Maduro’s capture had the world’s ear – but Trump returned to petty gripes

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few but what I’d really like to talk about is my disastrous predecessor and some pathetic city mayors,” is what Winston Churchill didn’t say during Britain’s war against Adolf Hitler.

On Saturday, Donald Trump fancied himself at his most Churchillian as he hailed the derring-do of US military heroes who toppled Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in an audacious overnight operation.

But far from the gravitas of London’s cabinet war rooms or the White House’s situation room, Trump was luxuriating at his winter retreat, the gilded Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he whiles away the days playing golf and the evenings playing DJ.

And while Trump talked at length about the capture of Maduro and vague plans to “run” Venezuela in a case of the American empire strikes back, he could not resist upending his moment of glory by airing familiar grievances, from his legal treatment to frustrations with specific officials and a perceived lack of credit for his past actions.

Wearing a dark suit, white shirt and blue tie, the president claimed Maduro had sent “savage and murderous gangs” into the US which, with a weave of the Trump brain, led to a digression on crime in Washington DC, then the role of the national guard, and then how the national guard is doing great work in Memphis and New Orleans.

Suddenly, with a global audience on tenterhooks for the future of Latin America, we were here: “We also helped, as you know, in Chicago and crime went down a little bit there. We did a very small help because we had no working ability with the governor. The governor was a disaster and the mayor was a disaster.”

Then Trump pivoted to fires and “riots” in Los Angeles, lamenting: “We did a great job. Got no credit for it whatsoever, but that’s OK, it doesn’t matter. We don’t need the credit.”

Standing to Trump’s right, Marco Rubio, secretary of state, remained inscrutable.

The president continues to settle scores. While praising the current military leadership involved in the Venezuela raid, he complained about generals he worked with previously. He said: “I worked with some I didn’t like. I worked with some I didn’t respect.” This was in contrast with Gen Dan “Raizin” Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, whose name is a source of childlike fascination for Trump.

Trump was grilled about why, yet again, he had failed to tell members of Congress what he was up to. He shot back with gripes about their trustworthiness, stating: “Congress has a tendency to leak ... Congress will leak and we don’t want leakers.”

Later, he was asked about his pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted of drug trafficking. How could he square this with the purported crackdown on narco-terrorist Maduro?

When in doubt, blame former president Joe Biden. Trump asserted that Hernández “was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump”, using the third person as a rhetorical flourish: “That didn’t work out too well for them. This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly.”

Indeed, Trump mentioned his predecessor half a dozen times. “What Joe Biden administration’s did to our country should never be forgotten,” he said. If Trump had lost the 2024 election, he claimed, the US would have become “Venezuela on steroids”.

After nearly an hour, the final question was about Russia’s war in Ukraine. Another chance to bash Biden: “Look, that’s Biden’s war. That’s not my war … If I were president, it would have never happened. Putin says it, everybody says it.”

Love it or loathe it, Trump had just done something big and historic that made the whole world sit up and take notice. He had shaken the kaleidoscope of the rules-based order and tried to make American interventionism great again despite the reservations of his support base. Yet here he was still getting peevish about perceived slights, ingratitudes and injustices.

Trump is a man who is comfortable in his skin. But as a recent media report on the 79-year-old’s state of health noted, his hand has become so delicate that it started bleeding when Attorney General Pam Bondi nicked him with her ring while giving the president a high-five. The world’s most powerful man is also its most thin-skinned.