Theo Von guest Dave Smith: Trump using drugs to justify Venezuela strikes “has always just been an obvious bullshit pretext”
Smith: “Venezuela is responsible for, like, a tiny fraction of the drugs that come into America and, like, almost none of the fentanyl”
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From the January 6, 2026, edition of This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, accessed from YouTube
THEO VON (HOST): It makes you wonder kind of what's going on. What were the exact attacks that happened? Does it say? Like, did we go kill a bunch of people?
DAVE SMITH (COMEDIAN): Yeah. We definitely killed some people. There were a bunch of attacks, and then there was like an elite team that went and got — that was able to kidnap Maduro. And I know, so Mike Lee, the senator, posted on Twitter that he had spoke to Marco Rubio and that Marco Rubio had said something like, the other attacks were, like, in service of the mission to get Maduro.
So, like, I don't know what the, you know, taking out their defenses or something like that. But so, I mean, I don't know even where to start here, right? But so there's a lot — there's been obviously, for months now, there's been, like, they've been attacking, they've been bombing the boats that they're claiming are drug boats. But they haven't really demonstrated that they are. It's kind of just taking their word for it.
VON: Right. And we don't know. You just see this video, you see this footage of a black and white and then, like, a zooming-in of a night goggles explosion.
SMITH: And there was that whole controversial double-tap strike where they came back to kill the survivors, which there was a big controversy about because that's illegal under international law. You'd have to demonstrate that they were, like, still in the fight.
And then there was, you know, I guess, Pete Hegseth had said someone else made the decision, but then they claimed that they were still trying to get in the fight. It's all kind of sketchy. It's not exactly clear.
Marco Rubio, who's the secretary of state and also the national security adviser, and he's had that position for most of the the last year, this has been his pet project for a while. He's really wanted to get rid of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. The drugs thing has always just been an obvious bullshit pretext. I mean, like, there's no—
VON: That's what it feels like to me.
SMITH: Well, if you just look at the numbers, the — Venezuela is responsible for, like, a tiny fraction of the drugs that come into America and, like, almost none of the fentanyl. And if you really had a problem — you know, when people look at the OD deaths, the fentanyl is really where the action is there, and that's all from Mexico from parts made in China.
Even when, like, Donald Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy or some of these guys would have real tough language about the drug cartels on the campaign trail, it was always the Mexican drug cartels. They were always saying that because they could at least point to that and say, look, that leads to fentanyl, which leads to all these overdoses.
Now, those numbers have been going down and getting better, but I think some people, people I love, but some people have falsely, like, attributed that to the attacks on these boats off the coast of Venezuela. When really all that is is that there's a secure border now. And so less of the stuff is getting in than was under Joe Biden.