For the last few weeks, the Atlantic's Josh Partlow has been trying to get on the phone with people inside Venezuela.

Actually, at first, he tried to get into Venezuela, but his visa got denied.

So he ended up in Panama, trying to describe the catastrophic damage June's twin earthquakes rod hundreds of miles away and hoping his cell connection didn't drop.

It's been hard.

Yeah.

I mean, Venezuela says the death toll from last month's earthquake is, I think it's more than 4,000 people at this point.

You may have better numbers than me.

Yeah, it's pretty staggering.

It's, yeah, something like 16,000 people still missing.

Yeah, tens of thousands injured or without homes.

Yeah, exactly.

Josh says these earthquakes, they happened on a national holiday.

There was a World Cup game.

A lot of people were celebrating until they weren't.

I remember talking to a young man, a college student who was about to graduate who was at his uncle's house in the swimming pool and joined this holiday when things started shaking.

And he jumped out of the water, jumped over a concrete wall that separated him from the street and dropped about 10 feet to the ground.

And he set off on a, you know, 15-mile walk, you know, and riding on back of motorcycles,

multi-hour trip to try to see what happened to his own home.

And when he got there later that night, his giant 16-story apartment towers

had collapsed as well. So, I mean, it was just devastation all around.

I remember when the earthquake first happened. It was the end of June. And I was just thinking, like, how could we talk about it on the show? Especially because since January, the United States has been functionally running Venezuela from afar after removing Nicholas Maduro from power and installing what a whole lot of people see as a puppet government.

I kind of wondered at the time, would Donald Trump do something like he did in Puerto Rico,

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