Right-wing media outlets have spent months telling their audiences that a U.S. military campaign to topple the Venezuelan government would be simple and straightforward, requiring a minimal military footprint or lasting commitments to the country. In some cases, these outlets have suggested that the transition to a new government, following the toppling of President Nicolás Maduro, would be easy and organic.
Even if the United States were able to defeat the Venezuelan military fairly quickly in a conventional war, many experts warn that regime collapse would likely lead to an extended, bloody conflict that could have lasting ramifications throughout Venezuela, the surrounding region, and potentially the entire hemisphere. To date, the United States has carried out 13 known strikes on boats the Trump administration has alleged, without evidence, were engaged in the drug trade, killing at least 57 people, and has amassed the largest show of force in the region since the Cuban missile crisis.
Right-wing media suggest U.S.-supported “indigenous regime change” in Venezuela would be simple
According to numerous media outlets, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading the Trump administration’s campaign to topple the Maduro government, a long-running obsession of his. Rubio nominated opposition leader María Corina Machado for the Nobel Peace Prize, which she won this year, and praised her in Time magazine’s 2025 list of 100 most influential people in the world. Machado, in turn, has been a rallying point for U.S. interests seeking Maduro’s ouster.
Right-wing media figures have frequently cited Machado’s standing as evidence that Maduro could be overthrown and replaced with few complications.
In March, Erik Prince, arguably the United States’ most prominent mercenary, appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast to make that argument. Prince said the Maduro government is “going to have to be pushed out.”
“And it doesn’t require U.S. military,” he continued. “It can be covert action from the intelligence community or covert action from Venezuelan patriots helped by outsiders.” It’s not hard to imagine Prince considering himself or his allies as the “outsiders” in question, given his reported ties to anti-Maduro forces.
“María Corina Machado is a brave woman and deserving of our help and our support,” Prince said earlier in the interview.
In August, as conservative outlets began beating the drums of war, Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy — a vocal opponent of Maduro — conducted an interview with Machado. Campos-Duffy asked her to persuade Americans who support Trump “taking on Nicolás Maduro” but worry that “this kind of smells like regime change.”
“This has nothing to do with regime change … because the change of the regime was already mandated by the presidential election,” Machado replied. She added: “We are ready to take power — the legitimate government, elected. Venezuela will move orderly and peacefully to the transition.”
The same month, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh pushed to escalate in Venezuela based on what he referred to as “American chauvinism."
“They're a small, weak, pathetic, puny, poor country, and so they just have to do what we say,” Walsh said. “A war with Venezuela would last about four minutes.”
On September 10, following the Trump administration’s initial boat strike, Campos-Duffy appeared in a breezy segment with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aboard a U.S. naval ship in the region.
“I was literally in awe of what I saw. And it's not just the military equipment,” Campos-Duffy said.
“It's the soldiers. It's how well-trained they are. How fit they are,” she continued. “How well-fed they are, which I say ‘well-fed’ because Maduro, of course, is threatening with his own militia, which we know is starving over there — they don't have anything that even comes a fraction of close to what we saw here on the USS Iwo Jima.”
As Trump’s extrajudicial killing spree escalated in mid-September, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argued that “disgruntled military who want to liberate their country are living under the repressive arm of Mr. Maduro’s military counter-intelligence.”
In October, Fox News host Jesse Watters predicted that “there is going to be major action against Maduro pretty soon.” Even as he acknowledged it could go “sideways,” he stressed that it could be a “layup” to depose Maduro. Watters went on to pun on the Monroe Doctrine — referring to the “Don-roe Doctrine” — to argue that the United States has the right to interfere in Latin American countries’ internal affairs virtually at will.
On October 20, Fox News host Sean Hannity made that case directly, arguing that Machado “sounds like a pretty good leader for the people of Venezuela and the end of narco terrorism.”
A week later, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro argued that a “full-scale ground invasion of Venezuela” would not “be a good policy for the United States.” But, he countered, “if some sort of covert CIA action were to topple the regime in Venezuela, that would be a good thing.”
Shapiro argued there is a “bizarre idea that the best available scenario is always to leave the worst dictator in power because: Saddam Hussein,” but that that analysis “is benighted.” He added: “Sometimes the analogies work and sometimes they just don’t.”
The same day, former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser KT McFarland said in an interview on Newsmax that she gets “really nervous” when “people start talking about regime change and implying that it's going to be the American Marines who do it.” She then reassured viewers that Trump has “always been very, very hesitant about American military force, American Marines’ boots on the ground.”
“Now, he's been very much in favor of regime change,” McFarland continued. “But how does that come about? That comes about because of the people of every country want a regime change.”
“It's an indigenous regime change,” she said.
McFarland escalated her rhetoric just two days later on Fox News. “Behind Maduro, there’s a very strong opposition leader, who, if — and that’s not with the U.S. Marines — but if there was a regime change in that country, there’s a very credible, powerful, potential Trump ally waiting in the wings as the new leader.”
What Venezuela regime collapse could look like
At a baseline level, the U.S. military could likely overwhelm the Venezuelan army in a conventional war fairly quickly, though Venezuela’s air and missile defenses are robust and could pose a threat to U.S. fighters, bombers, and ships in the area.
Even if the Trump administration opted for a “shock and awe”-style bombing campaign that decimated Maduro’s government, what comes after that is anybody’s guess. Reporting from The Guardian suggests that U.S. or aligned forces would not only come up against Venezuela’s official military, but could also face substantial informal resistance.
If Maduro were assassinated or forced to flee, factions within his government and outside armed forces would likely attempt to assert power over parts of the country. The history of Latin America is rife with examples of U.S. intervention leading to extended periods of civil war and brutal crackdowns on civilians. The more recent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan should serve as cautionary tales of American hubris; in both cases elites were convinced that an opposition leader could simply be installed with few complications — assumptions that proved to be catastrophically wrong.
And while pro-war conservative pundits point to Venezuela’s 2024 election, which failed to meet free and fair standards, as proof of mass support for the opposition, those dynamics could shift if Caracas’ new government were installed on the back of U.S. tanks or as a result of a CIA-backed coup. The United States gave tacit approval, at least, for a coup attempt in 2002 that briefly removed Hugo Chavez from power, and in Trump’s first term he tried to install then-opposition leader Juan Guaidó into office in a pressure campaign. Both efforts ultimately failed.
The Monroe Doctrine and a Fox pundit’s dream of a right-wing Latin America
MAGA media figures have pushed to reinvigorate their version of the Monroe Doctrine, which conceives of the Western Hemisphere as the rightful dominion of the United States, for years. The escalation against Venezuela is a key part of this ideology, as is right-wing media’s support for Argentine President Javier Milei and its defense of former President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, both MAGA favorites. At the same time, Trump has waged a pressure campaign against President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a leftist, by imposing sanctions on him and his family for alleged involvement in the drug trade. Trump has additionally threatened Colombia with increased tariffs and cutting off aid.
A recent comment from Fox’s Campos-Duffy suggests that the Rubio-led campaign against Venezuela is in fact even larger in scope than is currently appreciated.
“A lot of people saying, we’ve heard María Corina Machado say it on our show as well, if Venezuela returns to the people who won the election last July, to the opposition party, and the Marxist, you know, socialist government of Maduro goes down, so will Cuba and so will Nicaragua. It will essentially get all of the communists out of our hemisphere,” Campos-Duffy said. (Some observers believe Rubio’s campaign to remove Maduro is a precursor to his goal of overthrowing Cuba’s communist government.)
Campos-Duffy’s scheme, if put into practice, would not represent the first time the United States has tried to crush left-wing governments and social movements in Latin America. As journalist Vincent Bevins details in The Jakarta Method, which examines the history of U.S.-supported anticommunist efforts around the world, forces backed by the U.S. military and CIA have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people suspected of leftist sympathies across Central and South America.
That bloody history doesn’t fit neatly within the current right-wing media fantasy of a quick and easy operation in Venezuela. So, like the many victims of U.S.-backed regimes in Latin America, that context simply gets disappeared.
