Trump Casually Mentions That We’re Apparently Bombing Venezuela Now

As much as one would love to simply be able to tune out most of the things coming out of the mouth of President Donald Trump, it actually behooves us to listen closely to his ramblings … particularly because you never truly know if pertinent admissions about national security or foreign policy are about to come spilling out of his mouth at any given moment while he’s talking about seemingly unrelated issues. That appears to be exactly what happened when Trump, in the course of a Friday radio interview with host John Catsimatidis of New York’s WABC station, thought it fit to mention that the U.S. military had struck “a big plant, or a big facility” in Venezuela last week, in the midst of Christmas celebrations. The comment even seemed to pass more or less unnoticed and not heavily remarked upon for a few days, despite the fact that it was an admission, directly from the President’s mouth, of the first on-the-ground U.S. strike against mainland Venezuela and the regime of autocratic ruler Nicolás Maduro. Trump effectively told us that we’re at war with Venezuela, and only now is that news actually being widely reported.

“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant, or a big facility, where the ships come from,” said Trump to Catsimatidis, a major GOP donor, on the air. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”

The moment occurs in the middle of a typically rambling Trump spiel, followed so quickly by other claims that even the hosts apparently didn’t react to it. He wasn’t even asked any follow-up questions.

In this clip from a right wing radio show on Friday, Trump claims that on Christmas Eve the US “knocked out” a facility in Venezuela from which the supposed drug boats launch. Has this been reported anywhere else?

The station’s write up doesn’t mention it: wabcradio.com/2025/12/26/s…

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) Dec 28, 2025 at 2:37 PM

It’s a classic Trumpism to mention such a deadly important topic off-hand, and then follow it with “I don’t know if you read or you saw,” which would seemingly indicate that Trump has absolutely no idea whether what he just said was publicly available information, or classified military secret that will cause his generals to suffer instantaneous heart attacks. And indeed, nothing had been reported about a strike on the Venezuelan mainland at the time that Trump made his comment, so what exactly was he talking about when he said “I don’t know if you read or you saw”? The man’s brain appears to be melting before our eyes; he’s admitting to covert U.S. strikes in the course of normal conversation and it’s only because his administration gives us such a constant deluge of horrors that such a comment can go almost without notice over the holiday weekend. Or maybe we were just too distracted by the Trump admin’s simultaneous Christmas strikes on Nigeria. Happy holidays!

As for what we’re actually bombing in Venezuela–which has not acknowledged the supposed strikes–we’re operating with what has become the customary level of total confusion and immediate mixed messages from Trump administration officials. Unnamed “American officials” cited by The New York Times without actual quotes or evidence “said that Mr. Trump was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela that was eliminated,” although that would seemingly directly conflict with Trump’s own quote that we hit “where the ships come from,” which would seem to suggest a dockyard or ship-building facility. There has been no other official acknowledgement, meanwhile, of the strikes–not from the military, intelligence agencies, White House or Venezuela itself. Is it possible that Trump is just making up fictional bombings that we haven’t yet carried out? Perhaps while children were nestled in bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, Trump was having such a vivid dream about bombing Venezuela that he woke up thinking that it was reality? How much longer will he be allowed by his handlers to do these kinds of off-the-cuff radio interviews, when he might just randomly launch himself into describing our secret military operations at any moment?

If these strikes do turn out to be real–and we have to assume they probably will–then it will be the latest escalation in the conflict between the U.S. and Maduro’s Venezuela that began with military’s campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific in September, which have hit at least 25 targets and killed at least 105 defenseless people so far, without bothering to provide any evidence that they’re transporting drugs, whether that’s cocaine or fentanyl, the latter of which the country does not and has never produced. Along the way, Trump has publicly admitted that he’s authorized the C.I.A. to conduct operations within Venezuela, announced what he’s described as a blockade–another act of war–of the country, and begun intercepting oil tankers coming and going from the country, whether the ships have been previously sanctioned or not. In perhaps the most grandiose moment of stupidity of the saga to date, he even announced the supposed creation of a new “golden fleet” of “Trump-class” battleships to be used around the world, despite the fact that the ships would be deeply impractical, more or less useless for the modern age of sea warfare, and prohibitively expensive and complicated to build and deploy, leading experts to opine that they’ll likely never actually be built or used. But don’t tell that to a guy who cares more about a ship’s size and ability to look cool than whether it might actually be of use in any of the country’s military objectives.

The fact of the matter is, we are currently at war with the nation of Venezuela in all but name, and despite the efforts of Congress to gently remind the executive branch that they’re meant to retain the power to make such a declaration, it is all too obvious that the Trump administration does not care one iota. Predictably, it won’t be real for many Americans until “boots are on the ground” or the first American soldier is killed in the field, but Trump apparently cares so little for the threat of those consequences that he’s not even careful with what he’s saying to random radio hosts in New York while he’s admitting to the conflict’s first strike on Venezuelan soil. Imagine what his next pronouncement might be, and how lost it will end up being in New Year’s chatter.