Fetterman: Why Can’t Dems Admit Maduro’s Capture Is Good?

Come on, man. We all know why.

John Fetterman does as well, surely, but he made the rhetorical point this morning on Fox & Friends. The deposing of a narco-trafficking usurper propped up by Cuba, Hezbollah, and the cartels has opened a path to liberation for Venezuela and seriously damaged the nefarious networks Nicolas Maduro operated and relied upon for power. Even if one has rational reservations about the potential consequences, it doesn’t negate Fetterman’s point. Why pretend that Maduro’s capture is a bad outcome?

ICYMI: @SenFettermanPA defended President Trump amid criticism over the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.

“I don’t know why we can’t just acknowledge that it’s been a good thing what’s happened.” pic.twitter.com/AK1LdZ39Cz

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) January 6, 2026

Why indeed? To acknowledge Maduro’s capture and wrenching from illegitimate control of Venezuela as a good thing would go to credit Donald Trump. And Democrats have only one message in the midterms – that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president who can never be credited with any good at all. 

In a way, Democrats are giving Maduro more credit as an elected leader than Trump. 

However, Politico reports today that Democrats may want to change the subject, or at least the context, from Trump’s clear and decisive strategic win in Venezuela. Their new message: Trump has now gone full globalist and cares more about Venezuelans than Americans. In other words, Democrats now want to claim the America First mantle:

“Ohioans are facing higher costs across the board and are desperate for leadership that will help deliver relief,” former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is running to reclaim his seat, said on X. “We should be more focused on improving the lives of Ohioans – not Caracas.”

The frame from Democrats shows how potent the party views affordability as an issue in the midterms, one that Trump and his team have grown increasingly preoccupied by after across-the-board losses in 2025.

“The problem Trump was already having was that he looked like he was focused on everything other than what matters in people’s daily life,” said longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “And now he’s just supercharged that.”

Trump won in 2024 largely by running on affordability, and his less interventionist “America First” approach helped him win over more isolationist voters who had been alienated by the neoconservative approach of the Republican Party in the Iraq War era. But continuing economic uncertainty and persistent inflation, combined with his second-term shift towards a more aggressive foreign policy approach, threaten to hurt the president and his party at the ballot box.

Ahem. Theoretically, this argument makes some sense as a reaction to Trump’s clear win in Venezuela. There is a long and somewhat inglorious history of American political parties ankle-biting presidents dealing with foreign-policy crises by claiming that they ignore domestic concerns. If Trump does not return to focusing on economic issues or successfully multitasks over the next few months, this message could be trouble – again, theoretically.

In practice, however, the hypocrisy is breathtaking. This is the same Democrat Party that threw open the southern border and allowed millions of refugees to enter illegally without consequence, by arguing their pain mattered more than the consequences for the same Americans they now claim to champion. They have spent the last year attempting to block the enforcement of immigration law to eject illegal aliens, many of them from Venezuela, and a significant number with ties to cartels, organized crime, and other gangs and networks. They spent four years virtue-signaling over “compassion” when it came to illegal aliens and not caring one whit about “affordability,” nor about the impacts of the flood of illegal aliens into communities across the nation. 

Trump and his team need to prepare for this fight. The good news is that Trump has the better argument, by far, and that Democrats seem more inclined to defend Maduro’s legitimacy than Trump’s. That might sell in SoHo, but not in the Springfields of the country. 

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