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**NOVEMBER 26, 2025**

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When one of the 250 Venezuelans arbitrarily banished by the Trump administration to an El Salvador torture dungeon stepped off the plane in Caracas and **kissed the tarmac** [link removed] back in July, he was manifesting the popular sentiment of his countrymen. Venezuela has survived the equivalent of three Great Depressions under the leadership of socialist Nicolás Maduro, but it could always be worse. Polls suggest that **the majority of Venezuelans** [link removed] hold an unfavorable view of María Corina Machado, the ideologue Trump is attempting to replace Maduro with.

And, spoiler alert: they’re right. Because the last time Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the vast menagerie of Miami grifters who comprise the powerful Venezuela Regime Change lobby attempted to overthrow Maduro back in 2019, they ended up “losing” some $30 billion in state assets. It’s a ridiculous story [link removed] that, perhaps fittingly, showcases Laura Loomer as a rare voice of reason.

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Natacha Pisarenko/AP Photo; Jorge Villalba/Getty

The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela [link removed]

In 2018, Henri Falcón tried to save Venezuela. As governor of the populous western state of Lara, Falcón had drawn overwhelming electoral victories and admiring profiles in the Western press for his humble demeanor, military precision, and reputation for finishing infrastructure projects on time and under budget. (“Efficient Revolution” was one of his campaign slogans.) But as oil prices and U.S. economic sanctions plunged the country into a harrowing depression, his ambitions grew humbler. “The overriding priority of my administration will be to make sure that not one Venezuelan child goes to bed without having eaten,” he wrote in a somber

**New York Times** op-ed announcing his presidential candidacy [link removed].

Just before the op-ed went to press, Falcón was called to a meeting at the U.S. embassy, at which officials expressed their displeasure with him. The hard-right political parties that had plotted [link removed] the failed but violent 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez reacted to Nicolás Maduro’s first election with bloody riots, rolling blackouts, and a strategy of manufactured chaos [link removed]. But the disgruntled aristocrats, living outside Venezuela while drawing generous salaries from USAID-funded NGOs, had decided to boycott the election, and believed everyone else should, too.

Falcón was incredulous: Replacing Maduro with a competent technocrat like himself was the rational way to save the economically ravaged country from the fate of Somalia or Haiti. But he was told that the White House saw the elections as by definition illegitimate, because the Supreme Court had banned the “most popular politicians” in the country from running. Participating in them was tantamount to collaboration with the Maduro regime. Should Falcón choose to go ahead with his candidacy anyway, they said, he should not be surprised [link removed] to find himself and his immediate family members on an Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, which would effectively lock him out of the global financial system, a cruel irony given that a pillar of his platform was establishing a strict currency peg to the dollar.

In short, the State Department was threatening to financially destroy him—for running

**against** Maduro. Falcón soon learned he wasn’t the only one who had been summoned to the embassy for such a “talk.”

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