By: Fern Sidman

By any reasonable historical metric, the dawn raid that removed Nicolás Maduro from the presidential palace in Caracas will be remembered as one of the most audacious acts of American statecraft in a generation. As The New York Daily News reported on Saturday, U.S. military forces captured the Venezuelan strongman in a lightning operation early Saturday morning, ending a month-long pressure campaign that President Donald Trump had openly described as a bid to dismantle a criminal regime masquerading as a sovereign government.

Yet in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani has fashioned himself the nation’s most vocal avatar of the democratic socialist left, the response was not relief, nor solidarity with a long-suffering people brutalized by dictatorship, but outrage — directed not at the tyrant now in handcuffs, but at the American president who finally brought him to justice.

According to the information provided in The New York Daily News report, Mamdani personally telephoned Trump to denounce the operation, telling reporters afterward that he opposed the “pursuit of regime change” and what he termed a “violation of federal international law.” Earlier in the day he had gone even further, labeling the seizure of Maduro an “act of war.”

Those words, stark in their moral dissonance, have ricocheted through political circles ever since.

Nicolás Maduro is not a misunderstood populist, nor the victim of imperial overreach. He is, as the U.S. Justice Department has alleged for years, the head of a narco-state — a ruler whose regime is steeped in cocaine trafficking, whose inner circle has been indicted on charges of weapons smuggling, money laundering, and conspiracy to flood American streets with poison.

Under Maduro, Venezuela’s once-vast oil reserves — many of them developed with U.S. investment decades earlier — were expropriated, mismanaged, and in some cases quietly siphoned off into offshore accounts controlled by regime loyalists. Billions in American-owned energy assets were effectively stolen, while ordinary Venezuelans were reduced to scavenging for food in the shadows of empty refineries.

Media reports have chronicled this collapse in painstaking detail over the years: the shuttered hospitals, the hyperinflation that turned monthly salaries into bus fare, the millions of refugees streaming northward. It has been documented over the years about the regime’s reliance on Cuban intelligence operatives, its brazen alliance with drug cartels, and its systematic dismantling of democratic institutions.

This is the man Mamdani implicitly defended.

When Trump announced after Maduro’s capture that the United States would “run the country” temporarily while a transition was arranged, the reaction in Washington was predictably polarized. Gov. Kathy Hochul called it a “flagrant abuse of power,” while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer labeled the operation “reckless.”

Yet those critiques rang hollow to millions who have watched every diplomatic overture fail, every sanction met with deeper repression. Trump, unlike his predecessors, concluded that the old script — condemn, isolate, wait — had merely bought time for a regime that thrives on chaos.

As The New York Daily News report noted, this was not a snap decision but the culmination of weeks of pressure, intelligence gathering, and diplomatic isolation. By the time U.S. forces entered Caracas, Maduro was already a global pariah whose legitimacy had evaporated even among former allies.

And then there is the oil.

Trump’s blunt promise to bring U.S. energy companies back to Venezuela’s fields was derided as mercenary by critics. But for many Americans — especially in an era of volatile global energy markets — it signaled something else: the restoration of assets looted under a kleptocracy that turned one of the richest petroleum reserves on Earth into a monument to socialist mismanagement.

Mamdani told The New York Daily News that he had been “honest and direct” with Trump, reiterating his opposition to regime change and insisting that the two leaders had “left it at that.” Yet the mayor conspicuously declined to describe the president’s response.

This silence has only intensified scrutiny.

Why, many are asking, does the mayor of New York City — a metropolis whose neighborhoods are home to thousands of Venezuelan exiles — choose this moment to lecture Washington about restraint? Why is his indignation reserved for the removal of a tyrant, not the tyrant himself?

The contradiction is especially glaring given Mamdani’s own history. Just months ago he referred to Maduro as a “dictator” in an interview with the Latin Times. On Saturday, however, he studiously avoided that descriptor, directing his fire exclusively at Trump.

To critics, this pivot betrays a deeper ideological reflex: a left-wing orthodoxy that recoils instinctively from American power even when that power is deployed against one of the hemisphere’s most brutal regimes.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores have now arrived in  New York City, where they are expected to face a litany of drug and weapons charges. The New York Daily News reported that the deposed leader is likely to be held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center — the same facility currently housing Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson — and could be arraigned as early as Monday.

The symbolism is hard to miss: a man who once presided over a nation of 28 million now reduced to a defendant in a federal courtroom.

Times Square, meanwhile, became a theater of protest Saturday as demonstrators rallied against what organizers called a “war on Venezuela.” But as the Daily News repot observed, the chants rarely mentioned the victims of Maduro’s rule, the political prisoners, or the millions driven into exile.

The irony is that Trump and Mamdani are not strangers. The two met in November following Mamdani’s general election victory, and despite their ideological chasm, the president reportedly took a liking to the young mayor.

That makes the weekend’s confrontation all the more revealing.

Trump, for his part, has been unapologetic. After meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Florida earlier this week, he warned that Iran “may be behaving badly” and hinted that Tehran was trying to resurrect nuclear facilities struck by U.S. forces last year. In that context, Venezuela was not an isolated theater but part of a broader strategy: confront hostile regimes before their criminal enterprises metastasize.

The New York Daily News report framed the episode as a collision between two worldviews. On one side stands a president who sees dictators as criminals to be neutralized; on the other, a mayor who views American intervention itself as the greater sin.

Trump’s calculus is unsentimental. He looks at Venezuela and sees a narco-state that traffics in cocaine, steals foreign assets, and exports misery. Mamdani looks at the same tableau and reaches first for the language of restraint, legality, and process — even when process has been the dictator’s shield.

This is not merely a policy dispute. It is a moral schism.

No one doubts that the road ahead for Venezuela will be perilous. Transitional administrations are fragile, and the specter of civil unrest looms large. But the removal of Maduro is, for countless Venezuelans, the first breath of air after years of suffocation.

In calling Trump to condemn that act, Mamdani has placed himself on the wrong side of that moment.

The New York Daily News has chronicled New York’s long tradition of sheltering victims of tyranny — from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean to Latin America. Those communities will be watching closely as the former dictator of Venezuela is led through a Brooklyn courthouse.

They will ask themselves who, in this city, truly stood with them when the chain