How Trump’s Foreign Intervention Could Shake up the Midterm Elections

The Washington Post

13:48 JST, January 6, 2026

President Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela will test Americans’ appetite for regime change, inserting a new and unpredictable element ahead of midterm elections this year that have so far been dominated by domestic issues.

Democrats immediately began arguing that action early Saturday was an abandonment of Trump’s promise to focus on improving lives at home, while many Republicans insisted it was an expansion, rather than a shift, in Trump’s “America First” mantra.

Trump on Saturday said the United States had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and planned to “run the country” during a transition period, an action Trump cast as part of a new era of “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.” The president touted the operation as a boost to U.S. interests: a blow to the drug trade, an opportunity for American oil companies and a show of strength.

But his argument drew skepticism on both the right and the left, as critics warned against dragging the U.S. into regime change and costly wars. Recent polls suggest there is significant political risk for Trump, who is already facing discord within his base. A CBS News poll in November found that 70 percent of Americans opposed U.S. military action in Venezuela and that the vast majority did not view the South American country as a major threat to national security. Americans in both parties have grown increasingly skeptical of foreign intervention in recent decades.

Republican leaders mostly backed the president, but some expressed doubts as Trump outlined a potentially expansive U.S. role in Venezuela and said he is “not afraid of boots on the ground.” Many Democrats framed the attack as a violation of Trump’s campaign promises to “get rid of all these wars starting all over the place” and to avoid the type of foreign entanglements that bedeviled many of his predecessors and bred cynicism within his base.

While foreign policy does not always play a central role in domestic elections, it often informs broader opinions about competence and focus. President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan undermined his argument that he was restoring faith and effectiveness in government that had been hampered by the covid-19 epidemic. President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq with faulty intelligence claims, and the attempts at nation-building that followed, damaged his party’s credibility and helped pave the way for Trump’s takeover of the GOP.

“What Americans want is an American president that’s going to care about them … and I think what this shows is the president’s more concerned about what’s going on in Venezuela, what’s going on in Argentina than he is on what’s going on in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) in an interview.

The politics of the intervention are hard to assess immediately, some strategists said, as details of U.S. plans remain unclear and the situation in Venezuela is still unfolding. The issue’s relevance to voters could change based on the ultimate extent of U.S. involvement and Venezuela’s stability in the months to come. Trump on Saturday said Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, appeared “willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great,” but she later criticized the United States’ actions as “barbarity.”

Pressed in an ABC News interview Sunday about whether the U.S. is “running” Venezuela, as Trump indicated, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. will use its “leverage” to steer the country toward its goals.

Trump had been ramping up pressure on Maduro for months, but the action in Venezuela probably caught many Americans off guard, given that it did not follow a provocation like the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Republicans embracing his latest action in Venezuela are betting that the fallout there will be limited, and even some staunch critics of foreign intervention on the right declined to criticize Trump on Saturday. But a few echoed the concerns from Democrats.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a proponent of “America First” policies who has become one of Trump’s biggest critics from the right, questioned his justifications for the attack – noting that the fentanyl responsible for most U.S. drug deaths comes primarily from places other than Venezuela – and reiterated her worry that he is veering from principles on which he campaigned.

“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” she wrote on X. “Boy were we wrong.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who has long been at odds with Trump, said the president, at his news conference, had undercut earlier suggestions from administration officials that the action in Venezuela was a limited effort to apprehend Maduro. Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser turned MAGA commentator, initially on his show hailed Maduro’s capture as a “stunning overnight achievement” – but after Trump’s news conference expanding on the U.S. role in Venezuela, he wondered if the plan would “hark back to our fiasco in Iraq under Bush.”

Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) called the Venezuela operation “successful” but added in a statement online, “We still need more answers, especially to questions regarding the next steps in Venezuela’s transition.”

Other Republicans echoed Trump’s points about U.S. interests in the region. Raheem Kassam, a political strategist who is editor of the conservative National Pulse, suggested Trump’s MAGA base will “warm” to the idea that the Venezuela action is “America First” and noted that many supporters also embraced Trump’s long-shot ambitions to annex Greenland.

Kassam doesn’t see the issue playing into the midterms much yet – but “if it turns into a disaster, certainly.”

“These things are very risky,” he acknowledged. Trump “will know what risk he’s taking and people know what it means if Caracas suddenly overnight turns into a complete powder keg.”

Some Republicans were skeptical that the U.S. would be as involved as Trump suggested Saturday was possible. “The president gets a lot of leeway up to a certain point,” said GOP strategist David Urban, “and I think that point would be, having U.S. soldiers in some meaningful capacity in Venezuela. I don’t think you’ll see that.”

Democrats, meanwhile, questioned the legality of the military action in Venezuela. Some also sought to use it to build their longtime case that Trump is distracted from the issues that matter most to voters.

“The American people don’t want to ‘run’ a foreign country while our leaders fail to improve life in this one,” wrote Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and potential Democratic 2028 presidential candidate, on social media, arguing that Trump was “failing on the economy and losing his grip on power at home.”

Buoyed by victories in November’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats are focusing intensely on the issue of affordability heading into the 2026 midterms. Trump’s advisers signaled after those elections that they would be refocusing on the economy, and Trump began to tout his economic achievements at rallies. Now, many Democrats say the operation in Venezuela could undercut that effort.

“His biggest problem is that costs are continuing to go up, and he promised people they would go down, and whenever people see him creating some other kind of a problem, rather than buckling down and trying to un-break that key promise, they turn against him more,” argued Andrew Bates, a Democratic strategist and former White House communications official under Biden.

Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, emphasized that it’s hard to predict the politics of Trump’s actions in Venezuela without more data.

“What I can say based upon polling is that one of Trump’s strengths in public opinion polls is that he’s viewed as strong, and not indecisive or weak, and in that sense this plays to his strength,” he said of the Venezuela operation.