President Trump’s hostility toward Venezuela has grown more explicit and reckless in recent days, making indifference on this issue from top Democrats and center-left media all the more conspicuous.
The New York Times reports that Trump has instructed the CIA to “take action” in Venezuela as the White House pushes for regime change that would, according to the Times, involve a “broad campaign that would escalate military pressure to try to force out” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Trump White House claims to have blown up six boats from Venezuela in the Caribbean, killing 27 people thus far with no legal or moral authority to do so (leading to the abrupt resignation Thursday of the military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s boat attacks, Adm. Alvin Holsey). The CIA authorization, according to the Miami Herald, “coincides with a broader US military buildup in the region. The Pentagon has deployed more than 4,500 troops, most of them based in Puerto Rico, along with a contingent of Marines aboard amphibious assault ships. The U.S. Navy has positioned eight warships and a submarine in the Caribbean as part of the expanded presence.”
It’s been a fast and unprecedented escalation, putting the US on the brink of a disastrous, illegal, and immoral invasion of the sovereign country with the world’s 50th largest military. All of which makes the lackluster, largely indifferent response from the liberal establishment all the more troubling.
Let us begin by looking at the two top Democrats in the country, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—the people most in charge of leading the resistance to Trump. Neither Jeffries nor Schumer have issued any formal statement whatsoever on Trump’s potential attack on Venezuela, or even commented, much less condemned, Trump’s illegal murder of Venezuelan citizens in the Caribbean. The closest either have come to chiming in was when they were asked directly about it at a presser Thursday, to which Schumer responded by leveling a vague process criticism about Trump “going it alone,” then quickly pivoting to healthcare. In the past year, neither Schumer nor Jeffries have mentioned Venezuela once in any of their social media posts or press releases.
The New York Times editorial board hasn’t mentioned Trump’s escalation toward Venezuela either (though it did support his previous attempts at a regime change in 2019). The Washington Post editorial board, while handwringing about the potential for Trump’s threats to “spiral into war,” lent Trump’s regime change efforts support with a wink and a nod. After praising pro-Trump Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (who openly supports a military invasion of Venezuela and Trump’s extrajudicial killings at sea), the Post tells its readers that Machado’s “economic vision” “could triple the country’s gross domestic product over 15 years by tapping its vast resources” and would “better serve” “U.S. economic interests” than the current Maduro government. The Jeff Bezos-owned paper then ended its editorial hoping Machado “someday got to lead the country she is so courageously fighting to save.” Through what mechanism it’s unclear but, given the current context and ramp up to a direct US attack, one is left to fill in the blanks.
Once again, like with Gaza protesters, it seems elements within party leadership are playing with fire, sitting back and letting Trump take out their mutual enemies.
To be clear, there has been some pushback, but it is sporadic, anonymous, or from Democrats lower down the food chain. The Democrats’ House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), posted on social media Oct. 7, “Trump and Rubio are pushing for regime change in Venezuela. The American people don’t want another war—and Congress can’t let any president start one illegally or unilaterally. That’s not how the Constitution works.” But the statement wasn’t attributed to anyone in particular and has been their sole comment on the potential military attack. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) are seeking a congressional resolution to prevent Trump from using military force against Venezuela, but it has gone nowhere and, in typical Kainian form, is expressed as a process criticism, outraged entirely over jurisdiction not the substance of the invasion.
Just as weak, liberal cable outlets like MSNBC have mostly limited their criticism of Trump on Venezuela to the illegality of the boat strikes. Better than nothing of course, but they’re missing the much bigger issue—which is the strikes are about provoking a pretense for a direct invasion and regime change war. It’s mostly been a nonissue in liberal circles.
In fairness, Trump’s firehose of attacks on Medicare, immigrant communities, the administrative state, environmental regulations, the Voting Rights Act, civil rights, Palestine solidarity protestors, and our entire education system make focusing on any one topic very difficult, and much of the silence around Venezuela no doubt comes from bandwidth issues. But it’s also something more deliberate: Journalist Aída Chávez reported on Sept. 29 that, according to a congressional source, “a senior Dem staffer is discouraging Democrats from coming out against regime change in Venezuela.” Once again, like with Gaza protesters, it seems elements within party leadership are playing with fire, sitting back and letting Trump take out their mutual enemies—in this case a government that has been under siege from both U.S. parties since it came to power in 1999, surviving a previous US-backed coup in 2002 that was only overturned after masses of Venezuela’s poor took to the streets the streets demanding the return of Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. Despite the fact that the 2002 coup was completely externally manufactured and undemocratic by any objective metric, it was supported at the time by the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post. Both outlets did so by lying about Chavez loyalists firing on protesters, a claim later debunked by the Times itself.
One can debate the democratic integrity of Venezuela’s latest election but it’s a non sequitur given it has nothing to do with why Trump is gearing up for an attack. “We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil,” Trump said in 2023, lamenting his previous failed coup. It’s clear Trump—who is gutting democracy in the US and showers praise on dictators throughout the world—could not possibly care less about these concerns, and would just as likely replace Maduro with a pro-Trump dictator, whomever it may be. Likely aware of this, the White House is using the pretense of taking out “narcoterrorists” as the moral basis for their escalatory attacks, insisting that every boat they blow up “saves 25,000 American lives,” somehow managing to find the only pretense less credible than Trump wanting to “restore democracy” in South America.
Meanwhile, Democratic leadership, either because they support it or don’t really care either way, continue to sleepwalk as Trump explicitly targets yet another Latin American country for US intervention. By directly attacking their citizens, Trump has already declared war on Venezuela, without any legal or ethical basis to do so. At some point, leadership of the nominal opposition party ought to take notice and at least register a formal opinion on whether Trump’s brazen illegality and dangerous escalation is something they support or not, rather than ignoring it out of cowardice or, worse yet, hoping Trump, once again, does their dirty work.
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