President Donald Trump can’t stop boasting about the audacious Jan. 3 commando raid that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and whisked them in the dead of night to a New York courtroom to face justice.
“I was told by real military people that there’s no other country on Earth that could do such a maneuver,” Trump told Fox News the morning after. “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. And if you would have seen the speed, the violence … it was an amazing thing.”
The exquisitely choreographed operation — which War Secretary Pete Hegseth called the “most sophisticated, powerful raid … in world history” — was in fact, a marvel of meticulous planning, high-tech technology and flawless execution, and will no doubt be studied in war colleges, if and when the details are ever declassified.
It’s not only that 80 elite special forces, including Delta Force commandos, backed by 150 assorted combat aircraft, were able to penetrate Maduro’s lair in the middle of a heavily defended military base. It’s that they overwhelmed his heavily armed Cuban security force, without suffering a single casualty.
“What those men did, going downtown, another country, their most secure place in the most secure base in the middle of the night without anybody knowing until those simultaneous bombs dropped three minutes before the helicopters dropped, no other country could coordinate that, no other,” Hegseth said.
In testimony before Congress, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the mission “brief, targeted, and successful … with only about 200 troops inside the country for a couple of hours and a firefight that lasted less than 27 minutes, with no loss of life on the United States side.”
Up to 100 people were killed in the attack, including 32 Cuban bodyguards who were protecting Maduro.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, in his one public briefing after the attack, provided some tantalizing details of how it was pulled off, saying Air Force and Navy fighter-bombers took out Venezuela’s air defenses, while Navy electronic warfare planes jammed their radars.
And Caine briefly referenced a “layering different effects” provided by Space and Cyber commands.
But within days, rumors began to spread that the U.S. forces had employed a new type of “shock-and-awe” weapon that stunned and disoriented Maduro’s protectors.
And then a social media influencer named Mike Netter, who’s running for state Senate in California, posted on X what was purported to be a transcript of an interview with one of Maduro’s guards.
Because the guard was unnamed and there wasn’t a source provided for the interview, verifying its authenticity was impossible. But he described the U.S. commandos as “technologically very advanced.”
“They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before,” he allegedly said. “But it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed.”
And he recounted the moment he said U.S. soldiers detonated some kind of sonic weapon.
“At one point, they launched something. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly, I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move,” the unverified account continued. “I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.”
That account was picked up by the New York Post, which also could not verify the account, although it noted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had shared it on social media.
Next, Katie Pavlich of NewsNation asked Trump directly in a Jan 20 interview if “a sonic weapon took out many of the Cuban bodyguards?”
“It’s probably good not to talk about,” Trump answered, but did seem to confirm there was something to the story.
“We have weapons that nobody knows about,” he said cryptically.
The next day, in Davos, Switzerland, Trump bragged that the U.S had “weapons of warfare that I can’t even talk about,” referring to the Venezuelan raid. “Two weeks ago, they saw weapons that nobody ever heard of. They weren’t able to fire one shot at us. They said, ‘What happened?’ Everything was discombobulated.”
But Trump also seemed to be referring to the jamming of air defenses, not close-quarters combat. “They said, we’ve got them in our sights. Press the trigger, and nothing happened. No anti-aircraft missiles went up.”
From there, the story picked up steam, and the mystery weapon got a name, “The Discombobulator,” Trump called it, in an interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas.
“I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he told Llamas, but talk about it, he did.
“It was my name, I’m very proud of the name,” Trump said. “Let me just tell you, you know what it does? None of their equipment works. That’s what it does … Everything was discombobulated … practically a shot wasn’t [fired] — you know, they were ready. It discombobulated everything.”
“Nothing worked, even including humans?” Llamas asked.
“Well, let’s put it this way — we lost no equipment in a very strong … a very bad environment. It was a military base,” Trump said. “And they’re good fighters.”
The U.S. military has experimented with directed energy weapons and high-powered microwave transmitters that emit nonlethal radio frequency millimeter waves for crowd control. But nobody seems to know, or is willing to say, if Trump is revealing a new capability or is simply confused about how current electronic jamming technology and cyberattacks can be used to disorient an enemy.
In his Jan. 3 briefing, Caine described how U.S. forces navigating Maduro’s compound were guided by “air and ground intelligence teams” that provided “real-time updates” about enemy positions.
A CNN report last month quoted a senior U.S. official as suggesting Trump may be conflating several capabilities into a single weapon that doesn’t actually exist.
It wasn’t long before Comedy Central’s The Daily Show was mocking Trump for the name he was so proud of.
“The Discombobulator?” faux news anchor Michael Kosta said, screwing up his face in an expression of disbelief. “That sounds like the worst ride at Six Flags.”
In a Jan. 26 appearance on CNN, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was asked if he knew of a weapon that either is, or is casually referred to as, the “Discombobulator?”
“I have never heard that term before,” Warner replied, expressing irritation that, if there were such a weapon, it would be the kind of thing that’s supposed to be shared on a classified basis with the leaders of the House and Senate and their respective intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Eight.
WHY TRUMP TRAINED HIS SIGHTS ON VENEZUELA
“This administration, unlike even the first Trump administration, has not shared with even the Gang of Eight the level of intelligence they should,” Warner said, “But the description of the effects the Venezuelans mentioned there or this name of ‘Discombobulator,’ I’ve never heard.”
“So, I don’t know what is being described,” Warner said, “but I sure as hell want to find out.”
Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.
