Jan. 5, 2026 — Venezuela: Not Embracing the “Saving Lives” Justification, by Timothy Trainer
In this week’s blog post by IP attorney and award-winning author Timothy Trainer, he takes a look at two issues facing the US, and the world. Scroll down for more. Follow Tim on Substack.
Who accepts the stated justification for the abduction of Venezuela’s Maduro as saving U.S. lives because of Venezuela’s role in supplying drugs to the United States? We should remind ourselves that just weeks ago, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in a U.S. court for his involvement in drug trafficking. The drug angle is undermined by Trump’s own actions.
Additional information weakens Trump’s argument. According to our own Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.N.’s Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), most illegal fentanyl enters the country from Mexico and there’s no evidence that there are significant levels of that drug produced in South America: Get the Facts: Is Venezuela a primary drug trafficker to the United States?, KCRA3 TV.
This article notes that “Venezuela is not among the primary direct traffickers of cocaine to the U.S.” and “there is no known direct cocaine trade route from Venezuela to the U.S. via sea. The only known direct Venezuela to U.S. trafficking route is via air, according to drug seizure data from UNODC. Cocaine could still arrive from Venezuela to the U.S. through intermediary countries.”
There’s another glaring reason why one should be skeptical about the claims that this administration took this action to protect U.S. lives.
If this administration was serious about U.S. lives, it wouldn’t be ignoring decades of science and medical research when it comes to vaccination of children. On New Year’s Eve, the Washington Post reported that the country is “experiencing its highest annual measles case tally in at least 33 years:” As U.S. vaccination rates fall, see how your school compares, The Washington Post. The Post article reported that “South Carolina this month [December 2025], a measles outbreak topped 175 cases, mostly among unvaccinated individuals, with hundreds quarantined.”
The measles outbreak began in 2024 as the U.S. experienced a significant drop in childhood vaccination rates. About 93 per cent of the 2025 cases affected those who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown: US measles cases surpass 2,000 for first time in 30 years, The Times.
One has to ask the question: Do parents who have embraced the anti-vaccine (anti-science) position then turn around and take their ill children to the hospital where science/research backed treatment occurs?
Take any medicines prescribed or over the counter? Do they suddenly rely on science AFTER a child is sickened by taking advice from a doctor or giving an ill child the medicine as recommended by a physician?
One major observation of the dynamics at play is that we have an anti-science/research crowd at the top of agencies who ignore decades of proven medicine and science that leads to illness and, sometimes, death. This administration tells us how much they care about the lives of citizens while convincing tens of thousands not to do everything possible to prevent children from severe illnesses and death thereby contradicting their own stated position of wanting to save lives in this country. Apparently, the administration discounts the value of children.
My reading is that the Venezuela adventure is not about life saving because information and facts exist that contradict that justification. As it has been in the past with other U.S. administrations, it’s about oil and money plain and simple. In the aftermath of the abduction, Trump is quoted as saying, “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us.
Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars. They took all of our property:” Trump pledges US return to Venezuela oil industry after Maduro’s capture, Fox Business. He makes clear what this military operation was all about: “We are going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and start making money for the country.”
What Trump says underscores what everything is about: MONEY. It will never be about others and saving the lives of the people of these United States. It has never been about lifesaving. If the lives of THE PEOPLE mattered to this administration, it wouldn’t be undermining policies that have kept the children of this country safe from preventable diseases for decades.
Timothy Trainer in Washington, DC • Photo by AnnaGibbs.com
About the Timothy Trainer: Writing books is a passion for attorney Timothy Trainer, who for more than three decades focused on intellectual property issues in his day job. He has worked in government agencies and in the private sector and his assignments have taken him to 60 countries around the world.
Tim found time to pen a few non-fiction tomes, including his first book, Customs Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights; the 15th edition was published in 2022. Thomson Reuters’ Aspatore Books published Tim’s next title in 2015, Potato Chips to Computer Chips: The War on Fake Stuff.
Fiction was a genre he always wanted to try. In 2019, Pendulum Over the Pacific, was released by Joshua Tree Publishing. “This political intrigue story is set in Tokyo and Washington, D.C., and centers on trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan in the late 1980s,” Tim explains.
In 2023, his first series hit bookstores: The China Connection.
In 2025, he published the sequel, The China Factor, which ranked #63 on the Amazon Asian Literature list in May.
