Actor Ethan Hawke despaired Saturday at President Donald Trump’s administration that so decisively captured Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores before removing them to U.S. soil for trial.
Hawke said he was, “a little bit in shock about it, I was already upset about the Kennedy Center honor, and now we’re bombing them [Venezuela] ” before going on to trash the president from the perceived moral high ground of Hollywood.
He shook his head when asked if he “made any sense of it,” before adding he has done “enough Shakespeare plays to know that power corrupts” in an oblique reference to Trump.
“Power corrupts […] History is littered with selfish and greedy people, ” Hawke said in an interview with Variety, citing words first attributed to English historian and politician Lord Acton.
As Breitbart News reported, Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were “captured and flown out of the country” on Saturday night after a series of explosions hit Caracas.
“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement,” President Trump said in a Truth Social statement confirming the successful action.
Further details followed at a press conference hosted later in the day at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reiterated rebuilding and running Venezuela is in the best interests of America now that Maduro is gone.
U.S. courts accused Maduro in 2020 of being a leading figure, if not the leader of, the Cartel of the Suns, an international cocaine trafficking operation led by top members of the despotic Venezuelan regime that for years sought to “flood” the United States with cocaine to harm its people.