President Donald Trump has offered a characteristically rosy assessment of his administration’s overnight attack on a sovereign state to capture its leader. Trump told the New York Times that “a lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people” were involved in the operation in Venezuela, in which President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured and flown out of the country. “It was a brilliant operation, actually,” he added, declining to clarify whether he had obtained congressional approval for the seizure. Maduro’s capture, which was reportedly accompanied by a series of airstrikes across the Venezuelan capital, follows a months-long campaign of pressure against the repressive Latin American country, which the Trump administration has framed as a response to state-backed narcotrafficking operations. The Maduro regime has described the seizure as an act of “imperialist aggression” and called on the “entire country” to “mobilize” in response. Trump himself is set to address the operation at a press conference in Mar-a-Lago at 11 a.m. local time.
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