In the early 1950s, the powerful United Fruit Company feared the land reforms Guatemala’s democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz might implement and convinced the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that the new Central American leader might embrace communism. The CIA, founded in 1947, was relatively new to the business of meddling in Central and South America, but the US certainly was not—among other expeditions, it had occupied Nicaragua on and off from 1912 to 1933, invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909 and then returned from 1917 to 1922, to protect US-owned sugar plantations.
Hunt was a decidedly middling spy, stationed in Mexico City—where he’d helped recruit another would-be junior officer, William F. Buckley, Jr.—but his career got a big boost when he helped lay the groundwork for overthrowing Árbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops,” Hunt said, decades later. It was one of the only successful CIA-backed coups of the 1950s, so Hunt was a natural to include when the agency began planning the Bay of Pigs invasion.Author: Garrett M. Graff. Source
