What Next - Don’t Call It a Regime Change
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
The Trump administration has a handful of answers to the question “Why did the United States pluck Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela?”—it was for narcoterrorism, or payback, or just oil. They’re even less clear about what’s going to happen with the country now.
Guest: Shane Harris, staff writer covering national security and intelligence for the Atlantic.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Why do growing businesses love working in Slack? |
| 0:02.8 | Let's ask Christia Ari Bikes. |
| 0:04.6 | Running things in Slack saves me so much time. |
| 0:07.3 | AI summaries save 97 minutes per week. |
| 0:10.4 | What say you? |
| 0:11.4 | Rocks from Gosney. |
| 0:12.4 | Slack helps us build community. |
| 0:13.9 | It helps us build connection. |
| 0:15.2 | Your partners, vendors and customers all in one place. |
| 0:18.3 | Take us on home, Ashley from Carraway. |
| 0:20.3 | If we did have Slack tomorrow, I would explode. |
| 0:23.4 | Well, let's not let that happen. |
| 0:25.1 | Visit Slack.com slash podcast to get 50% of Slack Business Plus. How do you describe what just happened in Venezuela? |
| 0:41.7 | Maybe we should start with the facts. |
| 0:45.5 | On Saturday morning, in what the Trump administration dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, |
| 0:52.3 | Delta Force Commandos entered the compound of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro |
| 0:57.3 | and extracted him from his own country. They took his wife too, killed dozens of Venezuelans |
| 1:03.9 | in their path. The administration said this was about accountability. Attorney General Pam Bondi |
| 1:10.6 | said Maduro was about to face the full |
| 1:12.9 | wrath of American justice. She alleges he's been running Venezuela as a narco state. But getting him |
| 1:20.0 | in front of an American court, did that constitute an invasion? A kidnapping? The Atlantic, Shane Harris says, no matter what word you use here, |
| 1:31.4 | just don't call what went down surprising. You know, look, the president had deployed so much |
... |
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