Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about the coming Supreme Court battle over President Donald Trump’s use of tariff powers. If the Court endorses Trump’s claim that anything he deems an emergency allows him to impose tariffs, Frum argues the United States will face a constitutional crisis unlike any before. The president will, in effect, have staged a “constitutional coup,” stripping Congress of its most fundamental Article I powers.

Then Frum speaks with Quico Toro of Caracas Chronicles about the Trump administration’s escalating pressure on Venezuela. They explore what American intervention might look like, the realities of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s hold on control, and whether any foreign power could truly bring his rule to an end.

Finally, Frum closes with a reflection on Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns and the rising tide of conspiracist anti-Semitism seen on both the left and the right today.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Quico Toro. Quico was the founder and remains the editor of a website called the Caracas Chronicles, which is the best English-language source of information on goings-on in Venezuela. And as the United States seems to be moving toward a war in the Caribbean against Venezuela, I thought it was indispensable to talk to Quico about what is happening: Why is the United States on the verge of war, apparently, with Venezuela, apparently about to carry out air strikes on the South American mainland? How did we get here, and what does it mean? Quico will be the man to enlighten us.

My book this week will be a novel written in 1933 by a writer called Lion Feuchtwanger, and the novel’s The Oppermanns, a family saga of a German Jewish family destroyed by the rise of the Nazis.

But before I get to these two subjects, let me open with some preliminary thoughts about something quite different, which is the soon-to-be-heard oral argument in the Supreme Court about President [Donald] Trump’s use of tariff powers. Specifically, the court is going to consider whether Donald Trump has exceeded the authority delegated to him by Congress by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

As I hope we all know, the Constitution of the United States vests power over tariffs and trade in Congress. But over the years, since 1934, Congress has delegated more and more of that power to the president. President Trump has chosen to interpret the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—which I’ll call IEEPA, which is what most people do, from here on—as a delegation of broad authority over tariffs to him, allowing him to create a one-man tariff show all of his own for almost any reason. And the Supreme Court is going to hear and decide whether that is valid.

The key word in the act is the word *emergency—*that is, these are powers that the president would not normally have; normally, the power to create tariffs rests in Congress. He would not normally have these powers, but in an emergency, the president can use them. That’s what Congress wrote in 1977 when they passed the law. And the question the Supreme Court will have to evaluate is: Is that delegation itself valid? And if it is valid, do we, in fact, have an emergency? Can the president simply proclaim an emergency for any reason, including having his feelings hurt by an ad he saw in a baseball game that he didn’t like, or is there some kind of objective constraint?

Now, as we think about what the court should do, there’s a little historical context here that’s really necessary to understand to guide the court as to what is the right thing. And remember, a conservative court is supposed to look to history.

In 1917, when the United States went into the First World War, Congress passed a law called the Trading With the Enemy Act. They gave the president vast powers over the American economy. And it was meant to last for the duration of the World War I emergency. After the end of the First World War, Congress never repealed the Trading With the Enemy Act, and it remained on the books through the Great Depression and through the Second World War. It was under the powers given him by the Trading With the Enemy Act that President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt not only took the United States off the gold standard—that he could have done with his regular powers—but prohibited the private ownership of gold by American citizens. He used the powers under the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act. And during World War II, those powers were used again. And during the Cold War, they were used, and those powers became very, very large during the Cold War period.

In the 1970s, after Watergate, Congress decided, you know, it was time to declare the First World War over. And so they passed a series of laws ending the emergency proclaimed in 1917, and creating new and theoretically more limited emergency powers through a series of statutes in the middle 1970s, of which IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was just one. There were others too. All of them to say, Look, we understand that the president needs emergency powers. The powers we granted in 1917 were too big, and anyway, that war is over. So here are new powers, more limited than the 1917 powers, that the president should use subject to more modern ideas of power, including judicial review.

So that is what Trump used to try to say, I can do anything. I can impose any tariff for any reason at any time. Anything I say is an emergency—whether it’s fentanyl use, whether it’s an ad in the World Series—anything I say is an emergency is an emergency. No one can second-guess me. And I can then put any tariffs in the way that I like.

Now, what Trump is here creating is a unilateral power to tax—and not just tax, because at the same time, he’s claiming unilateral powers to spend. He says he wants to take some of this tariff money and give it to the farmers; that’s a spending power. That money could be used for anything. Congress normally decides where money goes. But Trump is saying, I will unilaterally take these taxes I have imposed and spend it the way I want. And meanwhile, other spending that Congress voted [for], like foreign aid, I’m going to refuse to spend it because I have the power to decide what to tax, what to spend, and I have the power, in effect, to veto spending that Congress has passed and that I or my predecessor signed—so unilateral powers to tax, spend, not spend. Oh, and one more thing: I’m claiming unilateral power over the money supply because I am claiming the right to fire any member of the Federal Reserve for any reason, no matter how obviously specious. That’s another case going to the Supreme Court, where Trump fired a governor of the Federal Reserve, alleging all kinds of fraud. Federal Reserve governors are not supposed to be removed except for very good reason. But basically, he says, I can remove any Federal Reserve governor I want and appoint anyone I want, and that gives me control over the monetary as well as the fiscal side of the economy.

So we’re putting together powers that are exactly the powers that were repudiated not only in 1776 by the American Revolution—“no taxation without representation”—but in the English Civil War of the 1640s, where the English cut off the head of King Charles I because he claimed the power to tax without vote of Parliament.

It cannot be right that the president of the United States has the power to tax without Congress, to spend without Congress, to refuse to spend monies that Congress has voted [for] and that his predecessors or he have signed without Congress, and to control the entire monetary system without Congress, even though the Federal Reserve is a creature of Congress. But this is, apparently, a close call because the Supreme Court is very disposed to a large use of presidential power, especially the powers of this president. And they’ve also given him, of course, if he does abuse any power, this extraordinary new doctrine of criminal impunity.

It’s hard for me to believe that the court will validate any of this, but if [it] does, Americans are going to be left with a really “no exit” dilemma. The president has made a kind of constitutional coup. He’s effectively repealed the most important powers in Article I—taking away the taxing power, taking away the spending power, taking away the power to refuse to spend money the Congress voted [for], taking away the power over the money, which is also given to Congress—and concentrated that power in himself and his own personal judgment for any reason, no matter how trivial. That’s why this silly episode about the Blue Jays ad posted by the province of Ontario is so important. That is so petty and trivial—if that is an emergency, then anything is the emergency, then the president has these powers at will; we might as well close Congress altogether. Oh, wait—the House of Representatives as I speak is closed indefinitely, so maybe that’s a taste of [things] to come.

This is a real constitutional crisis, even though it’s being carried out with words and precedents and legal documents. Follow it closely and hope for the best, but be ready for some very dark chapters ahead in American history, American constitutional doctrine, and the limitation of the power of the people’s representatives in Congress.

And now my dialogue with Quico Toro.

[Music]

Frum: Quico Toro devoted 25 years of his life to the struggle for a democratic future for Venezuela, his native country. In 2002, he founded Caracas Chronicles, the premier English-language site for reporting on the [Hugo] Chávez–[Nicolás] Maduro dictatorships. I got to know Quico when I visited Venezuela in 2010. He saved me from many misunderstandings and mistakes, although I still managed to make many that he could not prevent. Now a Canadian citizen, he has a day job developing new technologies to fight climate change as director of climate repair at the Anthropocene Institute. He speaks to us today from Tokyo.

Good morning. Good afternoon.

Quico Toro: One of those. Hi.

David Frum: One of those. (Laughs.) Okay, so we are recording this dialogue on the evening of Sunday, November 2, Washington time; morning of Monday, November 3, Tokyo time—is that right? The United States has amassed in the Caribbean the largest set of naval assets deployed there since the Cuban missile crisis. The United States is blowing boats out of the water that the Trump administration says are piloted and crewed by narco-traffickers, although there’s no evidence for that, and there’s at least one accusation by the president of Colombia that one of those boats was innocent—was a fisher boat and the people aboard were innocent people. And who knows what is true; the Trump administration has offered no evidence. But it’s also offered no plans for what it intends to do with this vast fleet. Are we on the verge of war between the United States and Venezuela?

Toro: It sure seems like it. There hasn’t been a buildup like this—and you have to understand, being Venezuela and dealing with the kind of government that we’ve had, we’ve had 30 years, or 25 years, of the government telling us that the Americans are gonna attack. There are Americans under the bed. The Marines are gonna be coming off the boats anytime now. It’s an old, sort of Cuban-inspired technique to keep people in line. I think people discounted it for a long time because it was clearly propaganda, so there’s just this disorienting feeling of, Wait a minute—this time, it’s different.

Frum: Must be very strange for the regime, after having used the threat of American military intervention again and again, to say, Wait a minute, and now it’s here—maybe. Although it’s weird, right, because it’s just a fleet. There’s no mobilization of troops; there’s no speech to the country. So if there is a war, it looks like what Trump has in mind [is] kinda hitting Venezuela from the air and hoping that the regime collapses or something. Can you make any sense of what they think they’re doing?

Toro: Well, part of it is that it doesn’t seem like there’s really consensus among the people who are driving Venezuela policy. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is an old-time Cuban American anti-communist sort of fighter who has wanted regime change in Caracas, and in Havana, for a long time. But then, he has to get along with people like Richard Grenell, who is the special envoy to Venezuela, who wants to just cut a deal with the Maduro regime and with the principal, with Donald Trump—who, from what we are able to understand, seems to be actually quite exercised about drugs and wanting to turn this into an anti-narcotics operation.

So I don’t think they really have a consensus internally about what they want. Donald Trump is, obviously, gonna change his mind three times before breakfast. But, yeah, what is most visible about this is that there doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a land invasion. And so what they seem to be wanting to do is something, in some way, similar to what Trump tried to do in the first administration in 2019—there was this maximum-pressure campaign to really turn the screws on the Venezuelan economy and the oil industry. And the logic seemed to be to make life so intolerable that somebody inside the regime would make a move against Maduro. What happened in 2019 is that instead of making that move against Maduro, conditions became so intolerable that 8 million people left, right, and many of them ended up in the U.S. and now, in this very strange twist, are accused of having been sent by Maduro to destabilize the U.S.

So there are layers and layers of irony in that. But what we do know—and this isn’t old canard, but it remains true as far as I know—is that no regime anywhere has been dislodged purely from the air, right? So that doesn’t seem to work. So the operating assumption here, that you can create enough pressure with an air campaign, it just seems flawed.

Frum: Okay, so let’s go, now, a little slower. So, as you say, Trump says eight things. Yesterday, Saturday, he was talking about declaring war on Nigeria, or at least against Nigerian Muslims on behalf of Nigerian Christians. So maybe his attraction will be distracted. But let’s start with some basic things: To what extent is Venezuela a major source of drugs bound to the United States?

Toro: Well, it’s not a source of drugs at all, because Venezuela has never really grown coca. It’s a trafficking route that Colombian cartels and sort of narco-guerilla organizations have used for some time. And it is true that the Venezuelan military elite, this Cártel de los Soles thing, is not a lie. That is a real thing. High-ranking Venezuelan military officers figured out long ago that they can make a bunch of money by using these routes to get cocaine, mostly, on drug boats north. There’s no fentanyl coming through Venezuela; there’s just no supply chain for that. But, yeah, it is a trafficking route; it is not one of the biggest trafficking routes at all. And also, drugs, you should understand, is just one of a diversified portfolio of businesses, legal and illegal, that Venezuelan generals in this kleptocratic setup have control over. So it’s drugs, but it’s also oil, but it’s also construction and insurance and things like retail and even tourism.

The Venezuelan economy and society have become militarized over the last 10, 15 years because Maduro, long ago, realized that he needed a praetorian guard to stay in power, and the way to keep the generals on his side would be to cut them into a variety of deals.

Frum: Tell us about the boats that the Trump administration is blowing up in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Do you believe these are, in fact, drug boats? And if so, who owns them? Who operates them?

Toro: They do appear to be drug boats in that nobody fishes with a fast boat, as far as we know. And for a while, I was a little suspicious if they were real at all. Like, this whole thing looked like it might have been a montage, but some debris and some human remains have been washing up in Trinidad. So it does appear to be a real thing.

They’re operated by gangs that are given protection by the Venezuelan military and pay a cut to the military to traffic drugs north, often through Haiti or other Caribbean islands, and sometimes direct to the U.S. As so often happens, there is a nub of truth to the allegations; it’s not entirely made up. It is just they’re being used to justify something. It’s kind of strange.

Frum: Are the boats an important source? Are they the major conduit? These boats don’t look that big, and when you think about the mass of drugs that are consumed in the United States—I mean, I guess cocaine’s not that bulky. But is this a highway, or is this a roadway, or is this a byway? How relevant are these boats?

Toro: Look, anything to do with the drugs industry is very tricky to estimate because, obviously, people who ask too many questions have a way of getting killed. I don’t understand it to be the major way that drugs go from Venezuela to the U.S. There are also flights. Colombian cartels use things like submersibles and semisubmersibles, these kinds of handmade submarine-looking things that are also used. The biggest route is really up by land or by water to Mexico and then through Mexican cartels across the land border. That seems larger.

Frum: Let’s talk about something you touched on lightly but needs to be really emphasized, which is the flow of people from Venezuela to the United States. This has been one of Trump’s big issues. We’ve seen this extraordinary brutalization—things you’ve never seen before in the United States: immigration police with their faces masked, no display of names or badges, engaged in extraordinary roughness and even outright violence against immigrants, against permanent residents, sometimes against citizens who get in the way. And you make the point, and this really needs to be stressed, that Trump is here reaping the consequences of his own policy. There was not always a big migration of Venezuelans to the United States. This is a new thing, and it happened in response to things that the United States did.

Toro: When I was growing up in Venezuela in the 1980s, we were receiving refugees from dictatorships in Uruguay and in Argentina and in Chile. People would go up to seek refuge in Venezuela. We had refugees from Francoist Spain still living in Caracas. Venezuela was a rich country—we had all this oil. So we were absorbing refugees and migrants, and really, until the last 10 years, you couldn’t find an arepa in Washington. I found an arepa truck in Tokyo the other day. Now there are Venezuelans absolutely everywhere because—well, we should be very clear: When it comes to destroying Venezuela’s prosperity, nobody can top Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, who really destroyed the economy, through expropriations, taking over farms that were just left to rot, crazy mismanagement, and horrible economic policy, and hyperinflation. Anything you can think of, they did it, and they did it wrong.

But the Venezuelan oil industry and the Venezuelan economy went bankrupt gradually—what’s the old saying: You go bankrupt first gradually, then suddenly. They’ve been going bankrupt gradually for a long, long time until 2019, when Donald Trump, in his first administration, decided that he was gonna get rid of Nicolás Maduro and the way that he was gonna do that would be to destroy the Venezuelan economy, or what was left of it. The economy had been in very bad shape, but the scale of collapse in 2019 and 2020 was unlike anything we’d seen before. We’re talking 20 and 30 percent GDP contractions per year. This is not something you ever see outside of war, usually. And nobody seems to have forecast—I certainly missed it—that this would induce people to leave, often on foot.

People should understand that many of the Venezuelan migrants that turned up on the southern border in the last few years were people fresh off of a 3,000-mile trek from Venezuela, passed things like the Darién Gap in Panama, which is a swamp that is so wild, there aren’t even roads in it. You got jaguars and snakes and gangs, and this is one of the most dangerous places in the world. People crossed that on foot with their children on their back because there was no way to stay alive in Venezuela.

So one thing that I think is particularly galling to Venezuelans now is seeing the Trump administration attacking and maligning people who ended up there through his policies and calling them [criminals]. Obviously, there will be a portion of criminals in that very large migration—we’re talking about a quarter of the population—but mostly, this is a cream of Venezuela’s young generation that had to leave. We’re talking anybody who was a little bit high agency, anybody who was young, they were willing to work really hard to send money back home to keep older relatives or young children alive back home. Those are the people who left, and those are the people who are now delivering Uber Eats meals in—everywhere around the world, from Cleveland to Santiago de Chile, all around.

Frum: If there are air strikes, what would that look like? What do you hit? What are the targets? And how would Venezuelans react to North Americans blowing—I mean, there’s a lot of resentment of the regime, obviously. On the other hand, no one likes being hit from the air.

Toro: It’s the most unpredictable thing. There are some people who are convinced that what’s coming is going to be strikes into airstrips and cocaine labs in the jungle near the Colombian border, far from population centers. If they’re really trying to go after the drugs operation, that’s what they would do. On the other hand, it’s very easy to repair sort of a landing strip somewhere.

But who knows? The Miami Herald was reporting that they’re planning to attack mostly military and naval installations, which I think many Venezuelans who—I mean, we should underscore that Venezuelans hate the Maduro regime by large numbers, right? It’s destroyed everyone’s lives. So I suspect some Venezuelans wouldn’t mind that that much. Certainly, the Venezuelan opposition, now largely in exile, has been encouraging the Maduro regime to do something like that.

But the question is not what happens the day or the two days after air strikes begin. The question is: What happens a week, two weeks, three weeks down the line? Does this keep going? At what point does Donald Trump just lose focus and get interested in the next shiny object? One scenario that I play with and that keeps me up at night is that the logic of this seems to be to push somebody inside the armed forces in Venezuela to say, No, we’re not gonna sit here dodging tomahawk missiles; we’re gonna move against Maduro, so—

Frum: That does seem to be what they want. They want a coup.

Toro: Yeah, that seems to be the—well, it’s the only sort of logical endgame here. And we’ve heard things about the CIA conducting—I mean, it’s very strange to announce a CIA covert operation, but that’s just the way they roll. So it’s likely that American intelligence assets are trying to reach out to people inside the military who might be having second thoughts.

But we also know that, for more than 10 years now, Nicolás Maduro has made it a bit of a specialty to find people whose loyalty can’t quite be relied on and shove them off into these ghastly regime prisons and torture centers. So one scenario that keeps you up at night is that the bombing begins, some kind of insurrection starts to be worked out, the Maduro regime picks up on who is plotting against it, and then the bombing stops before that’s had a chance to play itself out. We could just be easing the path for Maduro to purge the next set of unreliable elements inside the armed forces.

Frum: Does the Maduro regime have any capability to, or interest in, retaliating against the United States? Could they use terrorist tactics? Presumably, some of those 8 million people who migrated here have some kind of loyalties back home and might be activated in some way. Is that a reasonable thing, or does that seem too fancy a speculation?

Toro: I know people take the possibility very seriously, particularly because, back during the Chávez years, there was this move by the regime to buy thousands—I think over 5,000—of these shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles, which have been sloshing around Venezuela for a long time. You can very easily imagine one of those being snuck under a few bags of cocaine on one of these boats that have been going north. Who is to say that those aren’t in the U.S. now? That would be extremely risky for the Maduro regime. I don’t think it’s a strategically logical thing for them to do, and illogical as this regime is, one thing that they don’t make mistakes about is on how to stay in power. This is the one thing that they know how to do and that they’re serious about and good at. So I do think it’s fanciful. I wouldn’t entirely rule it out as a possibility. This might be something that Maduro would consider as a very last resort.

Frum: What would happen if, in Venezuela, if this whole thing just sort of deflated, because one of the things that happens a lot with Trump is there’s a lot of huffing, there’s a lot of puffing, they move a lot of boats around, and then he gets bored; he gets distracted. Or there’s a factional fight—as you say, there are people in this administration who wanna do business with the regime. There’s nothing that Trump likes more than a corrupt dictator. And Venezuela’s got one of the world-heavyweight-champion corrupt dictators, so it’s kind of weird that this one isn’t his friend when so many of the others are his friends. If it just deflates and Trump says, Okay, I scared them, would there be a feeling of relief in Venezuela, or are people sort of hoping for some kind of liberation, however expensive it is?

Toro: That’s a really hard question. I think that should be, really, our base scenario. That is what, I think, is most likely to happen because the risks involved in a military strike are so high. I don’t think—

Frum: They just are hoping to scare people? I mean, Trump is sort of a bully, but who then frightens himself.

Toro: Right, right. It might be that the point is simply that the buildup itself is meant to set off some kind of insurrection in Venezuela, and if that doesn’t happen, maybe they’ll just go on to the next thing. I suppose the sailors on the USS Gerald [R.] Ford will be annoyed to have been brought from [the] Mediterranean, but that could certainly happen.

But I think that the more interesting possibility here is that what they’re looking for is regime change, but not necessarily a regime change towards a democracy, but more a regime change towards an extractive military dictatorship that wraps itself up in the stars and stripes. I think that they would like that. It’s too difficult for Maduro himself, being a Cuban asset and having spent his entire career attacking the United States, to make that pivot. I don’t think Marco Rubio and other players in the Trump administration would accept that. But you can just about imagine a future where some lieutenant colonel comes up the ranks, deposes Maduro, says, We are pro-American now, and starts to loot the country in cahoots with the kleptocrats.

Frum: Yeah. Well, there’s one other scenario, and this is not a Venezuela-specific one. One of the things that’s been very different about Trump 2 has been Trump is creating these military crises, or seeming military crises, in order to justify actions at home. I don’t know that he’s convinced anybody, but the reason we have mass troops in our streets bundling people off without [showing] ID, with brutal tactics, is Trump says, We’ve got a crisis at home. There are these deployments of troops to try to get us used to the idea of a militarization of policing in American cities. There’s the blowing up of boats with no form of process of any kind, no form of law, no authorization by Congress. This whole deployment in the Mediterranean—in the Caribbean, rather—is happening without show of Congress.

There have been two large deployments in the Caribbean, I guess, in the past 40 years. One is the Grenada invasion of 1983, when the [Ronald] Reagan administration toppled a dictator who was building a big airstrip to receive Cuban and Russian planes on Grenada. The Reagan administration went to the trouble of getting a resolution from their neighbors. They sent 1,900 Americans to the island and 300 Jamaican and Barbadian troops as well, not because the Jamaicans and Barbadians were needed for the extra firepower, but to show, Look, this is a collective action.

In 1990 or ’91, there was an invasion of Panama to depose the dictator [Manuel] Noriega. There was a court order from an American court saying he had been indicted for various drug-smuggling offenses, and the [George H. W.] Bush administration would say, This is not just the president acting on his own whim; he was executing a valid court order.

There’s more going on in both cases, obviously, but there was some form of justification to both the United States population and to the world. And that seems entirely absent this time, and maybe that’s also the point, is to say that the president is acknowledging no limits at all on his ability to use force outside the borders of the United States or inside the borders of the United States.

Toro: What can I say? The scary part about that—and the thing that’s strange as a Venezuelan watching the United States act like this—is that it’s so reminiscent [of] the kind of tactics that Chávez and Maduro used to consolidate power themselves back in the day, right? So you find an unwritten rule, and you break it, and you break it just to show that you can break it and to destroy the president and to demonstrate your power and your ability to just not care. To your opponents, it’s an intimidation tactic.

We should remember that Nicolás Maduro stayed in power in 2024 after he lost an election by a more than two-to-one margin by simply announcing that he had won on the basis of nothing—never publishing district-by-district or voting-center-by-voting-center tallies, as had been done in every election in Venezuela since the 1950s. Now, why do you do that, to convince people that you actually won? No, of course not. Everybody knows that he didn’t win. To demonstrate your power to behave in thoroughly unreasonable ways. It’s how you intimidate people.

Frum: Let’s just give Americans a tour of the country that Venezuela was, because there’s an old saying, Americans will do anything for Latin America except read about it. So I don’t think Americans may have a good understanding of the long history of political stability that once prevailed in Venezuela and the very high levels of prosperity that were the case through most of the post-war period. So tell us a little bit about Venezuela in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Toro: Well, I want to start further back from that because, beginning in 1925, from 1925 to 1975, Venezuela had the fastest-rising standard of living of any country in the world. It went from being this malarial, very poor, almost entirely illiterate country to being a place where Spanish people and Italian people in the post-war period wanted to immigrate to.

We got rid of our last dictatorship—well, except for the present crop—in 1958, just a few months before the Cuban Revolution came to power. Actually, they’re pretty much contemporaneous, the Cuban Revolution and Venezuelan democratization. And for 40 years, from 1958 to 1998, Venezuela was a multiparty democracy; parties alternated, peacefully empowered. There were actual human rights. There was actual freedom of speech. You could say what you wanted.

But at the same time, for much of that period, there was this process of middle-class creation where, thanks to universal free education through university level, the children of peasants, really, and factory workers got university educations and became middle class and joined these stable, broad-based center-left and center-right political parties. Venezuela was a country that successive American administrations pointed to as a demonstration of what was possible if you stepped off of this Cold War treadmill of leftist guerillas and right-wing dictatorships that affected most of the region. And as I said before, we were receiving political asylum seekers from all across the region because Venezuela was a rich, stable democracy.

Growing up, it never once occurred to me that we could end up where we are today. We were supposed to be the leaders, the shining beacon for other countries in Latin America that were democratizing. And indeed, we had things like government think tanks that would advise other Latin American governments on how to democratize. Venezuelan diplomats helped negotiate the end of several Central American civil wars in the 1970s and ’80s because they were seen as a trusted outside partner that was democratic, but not entirely beholden to the United States. So the reversal of fortunes is absolutely—

Frum: So what was the crack in the society into which Hugo Chávez was able to insert himself? Where did he come from? How and why did he succeed?

Toro: Many books have been written about this, and it’s a subject of much controversy, but I’ll tell you my take. My take is that, after the 1973 oil crisis for you, which is the oil bonanza for us in 1978, you went from this period where oil had been a useful source of foreign exchange, but a stable source of foreign exchange, and the kind of predictable free money that you could build prosperity on to this much more pronounced boom-and-bust cycle, where oil revenues were very high one year, very low the next year. And that fed through to the Venezuelan economy that went into these very strong boom-and-bust cycles—we would take on a lot of debt when oil prices were high and then couldn’t pay it when oil prices were low. You put this together, and it meant that the mechanisms of middle-class formation that had been running from the 1920s to the 1970s broke down by the early 1980s and especially the early 1990s. The sense that Venezuela had had for two generations that you will live better than your parents was beginning to break down, and that’s when Hugo Chávez came into the scene, guns ablazing, trying to take over the government by force in a bloody coup in 1992, which is how we all first heard about him.

Chávez capitalized on this frustration not of very poor people, really, but of people who had a foothold in the middle class but were losing that foothold. And those are the people that he initially talked to when—actually, there’s been some very interesting research my friend Dorothy Kronick at UC-Berkeley has done showing that the initial Chávez coalition was not mostly made up of poor people; it was made up of urban, lower-middle-class people who were very annoyed that they were no longer rising the way they had been [expecting].

Frum: And so he tries to take power the first time violently, then competes, and seems to have won the first time freely and fairly.

Toro: And not just the first time. He won many elections, actually, freely. How fairly is more of a debate. It happened also that soon after he came to power in 1998, by 2003, 2004, 2005, oil prices began to go up again quite fast. And Venezuela is such an oil-dependent economy that when you had a lot of oil money sloshing around the country, he could afford a consumption boom, so the first 10 years of the 21st century were really bonanza years in Venezuela—

Frum: Same as in Russia.

Toro: Right.

Frum: Same as in Russia, same reason. And he had the same kind of method as [Vladimir] Putin. I remember when I was there in 2010, when things were still—I mean, the lights were going out, the country was visibly falling apart, but there was still sort of a sheen of prosperity; there was food everywhere—that he had these call-in shows where he would give people a mobile home, he would give them a dishwasher, and it came as a gift of the president. It’s very Trumpy. It’s funny that they dislike each other so much when Trump seems to have learned so much from him—or maybe they all go to the same thug-dictator school.

Toro: The techniques are clearly parallel, and that’s what’s so hard for me to even process, David, because all through that time, I was vaguely embarrassed that Venezuela had become such a throwback, and I was just like, Actual serious countries don’t behave this way anymore. It never for a second occurred to me that Venezuela was gonna be a precursor or a forerunner to the kinds of techniques that not just Trump, but Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen and [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan in Turkey, that this populist wave runs on techniques that Chávez was doing already in the 1990s.

Frum: Chávez was a large character. He played the part of the manly tough guy. He gave enormously long speeches. But some people seem genuinely to have liked him. His successor, Maduro, just seems like a hack, just like a faceless—how does he hold power without this apparatus of charisma that Chávez was able to mobilize?

Toro: It’s important to remember the circumstances under which Chávez died in March 2013. He’d been diagnosed with cancer a couple of years earlier. He’d been offered high-tech care everywhere from São Paulo to Lebanon to Spain. He had his choice of the best cancer care in the world, but he chose to go to Cuba. Why? Because he trusted the Cubans, and he trusted Fidel Castro more than anyone else. And so for most of the last two years of his life, Chávez, who had forged an extraordinarily close relationship—he described it as a “merger of two revolutions” at one point. He, at one point, said that Cuba and Venezuela were two different governments, but only one revolution. So he trusted the Cubans more than anyone else, and for those last two years of his life, his connection with Venezuela was mediated through Cuban intelligence because he was physically in Havana receiving cancer care for most of that time. And lo and behold, who eventually gets picked as his chosen successor? The most reliable Cuban agent in all of the Venezuelan elite.

Nicolás Maduro, he didn’t go to university. He spent two years in Havana at the school of political cadres that the Cubans had been running on the model of the Patrice Lumumba [Peoples’ Friendship] University in Moscow. He joined the Liga Socialista, which was a specifically niche pro-Cuban political party in Venezuela, when he was a teenager. So he’s been a Cuban asset literally his entire life. And the Cubans are very good at keeping power for a kind of leftist dictatorship in Latin America; they know exactly how to do it. They’ve exported the techniques that Cuban intelligence has been using for its entire existence to Venezuela. Cuban agents manned the top posts in Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence shop inside the presidential palace. So you sound slightly paranoid when you describe it this way—and it is genuinely very weird because you don’t usually hear about a smaller, weaker, poorer country, in effect, sort of colonizing and parasitizing a larger, richer, more powerful country—but that is what has happened.

Frum: And give us a sense, on the global-repressiveness sweepstakes, how repressive is the Venezuelan regime, both in its Chávez iteration and now in its Maduro? Let’s put it bluntly: How many people are in political prisons, do you think? How many people have been done to death? We see there are 8 million refugees, but that’s not entirely the regime’s doing, or intended doing.

Toro: Right. (Sighs.) The difficult bit about that question is to really convey, in a short answer, how gradual the ratcheting has been. Because for a long time, between 2000 and 2012, Venezuela was—political scientists describe it as a hybrid regime, so there were elections. Votes were counted openly. Chávez did keep winning those elections. There was freedom of speech at the beginning, and then less and less as time went on. The space for actual free thought and free expression and political organizing narrowed very gradually over, what, now 27 years since Chávez was first elected.

So I think the true breaking point came in 2017. So Maduro came to power in 2013, so in his fourth year in power, there was a large set of street protests. People maybe remember the images from the news of these university kids and their homemade shields and homemade gas masks, like, duking it out with the security forces, who were beating them and tear-gassing them and rounding them up and throwing them in jail. That seems to have been the point at which Maduro realized now that the facade of a democracy is too costly to me right now to keep up, and we’re just gonna go full dictatorial. So from 2017, and especially after 2019, with maximum pressure and with COVID, which was an excellent pretext for further authoritarian crackdowns, it really ended the possibility to write freely in Venezuela. At Caracas Chronicles, it became almost impossible to do it.

Now there are checkpoints all over Venezuela. If you drive from, not even just from one Venezuelan city to another, but even inside Caracas and the major cities, there are checkpoints where police or military—or people in uniform, so you don’t know who they are—will stop you, will go through your stuff, will go through your cellphone, will look through your WhatsApp and your email to try to find anything that could be antiregime and, if they find it, will trundle you off to jail. So people I talk to in Venezuela told me that there’s this now ritual that they have to do: Before they go out anywhere, they have to look through their phone, make sure that there’s nothing on that that’s gonna get them in trouble, and delete it if it is there.

There are dozens of military political prisoners, a few hundred civilian political prisoners. It’s not a huge gulag state, I wouldn’t say, but what there is, is this understanding—especially since 2019, 2020—that you’re not allowed to protest; you’re not allowed to speak openly. People know this, and people behave accordingly. The people who stayed behind knew that this is what they were signing up [for]. The people who left were people who were unwilling to live in those conditions.

Frum: Let’s recapitulate, as we’re coming to the end of our time.

This American fleet in the Caribbean Sea threatening Venezuela—outcomes: So one is huff, puff, and Trump gets bored or declares victory and says, I’ve got something. Is there a possibility of a negotiated settlement between the United States and Maduro? Is that something that Maduro could do?

Toro: Never say never, but it sure doesn’t seem to be in the cards now.

Frum: Okay, so another option is that they try to foment some kind of coup d’état, either outside the regime from the military or within the regime. Is there any professional military, or is the military completely political?

Toro: Entirely political at this point.

Frum: So you’d have to find someone who was a Maduro loyalist who was willing to turn against him. There’s not some—

Toro: But that’s not as crazy as it sounds because most… Venezuela has been a kleptocratic military dictatorship for years now, right, so the people who have reached the top of the military hierarchy are people who are there largely motivated by graft and the possibility to enrich themselves. I think the American calculus, Marco Rubio’s calculus, seems to be, These guys are gonna wanna cut a deal because they didn’t get into this to fight the United States militarily; they got into this because they wanted fancy cars and expensive homes, and we can offer that.

Frum: Well, that’s not unfamiliar in the U.S. (Laughs.) We got a few of those.

[Content truncated due to length…]

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed