Welcome back to POTS of the World.

This is a breaking news episode that we just recorded on Saturday morning about the regime change operation in Venezuela.

Here's the episode.

Hey, Ben, new year, new regime change.

Early Saturday morning, the United States launched a regime change operation in Venezuela,

where U.S. Special Forces troops, along with FBI agents, blew up key Venezuelan military infrastructure and captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife. Trump said the Maduro's are now on a U.S.

warship, the USS Iwojima, their en route to New York City for prosecution. They are calling

this Operation Absolute Resolve. Got to love these names. Trump and Rubiobo suggested that the

military operation is over for now, but that U.S. troops are ready to conduct a second wave

of strikes if necessary.

Trump said that second wave would be even bigger than the first. But in the interim, Donald Trump said

that we, the United States of America, will be running the country of Venezuela. He literally said

that the team of guys behind him would be in charge of a foreign country. That group was Secretary

State Marco Rubio,

Secretary of Defense, Pete Heggzeth, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, Dan Kane, the chairman

of the Joint Chiefs, and Stephen Miller. So he's a vice-roy now. I guess that collection of

great minds is going to dictate terms to Maduro's former vice president, Delci Rodriguez, who has since been sworn in as president, and I guess just run Venezuela as a vassal state through her, though Trump said he's not afraid to put U.S. boots on the ground more of that in a bit. So this could be trending towards a military occupation. So we're doing this, the breaking news episode on the fly. We're learning information in real time, but we're going to

try to cover what we know about the military operation, how the U.S. is going to run Venezuela going

forward and what comes next sort of internally there, including what it means for the Venezuelan

opposition that desperately wanted this outcome, but now doesn't seem to be part of Venezuela's

future, at least according to Trump. We'll talk about Trump's threats to Cuba and Colombia. What lessons he might learn from this, including very bad ones. We'll talk about the international reactions such as it is at this moment. The legal questions, Congress's role, and then who Maduro is. And I don't know, we'll try to be a little bit hopeful, like maybe try to sketch out what a good

outcome could look like, but I don't think either of us feel like we're trending that direction.

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