"When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players," Gen. George S. Patton told men of U.S. Third Army in 1944. "Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser."
"We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning," Donald Trump told supporters on the campaign trail in 2016. "And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!"
A decade later — well, a decade minus one four-year total loser of an interregnum — and Americans are still not sick of all the winning.
Not even close, if this report from CNN on America's support for Operation Absolute Resolve is anything to go by.
CNN, really? Really:
🚨 HOLY CRAP! CNN was just forced to report that support for what President Trump did to Maduro SURGED +25 POINTS among the American public
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 6, 2026
"After the ousting, look! Support went THROUGH THE ROOF!"
"It turns out, Americans like what they deem to be successful operations!" 🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/4gLymoQOuD
I try not to write very often about polls, and I'm not even sure how much I trust this one.
But when asked in a purely theoretical way before Absolute Resolve if U.S. forces should remove Nicolás Maduro from power, just 21% of Americans were in favor.
That's a good number, as far as I'm concerned, because prior to Absolute Resolve, our experience with removing foreign leaders ended up as long-term and increasingly pointless engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're right to be wary of any grand plans for remaking some other country's leadership.
After Absolute Resolve, it looks more like an episode of SWAT, where the cops go in at the end of the show, knock down a door, and cuff the drug dealer before he can flush his stash down the toilet.
And that's probably why CNN was "just forced to report" that support surged 16 points — not the 25 that Daugherty claimed. Still, that's yuge. And there's plenty of room for growth as his trial reveals more about Maduro's misdeeds.
The operation was nothing like SWAT, of course. In addition to our Special Forces and some very fancy helicopters doing some seriously daring flying, something like 150 aircraft were involved, including the unmatched F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter, the F-35 Lightning II multirole fighter, and Navy EA-18G Growler electronic warfare fighters.
The F-22s were there mostly in case the Venezuelan air force — including some well-respected Russian-made Su-30s fighters — came out to play. But our suppression of Venezuela's air defenses and (supposedly) stealth-defeating, Russian-made radar system kept Maduro's jets grounded.
Perhaps most impressive was the work of the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), coordinated with Space Command and interagency partners, in shutting the lights off in Caracas, among other nifty little tricks. Honestly, USCYBERCOM showed off some abilities that I kinda wish we'd kept in our back pocket for use against more serious opponents. They were that good.
But I digress.
We're not done with Venezuela yet, although hopefully the military part is complete. But our support for Absolute Resolve might go up or down from here, depending on, as former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is supposed to have said, "Events, dear boy, events."
Recommended: Trump's Entire Foreign Policy in Just Six Words
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