
Mar-a-Lago is a familiar place for Trump to manage high-stakes military operations
CNN
Hours after declaring from underneath the tented ceiling of Mar-a-Lago’s Tea Room that Venezuela’s leader was in American custody and the US was running the country on Saturday, President Donald Trump emerged victorious onto his club’s crowded patio as dinner-goers cheered the audacious mission he’d ordered from a few yards away.

President Donald Trump’s allies in the Republican Party and his Make America Great Again movement — even some who previously warned against wading into new foreign conflicts — largely rallied behind his actions in Venezuela on Saturday, hours after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro in a large-scale military operation.

More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.











