"On Friday night, when Donald Trump met with a small group of senior Administration officials and decided to authorize a raid in Caracas by Delta Force commandos to capture Nicolás Maduro, those present included Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Secretary of War Pete Hegseth; the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe; Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Stephen Miller, the President's most essential policy adviser, omni-portfolio'd and grimly saturnine."
"Vance's exclusion may have owed something to ideology. The Vice-President, who served in Iraq, has been one of the loudest critics of American interventionism in the second Trump Administration, both before entering the White House and since. (Last spring, when The Atlantic published Signal chats of the planning for a bombing attack in Yemen, the messages showed Vance striking a few cautionary notes.)"
Donald Trump authorized a Delta Force raid in Caracas to capture Nicolás Maduro during a small meeting with senior officials including Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Dan Caine, and Stephen Miller. Vice-President J.D. Vance was absent from both the planning meeting and the Mar-a-Lago announcement, and his name did not appear in a Wall Street Journal account of the operation's planning. Vance's exclusion may reflect his vocal anti-interventionist stance and prior cautions during planning for other operations. His absence has left administration explanations about the raid's purpose and follow-up objectives muddled. Vance later posted a long, lawyerly message on X framing the operation around drug-trafficking concerns.
Read at The New Yorker
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