After Maduro Did This, Trump Ordered the Raid That Captured Him

Matt Vespa | January 05, 2026 7:00 AM

Nicolas Maduro’s presidency in Venezuela is over. We ended it. The quasi-dictator dared the United States to get him, and we did. We’re the United States, man. There is nowhere we cannot go. We’ll find you, and we’ll either kill or capture you. Body bag or handcuffs—it doesn’t matter. The nation’s crappy system of air defenses, all Russian-made, did nothing to thwart the massive air campaign around Caracas, where helicopters took out targets with impunity.

In three minutes, Delta Force landed, breached the military facility where this tin-pot dictator resided, arrested him, and tossed his sorry ass on a helicopter with no American casualties. That’s how a real military operates. These banana people need to get that nothing will stop us—ever. But Maduro tempted fate with these dancing routines that reportedly led Trump to greenlight the raid (via NYT):

JUST IN: Maduro’s dancing was “final straw” for Trump, in his decision to capture Venezuela’s dictator — NYT pic.twitter.com/bZh5X7gotb
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) January 4, 2026

It was one dance move too many for Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Maduro in late December rejected an ultimatum from President Trump to leave office and go into a gilded exile in Turkey, according to several Americans and Venezuelans involved in transition talks.
This week he was back onstage, brushing off the latest U.S. escalation — a strike on a dock that the United States said was used for drug trafficking — by bouncing to an electronic beat on state television while his recorded voice repeated in English, “No crazy war.”
Mr. Maduro’s regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some on the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them and trying to call what he believed to be a bluff, according to two of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the confidential discussions.
So the White House decided to follow through on its military threats.
On Saturday, an elite U.S. military team swooped into Caracas, the capital, in a pre-dawn raid and whisked Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to New York to face drug trafficking charges.