The shock finally seems to be wearing off on the biggest story of Donald Trump’s 2026: the capture of Venezuelan despot Nicolás Maduro. And while it took some time for Americans to understand the justification behind the stunning operation that put the dictator in U.S. custody, Republicans have certainly warmed up to the idea.

If you’d have asked GOP voters what they thought of using military force in Venezuela at the end of December, you wouldn’t have found many takers. Just 43% were on board with a mission like the one we witnessed in the new year. But as more people start to look beyond the anti-Trump bias, the more they seem to recognize the rationale for such an audacious move. In what Axios calls a “dramatic shift,” 74% of Republicans now either somewhat or strongly support the force the White House used in Venezuela — a more than 30-point shift from Christmastime. And while Democrats’ opposition is steady, there is one point on which both sides agree (49%-48%): a new election should be the next step in the oppressed country.

Of course, not every Republican is at peace with the president’s strategy, as last week’s Senate vote on the War Powers resolution proved. Five of Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) majority crossed over to advance legislation that would grind any future action in Venezuela to a halt without Congress’s approval. “Even those who celebrate the demise of the socialist, authoritarian regime in Venezuela, as I do, should give pause to granting the power to initiate war to one man,” Kentucky’s Rand Paul (R) insisted. Together with Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Todd Young (Ind.), and Josh Hawley (Mo.), the small group brought the Senate closer — but not close enough — to the 60-vote threshold they would have needed to send the doomed resolution to the House.

Hawley, a conservative stalwart and former state attorney general, wanted to clarify that his vote was more a statement about additional military action than a critique of the initial operation. “With regard to Venezuela, my read of the Constitution is that if the president feels the need to put boots on the ground there in the future, Congress would need to vote on it. That’s why I voted yes on this morning’s Senate resolution,” he explained.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) respectfully disagrees. Sitting down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins for Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill,” the former Army infantry officer wanted people to know that the five Republicans “strongly support what President Trump did in Venezuela,” which contradicts the media’s messaging of growing cracks in the party. “They just have concerns about what’s next in Venezuela. And they have somewhat different views than I do about the extent of presidential power under the Constitution and Congress’s role in foreign policy and defense policy. I think those are genuinely heartfelt positions. … But as a practical matter, this is not going to have any impact on what we’re trying to accomplish in Venezuela.”

At the end of the day, Cotton argues that the vote “will have no impact.” After all, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is under no obligation to bring it up in the House, and President Trump would obviously veto it. And frankly, he pointed out, “You have a difference between those Democrats and the handful of Republicans who supported this resolution, though they all agree that Maduro was an illegitimate communist dictator and a drug trafficker, and the world’s a better place with him behind bars. The Democrats, though, want to eat their cake and have it too. They then say that Donald Trump was wrong to execute the operation that put him behind bars.”

That’s ironic, his colleague Mike Rounds (R-N.D.) emphasized on “Washington Watch,” since Democrats were upset Trump didn’t go after Maduro in his first term. “Then, we had a bounty out on him,” he reminded people. “The Biden administration recognized that this was a bad guy. And so, this isn’t something that’s political in nature. This is the case of where it was high time [to take out] an individual who had the ability to really cause great harm in our country.” He paused before adding, “There are thousands of Americans [who] are dead because of what this guy did and facilitated and made money on.”

And it’s not like this happened in a vacuum, Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery insisted to Perkins. “This was the natural consummation of a three-month pressure campaign by the president. The president, starting about three months ago, very aggressively started to communicate to Maduro and his cronies, ‘Your behavior is unacceptable.’ It began with strikes on boats. It evolved into sanctioning, shadow fleet ships… [then the] seizing three of those tankers and … an attack on one of their port facilities. So he was ratcheting up,” the admiral noted. “He was offering Maduro the opportunity to leave the country to get to Cuba on his own. And only when [Trump] felt that Maduro wasn’t taking him seriously did he then execute what Secretary [Marco] Rubio described as military-enabled law enforcement operation.”

While the media is all too eager to repeat the Left’s claims that Trump acted recklessly and unconstitutionally, some Democrats are quietly chiding the party’s furor. At least three of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s members spoke off the record to Axios, warning that the outrage over Maduro is hypocritical. “Maduro is bad, [I’m] glad he’s gone. … You can’t have it both ways. Everything Trump touches must be bad according to the base.” Another wished the party “would be a little bit more measured on this.” “It looks weak,” the third chimed in. “If you don’t acknowledge when there’s a win for our country, then you lose all credibility.”

Adding to the other side’s embarrassment, House Republican Rick Crawford (Ark.) shamed his liberal colleagues by introducing a resolution on Monday that highlights eight bills calling for Maduro’s capture over the last four years - all sponsored by Democrats. “Democrats have introduced numerous pieces of legislation condemning the Maduro regime, declaring Maduro an illegitimate president, and urging the U.S. to take decisive action,” he said.

Until the operation that extracted the Venezuelan leader, Maduro’s track record wasn’t up for debate on either side of the aisle. He “wrecked his country, stole elections, facilitated the drug trade, flooded the hemisphere with millions of refugees, and aligned his regime with enemies of the United States,” the editors of National Review rattled off. “That Trump pulled the trigger after months of what many believed was a gigantic bluff sends a message about the seriousness of his threats that will be duly noted from Havana to Tehran.”

And that matters significantly, Cotton insisted. Venezuela has turned into “a crossroads and a playground for every American enemy around the world: China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, [and] even Islamic terrorists like Hezbollah,” he cautioned. The country has become a staging ground for terrorists, which isn’t happening anywhere else in Latin America. “And they were using Venezuelan territory to radiate threats out to the United States, so I think the president was right to act decisively after trying diplomacy and trying to let Maduro go into exile.”

Yes, Cotton acknowledged, there’s a long way to go in righting the ship in that nation. “But remember, this was once a stable, prosperous, pro-American country before Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro turned it into a virulent anti-American country. We want to return it to those roots.” In the meantime, he stressed, the United States “is safer and Venezuela has the hope of a brighter future … because we had our brave troops and intelligence officers go in, apprehend Nicolás Maduro, and bring him to justice in the United States.”