First things first: The stunningly audacious raid that extracted Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela is a genuinely history-making victory for Donald Trump. At a cost of zero American lives, the United States captured a singularly destructive force: a dictator whose record of criminality and misrule blighted millions of Venezuelan lives and destabilized politics in the entire Western Hemisphere.
After clumsily stealing a presidential election he had plainly lost by a landslide 18 months ago, Maduro kept running the Venezuelan state as a sprawling criminal syndicate. Along with his power broker wife, Cilia Flores, he belongs in a prison cell as surely as anyone I can think of. Which is why you’ll be hard-pressed to find a Venezuelan who doesn’t, on some level, rejoice at last night’s news.
