00:00Let's bring the scope to Latin America. He mentioned Venezuela. Right afterwards he said
00:05the U.S. rejects political violence of any kind. However, he failed to mention the politically
00:10motivated violence lived in Venezuela during the January 3rd military attack that also,
00:15as we know, led to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and also Congresswoman
00:22Celia Flores. But there is something even more remarkable in today's speech. There was
00:27also a changing point. In the first hours that led after the attack, Trump referred to this mission
00:34as smooth, that had no resistance from Venezuela. However, today, almost two months after this
00:40attack, he recognized that the military forces, the U.S. military forces, were received with a
00:46strong military response. In your opinion, what does this shift in narrative means?
00:54Well, I think that this is a very good example of how President Trump is able to use different
01:04kind of narratives in different moments. We knew that at the first moment where the U.S.
01:12Army kidnapped the President Maduro in Venezuela, they were trying to show this as a smooth process,
01:19something that didn't have any blood that was spoiled, which we totally know that it was false.
01:28In Venezuela, there has been more than 100 people who were killed. We know that there were hundreds
01:34of planes who bombed the Venezuelan territory in a total violation of international law. But the intention
01:43was to show a win, kind of a clean, clean win that had no blood in their hands at that
01:54moment. But now,
01:55the need of narrative has totally changed. Now, as you could see in this speech, President Trump was
02:04trying to position kind of a heroic narrative where he was giving medal of honors to different people.
02:14We, we, he, he positioned this, this pilot from the, the helicopter who helped to kidnap Maduro, but he also
02:23gave recognition and heroic recognition to people who have been attacked with some, by some criminals,
02:32themselves, which happened to be immigrant, but it has nothing to do with their immigration status,
02:39this basic daily delinquents that happens all, all the time in the U.S. So he's trying to build this
02:45heroic narrative. And it's very interesting to see how a same fact that was presented in a certain way,
02:56less than two months ago. Now it is totally changed in order to satisfy the needs in the moment. That's
03:04exactly what we were analyzing the first part, just before the speech, in how the strategy that has
03:11always been built in the last months by, and years, we could say by President Trump, is kind of the
03:17importance on the narrative beyond the facts, which is, at the same time, has been effective to a certain
03:24point, because we know how the social networks and the propaganda works and has allowed Donald Trump to
03:32maintain some of its policies and its narratives. But at the same time, it's creating, as we were saying
03:39before, a deepening gap between reality and narrative that is going to have a huge backlash at the moment,
03:48where all this economic reality, geopolitical reality, and internal reality will just join the facts again.
03:57And this is something that is going to happen. President Trump cannot remain creating fictional narratives
04:05for years. The reality of what is the economy, the reality of what is the status of the international
04:13war that is being set up against China and Russia is going also to catch up with reality. So all
04:22of this
04:22is just going, we could say that Trump is kind of building a ticking bomb that is going to explode
04:29in his hands.
04:30Thank you very much, Eduardo, for your time here in Telesur English, for helping us as well going through the
04:36main highlights of this 2026 State of the Union. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.
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