Joe Scarborough Issues Blunt Warning to Trump Amid Venezuela Crisis

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough has issued a grim warning to President Donald Trump about the change in leadership in Venezuela.

The warning came on Monday’s (January 5) edition of MS NOW’s Morning Joe, in which Scarborough and his co-hosts discussed the capture of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on Saturday (January 3). Maduro is set to appear in New York to face drug and weapons charges.

Scarborough said he believed the removal of Maduro is a good thing, but also shared concerns about the United States’ involvement in Venezuela’s regime change.

“You know, it is stunning, it is breathtaking talking about ‘we own this place,'” Scarborough said, per Mediaite, referring to Trump’s comments to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday (January 4).

He added, “It reminds me of what George W. Bush said, and I looked it up, on May the 1st, 2003: ‘In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.’ And 22 years later, there are still thousands of troops in Iraq trying to maintain order there.”

“And Donald Trump is very critical of that,” Scarborough’s wife and cohost, Mika Brzezinski, responded.

Scarborough continued, saying, “You will certainly not hear from me any suggestion that Maduro was a good leader, a good man, a legitimate leader of Venezuela; he certainly was not. And I suspect in time we hope the hemisphere will be much better with him gone.”

“But the problem here is, things never go as you expect,” he went on. “When you’re trying regime change, the lesson of the last 20 years is regime change doesn’t work; it never goes the way you expect it to go.”

To make his point, Scarborough pointed to the already contentious relationship between Trump and Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who is now serving as Venezuela’s acting president.

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“We saw that right out of the gate the other day when President Trump said [Rodríguez’s] going to do what we tell her to do, and she’s going to work with us, and then immediately after that, Delcy Rodríguez delivered a much different statement.”

Rodríguez initially stood by Maduro as the rightful leader of Venezuela following his capture on Saturday, which she described as an “atrocity,” per Mediaite. However, as Brzezinski pointed out, Rodríguez softened her stance on Sunday (January 4), calling for “peace” and “cooperation.”

This came after Trump told The Atlantic that Rodríguez would have a “very big price” to pay if “she doesn’t do what’s right.”