Where Are the Democrats on Venezuela?

The U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro, has prompted two markedly different reactions from Democrats in Washington.

Among the party’s leadership and old guard, criticism has centered less on the brazen illegality of the act itself than on the Trump administration’s failure to extend the basic courtesy of consultation and prior notice. 

“The administration has assured me three separate times that it was not pursuing regime change or taking military action in Venezuela. Clearly, they are not being straight with Americans,” complained Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was careful to preface his remarks with the requisite denunciation of Maduro as “an illegitimate dictator.” 

Schumer’s counterpart in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, opened his official statement with an even stronger condemnation of the Venezuelan president, describing Maduro as a “criminal and authoritarian dictator who has oppressed the people of Venezuela for years” before turning to a notably restrained criticism of President Donald Trump for his failure to “properly notify Congress in advance of the operation in Venezuela.” The House leader went on to adopt the tone of a pedantic professor rather than a national political leader: 

Pursuant to the Constitution, the framers gave Congress the sole power to declare war as the branch of government closest to the American people. The House and Senate must be briefed immediately and compelling evidence to explain and justify this unauthorized use of military force should be presented forthwith.

Most Democrats in leadership roles have echoed this messaging, while other Democrats don’t even attempt to hide their approval of the administration’s audacious violation of international law. Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee chair, described the “capture of the brutal, illegitimate ruler of Venezuela” as “welcome news for my friends and neighbors who fled his violent, lawless, and disastrous rule.” Mindful of partisan optics, Wasserman Schultz offered only mild criticism of the Trump administration, describing the “absence of congressional involvement prior to this action” as a mistake that “risks the continuation of the illegitimate Venezuelan regime.” In essence, the Florida congresswomen complained that the administration had not sought congressional authorization for a full-scale attack. “Cutting off the head of a snake is fruitless if it just regrows,” she said. 

Senior Democrats have repeatedly taken aim at the president and his administration while stopping short of condemning the act itself. Their outrage was directed less at the invasion of a sovereign country and the abduction of its leader than at being excluded from the decision-making process.

That emphasis on process stood in sharp contrast to the response from the party’s younger and more progressive members, who offered an unambiguous moral denunciation of the Trump administration’s illegal action and policy of regime change, and gave little weight to the administration’s manufactured pretexts for the invasion. 

In a statement released shortly after the news of the strike, the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Ilhan Omar, denounced the invasion of Venezuela as “blatantly illegal and unconstitutional” and called for Congress to restrain the president’s war powers. “With today’s action, Trump is signaling a new era of open domination of the hemisphere and continued disregard for international law and sovereignty.” 

“It’s not about drugs,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York stated bluntly. “If it was, Trump wouldn’t have pardoned one of the largest narco traffickers in the world last month. It’s about oil and regime change. And they need a trial now to pretend that it isn’t. Especially to distract from [Jeffrey] Epstein [and] skyrocketing healthcare costs.” 

“Trump risked the lives of American troops and killed at least 40 people in Venezuela in pursuit of oil and profit,” echoed Rep. Joaqin Castro of Texas, who called on Congress to “stop this reckless and illegal regime change war.”

This variance between establishment and progressive Democrats laid bare the depth of the party’s generational and ideological divisions, which are likely to grow even more pronounced in the coming months as candidates begin competing in high-profile midterm elections. 

“The government of the United States has illegally invaded a foreign country and kidnapped its leader. There are gonna be people … on both sides of the aisle, trying to convince us all that somehow this was justified. It isn’t,” declared Graham Platner, the progressive candidate running for the Senate in Maine, in one of the clearest rebukes of the Trump administration’s action, which he aptly described as “international gangsterism.” 

Platner’s chief primary rival, moderate Gov. Janet Mills, later released a statement that largely mirrored the establishment wing’s equivocating response. 

At the heart of the foreign policy rift between younger progressives and older liberals is a fundamental disagreement over the role the United States should play in the world today. Among the party’s old guard, there remains a lingering Cold War conviction that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation,” as the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously put it. This post-Cold War version of “liberal internationalism” clings to a highly idealized view of American history that younger progressive Democrats — who grew up and sometimes served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — find not only laughable, but dangerous. 

More than two decades and countless deaths later, the party that led the U.S. into disastrous quagmires in the Middle East is intent on leading the country into yet another war. The key difference today is that Trump and his cronies have not even bothered to conceal their imperialist motivations. In the White House press conference held on Saturday, the president spoke openly about installing a puppet leader and cashing in on the country’s natural resources. “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us,” declared the president, as if the United States has a divine right to the country’s natural resources. 

The following day, the emboldened president doubled down on this neo-imperialism and acknowledged the ultimate goal of regime change in an interview with The Atlantic: “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.” He also threatened other countries and territories and their leaders, such as Colombia and Greenland. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” declared Trump, signaling potentially more regime change attempts to come.  

In the early aughts, most Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq. This was partly due to the initial public support for the war and the George W. Bush administration’s fabricated intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” (much like the Trump administration’s fabricated claims about the Venezuelan government’s support for “narco-terrorism”). At the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, a Gallup poll found that 72% of Americans favored the invasion, with roughly the same number expressing approval of President Bush. Today there is no excuse for Democrats to stand by as another Republican president — this one historically unpopular — launches an illegal invasion in our own backyard. Indeed, it is not only morally correct but politically smart to oppose the illegal attack on Venezuela, as there is little appetite for another regime change crusade among the American public. In a YouGov poll conducted in late December, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans (and less than half of Republicans) supported invading Venezuela or using military force to overthrow Maduro. Other polls show similar levels of opposition to military intervention. 

If there was ever a time for Democrats to grow a spine, it’s now. As California Rep. Ro Khanna put it on Saturday, “If you cannot oppose this regime change war for oil, you don’t have the moral clarity or guts to lead our party or nation.”