Trump’s Move for Regime Change in Venezuela Threatens a New MAGA Rift

 

Trump’s Move for Regime Change in Venezuela Threatens a New MAGA Rift

 

Some Republicans are asking how Mr. Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela squares with his past pledges to avoid foreign entanglements and nation building.

 

Reid J. Epstein Kellen Browning

By Reid J. Epstein and Kellen Browning

Jan. 4, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/us/politics/trump-republicans-venezuela.html

 

President Trump seized control of the Republican Party on an anti-interventionist “America First” platform that has cleaved the G.O.P. from its Bush-era foreign policy that led to years of messy foreign entanglements.

 

Now Mr. Trump’s decision to send the military into Venezuela to remove its president, and his vague claim that the United States would go on to “run” the country, have threatened to open a new rift within the political movement he has built over the past decade. A handful of Republicans are asking how it squares with his campaign-trail promises to not engage in nation-building or begin new foreign wars.

 

Mr. Trump and members of his administration have offered differing explanations of what would happen in Venezuela now that the United States has captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him back to New York to face criminal charges. After Mr. Trump said that Americans would “run” the country, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tiptoed back from that position on the Sunday morning news shows, and noted that American troops were no longer on the ground there.

 

“The lack of framing of the message on a potential occupation has the base bewildered, if not angry,” Stephen K. Bannon, the pro-Trump podcaster, said in an interview. “While President Trump makes the case for hemispheric defense, Rubio confuses with talk of removing Hamas and Hezbollah.”

 

On his podcast, “War Room,” Mr. Bannon and some of his guests praised the way the military operation had been executed. But he also asked pointed questions, including whether it was “harkening back to our fiasco in Iraq under Bush.”

 

The operation was celebrated as a victory by many Republicans. Representative Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s military action in Venezuela was “consistent with a foreign policy that is aimed first and foremost to protect the interests of the United States.”

 

But it also attracted criticism from a smattering of younger right-wing influencers and podcasters who hold significant sway among the online MAGA base, and who developed their political identities watching prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush and Obama administrations.

 

Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist, wrote to her 7.5 million followers on X that the C.I.A. had “staged another hostile takeover of a country” at the behest of “globalist psychopaths.” She compared the incursion to U.S. actions in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

The few critical notes among congressional Republicans came from lawmakers who have already distanced themselves from Mr. Trump.

 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is resigning on Monday after a public break from Mr. Trump led to her being ostracized, compared the president to previous administrations that had sought regime change in Iraq and Libya.

 

“This is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn’t serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks and the oil executives,” she told NBC on Sunday. “And so my pushback here is on the Trump administration that campaigned on Make America Great Again, that we thought was putting America first, I want to see domestic policy be the priority that helps Americans afford life after four disastrous years of the Biden administration.”

 

While Mr. Trump has long accused Venezuela and other Latin American nations of sending drugs and criminals to the United States, his assertion that Venezuela’s president needed to be ousted so American oil companies could reclaim resources there was relatively new. Unlike the lead-up to the Iraq war two decades ago, the administration had made relatively little effort to sell the American people on using military force in Venezuela before this weekend.

 

“VENEZUELA is not about drugs; it’s about OIL and REGIME CHANGE,” Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a longtime thorn in Mr. Trump’s side, wrote on social media. “This is not what we voted for.”

 

Mr. Trump, in an interview on Sunday with The Atlantic, dismissed concerns about what might happen next in Venezuela. “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now,” he said. “Can’t get any worse.”

 

Mr. Trump himself has at times diverged from his isolationist language and his pledges to end the “era of endless wars,” especially last year when he launched strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran. He has said in the past that “America First” essentially means whatever he says it means.

 

Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who has long echoed Mr. Trump’s isolationist foreign policy views, seemed to endorse the idea that “America First” was consistent with taking over another country and dictating its affairs.

 

“Again, we will see,” Mr. Jordan told Dana Bash of CNN when she confronted him on Sunday about what “America First” meant. “We don’t know what that exactly means.”

 

Mr. Kiley, the California Republican, said that because of Venezuela’s relative proximity to the United States and Mr. Maduro’s relationships with American adversaries like Russia and China, the U.S. was justified in intervening to protect its interests and security.

 

“When it comes to foreign policy, you have to have a realist perspective as well,” Mr. Kiley said. “And philosophy and ideology can only take you so far when you’re dealing with the complexity of human affairs in a dangerous and interconnected world where U.S. interests could be implicated in a whole host of ways.”

 

Other Republican defenders of Mr. Trump’s action argued that the effort was more specific and targeted than invasions that led to yearslong occupations, and predicted that it would not involve American casualties or troops remaining on the ground.

 

Brian Schimming, the chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said it was easier for Republicans who opposed other foreign interventions to support one in Venezuela because of the country’s relative proximity to the United States.

 

“Getting people over the bridge that this is an America First thing is not a hard thing,” Mr. Schimming said in an interview. “This is not one where somebody in this coffee house is saying, ‘Oh my God, I hope my brother doesn’t get drafted.’”

 

Robert Axson, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party, said that “a little bit of an investment of force and showing that force now, if appropriately measured and focused and planned for, as thus far it has been, can do a world of good in avoiding what could be an absolute catastrophe down the road.”

 

Mr. Axson acknowledged that some people might question whether the incursion was contrary to Mr. Trump’s isolationist message.

 

“Being America First and being very restrained in willingness to risk American service members is certainly appropriate, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to put your head in the sand and do nothing,” he said.

 

Vice President JD Vance, in a lengthy post on social media, sought to calm anxieties about Mr. Trump’s claim that the United States would run Venezuela so it could expropriate the country’s natural resources.

 

“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?” Mr. Vance wrote. “Great powers don’t act like that.”

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Jack Crosbie contributed reporting.

 

Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.

 

Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.