With a large dollop of bravado and an occasional dab of circumspection, elected officials and political candidates in key mid-term races in Coastal Georgia and elsewhere in the state reacted on social media to the U.S. raid on Venezuela.
Just months ahead of the party primaries in May, Coastal Georgia Congressman Earl “Buddy” Carter hailed the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and transport him to the U.S. for trial on drug-trafficking charges.
Carter, along with U.S. Rep. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley, his rivals for the Republican nomination to face U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff in the fall election, described the raid as a justified response to, as Carter put it on the social media site X, “sending drugs into our country and killing our children.”
Dooley, Gov. Brian Kemp’s handpicked candidate for the nomination, was relatively restrained in his praise. “I applaud the Trump Administration for taking decisive action to apprehend Maduro and force him to answer for his crimes against Americans,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Carter and Collins, both self-described “MAGA warriors,” spared little in the way of accolades for the president, whose support — and just as importantly, the backing of his supporters — they are seeking ahead of the May 19 primary.
“No other president could have done this,” Carter wrote, while Collins praised the president’s foreign policy acumen.
“You know how we always say that President Trump is out there playing 4-D chess? Well, taking Maduro to task is just one of the many chess moves,” the lawmaker from Jackson said in a video posted on X.
Carter and Collins also signaled more muscular U.S. action to come. “This indictment is just the beginning,” Carter wrote in his post, though what, exactly that meant, he did not say.
“We’re so back. The years of America Last or our country not being respected on the world stage, they’re over,” Collins proclaimed.
‘Greatest military’
As of Sunday evening, all the Republican candidates seeking to succeed Carter as Coastal Georgia’s representative in Congress had not reacted on their social media to the U.S. raid on Venezuela. Those who did struck markedly different tones.
Brian Montgomery, a Republican candidate as well as a West Point graduate and decorated combat veteran, said on X that he was praying for the safety of all U.S. service members involved in the raid and retweeted a White House statement quoting Trump as saying, “We have the greatest military in the world by far.”
Jim Kingston and Kandiss Taylor took a droll route. Kingston, son of longtime Coastal Georgia congressman Jack Kingston, tweeted out a three laughing-faced emojis attached to a 2020 post by former President Joe Biden that mocked Trump’s toughness and admiration for dictators like Maduro.
Taylor posted a photo of Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at their news conference in Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, with the caption: “Alpha men. I love them.”
On the other hand, some of the Democrats aspiring to Carter’s seat in Congress addressed the historically contentious issue of the legislative branch’s constitutional role in funding and prosecuting wars.
Writing on Facebook, Michael McCord called the raid a “foreign policy scandal” and an “act of war” without any authorization from Congress, no public legal justification and no constitutional authority.
Defonsio Daniels said “no one should shed a tear” for Maduro’s capture. At the same time, he wrote on Facebook, “those in power still must act within the limits of the Constitution and the law.”
“As Americans, we cannot allow our justified disgust for a dictator to become a blank check for any president to wage war, risk and cause civilian lives, or claim authority to ‘run’ another country without accountability,”
‘Awful movie’
Amid the shower of mostly accolades in the hours immediately following the raid, Democrats and other critics of the administration posed obvious questions.
What did Trump’s declaration that the U.S. would now temporarily “run” Venezuela and work to tap the country’s massive oil reserves mean? And what about the pledge to mount a “second and much larger attack if we need to do so” on the country of some 28 million people? And how does that square with the pledge of candidate Trump to extricate and keep the U.S. out of foreign wars?
As of early Monday evening, Ossoff had not reacted to the raid on social media or in a statement posted on his office’s website. But his Georgia colleague in the U.S. Senate, Democrat Raphael Warnock had.
“We have seen that awful movie before,” Warnock said in a statement released by his office hours after the raid, referring to experience with “regime change” in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “This is a slap in the face to the hardworking people who voted for him on the promise of peace.”
And just two days before leaving the House of Representatives, a MAGA warrior-turned-apostate, Marjorie Taylor Green, among others, asked equally pointed questions: If defeating “narco-terrorism” and preventing the poisoning of American children is the aim, why did the president last month pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández despite even though he had been convicted in a U.S. court on nearly identical drug-related charges?
Furthermore, she asked, if U.S. military action and regime change in Venezuela were really about saving American lives from deadly drugs, why hasn’t the Trump administration taken action against Mexican cartels?
“We are ‘running’ Venezuela now. America First!!!” Greene wrote.