Now for the main event…

Following the stunning operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, tensions on Capitol Hill have erupted as Republicans debate what “America First” really means in Trump’s second term. At the opposite poles of the argument are two senators who mostly despised one another to begin with: Rand Paul, the anti-interventionist libertarian, and Lindsey Graham, a champion of American aggression and imperialism who’s never met a war he didn’t like. As it happens, their views also represent the vastness of Trump’s foreign policy evolution in his second term.

Paul, a loner whose social life is nearly as isolationist as his ideology, didn’t object to the capture of Maduro, itself. He does take issue with Trump’s decision to bypass Congress—again—and his ignorance of most things having to do with the legislative branch. While he has sometimes sparred with Trump, he believed the president basically shared his isolationist leanings. The Venezuela operation called that belief into question. “Whenever I had misgivings about something else, I would always come back and say, Well, he’s the best we ever had, much better than the Bushes, who were war mad,” Paul told reporters this week. “I thought Donald Trump was different.”

During his first term, of course, Trump did mostly align with Paul’s libertarian view of the world, much to the dismay of most of the House and Senate Republican conference. Trump complained about war-hungry Bush-era advisers and believed so deeply in isolationism that he shunned international treaties and threatened to pull out of NATO. Indeed, his campaign for a second term was largely based on the promise to end wars and keep U.S. resources stateside. But now he is unconcerned with congressional constraints and international norms, and is guided by his belief that he can do as he wants, admitting to a group of New York Times reporters that his only limitation is his “own morality.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s second-term interventionism—bombing nuclear facilities in Iran, where he’s reportedly considering further intervention on behalf of protestors; ordering strikes in Yemen, Syria, and Nigeria; openly lusting after Greenland; musing about military action in Mexico; and threatening leaders in Nicaragua and Colombia, among other countries—has been a dream come true for Graham, a gregarious and animated green room denizen who tends to insert himself into negotiations only to stir up drama. (Last Congress, then-Sen. Kyrsten Sinema called him a “chaos monster” after he derailed border-security talks during Joe Biden’s final year.) Now, America First suddenly has an entirely new meaning—a validation of the years that Graham has spent ingratiating himself with the president, whispering in his ear about the value of American aggression. “America First means that when a country is hurting you, they pay a price,” Graham told me. “So to me, America First takes off the table ignoring problems.”

Naturally, Paul blames Graham for Trump’s evolution into an interventionist. “There should be a law that Lindsey Graham can only go to the White House every other week, and that he’s only allowed to meet with midlevel people and not the president,” Paul said this week. “And no more golf outings.”

While Graham has certainly enjoyed a more intimate relationship with Trump—including an open invitation to all his properties—Paul had previously been able to rub the president’s foreign policy views in his face. Which is why, in recent days, Graham has seemed to relish the opportunity to remind his colleague that a sea change has taken place. On Paul’s birthday, last Wednesday, Graham posted on X, “As a birthday present we have seized yet another oil tanker. Next year to celebrate, maybe we can do a golf outing to Venezuela and Cuba!” (Paul thanked him for the birthday wishes but noted that “replacing one socialist with another in Venezuela doesn’t bode well for golf though.”) Graham is bullish that the Maduro operation is just a sign of things to come—that leaders of “every narco-terrorist state” will meet the same fate, as he told me this week.

Just one day after his social media sparring match with Graham, though, Paul scored a major victory when the Senate advanced his resolution, with the support of four other Republicans, limiting the president’s ability to use military force in Venezuela. (Trump was furious, dialing up the senators who crossed him, and Graham said he will be “requesting a meeting” with Senate Republicans to discuss efforts “to restrict President Trump’s authority as Commander in Chief.”) It was among the few times this term that Senate Republicans have voted to restrain the president and might foreshadow how the upcoming debate and final vote on the resolution will go. For his part, Sen. Thom Tillis didn’t close the door to voting for it. “I didn’t want anybody to conflate any vote on war powers with any question that I supported the operation that occurred,” he said.

Paul still has some sway with the president. After a phonecall with the ambassador to Colombia, Paul told Trump that the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, wanted a diplomatic solution to mollify Trump’s ire. Petro and Trump spoke Wednesday, which at least temporarily eased hostilities. Greenland, however, remains an outstanding point of tension within the party. While the vast majority of Republicans insist that Trump has no plans to use the military to take the country, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told me he hasn’t received any guarantee from the White House that military force is off the table. “I haven’t quite sought any specific guarantee, but my impression is, just again from the conversations that have been held—and as you know, we’ve had several briefings—I don’t anticipate that on the military front,” he said.

Denmark, of course, isn’t so confident. Danish Ambassador Jesper Møller Sørensen spent most of last week running around the Hill, meeting with Republicans to make sure they didn’t support taking the territory by force. After his meeting, Nebraska’s Republican Rep. Mike Flood released a statement saying that the Danes “expressed an openness to discuss any measure that would enhance the security of the United States, while respecting the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark.” It’s unclear what Trump will decide to do, but the world—and even members of his own party—have certainly underestimated his audacity before.

Meanwhile, the shifting definitions of America First are hardly a problem for Trump’s most ardent supporters. A recent YouGov poll, taken largely after Maduro’s arrest, found that Republican support for overthrowing Maduro had risen 22 percent from late December, from 44 percent to 66 percent. If any incident made clear that it’s the person, not the policy, that Trump’s backers support, it was this one. Dominic Tripi, the onetime Trump acolyte and emerging political commentator, texted me earlier this week: “The cult is ‘culting’ harder… They’ll cheer for anything he does.”

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