Jon Stewart on Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela: ‘This is all exhausting’

Late-night hosts tore into the Trump administration’s surprise military attack on Caracas, capture of president Nicolás Maduro and vague plans to “run” Venezuela.

Jon Stewart wasted no time in his first Daily Show appearance of 2026, immediately digging into Donald Trump’s shock decision to remove Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power in the early hours of 2 January, which more than a dozen countries condemned as a “crime of aggression” to the UN.

“Now, obviously, this is actually a very fraught moment for the world,” he said on Monday evening. “It is highly unusual for any government, any sovereign nation, to violate the airspace and territory of another sovereign nation and hit the grab and go on their president.

“Look, no one knows how this operation is going to work out,” he added. “But based on the United States’ track record, my guess is we’re going to be really happy about this for a couple of weeks. And then 30 years from now, there will be a Venezuelan leftist revolution, and the new government will point to this moment as the reason our embassy there is on fire. And it will absolutely ruin a Democrat’s presidency. Generally, that’s how this shit works. And remember, the reason Maga was so high on Donald Trump was that he was the guy who wasn’t going to get involved with this kind of shit any more.”

Stewart also lamented Trump’s blatant admission – despite his aides’ best efforts to paint the attack as an effort to stop drug trafficking – that the US incursion on Venezuela was motivated in part by access to crude oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump said. “We need total access. We need access to the oil.”

“Oil. Precious commodity, certainly – but not the reason a country, formed 250 years ago on the ideas of liberty and self-determination, would go into a country and snatch a man at night,” said Stewart. “There must be a slightly more noble pretense. Is this your first war? I mean, what the fuck?

“We can’t even be conspiracy theorists now,” he joked. “‘I think they did it for the oil’ – Yeah, no, I did it for the oil.”

Stewart noted the precedent Trump’s actions set for future US administrations: “If we need shit and it’s not too far away, we are going to take it.”

“The people I feel sorry for are the Trump defendants, the defenders, the sycophants, who haven’t received the memo that we no longer have to frame our adventurism in the ideals of our great country,” he concluded. “Look, this is all exhausting and exposes the Gulf of America – not the body of water. The real Gulf of America is the gap between the high aspirations that embody the founding of this country and the thuggish gangsterism that this crew thinks makes us great again.”

Jimmy Kimmel returned to the stage with a quick summary of Trump’s action-packed holiday break. “It would take a nine-part Ken Burns documentary series to cover it all,” he joked. “But I’m going to do my best to boil it down.”

Kimmel reminded viewers that Trump hosted the Kennedy Center Honors in December. “After boasting about what a great host he is and how much better he is than I am and how huge his ratings would be, Trump hosted the lowest rated Kennedy Center Honors telecast of all time,” he said. “I’d hate to be the White House intern who had to tear that headline out of all the papers and eat ’em. You know, as I recall, he said he’d step down if this happened, right? He said: ‘If I can’t beat out Jimmy Kimmel, then I don’t think I should be president.’ Hey, a deal is a deal. Back to Mar-a-Lago you go.”

Trump claimed his new year resolution for 2026 was “peace on earth”, but “that lasted for just under two days”, said Kimmel. “If you were wondering how bad these Epstein files are for Trump, turns out they’re invade Venezuela bad.”

Even worse, Kimmel continued, is Trump’s claim that he himself will now run Venezuela.

“He’s going to run Venezuela? He can’t even run the country he runs!” he fumed. “This is like if JCPenney decided to buy Sears. For 10 years, he’s been promising this plan for healthcare, now he’s running this other country that I guarantee you he could not find on a map.”

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert also addressed Trump’s surprise attack on Venezuela. “Do you know what this means? Those Epstein files must be crazy,” he said, taking a drink of whiskey on stage.

“For the record, Maduro is not a good guy. He and his wife were charged with drug trafficking and ‘narco-terrorism’ – which lately has been a fast track to a pardon,” he quipped. “So why suddenly decide to snatch their president in what appears to be a violation of United States and international law? Well, in an international military conflict of this kind, there are many factors to consider, but reportedly the last straw was Maduro’s regular public dancing.

“OK … that’s a new one,” said Colbert after the reportedly offending clip of Maduro dancing. “Let this be a warning to every uncle at a wedding.

“So now that the president of Venezuela has been renditioned to the Gowanus Expressway, everyone’s got one question,” said Colbert before several clips of news anchor wondering: who will run Venezuela? “Well, we still don’t know for sure, but chances are it’s going to come down to either Paramount or Netflix. Lotta money on the line,” he joked. “Of course, Trump has his plan,” which is, as he put it, to “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

“Oh, so this country and Venezuela?” Colbert mocked. “Evidently, when he says ‘America First’ he means alphabetically.”

“You guys, Donald Trump made history this weekend by becoming the first-ever winner of the Fifa peace prize to bomb another country and kidnap its leader,” joked Seth Meyers on Late Night. “The most stunning turn of events since Hannibal Lecter’s high-school classmates voted him least likely to eat your liver.”

Meyers later mocked all the Republicans who attempted to spin the attack as a crusade against drug trafficking, while Trump immediately copped to a motivation for oil. “It’s really just amazing how Trump just undercuts everyone around him and confesses the truth,” he said. “He’s got all his little minions on TV saying this is really about the drug trade or human rights, and then Trump immediately throws them under the bus by saying the word oil over and over again, like the uncle no one listens to on Family Feud.”

Meyers also played a “hypocrisy package” of clips in which Trump railed against the “never-ending wars” of previous administrations.

“I still can’t actually believe anyone thought Trump was telling the truth about being anti-war,” he said. “You really thought Donald Trump, the most thin-skinned, impulsive man on the planet, would suddenly discover the concept of restraint when he gained control of the world’s most powerful military. Giving Donald Trump control of the US military is like giving the cast of Real Housewives an open bar and a ‘one free slap’ coupon. There’s gonna be a lot of fighting, a lot of crying and a lot of really bad dancing.”