Last week, I reported on how many congressional Republicans are in wait-and-see mode with respect to President Donald Trump’s escalatory posture toward Venezuela. The administration has spent recent months blowing up alleged drug boats in the region in what the White House has repeatedly insisted is part of the president’s “unprecedented action to stop the scourge of narcoterrorism.”
Most congressional Republicans view the boat strike campaign as part of a calculated strategy to put pressure on Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, as Trump, who has warned that the strongman’s “days are numbered,” weighs escalated U.S. military action in the region.
Not every Republican in Washington has been pleased with the White House’s ambiguity on its endgame with respect to Maduro. “They cannot communicate the clear end goal,” one Republican senator told National Review of the White House’s Venezuela messaging. “The end goal is to topple Maduro, which is an impure end goal. Therefore, they have to use this artifice of a drug war treated as a real war in order to obscure what their clear intentions are.”
Turns out that GOP lawmaker may have been onto something. Speaking with Vanity Fair for a revelatory two–part series on her tenure as second-term Trump’s right-hand woman, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said, “The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times. . . . These are not fishing boats, as some would like to allege.”
But she also let it slip that the president “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will” — suggesting that her boss’s end game is to push Maduro out of power. She added that “if he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.”
(In case you missed it, the White House is now doing damage control on the Vanity Fair articles, with Wiles insisting in a social media statement that “significant context was disregarded” and that the series was a “disingenuously framed hit piece.”)