Over the past few days, the United States carried out one of the most extraordinary military operations in recent memory: airstrikes in Venezuela, followed by the capture and forcible rendition of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to New York. Within hours, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “run Venezuela” until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.

A Narrative Untethered from Reality

The official explanation for the operation blended criminal justice language — Maduro is now to face federal prosecution, after all, with broad assertions about the war on drugs. But those assertions collapse under basic scrutiny. Fentanyl, the centerpiece of the drug-war rationale, overwhelmingly enters the United States through land routes via Mexico, facilitated by cartels using cars, legal ports of entry, and internal networks; it does not arrive directly from Venezuela in quantities significant enough to account for the opioid scourge. Maritime interdictions tied to fentanyl are rare, and Venezuela does not appear as a source or primary conduit in DEA trafficking data. Even more bluntly, a small coastal craft cannot physically travel from Venezuela to the U.S. mainland without refueling support, a mother ship, or intermediate staging points — none of which feature in documented trafficking patterns. But evidence has never been the indispensable touchstone it once was.

Within 48 hours of seizing Maduro, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric leapt........

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