Trump infuriated by Maduro’s ‘constant dancing’, was the ‘last straw’ before kidnapping

Honestly, we expected Nicolás Maduro to put up a little bit more of a fight. I mean, if you’re going to be an autocratic leader directly targeted by the United States, you should be building bunkers, hiring body doubles, and generally being extremely hard to find.

But Maduro wasn’t. When Delta Force arrived to black bag him, he was in his residence at the Fuerte Tiuna military complex in Caracas. Apparently, he was still in bed when the Americans arrived and couldn’t escape into a steel-reinforced panic room in time (what his plan was after that who knows? Wait it out?).

All of which makes us think that maybe Maduro wasn’t taking Donald Trump‘s threats quite as seriously as he should have. Now it seems that Maduro’s insouciance was personally enraging Trump and may have been the deciding factor in kicking off the mission to nab him.

As The New York Times outlines:

“Mr. Maduro’s regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some on the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them and trying to call what he believed to be a bluff.”

And now from WSJ: “Trump privately expressed frustration about the videos, telling aides he believed Maduro was unserious, a senior administration official said.”https://t.co/phni58cxOd pic.twitter.com/r2FRezIafc

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) January 5, 2026

Trump himself was particularly aggrieved, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that:

“Trump privately expressed frustration with the videos, telling aides he believed Maduro was unserious”.

The party’s over

Well, Maduro’s certainly not dancing anymore. He now languishes in a New York cell as he awaits what’s surely going to be a just and sensible criminal trial with zero political interference from Washington. Or… maybe not. In legal terms, Maduro’s goose is cooked, and unfortunately for him, his fate rests in Trump’s hands.

Naturally, this has pretty much every other Central and South American leader urgently reviewing their security arrangements. If Trump can simply snatch a country’s leader while the rest of the world makes an upset face, who’s to say he won’t go after Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and even Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum next?

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this insane situation, it’s when Trump is currently and actively trying to kidnap you, maybe find a place to lie low until he’s lost interest, and don’t tweak his nose by grooving to EDM in front of him?