It’s only been days since an audacious U.S. raid snatched Nicolás Maduro from a Venezuelan military base and sped him to a Brooklyn prison, yet Detroit-area Trump supporter Aaron Tobin can already see it all playing out on the big screen.
It’ll be the subject of movies for years to come, he predicts. “I am thrilled.” Plenty of others who voted for President Donald Trump and spoke to The Associated Press about the raid are applauding, too — at least for now.
The seizure of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader and his wife has forced another reckoning on the “Make America Great Again” coalition, already rocked by the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and strained by rising health insurance premiums and living costs.
Trump promised his voters that “America First” would stand against more foreign entanglements. Instead, he intervened with force and without congressional approval in a new frontier, a South American capital so far from Washington that Google Maps says it “can’t seem to find a way there.”
The geopolitical action film that Tobin sees in his mind is only at its opening scene, before all the complexities of uprooting a foreign government by a U.S. president’s fiat come rushing in. U.S. forces entered and exited swiftly. But what happens next?
Trump finds early but not endless support
Early on, the pushback from congressional Republicans and Trump’s core constituencies has been guarded, in contrast to their uproar over the Epstein episode or the tensions coursing through Republican politics over the now-expired health insurance subsidies.
Against that backdrop, Trump voters interviewed by AP journalists around the country praised the operation and expressed faith in Trump’s course. But not always limitless faith. They did not all back up Trump’s claim that those who “voted for me are thrilled. They said, ‘This is what we voted for.’”
“I support him so far,” Paul Bonner, 67, told AP while browsing at a Trump merchandise store in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. “Until he messes up, I support him.”
Trump’s apparent willingness to stay involved in Venezuela and his intensifying rhetoric about expanding U.S. power elsewhere in the hemisphere are making some of his die-hard supporters nervous.
Not all of them are reaching for the popcorn yet.
In Mississippi, a conflicted Trump voter
Chase Lewis, 24, of Philadelphia, Mississippi, said the move caught him off guard and he still isn’t sure whether he supports it. “It’s good that they’re finally freed from that dictatorship,” he said of Venezuelans, “but I don’t know what it’s going to cost us.”
He added: “I don’t want my friends that are serving right now to be dragged into a war because we went and stuck our nose in Venezuela’s business.”
In Colorado, cheers and caution from Trump voters
To Trump voter Travis Garcia, leaning against his red pickup truck on a chilly evening in Castle Rock, Colorado, it’s a slam-dunk. “Of course I’m going to be happy that they captured a dictator that’s constantly sending drugs our way,” he said. “If we’re not gonna do it, who’s gonna do it?”
However, several Colorado supporters expressed that their support hinged on avoiding a prolonged conflict, concerned that the military operation might draw the U.S. into a deeper quagmire.
From Pennsylvania: Good riddance to Maduro
At the Golden Dawn Diner in Levittown, Pennsylvania, Ron Soto, 88, expressed unreserved faith in the president’s ability to manage what comes next. “Maduro is an awful man,” he said. Yet there remains a critical view towards the extent of U.S. military involvement in foreign affairs.
As Trump supporters across the nation digest the implications of the operation, their sentiments reflect an ongoing complexity within the MAGA movement - a blend of pride, hope, and caution as they look towards Trump’s next steps in foreign policy.
