Maduro gets a trial. Why is that more outrageous than Bin Laden’s burial at sea? If you wanted a case study in selective outrage, you could do worse than line up two American presidents and two enemies of the United States: Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden in Pakistan versus Donald Trump and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. In the first case, the target died without ever seeing a judge. In the second, the man will get a lawyer, a docket number, and his day in court. Yet it is this latter case that many commentators treat as uniquely alarming. That should make us pause.
Start with the enemies themselves.
Bin Laden planned 9/11 and a long list of terror attacks. Maduro has starved his country, rigged elections, crushed opponents, and turned a nation with immense oil wealth into a humanitarian cautionary tale. These are not misunderstood reformers who just need better PR. They are, in different ways, architects of misery.
Then look at how our presidents responded.
In 2011, Obama sent a small U.S. team into Abbottabad, Pakistan, to kill bin Laden. The raid violated Pakistani sovereignty, killed the target on the spot, and ended with a burial at sea. There was no federal indictment and no trial. The legal theory mixed wartime authority, self-defense, and a thick stack of internal memos. Many Americans, including plenty who opposed the Iraq War, cheered anyway. Even those uneasy about drones and targeted killings tended to file the bin Laden raid under “necessary” rather than “normshattering.”
Now look at the Maduro operation.
The United States helped uproot a corrupt regime and capture its leader. Maduro is not lying in a crater or at the bottom of the ocean. He is alive. He will be charged, represented, and tried. If your standard is that America should never use force overseas without pristine multilateral paperwork, then both presidents have something to answer for. If your standard is that people who do great harm should face justice instead of summary execution, the Maduro case is, procedurally speaking, clearly less extreme.
Double Standard Hard at Work
Yet the intensity of outrage does not track that logic. Obama’s order to kill bin Laden was widely treated as a moment of national catharsis. There was talk about what precedent it might set, but very little insistence that anything short of a live capture and a long trial was a moral scandal.
When Trump moves against Maduro and produces a live defendant, some of those same voices discover that the very idea of such an operation is obviously beyond the pale. The problem, we are told, is the abuse of executive power, the erosion of norms, the drift toward strongman politics.
You do not have to love Trump’s style to see the asymmetry.
Under Obama, sending a team into Pakistan to kill a man without trial could be read as reluctant resolve. Under Trump, capturing a dictator for prosecution slots neatly into an existing story line of recklessness and danger. Once we decide that the name on the Resolute Desk explains everything, we stop comparing the facts.
You can defend Obama’s raid and still admit it bypassed any notion of a courtroom. What you cannot do, at least not with a straight face, is applaud that move as sober statecraft and then declare that bringing Maduro into a courtroom is uniquely monstrous.
Here on the Central Coast, we are used to thinking about “process” in more mundane contexts — from water boards to zoning hearings. If it matters that a homeowner in Santa Barbara gets a fair hearing before a commission, it ought to matter that a captured head of state faces an actual judge instead of a firing squad. A trial may not fix Venezuela overnight, but it does set a better precedent than a crater and a classified memo.
There is a simple standard we should apply no matter who sits in the Oval Office. When the United States uses force against foreign leaders and terrorists, our first preference should be capture when feasible, trial when possible, and a clear public record explaining why if neither happens. Real life will not always allow that. Sometimes there is no safe way to take someone alive. Sometimes the threat is immediate.
But on that spectrum, the Maduro case nudges us toward a healthier norm: away from “dead body, sealed memo” and toward “living defendant, open docket.” You do not need to be a Trump supporter to say that, on paper, a courtroom is better than a crater. You do, however, need a short memory to pretend this is the first time an American president has pushed the edges of military power.
Maduro will get his day in court. Some of us might use the occasion to put our own double standards under a bit of cross examination too.
Nick Koonce shares his views from a moderates perspective—less shouting, more thinking, and an occasional raised eyebrow at our shared hypocrisies.
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Process, power, and selective outrage
If you think the Maduro grab is unique in its disregard for sovereignty or international norms, you have forgotten a long history of American and non‑American regime change operations. What is genuinely distinctive here is not the willingness to interfere in another country’s politics. It is the combination of two things at once:
A brutally honest strategic motive—energy and great‑power rivalry, not humanitarian uplift.
A procedural choice to bring the captured leader into a courtroom instead of leaving a body in a ditch.
You can see this dynamic even in our own backyard. Local coverage of Representative Salud Carbajal’s swift condemnation of the operation has leaned heavily on tone—outrage, alarm, the obligatory denunciations—while skating past the harder comparisons. The same voices that can barely spare a sentence for the legal gray zone around bin Laden’s killing suddenly discover an elaborate conscience once the target is Maduro and the president is Trump. While the Angry Poodle gave its obligatory partisan growl to Carbajal’s denouncement, a more attentive watch dog has a more tactical response.
I asked my cousin who is a raging Regressive “ Biden put a 25 MM bounty on Maduro but was too incompetent to do anything about it. Aren’t you and your friends happy that somebody, anybody, followed through on the bounty Democrats placed on Maduro?” Her answer: “But Trump!” That’s always their answer. Nobody cares anymore.