One of the Trump administration's best policy salespeople has been relatively quiet in the debate over the recent arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, and one analyst thinks it's because people are having to "twist his arm" behind the scenes.
Vice President JD Vance, whom New Yorker contributor Benjamin Wallace-Wells argued in a new article on Tuesday is "the ablest communicator in the President’s orbit," has been relatively absent from the media sphere since Maduro was arrested over the weekend. Vance did put out a rather milquetoast statement for his standards, according to Wallace-Wells, but hasn't been the forceful advocate that he typically is.
“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?" Vance's statement read in part.
Wallace-Wells said Vance sounded "pained" in his defense.
"The Vice-President seemed pained, like someone was twisting his arm," he argued. "His statement also didn’t add up to a case for war, or anything like it."
Vance's hesitation might stem from his military background and his anti-interventionist ideology. Beyond that, Wallace-Wells added that Venezuela might be a political mess that Vance, who stands to inherit Trump's MAGA movement, can't sell.
"If Trump means to persuade the American people of the wisdom of the attack by trying to bring them cheaper Venezuelan oil, then that will mean a far deeper entanglement in a conflict that he might prefer to treat as a hit-and-run," he wrote. "And then there’s the tricky international question of why, exactly, the U.S. is entitled to just take oil reserves off of Caracas in the first place."