President Donald Trump is taking a victory lap on social media following his surprise attack on Venezuela.
On Saturday evening, following a wild early-morning military operation in which the U.S. abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Trump took to Truth Social to share macho meme videos, celebratory news clips, and fawning praise of himself.
In one particularly startling video that the 79-year-old president shared three times, Maduro says, in Spanish, “Come for me. I’m waiting for you here in Miraflores. Don’t take too long to arrive, coward.”
The clip is then followed by a bald eagle with a voiceover encouraging the military to attack and footage of missiles firing across dark terrain, likely Venezuela. The video is soundtracked by “Thunderstruck,” a song by the Australian band AC/DC.
The footage of Maduro does not show him speaking to Trump. It is, in fact, taken from a speech the deposed leader gave in 2024, directed at the Venezuelan opposition leader, Edmundo González Urrutia. It has previously been used, erroneously, to suggest that Maduro was taunting the U.S.
The raft of posts was fired off in rapid succession, with Trump updating his timeline roughly 40 times in an hour.
Between posting about the Venezuelan fallout, the 79-year-old also veered off topic to attack archrival Gavin Newsom, reshare old claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, and heap praise on YouTuber Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old MAGA favorite known for his widely refuted video alleging welfare fraud at Somali day-care centers in Minnesota.
Trump also shared congratulatory posts from MAGA diehard Laura Loomer and Tesla boss Elon Musk, both of whom made patriotic statements following the United States’ attack on the South American country.
“Idk what it is but Trump just makes me feel so pumped to be an American,” Loomer wrote. “He makes it very exciting to be an American!”
Musk, who was born in South Africa and has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Trump, reshared one of his own quotes saying that he will “fight for and die in America.”
“YES,” the world’s richest man wrote in reply to a tweet from the White House reading “GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES MILITARY.” Trump reshared it all.
Minutes after posting those messages, Trump pivoted to what appears to be an artificially generated clip of himself warning the Nigerian government that the U.S. will come in “guns blazing” unless they “stop the killing of Christians.”
It’s not unusual for the president to go on a social media binge at odd hours or for extended periods of time. On Christmas Day, he sent almost 150 messages to his 11.3 million Truth Social followers in a particularly extensive spree, hitting on familiar themes of election fraud, media bias, and Somali immigrants.
Following the invasion of the Venezuelan capital in the early hours of Saturday morning, Trump appeared to be struggling to stay awake as he spoke at a press conference giving details on the operation.
It is unclear if the president slept on Saturday, having first shared a message about the “large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro” on Truth Social at 4:21 a.m. ET. He called in to Fox & Friends later on Saturday morning ahead of his 11:45 a.m. press conference today and has remained active online since.
