The first time President Donald Trump tried to push Nicolas Maduro out of power, he wasn’t coy about it. He accused the Venezuelan dictator of stealing an election, stripped U.S. recognition from Maduro’s government, imposed sanctions on Caracas and rallied other countries to pressure Maduro to quit.
It didn’t work.
In his second term, Trump is targeting Maduro differently, and his message is, uncharacteristically for Trump, less direct. Even though Trump continues to say Maduro is an illegitimate leader, he has said “we’re not talking about” regime change in Caracas. Instead, he’s emphasizing the long-standing accusations that the strongman is a drug lord and a dangerous criminal. The plan, people familiar with the situation tell me, is to force Maduro out as part of Trump’s ongoing fight against drug cartels.
The effort has included labeling such groups as terrorist organizations, carrying out military strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats from Venezuela, raising the U.S. bounty on Maduro’s head to $50 million and cutting off diplomatic talks with Caracas. The campaign may not formally be about regime change, but if the pressure from the anti-cartel moves happens to topple Maduro, well, the president and his team will be delighted.
While Trump admires many of the world’s autocrats, he has long appeared to genuinely dislike Maduro. The South American has socialist roots, not far-right tendencies the way Trump favorites such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin do. And — I’ve heard this from multiple U.S. officials over the years — Trump is truly aghast at how Maduro savaged the economy of a once-vibrant Venezuela.
“Would everyone like Maduro to go? Yes,” a Trump administration official said of the U.S. president and his aides. “We’re going to put a tremendous amount of pressure on him. He’s weak. It’s quite possible that he’ll fall from this pressure alone without us having to do anything” more direct.
But is Trump willing to eventually “do anything”? Send an invasion force to Venezuela or launch a missile with Maduro’s name on it, maybe? Trump’s team doesn’t seem to be ruling anything out.
Trump has many plans available to him, including ones calling for airstrikes against drug targets on Venezuelan soil, but he has issued no order to directly take out Maduro, the official said. Still, one person familiar with the discussions suggested that if Maduro is considered a drug lord and a terrorist, he could become a fair target. “Don’t we go after indicted narco traffickers and terrorists all the time?” the person said. I granted both people anonymity to talk about sensitive internal deliberations.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
I’m not sure if there’s some special term for this approach. Regime change on the side? Whatever you call it, it may prove harder to pull off than the steps Trump has taken so far.
The U.S. has tried an array of pressure campaigns against authoritarians in the past. Some have gone heavy on economic sanctions (Iran, Cuba). Some have armed rebels (Afghanistan). Some have used the U.S. military in ways that technically were not about ousting a regime (Libya) — or were (Iraq).
These efforts can weaken autocrats and sometimes hasten their fall. But they also can take many years, and it’s often not clear whether U.S. pressure or another factor forced them out.
The U.S. takedown of Manuel Noriega, the military ruler of Panama and troublesome longtime CIA asset, provides an interesting comparison to the face-off with Maduro. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Panama in the 1980s, indicted Noriega on drug trafficking charges and refused to diplomatically engage the puppet regime he oversaw.
But Noriega didn’t lose power until the U.S. invaded Panama with more than 20,000 troops in late 1989 and detained him. The invasion was spurred in part by Noriega forces’ attacks on Americans in Panama as well as concerns about control over the Panama Canal, but then-President George H.W. Bush made sure to mention the drug charges in explaining his decisions.
Venezuela is a bigger, more complicated country, making the Trump team’s approach even more unpredictable. Maduro has survived for a long time with the support of the country’s security forces, even if there is strong evidence that the country’s citizens keep voting against him.
I believe Trump is willing to escalate his anti-cartel campaign, but I’m not convinced he’d ever send a full-on invasion force to topple Maduro. That’s partly because it could trigger alarm bells in the MAGA base, which has a strong isolationist streak.
But a smaller force that goes after just Maduro, the drug kingpin? Maybe. The MAGA base is much more supportive of battling the cartels.
Sticking to an anti-Maduro campaign without officially labeling it “regime change” has other benefits, former U.S. officials told me. Trump would look weak if he loudly proclaimed he was trying to oust Maduro but it doesn’t work (It wasn’t a great look last time). The U.S. also would be less responsible for the potentially costly fallout in Venezuela if it avoids an all-out invasion and sticks to what it insists is a law enforcement mission.
“The Trump administration’s calculation could be that doing regime change on the cheap will help them avoid the penalties of the ‘Pottery Barn rule,’” said Peter Feaver, a former national security hand in the George W. Bush administration. That was former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “famous aphorism that if you break Iraq, you have bought Iraq and are responsible for security stabilization in the aftermath.”
Venezuela has a steady opposition that has various plans for what to do if the regime falls. The main opposition figure, María Corina Machado, was on Friday awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — an honor Trump himself covets. Machado dedicated her Nobel in part to Trump “for his decisive support of our cause.”
The person familiar with the discussions told me that the Trump administration is not coordinating its actions with the Venezuelan opposition, though U.S. officials are in touch with them.
David Smolansky, a representative of Machado, declined to say if the opposition is coordinating with the Trump team on its moves against the cartels. But Smolansky said Machado’s office is in constant communication with the administration and Congress, including providing information about drug activity emanating from Venezuela.
Leopoldo López, an opposition activist who spent years as a political prisoner in Venezuela, said the U.S. administration is simply now in sync with what he and others have said for years: that Maduro should be approached as the head of a criminal enterprise, not a head of state.
López compared Maduro with a more famous narco. “If you had Pablo Escobar as the president of Colombia, going after Pablo will be the same thing as making political change possible,” López said.
The U.S. steps against Maduro — elements of which were previously reported by The New York Times — also dovetails with the individual goals of some Trump aides.
Secretary of State and acting national security adviser Marco Rubio — a Floridian of Cuban descent — has long wanted to eliminate the Venezuelan regime in part because it could damage the regime in Cuba, a Caracas ally. Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a hard-core anti-immigration voice, hopes a new government in Caracas will make it easier to deport Venezuelans in the U.S., especially if post-regime chaos is limited. Trump aides also hope their crackdown on Maduro unnerves other leftist Latin American leaders, and reduces the flow of drugs.
While the people I talked to weren’t willing to predict how and whether Trump would escalate his anti-drug-cartel-but-not-technically-regime-change operation, they did indicate that he wouldn’t de-escalate anytime soon.
For one thing, the president is quite enjoying green-lighting airstrikes against boats alleged to be ferrying drugs.
“He can blow boats out of the water every week for quite a long time,” the Trump administration official said.
