COMMENTARY Venezuelans shouldn't be surprised if Trump sees more political dividends in cutting an oil-and-deportees deal with Maduro instead of tightening the regime-change screws.
Every Venezuelan, there and here, knows what’s going to happen on Friday, Jan. 10.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro will have himself sworn in as president after brazenly and brutally stealing a July 28 election that he lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González by a landslide. González, currently in forced exile, plans to return to Venezuela on Friday to conduct his own inauguration — but Maduro’s regime is poised to arrest him.
In other words, Jan. 10 promises to be every bit the ghastly, 19th-century tinpot-palooza the civilized world’s expecting it to be.
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But I would ask Venezuelans here, in their ever-burgeoning South Florida diaspora, to consider what would have happened this past Monday — Jan. 6, Congress’ election certification day — if their favorite guy, President-elect Donald Trump, had lost instead of won the Nov. 5 vote.
The day would almost certainly have been a repeat of Jan. 6, 2021 — when Trump, after losing the 2020 election, unleashed his own ghastly tinpot effort to stop certification of that result. He would again have cried “fraud” and sent his furious MAGA mob to Capitol Hill to avenge him.
In other words, on J6 Trump would have displayed the brutish, egomaniacal contempt for constitutional rule of law that Maduro will disgorge on J10.
It’s a reminder that at the end of the day, Trump and Maduro are cut from much the same sociopathic cloth.
MAGAzuelans can have the migrant deportations they’ve been braying for. Or they can have harsher sanctions on Maduro. But they can’t have both.
So perhaps Venezuelans shouldn’t be surprised by reports that Trump, when he takes office again this month, may not bring the hammer down on Maduro as hard as many hoped.
He's perhaps thinking instead of cutting the same sort of deal Republicans once criticized President Biden for seeking — namely, that the U.S. will loosen oil-export sanctions on the Caracas regime if Maduro accepts the tens of thousands of migrants Trump wants to deport back to Venezuela.
Before MAGAzuelans (as Venezuelan Trump voters are widely known) choke on their guayoyos, they should remember some basics about the demagogue they supported in November.
Trump Inc. dividends
First and most important: Trump rarely if ever does anything that doesn’t benefit Trump. Right now, tightening the screws on Maduro doesn’t pay dividends for Trump Inc. as much as expelling migrants and getting more fossil fuel onto the global market do. Those are promises he made to his MAGA base — whom he holds dearer than Venezuelan expats.
In a Zoom press conference this week, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado — who said she’ll risk her own freedom and come out of hiding on Thursday to lead protests against Maduro’s inauguration — pushed back against the idea of a Trump-Maduro negotiation:
“Those who have concerns about the effect of migration,” Machado said, “should know that the only way we’ll stop those flows — and even have hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans coming back voluntarily — is with a democratic transition that brings hope for our future.”
She may be right. Sanctions opponents insist revived oil commerce will improve Venezuelans' lives. But polls indicate if Maduro remains in power, Venezuelans — millions of whom have fled his political-economic horror show in the past decade — will keep heading for the U.S.
Still, Trump’s calculus may well be: if Maduro takes back the ones I kick out, who cares?
Trump's also aware that many Venezuelan exile voters themselves have been urging the U.S. to evict more recently arrived Venezuelans — who are often poorer, less educated and, especially in the case of migrants belonging to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua, make more established expats like the Brahmins in South Florida look bad.
MAGAzuelans may learn a hard lesson when Trump’s back in the White House:
They can have all those Venezuelan migrant deportations they’ve been braying for on Spanish-language radio. Or they can have harsher oil sanctions levied on Maduro.
But they can’t have both.
Besides, the bottom line is that Trump’s been around this block with Maduro before.
Six years ago, during his first presidency, Trump declared then opposition leader Juan Guaidó to be Venezuela’s legitimate president and slapped a de facto oil embargo on the regime. But Trump got bored and annoyed with the project when it didn’t topple Maduro overnight.
Meaning, when Trump saw there was no payoff for Trump. That’s the J6 way — and the J10 way.
