Seva Gunitsky and Semuhi Sinanoglu
In the end, it may have been the dancing. “He gets up there and he tries to imitate my dance,” said U.S. President Donald Trump in a January 6 speech, explaining why he had ordered the American military to fly into Caracas in the dead of night, seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bring them to the United States to face criminal charges. Trump had other reasons, too. Maduro, he said, was a drug trafficker. He led a repressive authoritarian government. He was reluctant to give U.S. companies preferential access to Venezuelan oil. But few experts believe that Caracas plays a significant role in the drug trade, and Trump has left the remainder of Venezuela’s violent regime nearly intact. And while the White House certainly wants Venezuelan oil, Maduro had already offered Trump nearly unlimited access to his country’s crude after months of pressure.
But Maduro kept on dancing. At rallies in Caracas, he jerked his arms back and forth in a slightly more acrobatic version of Trump’s own moves. And for the White House, that seems to have been too much. Maduro’s “regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some on the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them,” The New York Times reported the day after the extraction. “So the White House decided to follow through on its military threats.”
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