WILL TRUMP INVADE VENEZUELA TO OWN THE LIBS?
A longtime obsession on the right has become an irresistible military target for Trump.
By Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
For conservatives, Venezuela has become a one-word rejoinder to any and all liberal policy proposals. Want more government spending? A higher minimum wage? National health care? Venezuela did all that, and more, and it’s become an economic basket case—or so the theory goes. It’s a reductive argument—Venezuela’s national wealth is also tied to the price of oil, which has collapsed in recent years—but it’s a seductive analogy, especially for the president. “The new Democrats are radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela,” Donald Trump wrote in an op-ed last year. He went on to accuse Andrew Gillum of seeking to turn Florida into “the next Venezuela,” and swore that Beto O’Rourke would “never be allowed to turn Texas into Venezuela” either. More recently, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., trolled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a meme suggesting that Americans would starve under Venezuela-style socialism, forcing them to eat dogs for sustenance.
The punch line has become more serious in recent days, as Venezuela’s political system has begun to buckle with a little help from the Trump administration. Last week, the United States officially recognized socialist-lite opposition leader Juan Guaidóas the legitimate president of Venezuela, and called for current president, Nicolás Maduro, to step down. It’s not officially a coup—at least not yet. “This is not a U.S.-sponsored anything,” Sen.Marco Rubio, one of Maduro’s harshest critics in the States, said last weekend. “This is the U.S. supporting the people of Venezuela, who want their constitution and democracy followed.” But it is the sort of Truman Doctrine flexing that led the U.S. to topple several South American regimes in the past.
Trump’s personal fixation on Venezuela is notable, given that he professes to be such an ardent anti-interventionist. For years, he has been among the most vocal voices of dissent in the G.O.P. calling for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria. But there’s something about Hispanic, socialist Venezuela—the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of countries—that makes Trump lust for a “military option.”
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a notorious neoconservative hawk, told Axios’s Jonathan Swan that Trump asked him during the height of the government shutdown if the U.S. should simply invade Venezuela.
Graham, recalling his conversation with Trump, said: “He [Trump] said, ‘What do you think about using military force?’ and I said, ‘Well, you need to go slow on that, that could be problematic.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m surprised—you want to invade everybody.’”
Graham laughed. “And I said, ‘I don’t want to invade everybody; I only want to use the military when our national-security interests are threatened.’”
”Trump’s really hawkish” on Venezuela, the hawkish Graham added in a phone interview on Sunday afternoon, adding that Trump was even more hawkish than he was on Venezuela.
It’s not the first time Trump has mused aloud about a military intervention, often unbidden, to topple Maduro. Over the past two years, a revolving door of moderate Trump advisers—Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Gary Cohn—have reportedly talked Trump down from invading Venezuela, though he has continued to push the idea. According to the Associated Press, Trump has raised the issue in private conversations with Latin American leaders, despite being advised not to ask. Those leaders reportedly balked, but the idea has slowly gained traction among Venezuela’s opposition as the situation there has deteriorated. At the same time, political conditions inside the White House began to change. Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, and Cohn are all gone, replaced by hawks like National Security Adviser John Bolton,who recently named Venezuela as one-third of a “troika of tyranny,” and notorious neocon Elliott Abrams. On Fox News, the specter of socialist Venezuela has dominated headlines. The feedback loop between Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham,and Trump has whipped all parties into a frenzy. The prospect ofteaming up with right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—the “Trump of the Tropics”—to help make an example of the far left is even sweeter.
Would Trump invade Venezuela to “own the libs”? It’s hard to imagine another bout of military adventurism would be well received by most, but Trump—whose acting chief of staff says a military option is not “off the table”—may be tempted as Democrats curtail his power at home. As Trump faces a newly empowered Democratic party—strong-arming him in Congress over the government shutdown, launching investigations into his businesses, and, most important, gearing up to run against him in 2020—regime change in Venezuela would scratch his itch to exercise unilateral executive power and provide a potent (if bloody) talking point. “It is far more important to shut down the Maduro government than our government, and I think Donald Trump is leading there—and he is winning there,” conservative radio hostHugh Hewitt said Sunday on Meet the Press, encouraging the president to wag the dog. “That’s gonna happen. That’s gonna bring us together.”
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