There is some skepticism among Republicans about the incipient war in Venezuela:
The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told GOP senators last week that Trump isn’t pursuing regime change, but some Republicans are skeptical given White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s comments to Vanity Fair in which she said Trump wants to keep “blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle.”
Senate Republicans largely support Trump’s tactics of targeting Venezuelan boats, but some argue attacking the regime directly would go too far. “I think we just have to be very careful when we’re dealing with regime change. It seems to backfire a lot,” Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall (R) said.
Another Republican senator said they believe the administration is intent on ousting Maduro. “I don’t want to have another Iraq or Afghanistan,” they said, referring to the wars in which the U.S. helped oust Saddam Hussein and the Taliban from power. Both situations quickly turned into quagmires that dragged on for years.
Trump said Monday that it would be “smart” for Maduro to give up power, but said it’s up to him. “But again, we’re going to find out,” he said.
Meanwhile, Trump on Monday continued to ramp up his rhetoric against Colombian President Gustavo Petro, warning him to “watch his a‑‑” and close alleged drug factories in his country. “I love the Colombian people,” Trump said. “But their new leader is a troublemaker, and he better watch it. He better close up those cocaine factories. There are at least three major cocaine factories. We know where they are.”
That’s small potatoes. Get a load of what America’s Future Dear Leader has in mind:
SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.
JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States.
SA: What sort of ideas?
JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests.
Basically, he says that if Europe doesn’t do exactly what we tell them to do, they will be a threat to our national security. It’s the new go-to.
Donald Trump is a dangerous cartoon character creating chaos and mayhem, using the power of the presidency in a vain attempt to fill the screaming void of his narcissistic neediness. JD Vance is not. He is the full realization of power-hungry, American, fascist, expansionism. If he becomes president we are done.
There are probably a lot of MAGAs like this who are eager to get down to business:
Trump’s opening the door. JD Vance is ready to walk through it.