United States bombs Caracas, captures the Venezuelan president, and posts a photo.

The United States military launched air strikes on the capital city of Venezuela at two o’clock in the morning local time on Saturday. The capital city. That is the first sentence and you can keep reading or you can sit with that one for a minute.

Two explosions at La Carlota military airport. Helicopters in over the residence. Special forces on the ground. Air defenses suppressed by aircraft. By daylight the president of a country we are technically not at war with was in custody on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima. The country pivoted to an interim presidency by lunch on Monday.

Hon. That happened on a Saturday morning. That is the kind of thing that gets a Pulitzer Prize, a six-month investigative book, and a Senate hearing. We got a Truth Social post.

The post was a photograph. Maduro on a metal floor, blindfolded, in soundproof headphones, in a gray Nike sweatsuit, holding a plastic water bottle. In a Nike sweatsuit. Like he had just been picked up at a half-marathon. The President of the United States had captured a head of state in a military operation and the first official documentation was a trophy photo with the kind of caption you’d put under a fish.

You ever notice how every regime change in this hemisphere comes with footage somebody posts on a phone before the State Department has a comment ready. The State Department is supposed to be the comment.

The President said, on camera, the same day, that the United States is “going to run the country.” Buddy. Run the country. That’s the entire phrase. Not “support the transitional government.” Not “secure the people.” Run. As in, the verb that means run.

Look. The man in the sweatsuit is not a sympathetic figure. Maduro stole an election in his country. People starved. People left. None of this is a defense of the man at the bottom of the photograph. The question is what the man at the top of the photograph thinks happens next, in a country of thirty million people, two hours by plane from Houston, that the United States now appears to be claiming, in the casual voice of a guy claiming a parking spot.

We bombed a capital city. We took its president. We posted the photo. The country was not asked. The Senate was not asked. The hemisphere was not asked.

That ought to concern you.