President Donald Trump seized control of the Republican Party on an anti-interventionist “America First” platform that has cleaved the GOP from its Bush-era foreign policy that led to years of messy foreign entanglements.
Now Trump’s decision to send the military into Venezuela to remove its president, and his vague claim that the United States would go on to “run” the country, have threatened to open a new rift within the political movement he has built over the past decade. A handful of Republicans are asking how it squares with his campaign-trail promises to not engage in nation-building or begin new foreign wars.
Trump and members of his administration have offered differing explanations of what would happen in Venezuela now that the United States has captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him back to New York to face criminal charges. After Trump said that Americans would “run” the country, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tiptoed back from that position on the Sunday morning news shows, and noted that U.S. troops were no longer on the ground there.
“The lack of framing of the message on a potential occupation has the base bewildered, if not angry,” Steve Bannon, the pro-Trump podcaster, said in an interview. “While President Trump makes the case for hemispheric defense, Rubio confuses with talk of removing Hamas and Hezbollah.”
On his podcast, “War Room,” Bannon and some of his guests praised the way the military operation had been executed. But he also asked pointed questions, including whether it was “harkening back to our fiasco in Iraq under Bush.”
The operation was celebrated as a victory by many Republicans. Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., said in an interview that Trump’s military action in Venezuela was “consistent with a foreign policy that is aimed first and foremost to protect the interests of the United States.”
But it also attracted criticism from a smattering of younger right-wing influencers and podcasters who hold significant sway among the online MAGA base, and who developed their political identities watching prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush and Obama administrations.
(Tierney L. Cross | The New York Times) President Donald Trump looks on as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. Some Republicans are asking how President Trump's military intervention in Venezuela squares with his past pledges to avoid foreign entanglements and nation building.
Candace Owens, a right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist, wrote to her 7.5 million followers on the social platform X that the CIA had “staged another hostile takeover of a country” at the behest of “globalist psychopaths.” She compared the incursion to U.S. actions in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The few critical notes among congressional Republicans came from lawmakers who have already distanced themselves from Trump.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is resigning Monday after a public break from Trump led to her being ostracized, compared the president to previous administrations that had sought regime change in Iraq and Libya.
“This is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn’t serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks and the oil executives,” she told NBC on Sunday. “And so my pushback here is on the Trump administration that campaigned on Make America Great Again, that we thought was putting America first, I want to see domestic policy be the priority that helps Americans afford life after four disastrous years of the Biden administration.”
While Trump has long accused Venezuela and other Latin American nations of sending drugs and criminals to the United States, his assertion that Venezuela’s president needed to be ousted so American oil companies could reclaim resources there was relatively new. Unlike the lead-up to the Iraq War two decades ago, the administration had made relatively little effort to sell the American people on using military force in Venezuela before this weekend.
“VENEZUELA is not about drugs; it’s about OIL and REGIME CHANGE,” Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, wrote on social media. “This is not what we voted for.”
Trump, in an interview Sunday with The Atlantic, dismissed concerns about what might happen next in Venezuela. “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now,” he said. “Can’t get any worse.”
Trump himself has at times diverged from his isolationist language and his pledges to end the “era of endless wars,” especially last year when he launched strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran. He has said in the past that “America First” essentially means whatever he says it means.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who has long echoed Trump’s isolationist foreign policy views, seemed to endorse the idea that “America First” was consistent with taking over another country and dictating its affairs.
“Again, we will see,” Jordan told Dana Bash of CNN when she confronted him Sunday about what “America First” meant. “We don’t know what that exactly means.”
Kiley said that because of Venezuela’s relative proximity to the United States and Maduro’s relationships with American adversaries such as Russia and China, the U.S. was justified in intervening to protect its interests and security.
“When it comes to foreign policy, you have to have a realist perspective as well,” Kiley said. “And philosophy and ideology can only take you so far when you’re dealing with the complexity of human affairs in a dangerous and interconnected world where U.S. interests could be implicated in a whole host of ways.”
Other Republican defenders of Trump’s action argued that the effort was more specific and targeted than invasions that led to yearslong occupations, and predicted that it would not involve American casualties or troops remaining on the ground.
Brian Schimming, the chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said it was easier for Republicans who opposed other foreign interventions to support one in Venezuela because of the country’s relative proximity to the United States.
“Getting people over the bridge that this is an America First thing is not a hard thing,” Schimming said in an interview. “This is not one where somebody in this coffee house is saying, ‘Oh, my God, I hope my brother doesn’t get drafted.’”
Robert Axson, the chair of the Utah Republican Party, said that “a little bit of an investment of force and showing that force now, if appropriately measured and focused and planned for, as thus far it has been, can do a world of good in avoiding what could be an absolute catastrophe down the road.”
Axson acknowledged that some people might question whether the incursion was contrary to Trump’s isolationist message.
“Being America First and being very restrained in willingness to risk American service members is certainly appropriate, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to put your head in the sand and do nothing,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance, in a lengthy post on social media, sought to calm anxieties about Trump’s claim that the United States would run Venezuela so it could expropriate the country’s natural resources.
“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?” Vance wrote. “Great powers don’t act like that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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