News Brief: As Trump Attacks Venezuela, Media Takes His Absurd “Drug War” Pretext at Face Value
Citations Needed | October 29, 2025 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of Citations Needed and today, Adam, we want to talk about the United States government’s escalating efforts to do a regime change in Venezuela.
Now, the US has been attempting to overthrow the government of Venezuela for many decades now, since the Chávez days in the late ’90s, including an albeit brief but successful coup in 2002. We are now over two decades past that, and we are still seeing the same kinds of attempts to change the government there forcibly this time around, Adam, using the facade of battling drug cartels.
Now, while outlets like the New York Times and the Atlantic sometimes offer kind of thin and phoned in criticism of the Trump administration’s violence and aggression, they largely serve to launder what Trump is doing through their media outlets, offering actually support for the broad premise, which winds up actually legitimizing, in many ways, what Trump is doing, legitimizing the violence of extrajudicial murder, of blowing fishermen out of the water under, again, this thin pretext of stopping drug trafficking.
Adam: Yeah, so let’s recap here. So since early September, the White House has ordered, I don’t want to say airstrikes, because that kind of makes it seem like military operations. They’ve engaged in eight mass-murder sprees of random people we’re, supposedly, we’re told that they’re evile drug dealers, even though they’ve provided no evidence of this. To the extent to which they’ve rescued people who’ve managed to survive the boats, they don’t even bother trying them. They bring them back to their home country. So they’re these evil drug kingpins who are not even worthy of trial and prosecution because, of course, they’re just blowing up random boats. These so-called “drug boats” are designed to, quite clearly, provoke Venezuela into militarily responding. So what they’re doing is they’re poking Venezuela in hopes that it defends its people, defends its sovereignty, defends its coast, as again, as any country would, as the United States would, as any country would. And then say, Hey, look, they attacked the United States. We need to go to war against them. Thus far, the Venezuelan government has not taken the bait.
Nima: Yeah. Despite the fact that the strikes, up until this point, have killed nearly 40 people.
Adam: Yeah, and they’ve also blown up Colombian vessels off the coast of Colombia. And Colombia is, of course, also considered a socialist non-American ally now that they’ve had a new socialist government take over. And let’s be clear here that the fundamental premise that the Venezuelan government is a drug cartel presented by neoconservatives in the Trump White House like Trump himself, like Marco Rubio, is completely without basis. We’re going to read one NPR article from May of this year: “U.S. intelligence memo says Venezuelan government does not control Tren de Aragua gang,” which is kind of the main, I guess, drug cartel they allege that Maduro runs. The article would say, quote,
The U.S. intelligence community says it does not believe Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro directs Tren de Aragua (TDA), a criminal gang that operates in the U.S., in a newly declassified, redacted memo. The memo contradicts claims by President Trump, who has accused Maduro of controlling the gang, which Trump says is invading the U.S.
Unquote. So the US intelligence community doesn’t buy this. Nobody buys this. No serious person thinks that the Venezuelan government controls the primary drug cartels in Venezuela. It indeed, in many ways, combats them. This is obviously pretextual. No one thinks that blowing up random fishing boats in the Caribbean is going to somehow reduce the number of substance overdoses in the United States. This is not something that Trump himself probably believes. Although he claimed, for every boat they blow up, 25,000 lives are saved. This is the new line.
Of course, that has no basis in reality. But this is all something we have to sort of take at face value as an actual motive, when the motive is that Trump, quite explicitly, wants Venezuelan oil, and has said as much. In 2023, after lamenting his first failed coup attempt in 2018, which was being directed by Elliot Abrams and John Bolton under the auspices of sending in humanitarian aid, you can go back and listen to our News Briefs on how bullshit that was at the time. We also did two News Briefs at the time in 2019. From January 31, 2019: “Venezuela and the NYT’s Long History of Backing U.S. Coups.” In February of 2019: “Rubio and Trump’s Cynical Venezuelan Aid PR Stunt,” unquote. You can listen to those on our Patreon.
The point is, at the time, it was fairly obvious that the humanitarian aid pretext was just that: a pretext. It was not something that anyone took seriously. But our media largely did. They acted like there was this crisis, and that Senator, at that time, then-Senator Rubio was leading a charge with Elliot Abrams, again, whose previous primary thing he’s known for is using humanitarian aid to run guns to the Contras in the 1980s.
Nima: Right. And was convicted for it. I mean–
Adam: Right. For the Iran-Contra affair. So these neocon, ideological, anti-communist, anti-China Cold Warriors were supposed to act like their heart bleeds for the people of Venezuela, probably assuming that this wouldn’t really carry water a second time, because of the mountains of evidence that we saw about how USAID and the State Department and aid was weaponized to try to foment a coup, They’ve now taken a different approach, which is that they’re taking on so called, quote-unquote, “narcoterrorists.” And they refer to these people as terrorists. They’ve killed, again, no names are revealed, no trials, no data, no nothing. Just blowing up, killing random people, complete lawlessness, total violation of international law. Again, doesn’t really seem to matter. But once again, like with the fake Venezuelan aid, our media is, by and large, again, through their kind of tsk-tsk-ing about the pragmatism of it or the legality of it, they broadly accept the motivation that Trump is fighting drug cartels. They are once again accepting the basic premise that this is something that the administration is doing in good faith.
Nima: They’re just doing kind of process critiques, handwringing about, you know, seeking Congressional approval, or, you know, one man cannot take this action alone. But those aren’t actual critiques or real pushback on what is being done and why.
Adam: Well, because once you accept the premise that they’re somehow fighting drug cartels in good faith, you’ve done 80% of the work for them. Now we’re sort of debating whether or not this is the best way to go after so-called “drug cartels.” So here’s a New York Times article from August of 2025, headline, “Trump Directs Military to Target Foreign Drug Cartels.” And the article would go on to say, quote,
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration added the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups, asserting that it is headed by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and other high-ranking officials in his administration.
On Thursday, the Justice and State Departments announced that the United States government is doubling a reward — to $50 million — for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Maduro, who has been indicted on drug trafficking charges. The administration again described him as a cartel head, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said he “will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes.”
Unquote. Now, again, there’s no evidence at all that Nicolás Maduro is involved in drug crimes. The State Department’s case is obviously very thin. It is a politically motivated case. It is not something that the Trump administration is, of course, remotely doing in good faith. They are using it as a pretense to overthrow, to first delegitimize his government and then overthrow him, because if he’s the head of a narco, quote-unquote, “narcoterrorist regime” —
Nima: Right, then he’s no longer a legitimate leader. He’s just a criminal who needs to be brought to justice in this kind of macho Monroe Doctrine kind of way. But the media has kept doing this, not only throughout the summer, but now into the fall. For instance, the Miami Herald on October 2, 2025, had this headline, quote, “Caribbean route shut down: How U.S. forces hit Venezuela’s drug network,” end quote. And here is the lede, quote,
The largest U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean in decades is striking at the heart of Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles, a criminal network embedded within Nicolás Maduro’s regime and accused of moving massive quantities of cocaine overseas, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.
End quote. Okay. Compelling. The following week, October 10, 2025, the Washington Post editorial board praised María Corina Machado, the pro-Trump Venezuelan opposition leader who openly supports a military invasion of Venezuela by the United States for the purpose of regime change and installing her as new leader, and also vocally supports Trump’s boat bombings. The Post’s editorial board insisted that Machado’s quote, “economic vision,” end quote, could, quote, “triple the country’s gross domestic product over 15 years by tapping its vast resources,” end quote, and would, quote, “better serve” “U.S. economic interests,” end quote, than the current Maduro government.
So clearly, the editorial board of the Washington Post, you know, a paper owned by Jeff Bezos, is, while maybe handwringing about methods here and there, there’s this kind of slippery-slope language, you know, are we going to spiral into war? But all that kind of language does is start from a place of legitimacy, right? The point of a slippery slope is that you start somewhere where you’re like, No, that’s okay, but then it gets progressively maybe less okay, which means that where they are starting now, Trump extrajudicially slaughtering people in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, this is okay because the basic premise is taken at face value and accepted and actually agreed with. Because as the Post has done, they’re saying, Well, you know, all things being equal here, having a different government in place would better serve US interests.
Adam: Yeah, the Washington Post does one of my favorite things that they do in these editorials, where they support regime change, meddling, various forms of intervention. They do the kind of humanitarian frontloading: democracy, freedom, freedom, democracy. Again, whether or not a pro-Trump, rightwing demagogue who supports Israel and the genocide in Palestine is somehow a Democrat who’s going to preserve the democratic integrity of Venezuela, certainly seems like something worth discussing, whether or not we’re, again, even if you buy their own logic, you’re just replacing some one undemocratic party with another undemocratic party. So then, you know, it’s a lateral pass. It’s just, one has a welfare state and one doesn’t.
But the whole thing is so silly, because clearly, like, that’s not anyone’s motive. And so when they throw in the, Well, you know, the economic vision could triple the economy’s gross domestic product and, quote, “better serve” “U.S. economic interests,” unquote, it’s like, Oh, well, well, there’s the reason. Okay, so why frontload all the democracy and freedom bullshit that you clearly don’t believe in? And that’s the whole thing. Whatever one thinks of the Democratic properties, even if you accept the premise that the Democratic integrity of Venezuela is compromised or suboptimal or whatever, what’s important to understand is that Trump literally doesn’t care about that at all, and openly does not care about that at all. So as it relates to whether or not him invading and bombing and overthrowing the government, it’s completely irrelevant. It’s a non sequitur as to the motive. And the motives of people are important.
And I think when you get into this liberal game of legitimizing or delegitimizing a given, you know, quote-unquote, “regime,” you’re sort of accepting the premise that, A) it’s our place to sort of litigate these things, vis-a-vis bombs, missiles, and explosions and landing amphibious, you know, craft on their beaches, and shooting and killing people, but B) it’s like, what difference does it make if it’s not the thing motivating Trump? Again, if all you’re doing is sort of providing cover for what is the most obvious cynical resource grab in the history of cynical resource grabs, indeed, again, Trump has said as much in 2023. When lamenting his previous failed coup in 2018 and 2019, Trump said in a speech, quote, “We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil,” unquote.
And so this is someone who openly wants Venezuelan oil. He doesn’t like that. It’s not, the US is free and clear. He views anything in the Western Hemisphere, anything in the world, really, but the national security consensus in general views everything in the Western Hemisphere as, per se, American property, or it’s temporarily on loan from the United States. And to the extent to which you’re permitted to have your own resources, you only do so at the pleasure and behest of the United States, of course, otherwise known as the Monroe Doctrine. All the other trappings don’t matter. And, certainly, fighting drugs doesn’t matter. I mean, at least the humanitarian stuff, you can kind of get buy-in from the NED/CIA crowd. And it’s like, Oh yeah. You know, maybe there needs to be more this, or more that. With the ‘narcoterrorist’ stuff, it’s just so cartoonishly dumb. And again, I think they chose it because it kind of had this newfangled Pete Hegseth, kinetic, We’re going to kill some bad guys and take out some bad guys.
Nima: And every bad guy we kill there saves American lives here.
Adam: Right. And by the way, you know, your aunt who’s addicted to heroin, or your cousin who’s addicted to opium, that’s actually not the fault of Big Pharma or the fault of inequality, or destroying and gutting communities with deindustrialization, or turning every single small town into a place that is nothing but slot machines and prisons. No, no, no it is actually because of these evile Venezuelans who have effectively invaded your country.
And so liberal media goes, Oh, well, I guess Trump is taking on the drug cartels. And so the New York Times from October 12, 2025, quote, “Trump Is Blowing Up Boats Off Venezuela. Could Mexico’s Cartels Be Next?” Unquote. The headline implies that Trump’s extrajudicial killings are actually targeting cartels, but they’re not! They’re just targeting some guys. We have zero evidence they’re targeting any cartels.
This is the Associated Press from October 23, 2025, quote, “A timeline of U.S. military strikes on boats off South America and what Congress has said.” Here’s an excerpt. Quote,
In less than two months, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth say the U.S. military has killed at least 37 people in nine strikes against drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.
Trump has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States. He has asserted the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks.
So even while essentially being critical, the AP accepts the premise that the Trump administration is targeting, quote, “drug-smuggling vessels,” unquote. The term is not placed in quotation marks. It is not used ironically. It is accepted as an actual motivation of the administration.
And finally, I think probably the worst example, because it’s the, you know, highest of the high-liberal-brow, Atlantic magazine, Jonathan Lemire of the Atlantic, again, essentially, while doing this kind of mild legalistic chiding and criticism, while promoting his article, “The U.S. Is Preparing for War in Venezuela,” from October 24, 2025. Lemire wrote on social media, quote,
NEW: Admiral Alvin Halsey left his post atop Pentagon’s Southern Command after a tense meeting with Hegseth over Caribbean boat strikes
Since then, the U.S. has moved closer to war with Venezuela. Next stop could be strikes against cartels on land
Unquote. But there’s not strikes on cartels on the water. It’s just an assertion. We have no evidence these people are cartels. Even if they were, it would still be illegal, obviously, right? It would still be, you can’t just extrajudicially murder people on suspicion that even if they are sort of, quote-unquote, “drug traffickers.” That’s not how this works. It’s not any of it’s supposed to work. But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re just blowing up boats to provoke Venezuela to do something in response, so they can justify invading Venezuela, which they explicitly and openly talk about doing.
Last month, Trump ordered the CIA to begin regime-change efforts, not that they weren’t already, but to sort of, I guess, accelerate regime-change efforts against Maduro and Venezuela, something that Trump, when asked about it, didn’t deny. So their goal is obviously regime change in Venezuela, the narcoterrorist thing is clearly a pretense. It’s clearly a pretext. They provided no evidence. It contradicts the claims of their own national security assessment. But we’re running with this idea that, like, Oh, they’re going to strike cartels on land. They’re not going to strike cartels on land. They’re going to strike the Venezuelan military on land.
Nima: That’s called an invasion of Venezuela by the US military.
Adam: Right, because they view the Venezuelan government and military as interchangeable with, quote-unquote, “cartels.” So again, I feel like I’m kind of losing my mind here. So you have this sort of ostensibly liberal, mild process chiding, but then you’ve just accepted all the premises on Trump motives as something in good faith. And it’s not. It’s something we see all the time with Trump, and the way that you know, the so-called liberal media covers him, which is that everything is taken at face value. His motives are taken at face value. And you see this all the time with his ICE provocations, these ICE raids in Chicago and Los Angeles and elsewhere, and these National Guard occupations. National Guard is supposed to be, quote-unquote, “fighting crime,” or, quote-unquote, “combating crime.” The ICE raids and kidnappings are supposed to be, quote-unquote, “combating illegal immigration.” When that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is he is using his authority to, first off, to arbitrarily punish his political enemies, or cities he sees as hostile to him or his agenda. And he is using the National Guard to intimidate and scare his political opponents. The idea that he’s going after crime is just a pretext, obviously.
Nima: It is about, you know, engaging in terrorizing your opponents.
Adam: Right. And if he was genuinely trying to go after, quote-unquote, “illegal immigration,” then he would go after the corporations and hire people who are undocumented. But guess what? They virtually never do that, because his goal is to create racial terror regimes and to also, as it turns out, provoke reactions from these communities to justify further crackdowns in the National Guard, probably in anticipation of engaging in voter intimidation or even just outright canceling elections in 2026 and 2028. But you can’t talk about any motives with clear language. Everything has to be taken at face value. It’s the ultimate editorial, highbrow, liberal ethos in these newspapers that no one, if it’s our guy–if it’s Russia or China, they always have these sinister, obvious ulterior motives.
Nima: Right. The sinister motive is the starting point. The potentially ulterior motive for Trump winds up being buried in paragraph 27 and attributed to, like, Hippie McPeaceington at the No War Coalition for No Wars. And so it’s already sort of diminished in its authority, in its kind of awareness of history, and it’s putting in context what is clear and obvious to anyone paying attention now or at any time in the past who knows anything about US intervention anywhere overseas, but certainly in Latin and South America, and even more specifically, with Trump and Rubio and what they have been trying to do, and what they are now, very clearly attempting to do in broad daylight. But yet the media, as well as a lot of Democratic leadership supposed opposition to Trump, putting this just milquetoast criticism, handwringing about Congressional authority, wondering where this could lead, rather than calling out what is actually happening, and all of that mild chiding winds up just reaffirming the pretext that the Trump administration is putting forward. So the media is doing the Trump propaganda for him by not actually calling out what’s going on.
Adam: Yeah. And in January of 2024, I mean, this is what makes the whole thing so absurd, because if we’re going to take their motive as to attack drugs, again, A) Pete Hegseth himself has about a thousand stories that involve heavy drug abuse. The Trump White House, there was an internal, Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, published a report in January of 2024 about Trump drug abuse. There’s an 80-page report. You can read it. They were accused of doling out prescription pills, quote-unquote, “like candy,” according to one observer. They had, quote, according to the report itself, “severe and systemic problems” in all phases of White House Medical Units, pharmacy operations. Quote, “Anything that took place at the White House’s clinic was never written down, never recorded.”
One witness told the DOD, quote, “The only record that you ever had that a patient came in and got any sort of medication would have been if it was a controlled substance that we were required to document for the pharmacy.” But even dealing with controlled substances, drugs with potential abuse and physical dependence, the White House Medical Unit wrote prescriptions that, quote, “often lacked the medical provider and patient information mandated by DEA policy.”
They were handing out stimulants, speed, valium like candy with no oversight. This was a drug-fueled, drug-addled administration. Between 2017 and 2019, the White House Medical Unit spent an estimated $46,000 for brand-name Ambien, which is 174 times more expensive than the generic equivalent. Over the three-year period, the unit also saw an estimated $98,000 for Provigil, which is a stimulant. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Adderall, and so, if we’re going to talk about their motivation being combating drugs, you know, this isn’t some hypocrisy gotcha. It seems like their long history of substance abuse, and not in any kind of moral, personal failing way. I don’t want to sort of be sanctimonious about that. But on a systemic level, where the White House pharmacy is actually handing out pills to the Trump administration, and probably is doing it again, because again, there’s no oversight. It wasn’t until three years after they left office that this internal report came out. Shouldn’t that be mentioned? Shouldn’t we talk about the fact that clearly Trump doesn’t give a shit about whether drugs are illegal or not? That this is entirely pretextual. This is just a way to kind of turn countries you want to overthrow into sort of regime, criminal gang type situation. Because, again, I don’t think anyone would buy a humanitarian pretext again. That was, they kind of blew that capital the first time, and it failed. So this time–
Nima: I mean, they might try it again.
Adam: The thing is, again, the Washington Post and the New York Times do that for them, right? All these articles will be like, you know, The disputed 2024 election, or this or that. It’s like, Yeah, okay, sure, but that has nothing to do with why they’re doing it. So that’s, you know, they’ll sort of, they’ll volunteer that ideological work for them, especially the Washington Post.
Nima: Right. They’ll kind of provide additional cover when those aren’t even part of the White House talking points.
Adam: Yeah, free of charge, yeah.
Nima: So we will definitely continue to follow this. We are anticipating further violence by the US military in the Caribbean against Venezuela, and we’ll continue to follow how the media is covering this and what kind of coverage they are providing for the Trump administration’s regime-change efforts. So stay tuned for more on that and also more full-length episodes of Citations Needed, now in its ninth season. Thank you all for listening and supporting the show. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show, which we would love for you to do if you listen to the show semi-regularly, regularly, sometimes and enjoy it. It would be wonderful if you would go to Patreon and support the show. We do not run any ads. We have no corporate sponsors. We’re able to keep this show going because of the generosity and generous support of listeners like you. So thank you all again for listening. Like I said, we will be back with full-length episodes soon, so stay tuned for that. But until then, thank you all again.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, October 29, 2025.
