I agree to some extent but I have two hesitations:

1) The admin has been increasingly open about regime change being the goal.

2) The people who have pushed to get this far - Rubio, friends in FL - certainly view regime change as the goal. There will be big internal pressure to escalate.

In sum, the odds of a limited military action ousting Maduro are much lower than commonly perceived and we should be wary of dealing Trump in at a blackjack table where he will be chasing losses and tempted to double down on a bad hand. 6/

Trump will be tempted to escalate to delivery victory. A more extensive air campaign or a limited ground invasion will come onto the table as options. Arguably, proponents of action against Venezuela know this and are trying to maneuver him into this position. 5/

What if airstrikes fail to trigger a coup or trigger an attempted coup that fails? Trump will never take the L. One option might be to redefine success (ie, we destroyed the narco infrastructure) and call it a day. But this will be transparently nonsense and leave him looking very weak. 4/

The coup must be organized by mid-ranking officers who wouldn’t fear trial under the next government. Coups are risky coordination games that require communication and trust across units. The government knows this, surveils these officers intensively, and has done a lot of other coup proofing.3/

The most plausible mechanism linking air strikes to Maduro’s removal is a coup. Yet FANB’s upper echelon is deeply implicated in corruption and abuses. Even if air strikes impose costs, they have little incentive to remove Maduro without a guaranteed amnesty. 2/

I see what you're saying, maybe that's a fairer reading.

I do think its just an indefensible level of confidence about a very complex and unpredictable scenario.

But I get why they feel the need to project that confidence. They feel like this is the opportunity and they want to shoot their shot.

Broad protections for civil liberties are a definitional element of democracy but not autocracy. That's the best reason for ordinary folks.

Even if democracy is only a game for resolving elite conflicts w/o violence, ordinary people bear the brunt of that violence. That's another reason.

If he’s limping bc he’s got a rifle part down his pants it’s amateur hour but if he’s doing it to throw off gait recognition tech that’s some serious forethought.

The issue with Gyokeres is that we're taking on two kinds of substantial risk. Performance risk - Will his production translate from Portugal? Will he elevate the side? Roster/Financial risk - If his first two years are poor, are we stuck with a 29-year-old on 200k per week for three more years?

Its mainly people refusing to admit their own culpability, whether as Trump voters, as folks who spent years both sidesing him and fixating on shiny baubles like DEI, or as folks who lost their mind at the Biden administration. The truth is that WE FUCKED UP BIGLY and they played their part. End.

I'm as worried about Trump as anybody but "US is now less democratic than Russia or Ethiopia by our measures" seems like a bad take.

Yup. And its both patrimonial and - as is becoming more and more apparent- highly ideological in a very very dark way. That combination is terrifying.

You joke but G Gordon Liddy actually did this inside the Nixon White House.