The Michael Knowles Show - January 10, 2026


What ＂Unprecedented＂ Actions The U.S. Took In Venezuela In 4 Mins

Topics
unprecedented actions in venezuela
Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Mentioned
Nicolas Maduro Trump Sam Harris
Ep. 1887 - George Floyd 2.0, Leftists Call For Murder Of ICE Agents Ep. 1888 - Gang Members GET SHOT Trying To Run Over ICE Agent

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

147.28

Word count

498

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of President Trump's capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, politicians are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the military action as "unlawful" and "unprecedented." But when we examine the precedent, we find a lot of precedent.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.140 In the wake of President Trump's capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, politicians
00:00:05.160 are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the military action as unprecedented and illegal.
00:00:11.440 Kamala Harris, the Democrat presidential nominee who lost to Trump, came out within
00:00:16.000 hours to call the arrest of Maduro unlawful.
00:00:19.000 A tough argument to make when Harris's own administration attempted the exact same policy
00:00:24.400 a year earlier and even offered 25 million bucks to anyone who could help them do it.
00:00:28.720 Maybe Trump should call her up and try to claim his reward.
00:00:31.000 In terms of law, not only had there been a warrant for Maduro's arrest for over five
00:00:35.840 years, not only did Venezuela steal American property and traffic drugs to the United States, 0.61
00:00:41.740 but over 50 countries in the international community had not even recognized Maduro as
00:00:46.480 the legitimate president of Venezuela after he stole the Venezuelan presidential election.
00:00:51.240 Just about any way you slice it, the arrest was lawful and publicly defended, at least
00:00:55.440 for a while, by both Republican and Democrat administrations.
00:00:59.360 But how about the other claim, that Trump's intervention in Venezuela was unprecedented?
00:01:03.560 It was an unprecedented military action.
00:01:07.480 And this operation was flat out illegal.
00:01:09.720 This is not a win for the American people.
00:01:12.720 I don't know if any of those Democrats are history buffs, I suspect they're not.
00:01:16.440 But when we examine the claim that Trump's action in Venezuela was unprecedented, we find
00:01:21.680 a lot of precedent.
00:01:22.680 By my count, since the Mexican-American War in 1846, the total number of U.S. interventions
00:01:28.340 in Latin America has been 88, which is coincidentally the number of minutes which elapsed from the
00:01:33.760 time the U.S. troops reached Maduro's palace to the time they had completely evacuated the
00:01:38.020 country.
00:01:40.020 Pretty impressive.
00:01:43.100 In the middle to late 19th century alone, the United States military intervened in Mexico,
00:01:48.760 Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua again, and Cuba.
00:01:58.260 But it wasn't until the 20th century that we really got involved, intervening in Guyana,
00:02:05.100 Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Argentina, Paraguay, and Grenada.
00:02:11.100 The United States, respectively, in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, and Chile.
00:02:17.360 Three times in Haiti.
00:02:18.980 Five times each in El Salvador and Bolivia.
00:02:22.220 Six times each in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.
00:02:26.620 Seven times in Cuba.
00:02:27.940 Ten times in Honduras.
00:02:29.400 And a whopping dozen times in poor old Panama.
00:02:33.020 Even if you only count the successful operations that led to a change in regime.
00:02:38.400 Since 1906, the U.S. has helped to swap out governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican
00:02:45.280 Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic again, Brazil, the Dominican Republic
00:02:50.680 again, Bolivia, Chile, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti again.
00:02:56.100 Turn ahead to our own century, and we help to overthrow regimes in Haiti again, that's the 0.67
00:03:01.620 last one for now, and Honduras in 2009.
00:03:05.440 And then, most recently, we arrive at the unprecedented action in Venezuela, which is unprecedented only
00:03:13.720 in its efficiency, its legal predicate, and in how successfully it was carried out.