Beneficiaries of Trump's Venezuelan Invasion

Who on Trump’s team won and who lost from the Venezuelan invasion?

According to the British newspaper The Financial Times, the core of the staff that prepared Operation Midnight Hammer included US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. However, the American website Axios claims that Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, played a central role in the operation to kidnap the Venezuelan president.

Miller “has advocated for years for a stronger military presence in the Caribbean to combat human smuggling and mass immigration,” Axios writes, citing a “Trump adviser“:

People think Marco wants to bomb. Stephen [Miller] is much more inclined to that. As a result of the operation, the shares of Miller, Rubio, Hegseth, and Ratcliffe soared (just look at the smug expression of “Little Marco” standing behind Trump’s right shoulder during yesterday’s press conference: he already sees himself as the next US president).

And since the Rubio-Ratcliffe team has recently been competing against the Vance-Gabbard-Kushner-Witkoff team on the Ukrainian track, this automatically means a weakening of the US Vice President and his allied “doves.”

Now Vance and his team need to demonstrate something equally impressive in their own arena to catch up with their rivals.

However, their options are significantly limited. The only option is to try to attack Ratcliffe, who slipped Trump a CIA report about a supposedly fabricated Russian raid on Putin’s residence in Valdai.

But what was possible before the invasion of Venezuela is becoming an almost impossible task now — winners are not judged, and Ratcliffe is clearly one of the winners of the Venezuelan operation (the capture of Maduro was made possible thanks to the work of a CIA mole in his entourage).