We Have New Details of Trump’s Venezuela Attack—and They’re a Doozy |
The CIA carried out a drone strike bombing on Venezuelan soil last week, making it the first U.S. attack inside the country that we know of.
The strike, reported first on Monday night by CNN, hit a dock on the Venezuelan coast that the U.S. administration claims was being used by Tren de Aragua for narcotrafficking. The Trump administration also claimed that the dock was empty when the strike was carried out, resulting in zero casualties.
While Donald Trump vastly expanded the CIA’s ability to act independently, they still do not have the authority to carry out land strikes in Venezuela—although that means nothing when they’ve already extrajudicially murdered dozens of fishermen in Venezuelan waters and quite literally stolen an oil tanker.
While Trump alluded to hitting a “big facility where ships come from” last week, he refused to confirm or deny whether that attack was the one we now know was carried out by the CIA.
This is yet another alarming escalation of aggression against Venezuela. The Trump administration has gone back and forth in its justifications for their acts of war. They’ve claimed that the Venezuelan government is a malicious narcostate, that they want to make Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “cry uncle,” and that Venezuela was shipping their oil to “foreign terrorist organizations.” Either way, this reeks of classic U.S. intervention in Latin America that will likely further destabilize a country that we’ve been antagonizing for decades.
Americans across the country are facing enormous scam risks because of their president.
In a fundraising email circulated Monday, Donald Trump told his supporters that Democrats would steal their “tariff rebate checks” if they didn’t donate money to him within the hour.
“Troubles are BOILING OVER,” the email reads. “Dems want to send your check to illegals if you don’t respond in the next hour!”
Earlier this month, Trump floated the idea that the federal government would subsidize checks to American citizens to offset the cost of his “Liberation Day” tariff plan, seemingly similar to how he distributed funds during the Covid-19 pandemic. But within hours, scammers were already attempting to cash in on the national confusion. One scam flagged by the Better Business Bureau promised call recipients with unclaimed tariff rebate checks worth upwards of $5,000.
But Trump’s team has not taken heed of just how similar their fundraising language is to that of scam callers, seemingly more than happy to jump in on the hysteria.
“Only a massive and immediate response will do,” the president’s fundraising email continued. “I need YOU to help me hit my end-of-year fundraising goal by midnight tomorrow or EVERYTHING we’ve worked so hard to accomplish could go BYE BYE.”
A similar fundraising email issued by Trump’s team earlier this month urged recipients to “confirm” their names in order to receive the government checks. At the bottom, the message claimed to be “the only tariff rebate email authorized by President Trump.” That ad was paid for by “Never Surrender, Inc.,” a recently rebranded super PAC that mechanized Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and noted that it was not official communication with the U.S. government.
Regardless of the fact that Trump’s email has more in common with well-worn messages from a Nigerian prince than official White House communication, the entire concept of a tariff rebate program is nonsensical. Economists have repeatedly pointed out that tariffs are effectively taxes paid by importers and offset to consumers, rather than a legitimate revenue stream that pools money for future use.
Still, that hasn’t stopped Trump from claiming that his administration has made “millions”—or maybe “billions”—off of the unstable trade plan.
The National Guard presence in Washington hasn’t put a dent in violent crime in the nation’s capital.
At least, that’s the reality for the families of local murder victims, who claim that the Trump administration is ignoring their plight in order to push a narrative that crime has been practically eradicated from Washington, D.C.
There were at least 128 murders in the nation’s capital over the course of 2025, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.
One of those murders involved 17-year-old Tristan Johnson, who was shot and killed in November over what his family believed was the attempted theft of his favorite jacket. Just two weeks later, Donald Trump completely bypassed Johnson’s death to tell the nation that the city hadn’t “had a murder in six months.”
The boy’s mother, Juanita Sampler, told The New York Times that bold-faced lies about crime in the city were “heartbreaking.”
“For the president to say there’s no murders? That’s heartbreaking, that’s devastating to me,” she told the newspaper. “That’s my son. He is someone. He is somebody. His name was Tristan Johnson.”
Washington was a critical component of Trump’s agenda when he returned to office in January. Alongside other Democrat-led cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle, Trump used Washington to push a baseless claim that America’s cities have been consumed by violence—violence that could only be settled by the federalization of the target areas’ law enforcement.
That resulted in the deployment of thousands of National Guard members to different cities across the country, whom the administration used to assist ICE agents and safeguard its immigration agenda. So far, that has involved tearing parents from their children and deporting people, without trial, to a Salvadoran prison well known for its systemic torture........