Trump’s invasion of Venezuela fuses the deeply unpopular “war on drugs” with the “war on terror.”
Cover: US President Donald Trump speaks during a political rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina on December 19, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)
Mike Ludwig, Truthout || When Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro stepped foot in a Manhattan courtroom on January 5, he entered the proceedings of the highest-profile case in the “war on drugs” to date.
The indictment came after years of threats toward Maduro from the U.S., including a dramatic U.S. military buildup over the past five months and a string of extrajudicial killings by sinking dozens of small boats that the Trump administration claimed, without evidence, were ferrying drugs. Policy experts and Democrats condemned the strikes as illegal and ineffective, but the administration ignored Congress and continued blowing up speedboats, leaving at least 115 people dead so far.
Along with “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who regularly shared violent memes defending the military attacks, the White House methodically posted videos of the boat strikes as viral propaganda for a sudden escalation of the deeply unpopular “war on drugs.” Donald Trump has fused that war together with the “war on terror” throughout the first year of his second term. He designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and directed the military to go after them, including through the boat strikes, and went so far as to declare fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” Panned by public health experts, the move was reminiscent of former President George W. Bush’s justification for waging war on Iraq.
That fusion came to a head on January 3 when, on orders from Trump and without authorization from Congress, U.S. forces invaded Venezuela to abduct Maduro in a midnight raid that reportedly claimed up to 80 lives, including civilians. Indicted for alleged connections to cocaine smugglers, Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism” charges at a federal courthouse in New York City on January 5. The indictment doesn’t mention fentanyl, the substance at the center of Trump’s drug war narratives, and includes counts of conspiracy to possess machine guns under U.S. laws.
“I was kidnapped,” Maduro told the court during the arraignment.
A successful military operation tends to have a nationalistic, rally-around-the-flag effect on public opinion, however brief. Previous polling suggests that Trump’s drug war propaganda appears to be effective on some level — but almost entirely among Republicans who already support him. Beyond the GOP and MAGA base, independents and Democrats are wary of both the boat strikes and military action in Venezuela, and voters across party lines want Trump focused on the economy and health care rather than foreign entanglements.
Trump’s massive naval deployment in the Caribbean already costs an estimated $18 million per day.
Trump said on Saturday that his administration would “run” Venezuela for the time being but has offered few details since, leaving U.S. taxpayers to wonder whether the president has stumbled into a costly quagmire. Trump’s massive naval deployment in the Caribbean already costs an estimated $18 million per day while the affordability crisis spirals at home and a GOP budget bill passed last year cuts federal spending on health care and safety net programs.
“Even a short-term endeavor of running Venezuela will cost significant US military and taxpayer resources,” said Tressa Guenov, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, in a statement on Saturday.
Most people in the U.S. do not want war with Venezuela. In a September poll by YouGov, 62 percent of adults said they would oppose a U.S. invasion of Venezuela, including 48 percent of Republicans. Only 16 percent said they would support an invasion, and the vast majority were either opposed or unsure about sending U.S. battleships into the region. A Quinnipiac poll released on December 17 found 63 percent of registered voters opposed “U.S. military action inside Venezuela,” with only 25 percent in support.
A flash poll conducted following Maduro’s capture on January 3 found that 41 percent of respondents opposed Trump sending troops into Venezuela and 35 percent approved, with divisions falling along partisan lines. Only 16 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of independents supported the invasion, compared to 60 percent of Republicans.
Trump’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific are similarly unpopular. A December 15 Data for Progress poll found that a majority (52 percent) of likely voters said blowing up suspect speedboats was not an effective way to reduce drug trafficking. Voters also said Trump should prioritize restoring health care over foreign military interventions. Six in 10 opposed sending in troops to remove Maduro, including large majorities of Democrats (79 percent) and independents (69 percent).
However, Trump had support for abducting Maduro from 58 percent of Republicans in the December 15 poll. Guided by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration has long accused Maduro and Venezuelan military brass of profiting from various groups that smuggle drugs, part of a broader effort to recast drug trafficking as “terrorism” in order to justify military deployments without approval from Congress. The indictment accuses Maduro of using his position on top of a corrupt government to “protect and promote” cocaine imports to the U.S. but provides little evidence that the autocrat participated in smuggling himself.
“We know that Trump is using the war on drugs as a guise to undertake illegal action abroad, including in Venezuela, all while defunding the solutions [to drug problems] that we know work at home,” said Maritza Perez, the national affairs director at the Drug Policy Alliance, in an interview.
In public, Rubio has called Maduro the boss of “Cartel De Los Soles,” a supposed drug trafficking group within the Venezuelan military. The term first appeared in an indictment of Maduro filed in 2020 by the first Trump administration. However, “Cartel De Los Soles” is a figure of speech, generally used by Venezuelan media in the past to describe corruption in Venezuela. In the current indictment, federal prosectors backed off the claim that Maduro leads “Cartel De Los Soles” because the group does not exist.
While providing no evidence to the public, Trump and other officials claimed the boats sunk by U.S. forces were carrying fentanyl. But cocaine is the drug most likely to be smuggled out of Venezuela, not fentanyl. Fentanyl and other potent synthetics, typically produced in Mexico and smuggled overland rather than sea, are the primary driver of the overdose crisis. Fentanyl is also prescribed by doctors and used in emergency rooms, but Trump and other politicians exploit fear and misinformation around synthetic opioids to demonize immigrants and scare voters to the polls.
Guerrilla groups and cartels that do traffic cocaine out of the remote areas of Colombia and into global markets could likely continue to use Venezuela as a transit point regardless of whether Maduro is in power. Most of Maduro’s ostensible allies remain in Venezuela and continue to the control the government, including Delcy Rodríguez, the acting president who said on Tuesday the U.S. is not running the country as Trump has claimed. Now that Maduro has been captured, it remains to be seen whether the administration will continue spending millions of dollars to blow up small boats.
Experts say deploying carrier strike groups to sink suspect speedboats does not meaningfully reduce the domestic drug supply. The administration’s claims that the strikes would save tens of thousands of lives in the U.S. were easily debunked (the lives of innocent fishers were more likely lost instead).
Cocaine by itself is not a major cause of overdose deaths, and reams of research show that improving access to health care and addiction treatment is a far more effective drug control policy than attacking the supply. Trump and Republicans in Congress are doing the opposite by slashing funding for federal health programs that millions of people rely on.
Still, the administration leveraged dramatic videos of the boat strikes and other drug war propaganda to create the appearance of success, at least among Trump supporters, many of whom remain deeply suspicious of foreign military interventions after the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. A November Gallup survey found that more Americans are encouraged by the nation’s progress on “coping with the illegal drug problem” than in the past, but the uptick mainly reflects a change in perception among Republicans who see Trump’s aggressions as having an impact.
“MAGA loves it. MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do,” Trump told NBC News on Tuesday when asked about pushback over Venezuela. “MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”
Meanwhile, in 2024, an expansion of grassroots harm reduction and public health efforts actually did lead to a 27 percent drop in fatal overdoses. However, budget cuts and staff layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are reducing federal support for these proven strategies while Trump doubles down on waging a drug war in Latin America. Such policies have failed to reduce drug use since the war on drugs was declared by President Richard Nixon more than 50 years ago, and today large majorities are ready to move beyond prohibition and address drug use as public health issue.
“You can look to the federal funding cuts that have taken effect over the course of the year that Trump has been in power, which has impacted how many people are working at HHS and tracking overdoses and doling out money to people in communities who are providing treatment and recovery service,” Perez said. “That is going to result in less support for people who need it, which means potentially more people dying or being harmed by drug use.”
U.S. presidents are notorious for manufacturing consent for risky overseas military adventurism — President George W. Bush’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are a prime example — and Trump’s made-for-TV gamble of ousting Maduro to wage the “war on drugs” and assert U.S. control over Venezuelan oil reserves follows the same tradition.
Perez pointed out that Trump pardoned a corrupt former Honduran president and others convicted of major drug trafficking but is now prosecuting the Maduros. Like Maduro, Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of facilitating and profiting from cocaine trafficking as president of Honduras. He was serving 45 years in federal prison for trafficking large amounts of drugs into the U.S., but unlike Maduro, Trump released Hernández on a presidential pardon last year.
“If this were really about drugs, I wonder then why has Trump also pardoned drug traffickers, and I am talking like high-level drug traffickers,” Perez said in an interview.
The raid on Maduro’s private residence gave Trump what he wanted — spectacular images of U.S. military might and blaring global headlines — but the president will be blamed if Venezuela descends into chaos as a result. Meanwhile, his administration is dismantling modest progress made toward addressing drug use and overdose crisis as public health issues — reasons to reach out and help people, not wage war.
“Under the Biden administration, I actually did see a shift. That administration really did make a concerted effort to support health service, including harm reduction for people who use drugs,” Perez said. “That was the first time I saw that from the federal government — historically both sides of aisle are willing to participate in drug war — but now Trump is attacking anything harm reduction related and dismantling [the Department of Health and Human Services].”
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