I feel like a lot of us here struggle to reconcile that
A) the US has a long history of using "freedom and democracy" as a purely cynical, hypocritical and often straight up false (they called Allende a tyrant lmao) excuse for imperialism
and B) sometimes anti-imperialist leaders really are undemocratic, partially as a defense mechanism against imperialist aggression and partially because they aren't very good leaders and their incompetence leads to popular discontent (which is further exploited by imperialists to the point that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins)
I guess what I'm saying is you can be glad Maduro didn't get couped and replaced with Venezuelan Javier Milei, you can be 100% against sanctions and cynical US attempts to "democratize" Venezuela, but you don't need to pretend like there was nothing suspicious about this election. Just look at the vote counts released by the CNE on July 29 I mean come on lol, bro is regimemaxxing with these percentages