Democrats ripped into President Trump for taking out Venezuelan dictator and accused narco-terrorist Nicolas Maduro, but many of them have long called for removing the South American dictator and bashed Mr. Trump during his first term for failing to “get rid” of him.
The Trump administration’s surgical strike to capture Mr. Maduro early Saturday drew sharp rebuke from some of the same Democrats who criticized the president during his first term for not taking aggressive action to remove the ruthless dictator from office.
Among the flippers is Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York, who on Monday accused Mr. Trump of “fanning the flames of war” and causing “reckless regime change chaos.”
However, near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Schumer criticized the president for the opposite — failing to end the Maduro regime and bring Democracy to Venezuela.
“There was a big policy there,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor in 2020 as Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó looked on from the gallery. “It flopped. He hasn’t brought an end to the Maduro regime. The Maduro regime is more powerful today and more entrenched today than when the president began.”
Sen. Chris Murphy also reversed his view on Mr. Maduro’s removal. On Sunday, he accused Mr. Trump of invading oil-rich Venezuela on behalf of the U.S. oil industry and Wall Street.
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But in 2019, he was among the most outspoken Maduro critics and lambasted Mr. Trump for failing to intervene as human rights abuses, violent protests and an economic collapse gripped the country under Mr. Maduro.
“If Trump cared about consistency, he would make the realist case for intervention in Venezuela (getting rid of Maduro is good for the United States) rather than trying to pretend his administration suddenly cares about toppling anti-democratic regimes,” Mr. Murphy said at the time.
Mr. Murphy also co-authored an op-ed with former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes in 2019, stating Mr. Maduro was an illegitimately elected leader who had condemned the Venezuelan people to “a humanitarian nightmare of rampant inflation, shortages of food and medicine and pervasive insecurity through corruption, mismanagement and repression.”
At the time, he noted, 3 million Venezuelans had fled to other countries. By 2024, the number of Venezuelan refugees had climbed to more than 8 million, most of them flooding into the U.S.
On Sunday, Mr. Murphy insisted Venezuela was no threat to U.S. security and called Mr. Trump’s foreign policy “fundamentally corrupt.” On Monday, he called Mr. Maduro’s removal “Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela” and “a war mongering distraction.”
On Monday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz told the U.N. the operation to remove Mr. Maduro was not an act of war, and the U.S. is not occupying the country.
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“This was a law enforcement operation in furtherance of lawful indictments that have existed for decades,” he said.
Mr. Maduro on Monday pleaded not guilty in a federal courtroom in New York City to charges he masterminded a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
According to the indictment, Mr. Maduro led a “corrupt illegitimate government” that abused its power to “transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.” He used the proceeds from the illegal drug activity to enrich himself, his family and Venezuela’s political and military elite, it said.
The dictator was taken out a year after President Biden’s Drug Enforcement Administration announced a $25 million bounty on Mr. Maduro, charging him with “Narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, conspiracy to use and carry machine guns and destructive devices in furtherance of a drug crime.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris nonetheless condemned Mr. Maduro’s arrest.
“That Maduro is a brutal, illegitimate dictator does not change the fact that this action was both unlawful and unwise. We’ve seen this movie before. Wars for regime change or oil that are sold as strength but turn into chaos, and American families pay the price,” Ms. Harris said.
On Monday, Mr. Schumer further rebuked Mr. Trump in a Senate floor speech, but called Mr. Maduro “a tyrant,” and said “nobody mourns what happened to him.”
He seized on Mr. Trump’s plan to have the U.S. run Venezuela for the foreseeable future.
“The American people did not sign up for another round of endless wars,” Mr. Schumer said.
