• It was thoughtful of Trump to send New York’s new mayor two prospective hires.
• American military forces and intelligence operatives conducted a surgical invasion of Venezuela. In a little more than two hours, they extracted dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and former top regime official, Cilia Flores de Maduro. The pair are charged with overseeing an immense narcotics-trafficking enterprise, as well as international drug cartels in Mexico and South America. The Maduros were arraigned on Monday in a Manhattan federal court on the indictment, which supersedes a similar one filed during the first Trump administration. The stunning proficiency of the extraction operation, in which no Americans were killed, has not been matched by President Donald Trump’s management of the aftermath. While Trump said his top administration officials would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, he has left Maduro’s Marxist regime in place under the leadership of Delcy Rodríguez, one of its most ruthless officials. And while the left-wing claim that America fights wars for oil has historically been a smear, Trump is unabashed in insisting that the U.S. is seizing Venezuela’s oil. An operation designed to run another country ought to have been authorized by Congress. Weighing heavily in favor of it: Saturday was a bad day for Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran, which were in cahoots with Maduro.
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