Donald Trump speaks to the press after a U.S. military operation in Venezuela. (Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)
This weekend, following Donald Trump’s surprise military operation in Venezuela, some of the loudest voices in MAGA media backtracked on years of railing against U.S. intervention abroad, tying themselves into knots to defend—or at least avoid directly criticizing—Trump’s unilateral action.
Laura Loomer, the far-right "proud Islamophobe" who generally raises fierce objections to foreign intervention, praised the “genius” of Trump’s “geopolitical synchronicity,” framing it as a necessary counterterrorism strike, and repeatedly citing the alleged presence of Hezbollah inside Venezuela as an extension of Iran’s influence in the Western Hemisphere.
Within MAGA Media circles, there was little public reflection as to how the legally questionable operation to remove dictator Nicolás Maduro that left several American soldiers injured, contradicts its longstanding anti-war posture. Rather than condemning the intervention outright, Loomer focused instead on procedural grievances, questioning why Maduro was indicted in New York, “a liberal hell hole,” and not Florida. Roger Stone chimed in to agree, writing, “Why Maduro was not charged in Miami is a mystery.”
Despite the knee-jerk reaction by many in the MAGA media ecosystem to support Trump without reservation, the news served as a litmus test, forcing some of the movement’s biggest boosters to question what Trump’s promise of “America First” foreign policy actually looks like in practice.
Extremist Candace Owens rejected the intervention, declaring that Venezuela had been “liberated” in the same way Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq were. Casting the operation as another CIA-backed regime change, Owens denounced it as a “hostile takeover” driven by globalist interests, something that would inherently contradict an “America First” agenda.
Overall, though, there was little immediate pushback, or acknowledgement of the dissonance—and hypocrisy—at work. Those contortions underscored a broader MAGA media dilemma: How to reconcile Trump’s long-standing “America First” rhetoric with a military action that looks strikingly similar to the kind the base has spent years attacking.
Some elected officials on the right were more direct than the pro-Trump mouthpieces. Rep. Thomas Massie warned that the intervention risked American lives not for national security, but to benefit oil companies. “It’s not American oil. It’s Venezuelan oil,” Massie wrote in a social media post, arguing that U.S. soldiers were being put in harm’s way to make private companies more profitable.
The weekend’s events could also add another layer to the ongoing civil war ushered in by Charlie Kirk’s death and U.S. support of Israel that has already fractured the base.
Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of the far-right The National Pulse, argued to Status that Trump’s openness about his economic goals in Venezuela does not undermine “America First,” but rather enhances it. Unlike the Bush-era interventions that cloaked Middle East wars in moral language to avoid public backlash, Trump dispensed with the pretense. Kassam contended that the majority of the MAGA base will view the intervention as a foreign offensive undertaken in their best interests. “The American public have now repeatedly elected a businessman,” he said. “And they’re getting what they voted for.”
But that interpretation was far from universal. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has distanced herself from MAGA over, among other things, foreign policy—a rift that saw her resign from Congress—framed the operation as a further betrayal of the movement’s core promise. “Americans' disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it,” she wrote in a lengthy X post. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” Greene argued, adding, “Boy were we wrong.”
Even Steve Bannon, the Trump loyalist who praised the operation itself as “bold and brilliant,” raised alarms about what comes next. On his “War Room” podcast, Bannon questioned whether the administration had adequately considered the consequences of extracting Maduro without dismantling the rest of his regime, warning of potential civil conflict and regional instability. “So is this part of overall Hemispheric Defense, and we're going to clean up this mess in Latin America? Or is this just the neocons talking him into it?" Bannon wondered aloud on his show. That unease underscored how Trump’s escalation in Venezuela left even the architects of MAGA struggling to reconcile what appears to be an impressive military feat with potential uncertainty ahead.
Notably silent during the initial debate was Tucker Carlson, who has spent years positioning himself as an anti-interventionist MAGA warrior, repeatedly warning against regime change conflict. In October, Carlson argued that Maduro’s Venezuela was “one of the most conservative countries” in the Western Hemisphere, which he said should be a factor in whether intervention is necessary. Carlson couldn’t be reached Sunday.
As some within MAGA Media circles noted, even those who oppose Trump’s policies and actions have been reluctant to criticize him, fearing a backlash from the faithful who have steadfastly stuck with him through past controversies. In that sense, commentators are likely hedging their bets out of reluctance to potentially alienate their most engaged listeners and viewers, anticipating the power vacuum Trump will leave after his second term. “There’s this horrible fissure, and nobody can figure out which way the movement is going,” one MAGA Media figure told Status. “All these guys are just flapping around trying to capture an audience.”
But regardless of the motivation, a divide within the base is starting to emerge, and legitimate questions about the defining characteristics of Trumpism are taking hold.
With Trump’s Venezuela move, it appears his application of “America First” functions less as a restraint on U.S. military action than a justification for wielding it for financial gain—pledging to dispatch oil companies to “start making money for the country”—a dynamic, as Democrats were quick to assert, which seems fraught with potential for corruption.
Whether MAGA Media can reconcile that distinction remains an open question, but Trump, for his part, appears uninterested in waiting for consensus.
A woman watches Marco Rubio and Donald Trump discuss a U.S. military operation in Venezuela. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The NYT and The WaPo both learned in advance about the U.S. raid in Venezuela, but they held off on publishing stories to avoid endangering military personnel, Max Tani and Shelby Talcott reported. [Semafor]
Marco Rubio praised the outlets that held the sensitive information until after the raid, saying, “We thank them for doing that or lives could have been lost.” [Mediaite]
The NYT detailed how plans came together to scrap the planned front page on Saturday to feature coverage of the Venezuela operation. [NYT]
Reporter Tyler Pager also explained how he got Trump on the phone just moments after the U.S. captured Maduro. [NYT]
Bret Baier disclosed that he was in the middle of booking an interview with Nicolás Maduro when U.S. forces moved in. [Mediaite]
“CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil said in a social media video that the network’s pivot to cover the U.S. invasion of Venezuela—as opposed to a planned 10-city tour—was “a better launch than anything else we could have come up with.”
Dokoupil devoted much of Saturday’s introductory broadcast to an interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, without dissenting voices from outside the administration. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that Hegseth was “booked by Bari Weiss personally.” [Reliable]
Weiss, the new CBS News editor-in-chief, had chartered a private plane to facilitate Dokoupil’s rollout “Live From America” tour, Justin Baragona reported. [The Independent]
Dokoupil engaged critics on social media over the weekend, which included a vow that he would be “more transparent than [Walter] Cronkite or any one else of his era.” That prompted additional criticism, with veteran media reporter and critic Bill Carter calling it “a truly foolish thing to say.”
Adam Johnson took the media to task for failing to call the Venezuela invasion an act of war, arguing the press instead adopted language "that is flattering and sanitizing to the administration." [The Intercept]
Maduro’s government was anything but friendly to the press, jailing 21 journalists and shutting eight outlets in 2025. [LatAm Journalism Review]
Carlton Cuse, the executive producer of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” talked to Nellie Andreeva about a six-year-old clip from the Amazon series that has gone viral, in which the title character addresses Venezuela’s strategic importance to the U.S. [Deadline]
Switching gears: A Minnesota investigation of child-care centers accused of fraud in a viral video found that they are “operating as expected.” [NBC News]
Ouch: Critics Choice Awards host Chelsea Handler compared Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav to the vampires in “Sinners,” who come to an entertainment venue, “suck the life out of everybody and burn it all to the ground.” [Deadline]
“One Battle After Another” added the National Society of Film Critics to its list of best-picture accolades, with “Sinners” (also a Warner Bros. release) and “The Secret Agent” as the runners-up. [Variety]
Leonardo DiCaprio wondered in an interview if people “still have the appetite” for going to movie theaters or if they’ll become “like jazz bars.” [The Times]
A scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios)
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” became Disney’s third 2025 release to cross the $1 billion worldwide mark, the only U.S. studio to achieve that milestone last year.
Director James Cameron’s sequel joins his three $2 billion-plus earners—the previous “Avatar” movies and “Titanic”—though that’s a plateau “Fire and Ash,” despite its staying power thus far, looks unlikely to reach.
Reports of Sydney Sweeney’s box-office demise appear to have been premature, as the thriller “The Housemaid,” co-starring Amanda Seyfried, fell just 3% in its third weekend with nearly $15 million and a domestic total of $75 million. At this rate, it’s sure to pass her 2023 rom-com hit “Anyone but You.”
“Marty Supreme” also had another solid outing with nearly $13 million, and, at $56 million overall, as Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro noted, looks on track to become A24’s biggest domestic release ever, with only the Oscar-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Civil War” to beat
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