Corporate Coup assassination excerpt: Venezuela’s Maduro on John Bolton’s plot to kill him

By ANYA PARAMPIL – The Grey Zone

Following the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, Anya Parampil offers a detailed look back at the failed assassination of Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Maduro, and Washington’s role in the plot, in her new book, “Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire.”

Editor’s note: Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro reacted to the July 13, 2024 attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally by declaring, “I want, on behalf of all of Venezuela and our people, to reject, repudiate the attack against former President Donald Trump.” It was a magnanimous gesture from a leader who personally blamed Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, for orchestrating the drone assassination attempt that nearly claimed his own life at an August 2018 military rally in Caracas. 

In the following excerpt from her new book, Corporate Coup, Anya Parampil describes how Trump suggested interest in a deal with Venezuela while Bolton and a clique of neoconservatives were plotting regime change against the country’s socialist-oriented government, and who later sought to topple Trump’s own government. Maduro has since revealed that Trump had arranged a meeting with him, but that Bolton and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sabotaged it. “If we had met, Trump and I would have understood each other – we would even have become friends,” Maduro stated this February. “[Bolton & Pompeo] led Trump to a failure. False advisors!”

The excerpt that follows helps set the stage for a potential second Trump administration, and its inevitable battle with the Beltway foreign policy establishment that seems determined to destroy him – if it can not co-opt or overwhelm the president first.  

Get a copy of Anya Parampil’s book, Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire, here.

“As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état—not here, but you know, other places—it takes a lot of work.”

John Bolton uttered these words during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in July 2022,1 nearly three years following his departure from the Trump White House. When Tapper followed up with a request for details of the US official’s apparently criminal past, Bolton replied: “Well, I wrote about Venezuela in [my memoir] and it turned out not to be successful.”

For Venezuelans, Bolton’s confession underscored his already transparent role in directing Washington’s failed coup in Caracas—and the infamously incompetent military putsch that eventually came with it.

From the outset of Guaidó’s self-declared presidency, Bolton acted as his most enthusiastic cheerleader inside the White House. Days after the Trump administration’s January 2019 recognition of Guaidó, Bolton appeared on Fox Business to articulate the stakes of Washington’s new Venezuela policy.

“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” the veteran US official declared.2 In just a few words, Bolton shattered the myth that Washington’s preoccupation with Venezuela was rooted in an abstract moral commitment to ideals like freedom and democracy.

According to Bolton, Trump was always skeptical of Guaidó’s ability to dislodge Maduro, whom the US president considered “too smart and too tough” to fall. In his memoir, Bolton disclosed that Trump instead expressed a desire to meet with Maduro directly and “resolve our problems with Venezuela” on multiple occasions. He further revealed that the president did not even want to issue the initial White House statement in support of Guaidó under his own name, only caving after Vice President Pence held a phone conversation with the unknown Venezuelan politician on the eve of his self-directed “swearing in” ceremony.

Bolton happened to be on hand for that discussion. He later recounted how “after the call, I leaned over Pence’s desk to shake hands, saying, ‘This is a historic moment.’” Yet even months before Guaidó’s unexpected rise, Bolton stood accused of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.

“It all points to John Bolton, who has a criminal mentality, a murderer’s mentality,” Maduro told Max during an August 2019 interview. The Venezuelan president was referring to an assassination attempt that he had survived the previous year, months before Guaidó’s ascent.

On the evening of August 4, 2018, Maduro was delivering an outdoor address to the ranks of Venezuela’s national guard when a thunderous explosion erupted from the sky above him. Venezuela’s president remained still but was visibly alarmed as bodyguards unfurled protective shields to defend him from the sudden blast. National guard troops scattered in the streets as though they had been ambushed.

As Maduro; his wife, Cilia Flores; Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López; and the thousands of national guard troops present managed to escape without significant injury, authorities traced the fireworks-like combustion to a pair of bomb-strapped, manually operated drones recovered from the scene. While Venezuela’s government promptly characterized the incident as a foreign-directed assassination attempt on Maduro, others, including Bolton, hastily dismissed it as a false-flag operation.

“I can unequivocally say there is no US involvement in this at all,” Bolton told Fox News Sunday within twenty-four hours of the attack, positing it had been “a pretext set up by the regime itself.”

Bolton’s theory was discredited months later, when a group of Venezuelan military defectors claimed responsibility for the botched assassination and provided CNN with cell phone video documenting their preparation for the assault. The organizers claimed that after establishing a base of operations on a rural Colombian farm, they purchased retail drones online and spent weeks practicing how to fly them “high enough to avoid detection” before “swooping down at a steep angle to strike their target.” They ultimately failed to evade authorities in Caracas, who destroyed the drones mid-air after noticing their violation of Venezuelan airspace.

What precisely inspired the would-be assassins’ confession to the press was unknown. In their public account, however, the conspirators made certain to emphasize that authorities in Bogotá and Washington were totally unaware of their plot. At the same time, they bizarrely admitted to meeting with “several US officials” on three occasions in the aftermath of the attack—once again, for reasons that remain unclear.

Venezuela’s government, on the other hand, maintained that its own investigation into the assassination plot uncovered an evidence trail leading all the way to the White House.

********

Maduro agreed to speak with the Grayzone in August 2019, during our second visit to Venezuela. For the interview’s venue, the president’s office selected El Ávila National Park (Waraira Repano to the local indigenous population) located in the Cordillera de la Costa Central mountain chain resting between northern Caracas and the Caribbean Sea. Curious as to why the president wished to meet amid the lofty slopes of a coastal mountain, we made the bumpy trek up El Ávila’s winding dirt trail with excitement, happy to explore one of Venezuela’s most treasured natural wonders. After a thirty-minute climb, we arrived at our final destination: a national guard outpost perched on the mountain’s ledge. Beyond El Ávila’s luscious verdure, the location featured a boundless view of Venezuela’s buzzing capital in the distance—the perfect backdrop for an interview with the country’s president.

While waiting for Maduro, Max and I mingled with a group of uniformed men patrolling the outpost, including the burly leader of a local colectivo who spoke at length about General Smedley Butler’s 1935 exposé of corporate influence in the US military, War Is a Racket. Over a lunch of rice, yucca, and grilled chicken, he informed us the president was visiting El Ávila to address a graduation ceremony for the firefighting division of Venezuela’s national park service. Soon enough, we heard Maduro’s basso profundo thundering over the cheers of fired up cadets gathered nearby.

“They fight fires with drones!” Maduro quipped upon greeting us, a joking reference to the attempt on his life the previous summer. Our meeting took place on August 2, 2019—almost exactly one year to the date since the drone incident.

“I’m a man of faith. I believe in God very much,” the president reflected on surviving the attack. “I believe there was an event that day; that God saved our lives.”

In Maduro’s view, his assassination would have plunged Venezuela into a “deeper phase” of “armed revolution” if successful, risking all-out civil war.

“They planned it to perfection, with so much evil, to assassinate us,” he stressed, insisting the plot’s Miami-based “intellectual authors” and “financiers” were part of “networks established by the White House.”

“I can’t accuse President Trump,” Maduro said of his government’s inquiry into the conspiracy.

“But I do have all the evidence to accuse and ask for a landmark investigation into John Bolton,” Venezuela’s president asserted. “He’s a criminal. He failed.”

Bolton would later cite Max’s interview in his memoir, The Room Where It Happened, recounting that his “spirits were high” upon learning of Maduro’s accusations against him.

********

Bolton built up his cred as one of the world’s most ruthless putschists in April 2019, roughly three months following the US recognition of Guaidó. By then, Trump had adopted the view that Guaidó was a “kid” who “nobody’s ever heard of” and recognized that Maduro still maintained the support of, in his words, “all those good-looking generals.” Bolton, on the other hand, bolstered Guaidó’s estimate that 80 percent of Venezuela’s military and 90 percent of its population secretly supported his US-backed shadow regime—an assessment that even the opposition’s most loyal followers would have found laughable. On April 30, Bolton put his confidence to the test.

By Bolton’s own account, that date represented a turning point for which Guaidó and his US backers had long prepared. He recalled starting the day with a 5:25 a.m. phone call with secretary of state and former CIA director Mike Pompeo. As the US officials debriefed, a contingent of Venezuelan opposition activists began shutting down sections of Caracas’s main throughway, the Francisco Fajardo Highway. Then, for the first time since joining the White House one year prior, Bolton made the decision to rouse the president from his sleep to deliver important news: a military revolt was underway in Caracas.

“Wow,” was reportedly the extent of Trump’s reply, suggesting a blend of disinterest and mild discomfort.

Twenty minutes after Bolton and Pompeo’s conversation, Guaidó launched a Twitter livestream from his position in the middle of the highway, just outside Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda air base in eastern Caracas. The wannabe leader proceeded to call for a military uprising against Maduro, gawkily waving his hands to emphasize his appeal for mass rebellion.

“We push forward, we are going to achieve freedom and democracy in Venezuela,” he vowed at the end of his awkward plea.

Sunlight had just begun its morning stretch over the sky-high ridges of El Ávila that border Caracas. Even so, it was clear that only a handful of military personnel—fewer than a dozen—flanked Guaidó as he spoke. Though his statement failed to demonstrate that a serious mutiny was underway, one of Guaidó’s silhouetted accomplices was notable. Just over his left shoulder stood Leopoldo López, the sandy-haired star of Venezuela’s US-backed opposition who was widely believed to be pulling the strings of Guaidó’s shadow regime. As a key architect of the coup attempt underway, dubbed “Operation Freedom,” López had successfully broken out of house arrest, where he was serving a fourteen-year sentence for his role directing the deadly guarimba riots of 2014.

As the drama in Caracas unfolded, nonchalant Venezuelan officials assured me that Guaidó’s attempted insurrection was doomed. Indeed, by mid-afternoon Reuters reported that “an uneasy peace had returned” to the streets “and there was no indication that the opposition planned to take power through military force.”8 By nightfall, López and his family had reportedly taken refuge in Chile’s local diplomatic residence (they eventually settled in Spain’s Caracas embassy) and Guaidó was nowhere to be found.

Multiple accounts—including Bolton’s—later revealed that Venezuelan defense minister Vladimir Padrino López had duped Leopoldo, Guaidó, and their US handlers into following through with their foolish scheme by providing it with “passive support.”9 Trump’s inner circle remained convinced Padrino López was their man on the inside until the last minute, when he and his forces stood squarely beside Maduro.

*******

Throughout the day of Guaidó’s miscarried mutiny, credulous corporate media correspondents repeated assertions from US officials that Venezuela’s government would soon collapse. Pompeo even told CNN that President Maduro was on the verge of fleeing to Havana, Cuba.

“He had an airplane on the tarmac. He was ready to leave this morning as we understand it, and the Russians indicated he should stay,” the US secretary of state insisted with total certainty.

Even as hours passed with no developments in Caracas, Bolton continued to publicly indulge his regime change fantasy.

“Your time is up. This is your last chance,” the mustachioed militarist tweeted at Venezuelan military and intelligence officials, including Defense Minister Padrino López.

“Accept Interim President Guaidó’s amnesty, protect the Constitution, and remove Maduro, and we will take you off our sanctions list. Stay with Maduro, and go down with the ship,” Bolton threatened, tacitly admitting sanctions were a tool of US blackmail.

Despite Guaidó’s evident failure, US media neglected to scrutinize Bolton and Pompeo’s narrative of imminent triumph in Caracas. CNN’s Jake Tapper, an inveterate neocon who spent his days lamenting Obama’s failure to overthrow Syria’s government, was particularly hot for their scheme. Though he often sought viewers’ attention—or at least, that of the twenty-three-year-old Media Matters staffers paid to watch CNN full-time—with overblown anti-Trump tirades, painting the president as a Russian puppet who betrayed the grand traditions of American exceptionalism, Tapper was in complete lockstep with the White House when it came to Venezuela. For a smug broadcaster with a personality envious of drying paint, it seemed that trashing Trump while clamoring for endless regime change war was the perfect formula to advance his middling Beltway celebrity.

“CNN live in Venezuela as Maduro government mows down citizens in streets,” Tapper tweeted on the afternoon of April 30, attaching a photo of Venezuelan soldiers firing their guns at a target beyond the camera’s view. There was just one problem: the soldiers Tapper described were donning the blue armbands that mutinying Venezuelan troops had adopted throughout the day, meaning they were in fact allied with Guaidó—not the Maduro government. Tapper deleted his tweet after enduring hours of sustained mockery.

As Guaidó floundered before the world, Washington’s sole victory on April 30 was in the theater of propaganda. Amid the blitz of fantastical coverage, I called on someone I knew would be willing to interrupt the media’s regime change racket. Having met Tucker Carlson during one of the most consequential diplomatic meetings of Trump’s presidency, I was confident the Fox host would be an ally in the fight against further intervention in Venezuela.

*******

In the summer of 2018 I traveled to Helsinki, Finland, to cover the historic summit between US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Convened at the height of “Russiagate” hysteria, the Helsinki meeting represented a direct rebuke to US hawks and their media collaborators, both of which aimed to sabotage any improvement in US-Russia relations. At the time, I was working as a roving correspondent and news anchor for the US branch of Moscow’s flagship state-funded media outlet, RT.

Though I obtained official White House press credentials as a correspondent for RT America—the outlet at the center of Putin’s alleged conspiracy to influence the US public and electoral process in support of Trump—I was predictably alienated from the Beltway media mannequins assigned to the Helsinki junket. While waiting to clear security for the Trump-Putin presser in a hotel dining room overlooking the Baltic Sea, I listened as US network personalities agonized over the idea our president would even so much as sit across from his Russian counterpart. At one point, I overheard a reporter joke that Trump and Putin were having sex when their bilateral meeting ran late. Alas, chalking the delay up to vigorous negotiations regarding Europe’s energy supply, war in Syria and Ukraine, or nuclear arms reduction would have been absurd!

The White House press corps’ juvenile view of the world was on full display when the joint Trump-Putin news conference finally began, and I had a front row seat to the Cold War melodrama. The presser consisted of opening statements from each leader and four questions: two from the US side, represented by AP and Reuters; and two from the Russian camp, represented by Interfax and RT International.

Russian media were concerned with the material stakes of Washington-Moscow relations, with Interfax prompting Trump and Putin to discuss the future of Nord Stream 2, a pipeline designed to transport Russian natural gas to Germany. The pipeline, which was still under construction, was an object of obsession for Washington because it would allow Berlin to source its energy from Russia rather than the United States. Meanwhile, RT International asked whether the two leaders had discussed the war in Syria. As Putin wrapped his answer, a member of his entourage approached the podium with a soccer ball.

“President Trump just mentioned that we have successfully concluded the world football cup,” Putin said, smiling as he referenced the international soccer tournament that Russia hosted that summer. “Speaking of football, actually, Mr. President, I will give this ball to you—and now the ball is in your court.”

A handful of Russian journalists applauded as Putin handed the ball to Trump, who proceeded to thank his counterpart and state that he would pass the gift along to his son, Barron, before tossing it to Melania Trump, who was seated in the first row. The friendly gesture brought an air of optimism to the room and for a moment, it seemed as if a breakthrough between the US and Russia were truly possible. That hopeful spirit was squashed moments later, when AP reporter Jonathan Lemire took the floor to demand Trump address “high confidence” claims by US intelligence officials that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to secure his victory.

“Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every US intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did,” Lemire whined before demanding to know whom Trump believed.

“Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?” Lemire continued, goading the US president to treat his Russian counterpart like a naughty child.

Lemire’s grandstanding mimicked the act his colleague from Reuters staged moments before, when he similarly pressed Trump to denounce Russia’s government. Trump’s refusal to accept their narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 election outraged Western media, which used the Helsinki summit to further cast the US president as a puppet of Moscow. Rather than analyze the substance of Putin’s and Trump’s statements, virtually all US and European coverage of the summit consisted of a variation of the following headlines:

• Trump sides with Russia against FBI at Helsinki summit (BBC)15
• Trump’s Helsinki Bow To Putin Leaves World Wondering: Why? (NPR)16
• Donald Trump in Helsinki was terrifying. Cancel the Washington sequel. (USA Today)17

Not to be outdone in the realm of pro-war hysterics, CNN put an absurdly conspiratorial spin on the Russian president’s attempt at football diplomacy, publishing a report that claimed “Putin gave Trump a soccer ball that may have a transmitter chip.”

The mainstream media’s parrot jungle of Cold War hostility was only interrupted by the presence of Tucker Carlson, who traveled to Helsinki to conduct an interview with President Trump. Having long abandoned the signature bowtie and conventional policy views that once defined his career, by the time of the Helsinki reunion Tucker had emerged as the premier critic of Washington’s foreign policy establishment in US media. Most importantly, Tucker exhibited a willingness to consider arguments regardless of their assumed political silos, a fact I discovered when he hosted Max to offer a “left-wing” critique of Russiagate in the months following Trump’s election.

While many in the media project strident public personas to shield their vanity and lack of real-world charm, the larger-than-life personality Tucker displayed on air was his genuine character. The concerned gaze, over-the-top laugh, and mischievous twinkle in his eye were not an act for the camera. And though he could provide an endless stream of fascinating life stories himself (such as the time he accompanied civil rights icon Al Sharpton and left-wing academic Cornel West to civil war–torn Liberia20), he was just as inquisitive in person as with guests on his show. When I met Tucker in Finland, I found that despite our seemingly polarized political allegiances, we agreed on quite a lot. Unlike the jumped-up lapdogs overrunning Helsinki, Tucker was comfortable enough in his rank to view Washington’s elite with scorn—a consequential self-security he demonstrated during Trump’s tenure.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Tucker solidified his place among the most influential media personalities in US history, with his primetime Fox program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, eventually earning the title of most-watched cable news show of all time.21 Tucker set himself apart from other corporate news hosts, including those at Fox, as the most articulate—and humorous—voice of Trump’s freshly awakened America First base. Each weeknight, Tucker spoke for millions of Americans who had borne the brunt of neoliberal policies such as NAFTA, deindustrialization, and the military’s misadventures in the Middle East. Personally burned by his own support for the Iraq War years prior, by 2019 Tucker had matured into a fervent anti-interventionist who regularly opened his show with lengthy monologues that systematically debunked his media colleagues’ narrative du jour.

“Leaders on both sides of the aisle in Congress, in the media, in our intelligence services, and in virtually every overfunded think tank in Washington have suddenly aligned tonight on a single point of agreement: America must go to war in Syria immediately,” he announced at the start of a broadcast on April 9, 2018, hours after US officials accused Syria’s government of carrying out a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma.

“This ought to make you nervous. Universal bipartisan agreement on anything is usually the first sign that something deeply unwise is about to happen, if only because there’s nobody left to ask skeptical questions. And we should be skeptical of this,” Tucker told viewers, accusing US officials of crafting “propaganda designed to manipulate Americans.”

While conducting routine examinations of pro-war disinformation, Tucker mercilessly grilled Washington’s top policymakers before millions of disaffected Americans hungry for a reckoning with their elite.

“To hear you say ‘we need to knock off the Assad regime and things will be better in Syria,’ you sort of wonder like, well, maybe you should choose another profession? Selling insurance, painting houses, something you’re good at?” Tucker slammed Max Boot, a fixture of Washington’s neoconservative intelligentsia and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, during a memorable confrontation in July 2017.

“Is there no sanction for being as wrong as you have?” Tucker continued to badger a visibly rattled Boot.

Yet perhaps no figures attracted Tucker’s ire more than Trump officials who actively undermined the president’s “America First” agenda. He held particular contempt for Bolton, whom he characterized as a “bureaucratic tapeworm.”

“Try as you might, you can’t expel him,” Tucker said of Trump’s national security advisor during a June 2019 broadcast. “He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically emerging to cause pain and suffering.”

Tucker’s attack on Bolton came days after Iran shot down a US drone that had violated its sovereign airspace. In the aftermath of Tehran’s response to Washington’s naked aggression, the New York Times revealed that Bolton and others in the White House had pressured Trump to bomb Iran—belligerent advice the president rejected thanks to Tucker’s intervention.

“While national security advisers were urging a military strike against Iran, Mr. Carlson in recent days had told Mr. Trump that responding to Tehran’s provocations with force was crazy,” the Times reported, crediting Tucker with personally preventing war with Iran (and possibly World War III).

 

Tucker’s influence over Trump transcended their personal relationship. Without question, the most significant pair of eyeballs (among millions) fixed on Tucker’s show throughout the Trump years belonged to the president himself. As Washington’s dime store foreign policy “experts” leapt to rally support for Guaidó’s coup on April 30, 2019, I reached out to Tucker with a request. As Guaidó summoned military defectors to the Caracas streets, an invitation to Fox’s DC studio arrived in my inbox.

*********

Tucker’s broadcast on the night of April 30 was a fervent anti-war rampage perhaps unseen on cable news networks since 2003, when MSNBC host Phil Donahue’s militant opposition to the Iraq invasion made him the network’s highest rated host (and ultimately, led to his termination).

“Will the overthrow of Maduro make Venezuela a more stable and prosperous country? More to the point, would it be good for the United States?” Tucker asked his viewers. He then mocked Republican senator Rick Scott for demanding the deployment of US troops to Venezuela during an interview with Fox earlier that day.26

“Before the bombers take off, let’s just answer a few quick questions, starting with the most obvious: when was the last time we successfully meddled in the political life of another country? Has it ever worked? How are the democracies we set up in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and Afghanistan tonight? How would Venezuela be different? Please explain, and take your time,” the host continued.

As I walked through Fox’s offices and into the greenroom, a tall, barrel-chested man in a dark suit strode by and said hello. It was Douglas Macgregor, a retired US army colonel renowned in military ranks for his innovations in battlefield strategy—and resented in polite Washington society for his straightforward, realist approach to world affairs.

My friends among DC’s marginalized circle of former military and intelligence professionals with anti-interventionist views hoped that Macgregor could one day replace the uber-militarist Bolton on Trump’s National Security Council. Until then, as Trump remained captive to the neoconservative blob of Latin American expats, arms industry–funded think tanks, and the Pentagon Joint Chiefs, Macgregor was relegated to the Fox studio. And it was from there that the rock-ribbed Republican who had led US tanks into Iraq during the first Gulf War railed against further intervention in Venezuela.

“Over time, our history in Latin America is a disaster,” Macgregor cautioned Tucker, making his case in a commanding baritone. “We will incur the hostility of the population; they’ll want us ultimately to leave. And if [Guaidó] is viewed as a puppet, he is going to have trouble lasting.”

Tucker made sure to feature one pro-Guaidó voice on his show on the night of April 30, however. It was Republican congressman Mario Díaz-Balart, a stalwart of the Cuban American regime-change lobby in Miami, who used his time on air to conjure a cast of foreign evildoers exploiting Venezuela as a base from which to threaten—and even attack—the US homeland. It was a well-worn script the Cuban expat community had deployed over the years while appealing in vain for a US taxpayer–sponsored Bay of Pigs revenge.

“You have Hezbollah, you have Cuba, you have Iran, you have Russia, you have China there,” Díaz-Balart moaned, “so imagine if this regime that now is receiving a lot of international pressure survives? Is it, or is it not, potentially a green light, an open door for the Russians and for the Chinese and for others, to increase their activity against our national security interests, right here in our hemisphere?”

Tucker looked at Díaz-Balart with puzzlement. “Yeah, no? I mean, it’s kind of hard to see what you’re talking about exactly.” The host then transitioned the conversation to the US border, implicitly addressing his most important viewer: President Trump.

“So they have a small number of Russian advisers there, I’m supposed to think it’s a threat because, why? No one really explains. Why should I not be worried about eight million people leaving Venezuela?” Tucker asked, referring to a 2018 Brookings report that estimated eight million refugees would flee Venezuela in the event of increased instability.

By then, Díaz-Balart had run out of talking points and presumably lost Tucker’s audience of America Firsters. Fumbling for a reply, he claimed the only way to prevent the flow of Venezuelan refugees to the US border was “to do what we can to make sure that the regime is no longer there.”

“Or that the regime remains there, but there isn’t a scene like this,” Tucker retorted, pointing to images of Guaidó’s botched revolt flashing on screen. “I mean, that is kind of the message from Syria,” he added.

Tucker’s carefully staged anti-interventionist theater—capped by the performance of Colonel Macgregor, who would go on to advise Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal strategy (and be systematically sabotaged by the Joint Chiefs along the way29)—suggested that support for Guaidó was limited to Miami and Washington’s permanent war lobby, what the president and his supporters called “the deep state.” Trump himself must have known that a significant portion of his base, from immigration hardliners to isolationist paleocons, could not support an escalation of force against Venezuela that would destabilize yet another region of the globe and fuel a fresh migration crisis—this time on their own border.

I planned to use my time on air to reinforce that message in a direct appeal to Trump. By the time I sat down across from Tucker, less than four minutes were left in the broadcast. As Tucker sought my opinion of the day’s events, I felt my adrenaline surge.

“The fake news media are lying about the situation in Venezuela,” I began, imagining I was addressing the president himself. “Let me put it for you this way: imagine if Hillary Clinton had refused to admit defeat after losing to President Trump in 2016, banded together a group of twenty-four US soldiers, and attempted to take the White House by force? I don’t think that she would be walking freely on the streets the way Juan Guaidó is walking right now in Caracas.”

I then addressed reports of a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, noting the media never acknowledged the role US sanctions played in fomenting it. To illustrate my point, I cited a report that the Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank published days prior, which found that US sanctions contributed to thousands of excess deaths in Venezuela between the years 2017 and 2018 alone.

“President Trump, if he truly cared about the Venezuelan people—and the American people, for that matter—he would end this disastrous policy,” I said as rapidly as possible, sensing the ticking clock. “He would end the sanctions and he would look into John Bolton’s eyes, into Elliott Abrams’s eyes, and Mike Pompeo’s eyes and say: ‘You are fired. You are leading me down a disastrous path, another war for oil.’”

“You are passionate!” Tucker laughed. He was right. For me, speaking against the war on Venezuela was a defense of the people I had met in the country months before—several of whom I count among my dearest friends to this very day.

“I’m not sure I agree with everything you said, but I’m glad that you could say it here,” Tucker announced as our segment wound to a close. “You were just there, and I don’t think that you would be allowed to say that on any other show.”

I agreed with Tucker’s assessment before jamming in a final denunciation of Trump’s team: “President Trump promised to drain the swamp, and he flooded his national security team with that exact swamp!”

“Well, I agree with that, actually,” Tucker concluded.

With that, Tucker handed the Fox airways over to a visibly uncomfortable Sean Hannity, the bloviating GOP hack who literally wore his allegiance to Washington’s establishment on his sleeve, donning a CIA and FBI lapel pin on his jacket every night. Hannity struggled to hold back his contempt and surprise as he labored through a few seconds of banter with Tucker. Yet the segment electrified millions of others.

By the next morning, our interview had been translated into Spanish and gone viral in Latin America, especially Venezuela, which broadcast the exchange on state television. Days later, Tucker informed me that our interview not only garnered top ratings (which predictably plummeted as Hannity kicked off) but had caught the attention of Trump himself.

According to Tucker, the president phoned him shortly after the events of April 30 to venerate the perspectives featured on his show that evening. Trump complained that if he actually listened to Bolton’s advice, he would have already started “World Wars Three, Four, and Five,” explaining he merely kept the rabid hawk on his shoulder to send a message to world leaders that “all options” were on the table.

Indeed, Trump brandished Bolton as his “big stick” in international negotiations, fashioning the neocon as a prop in his Art of the Deal diplomacy. In reality, however, Bolton outmaneuvered the president, exploiting his Swamp connections and control over the flow of information in the White House to sabotage virtually all of Trump’s meaningful engagement efforts. In his memoir, Bolton boasted of undermining Trump’s push to draw down the US military occupation of northeastern Syria as well as the president’s attempts to détente with governments in Russia and North Korea.

Bolton paid particular attention to the Helsinki summit, even confessing his hope that “Trump would be irritated enough” by Putin’s delayed arrival “that he would be tougher” on his Russian counterpart (Bolton 2020, 153) while exalting the US media’s belligerent conduct at the leaders’ joint press conference. He also described instructing Trump to reject further bilateral arms reduction agreements with Russia, along with his view that the US should withdraw from the Cold War–era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Trump heeded that advice and announced the US’s unilateral withdrawal from the INF Treaty in February 2019,30 marking a 180-degree turn from the promising and amicable posture he set with Putin in Helsinki just seven months prior.

While Bolton’s treacherous behavior eventually led to his dismissal, it won him a veneer of respectability within the imperial cesspit of elite Washington—and a hero status among the liberal anti-Trump Resistance™ embodied by the likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper. Without this rebrand, the crux of Bolton’s legacy would have instead been his promotion of the catastrophic Iraq War and deranged Axis of Evil conspiracy.

Though Trump did not fire Bolton until September, the president’s frustration with his national security advisor reached a breaking point following the events of April 30, 2019. Echoing Tucker’s account of Trump’s reaction to the Venezuela imbroglio, the Washington Post cited senior administration officials who claimed the president felt “misled” by Bolton and other advisors, whom he believed had “underestimated Maduro.”31

“The president’s dissatisfaction has crystallized around national security adviser John Bolton and what Trump has groused is an interventionist stance at odds with his view that the United States should stay out of foreign quagmires,” the Post disclosed.

Bolton’s coup policy had not only flopped, but boomeranged. As it became clear that Venezuela’s military leadership had rejected his call to mutiny, a photograph of Guaidó standing in the middle of an empty highway with a stunned expression on his face and cell phone pressed against his ear circulated online.32 Though who exactly was on the other line remains unknown, many on social media joked that Pompeo and Bolton were likely scolding their useless marionette for embarrassing them so badly.

Designed to convince Trump of Guaidó’s strength, the botched revolt instead left the novice politician looking bug-eyed, unwanted, and alone. In the days following April 30, administration officials informed the media that Trump began referring to Maduro as a “tough cookie” in conversations around the White House (Gearan et al. 2019). Meanwhile, Bolton said the president had taken to describing Guaidó as the “Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela” (Bolton 2020, 277), accurately equating the US-backed coup leader with an uninspired Obama knock-off.