Venezuela Means Nothing to Pennsylvania MAGA

On Saturday morning, as Delta Force operators dragged Nike tracksuit-clad Nicolás Maduro from his Caracas compound, my stepfather was filling up his truck at a Flying J Travel Center station in Smithton, Pennsylvania. Gas was $2.80 a gallon. He called to share a low price and foreign policy prediction: “That's as cheap as I've seen it and it isn't going to get any cheaper. They’re just going to use our tax dollars to rebuild the [Venezuelan] oil infrastructure for the gas companies.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro appeared on KDKA this week and offered a coherent anti-intervention message calibrated for the Rust Belt. “I reject President Trump’s belief that we should be engaging in regime change wars,” Shapiro said. “The idea that we’re going to get tangled in foreign wars instead of fixing the problems here at home, that’s my biggest beef.”

But elite cue-taking has limits, and those limits live in places like the Monongahela Valley. Pennsylvania has lost more than 33% of its manufacturing jobs over two decades. The state faces a shortfall of 300,000 skilled tradesmen by 2030. A 50-year-old machinist in Mon City who’s been laid off twice and retrained twice doesn’t have bandwidth for geopolitical debates about hemispheric influence.

The only foreign nationals your typical MAGA voter in the Mon Valley still cares about are the Haitians in Charleroi, fifteen miles from my stepfather's house. Trump put them on the map during a September 2024 rally, claiming the town had been overrun by “massive crime.” The full story: somewhere between 700 and 2,000 Haitians moved to the borough to work at Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food plant that shut down in October 2025 and laid off 250 workers. Their Temporary Protected Status expires February 3. DHS is offering a $1,000 bonus and a free plane ticket for self-deportation. Some have already left. This is the sort of issue involving foreign nationals that animates MAGA in western Pennsylvania: not Maduro, not Caracas, but a small town where residents complain about traffic accidents caused by immigrants who can’t read road signs. For most of them, Venezuela is an abstraction, but Charleroi is only a half-hour away from the Meadowlands Racetrack and Casino where they spend.

Even the influencers are no longer on the same page. Tucker Carlson praised Maduro’s government for banning abortion and gay marriage while claiming the intervention was driven by “globo homo” forces. This collapsed the moment Trump announced the U.S. would “run” Venezuela. Former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene astutely called the strike “what many in MAGA thought they voted to end.”

The administration is touting the oil aspect of the operation, promising lower prices at the pump the same way they’ve been claiming that tariffs will lead to massive onshoring. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy performs what analysts call a “functional turn,” in which assets are valued for material utility, not moral symbolism. Taiwan, for example, matters because of semiconductors. Venezuela matters because of 300 billion barrels of reserves. The framing requires you to believe that occupying a South American country to rebuild oil infrastructure for multinationals differs from the Bush-era nation-building Trump campaigned against.

Pennsylvania’s elected officials split predictably. The idiosyncratic U.S. Sen. John Fetterman called it “a good thing.” But U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, the centrist Democrat and Navy veteran from Beaver County, issued a statement that could have come from a 2016 Trump rally: “We have enough problems here at home in America that President Trump is failing to fix.”

Shapiro’s positioning matters because it’s directed at the purple-state voter who wanted border security without forever wars, who believed “America First” meant staying out of other countries’ business and backyards. That voter watched Trump bomb Iran in June, watched him escalate against Venezuela for months, and now watches him talk about seizing Greenland while invoking the “Donroe Doctrine.”

Shapiro’s support for Israel certainly complicates any anti-intervention messaging on his part. But Venezuela isnt Gaza, which is an issue that can still animate thousands of Squirrel Hill voters in Pittsburgh. Venezuela might as well be the dark side of the moon to a steelworker in Clairton who has been laid off for so long that he can’t remember when he actually stood up on a job, any job. The operative question here isn’t whether Maduro deserved what happened — the Biden administration was hard on him, too, and his own supporters didn’t muster much resistance on his behalf — it’s whether anyone in Washington remembers that a deskilled 50-year-old worker in Monongahela preparing for his third career change exists.

My stepfather doesn't follow Tucker Carlson and only checks in on Shapiro, Deluzio, and Fetterman when questions arise related to his mine pension and health insurance. He does follow gas prices like a hawk. On some instinctive level, he understands what will happen next: American money rebuilds Venezuelan infrastructure, American companies get sweetheart contracts, and gas at the Smithton station stays right around $2.80 because that oil was never meant for small fry like him.

Old MAGA promised hard hats like my stepfather something different. Old MAGA is dead.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.