President Donald Trump isn't hiding his true motivations behind his controversial military intervention in Venezuela, despite a mountain of effort by his administration to claim it was merely a limited operation, according to a new analysis in The Atlantic.
Trump seized control of Venezuela, and his own vice president is now cheerleading the intervention despite penning an op-ed in 2023 titled "Trump's Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars." Analyst Jonathan Chait on Monday called out the administration for hailing the Venezuelan takeover as "America First" policy.
"MAGA is primarily a personality cult, the objectives of which evolve to suit Trump’s capricious moods," Chait wrote. "Yet his pivot to new wars of conquest is not some shocking reversal."
Trump's so-called "Donroe Doctrine" of regional supremacy is, he argued, aligned with Trump's personal convictions.
"In some ways, it represents the ultimate expression of the world order he hopes to engineer," said Chait.
That includes a "desire to dominate" and an "eagerness to bully his counterparties into submission, which Chait called the "essence of Trump's character."
Even as the administration tries to downplay the ouster in South America as limited operation, Trump's own words betray such notions, he wrote. Trump’s has consistently said the campaign is about oil, and has bragged he's in charge of the country, which Chait argued "clarify his motives," which is to assert dominance.
"This is in keeping with Trump’s view that wealth and power are always zero-sum contests, and his belief that control of natural resources will dictate who wins," Chait said.
The president's "conviction" that the United States' prosperity demands "siphoning or stealing natural resources from other countries," he added, is of a "piece with his winner-takes-all worldview."
"Trump thinks about economics less like a businessman, as some of his supporters say, than like a warlord or a gangster: He imagines wealth as something to be plundered and hoarded by the strong," wrote Chait.
