The world is still processing the remarkable raid in Venezuela and its effect on the political front.<\/b>
\nThe world is still processing the remarkable raid in Venezuela and its effect on the political front.
U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from his residence on Jan. 3 and transported him to New York to face U.S. charges in a narco-terrorism conspiracy case.
Maduro \u2014 a left-wing authoritarian who ruled Venezuela for more than a decade while ignoring election results \u2014 was not just another foreign dictator. He presided over the transformation of a once-wealthy nation into a failed narco-state, exporting drugs, migration instability, and criminal networks and gangs directly into the United States.
A Harvard-Harris poll in December makes it unmistakably clear where the American people stand on Venezuela. Public opinion was closer to 80-20 than a partisan split, driven by concerns about drugs, crime and national security.
Voters didn\u2019t view Maduro as a legitimate democratic leader. Some 64% said he should be removed from office; 75% described his government as a dictatorship. When given fuller context \u2014 election fraud, narco-terrorism charges, the reward for capture, and the spillover of Venezuela\u2019s collapse \u2014 support rose sharply: 85% said Maduro should be removed; 76% said the United States should arrest him.
The takeaway is straightforward: Americans see Venezuela as a narco-state problem with real consequences at home, and they broadly support decisive action to deal with it.
This public instinct didn\u2019t emerge in a vacuum. As someone who tracks public opinion over time, one of the most striking patterns in modern polling is what happened in July 2021. President Joe Biden\u2019s job approval collapsed at precisely the same moment Afghanistan collapsed \u2014 and it never meaningfully recovered.
In our polling after the horrific Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, Americans said they think Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine and the Oct. 7 attacks were direct consequences of that collapse in Afghanistan. In the public mind, weakness invited aggression.
What we\u2019re seeing now \u2014 with the capture of Maduro and the strike on Iran\u2019s nuclear program in Operation Midnight Hammer \u2014 is the Trump administration systematically repairing the damage to American power.
Where past administrations spent years bogged down in distant conflicts, this administration operates in hours.
And the strategic effects ripple inward. The former border czar Kamala Harris famously said her job was to address the \u201croot causes\u201d of the migration crisis. After years of inaction, it took a new president to first close the border in a matter of weeks, and then actually confront a primary root cause: the collapse of Venezuela into a narco-terrorism state aligned with America\u2019s greatest adversaries.
For Americans, this isn\u2019t about empire or interventionism. It\u2019s about restoring order, protecting lives, and reasserting the simple idea that American power, when used decisively and intelligently, still matters.
Dustin Olson is the managing partner of American Pulse Research & Polling and the founder of the political consulting firm Olson Strategies & Advertising\/InsideSources<\/p>\n