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“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Donald Trump said after declaring victory on 6 November 2024. It wasn’t his first pledge to disengage the US from foreign conflicts, and Trump’s top allies in conservative media and the “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement have all rallied to his pledge to “put America first”.
Now that the US president seems to have broken his pledge by launching an invasion of Venezuela, not to mention threatening future actions against Cuba and Colombia and potentially Greenland, some have reasonably wondered whether Trump’s supporters in Maga media would hammer him for that inconsistency.
But in the days since the US forcibly abducted Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, with dozens killed as part of the night-time operation, Trump has instead received strong support from his media allies, with a few on-again, off-again backers expressing some reservations.
“Generally, the party is going to stand with him on this and conservative media is going to stand with him on this,” former Republican congressman and talk radio host Joe Walsh said.
The conservative radio and television host Mark Levin, one of Trump’s strongest media defenders, not only celebrated Trump’s military actions but on Sunday called those who questioned the legality of the incursion, including Senator Bernie Sanders and the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, “pure evil”.
“They defend totalitarianism [sic] regimes against our nation’s own security and interests,” he added. Levin and Fox News host Sean Hannity have also championed “The Donroe Doctrine”, the notion that Trump’s America has dominance over the Western hemisphere.
The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called out those on the “so-called isolationalist right” who may oppose the Trump administration’s actions, referring primarily to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Shapiro said that Maduro was ousted by “a conservative Republican president, a gutsy president, who makes the calls to preserve America’s national security and her foreign interests”.
But even Carlson expressed cautious optimism in an episode of his streaming show on Monday after Trump gave his backing to Maduro’s former vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez.
Carlson said he’s “grateful for the wisdom of not taking out the entire government”, clarifying: “Not because I support the government, but because we have clear models in Iraq and Libya and a lot of Syria: it can be very hard to put those things back together again.” Carlson said it “seems like a much wiser approach” to keep the government structure in place but “making sure it’s pro-American”.
“That makes me calm down a bit,” he added.
The coverage among opinion hosts on Fox News has also been overwhelmingly positive. Fox News host Laura Ingraham called the capture of Maduro “quintessentially Maga”.
“America and the world is a safer, freer place,” Hannity said on Monday night. “And this administration, they are making no apologies, nor should they.
“Donald Trump’s like my surgeon: he’s elegant, and he’s precise, and he went in there with the perfect extraction,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said on the Five on Monday. “This is not regime change. This is just trying to change the regime’s behavior.”
Not everyone is falling in line. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who now runs her own company and has a radio channel on SiriusXM, mocked the pro-Trump coverage on her former network, even as she re-affirmed her support for the president. “I turned on Fox News yesterday, and I’m sorry, but it was like watching Russian propaganda,” she said on her Monday show. “There was nothing skeptical. It was all rah-rah cheerleading, yes, let’s go. And that’s fine. I love our military as much as anyone, and I believe in President Trump, but there are serious reasons to just exercise a note of caution before we just get on the rah-rah train.” She said Trump’s actions to depose Maduro were clearly about global oil dominance and not “this bullshit about law enforcement”.
Kat Timpf, a libertarian commentator who is a regular panelist on Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show, pointed out the inconsistencies in Trump’s past comments about international involvement. “Let me get this straight: we go to a country, we capture their leader, we bomb it, and then we say, ‘We run this country now.’ And that is not war,” she said, “but when they send cocaine over here that people are willingly snorting – that is war? It doesn’t make any sense … I hope I’m wrong. I hope this is suddenly the one regime change that works out well for us and for the people we are supposed to be rescuing, but we do not have a very good track record.” (Timpf said on X that she’s received “very brutal personal attacks” from Trump supporters – and from fellow long-term skeptics about foreign interventionism – for expressing concerns about Venezuela.)
The conservative media personality Candace Owens, who has emerged as a regular critic of the president, called it a CIA-led “hostile takeover of a country at the behest of a globalist psychopaths”, she wrote in a post on X, adding that “there has never been a single regime change that Zionists have not applauded because it means they get to steal land, oil and other resources.”
And Carlson, too, who had long warned against “regime change” in Venezuela, seemed skeptical that the US should be meddling in other Latin-American countries, including Cuba, where Trump seemed to show interest in intervention. “To spend all your time worrying about Cuba? I love the Cubans here. Love them. But how much money do you want to spend out of your kid’s college fund on regime change in Cuba?”
On his War Room show on Saturday, Steve Bannon, who prominently opposed the US pushing for so-called regime change in Iran this summer, called Trump’s move in Venezuela “a stunning and dazzling strike” and a “bold and brilliant raid” – though he has questioned the long-term consequences.
There was also some discord in the Murdoch-controlled print media ecosystem. The New York Post’s editorial board came out strongly in defense of the raid, writing: “Operation Absolute Resolve was stunningly successful, fresh testimony to the tremendous professionalism of America’s servicemen and -women – and of course to the resolve of President Donald Trump.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, however, took a more skeptical perspective, writing on Saturday that it was “odd” that Trump was “so dismissive” of the Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado. The board also dinged Trump for talking excessively about US interest in Venezuelan oil, “which sends a message that the US purpose is largely mercenary”. On Sunday, the board seemed skeptical about the possibility of Venezuela’s current leadership remaining in place. “The Trump Administration talks about its foreign-policy ‘realism’,” they wrote. “But if Maduro 2.0 remains in defiant power in six months, its gamble on his henchmen won’t look very realistic.”
Walsh, a former supporter of the Tea Party movement who left the House of Representatives in 2013, knows the price of standing in opposition to Trump. He had his radio show cancelled by Salem Radio Network in 2019 after he became a critic of Trump and announced a primary challenge.
“To be in rightwing media, it became clear when he first won, you either get on the train, or you don’t. It’s still that way,” he said in an interview. “If 100% of the audience came out against what Trump did in Venezuela, you’d see these people move, but that’s not going to happen.”
