ura Loomer points out, I guess Mamdani has been trying to get a security clearance. I don't know exactly what that means for a mayor, but she points out that this would be reason enough to deny him security clearance. So if what he wants is security clearance, he's going to have a tough time explaining why he's being photographed being friendly with the head of a cartel.

Well, Joshua Steinman is telling us on X that China is going to have a tough time explaining why the radar that they gave to or provided to Venezuela didn't work. And is it my imagination or is every time we make a military action against somebody who has radar that the radar doesn't work or that we can turn it off or bomb it or something? Well, I don't know if the radar just didn't work or if we had some kind of countermeasures that just took them out. I'm guessing we had electronic countermeasures, but the bottom line is if you're China and you think you can sell this stuff to a country that's trying to protect itself from America, you're going to have a tough time selling your radar. Sales of Chinese radar probably way down.

Well, we're still in the fog of war stage, so don't know what to believe. But the reports are that Maduro's bodyguards, which we knew to be Cubans — so he didn't trust his own people to be his bodyguards, he had Cuban bodyguards — that they handed their client over as soon as the US special forces got there. "Hey, you can have him. You can have him. He's over here."

And I thought to myself, is that a sign that the Cuban bodyguards were bad bodyguards, or was it a sign that they knew they had no hope as bodyguards facing up with our most elite soldiers? So I do not blame the Cuban bodyguards for running away. If you were in that situation, you might run away too. There was no way they were going to win. They were just going to die if they stayed.

Well, apparently Maduro is going to face potentially the death penalty. So that would be for violating the Controlled Substances Act and being part of a continuing criminal enterprise. So I guess that's enough that if you're convicted, that's enough for a death penalty.

And I kind of forgot that once you have him in custody that the interrogation begins. Do you wonder what the interrogation looks like? Is it the same interrogation you would give to some American criminal or do they bring in the special kind of interrogation? You know what I mean? Now that he's in American custody, presumably there would be lots of American oversight. So they can't go too far. You know, they can't torture him, can they? And where's the dividing line between torture and just interrogating? That's going to have to be answered.

I imagine they can make his life very bad without crossing the line because you know just imagine they also have his wife. So wouldn't it be legal to say, you know what, we're not going to torture you but you remember we have your wife and if she'd like to have a little bit better situation, well maybe you should talk. So one thing they can do is threaten to do something to someone who's not in the room. Is that legal? Could you interrogate that way? So long as nobody's actually damaged, is that legal? So maybe we'll find out where the line is.

All right. Let me tell you my best explanation of why we did this in Venezuela. Obviously there are multiple reasons and even Marjorie Taylor Greene has pointed out just recently, she was on one of the shows, that if this was really about narco terrorists and about protecting Americans from cartels and drugs, that the administration would be attacking the Mexican cartels.

Do you buy that as a reasonable argument that if the top priority was drugs and stopping them, we would have started with Mexico, not with Venezuela? And I would say the answer is that's not a good argument. Not a good argument because sometimes you start with the easy thing to make it easier to do the hard thing. From a military standpoint, you don't always attack the hardest target first, even if that's where you want to end up. You would make sure that you did something smaller and successful that would cause maybe the larger entity to negotiate better. And if they negotiate instead of hold tight, then you win because you do a smaller action in Venezuela. But theoretically maybe that was enough to get Mexico to cooperate or change its ways.

But obviously Mexico, their leadership is run by the cartels we believe. So they don't really have much room to negotiate. For the head of Mexico if they were to start saying okay we'll help you fight the cartel, I imagine the family of the president would be slaughtered that same afternoon. So there's not really any room for negotiation. But I would generally say that it is not a good argument that they would have started in one place rather than another.

So there's also the bigger question of are we using the narcotics Department of Justice angle to do something that we wanted to do for other reasons. And I'm going to give you the best other reason that I can think of. I haven't heard anybody say this, but here's a rule about life and a rule about how everything works. It goes like this. Things are either growing or shrinking. In other words, countries are either ascending or they're going backwards. It's very rare in the real world that something big and complicated like a country would just be the same.

Like if you check back with Venezuela in 10 years, if we hadn't done this, would they be the same place in 10 years? Well, I think they would have either grown or they would have shrunk. Now if you take the model that anything complicated and big and important is either going to grow or shrink and those are the only two conditions, it is true that they can stay the same. It's physically possible. But in the real world, it just doesn't happen. Things get bigger or they get smaller.

Now what I've been observing for years is that it seems like the cartels were getting bigger, right? So the cartels were on a trajectory that every year they were getting more control over more countries, shipping more drugs, getting bigger. If that's the direction they were going to continue, and at the time there was nothing to make them smaller, then you have to nip it in the bud because I was worried that the cartels would become so rich and so well armed that you couldn't do anything about them. You just couldn't stop them.

So if you stop them now where we obviously still have overwhelming force and we have an option, then you prevent them getting bigger every day. And the Venezuelans also were becoming the hub of all the other countries that were against us and you don't want that hub to get bigger. So if I were Trump and I knew — and he knows this, he knows this well — and I knew that things either get bigger or smaller and there's not really anything in between, you have to get them now because this is when you can.

So that's a more conceptual strategic argument. It wouldn't really necessarily work with the public.