Donald Trump is expanding his military intimidation campaigns against his enemies, foreign and domestic.
Trump’s decision to destroy a purported drug boat from Venezuela, in international waters, is the latest escalation from a president who spent years conning his followers into believing he hates neocons and values “peace,” and is now enthusiastically bombing countries and threatening invasions.
This week also offered yet another glimpse into Trump and the Republican Party’s willingness to wage war on American soil, as the president and his government plot to deploy armed troops and other assets to one of the nation’s largest cities. Team Trump is keen on making Chicago — after Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — just the latest Democratic-led city to suffer the consequences for opposing Trump.
In this sense, Chicago and Venezuela have at least one thing in common: Trump has wanted to attack and destabilize both since his first term in the White House.
Trump said Tuesday he would send the National Guard to Chicago, something he has already done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and could end in a court battle. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he expects the National Guard to begin operations Saturday.
On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign emailed his supporters: “We’re going into Chicago!” Trump asked for $15 donations, adding, “I WANT TO LIBERATE CHICAGO!”
Administration officials have been planning for months to bring their brand of militarized crackdown — on immigration, on protests against Trump’s immigration raids, and on Trump’s political enemies broadly — to the streets of Chicago, one of the Democratic Party’s bastions of power and influence. A confrontation between the second Trump administration and this major American city was all but inevitable; matters were already so tense in the earliest days of the new Trump era that, according to two sources familiar with the matter, Mayor Brandon Johnson privately discussed updated travel and security protocols with his senior staff, in the event that Trump would have him arrested the moment he stepped off an airplane at in the Washington, D.C., area.
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“Chicago is next, if they go too far,” one senior administration official told Rolling Stone in June, following Trump’s deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. “The second they do, the president is prepared to prove that nobody is above the law.” The Chicago mayor later responded to this reporting by stating at a press conference that he and the city would “go as far as necessary” to defend residents’ constitutional rights.
As The Daily Beast reported in July 2020, when massive racial-justice protests swept the United States and the coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the world, then-President Trump told administration officials that he wanted to launch an all-out federal offensive in Chicago. At the time, there were senior officials around him who bargained him down to a much smaller show of force. Today, Trump is surrounded by lieutenants who believe — as the president does — that one of the biggest mistakes of his first four years in office was to sometimes listen to and employ voices of comparable moderation.
“There was rarely a time I spoke to him about violent crime when two things didn’t come up: Number One, that it’s all happening in Democrat-run cities, with Chicago being shorthand for that kind of [blight],” a former senior Trump administration official told The Daily Beast that summer. “And Number Two, if it were up to him, we would return to the old days where it was eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth — or we would forget about proportionality altogether. He would talk about lining up drug dealers and gang members in front of a firing squad… If it were solely up to him, that is how the country would solve crime in Democrat-run cities [such as Chicago and Detroit].”
The Windy City is hardly the only part of North or South America that is currently reckoning with Trump’s aggression and cartoonishly oafish imperialism. Trump has also floated the idea of federal intervention in Baltimore and New Orleans. And when he’s not threatening Canada with annexation and senseless economic warfare, or ordering his senior advisers to draw up classified plans and options for attacking, bombing, and invading Mexico, the president has been busy attempting to destabilize the regime in Venezuela.
On Tuesday, Trump announced that he bombed “a drug-carrying boat” that departed from Venezuela. The administration claimed it killed 11 members of Tren de Aragua, a gang Trump designated as a terrorist organization, in the attack, which likely violated international law.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged the Trump administration will conduct more attacks like the one on this boat. “It will happen again,” he said.
Trump also accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of controlling Tren de Aragua, as the administration seeks his arrest.
According to Trump administration officials familiar with the planning, Trump has been briefed on a wide array of potential military options as it relates to Venezuela. Some of these officials familiar with Trump’s thinking on the topic say that for now, the president is not committed to conducting airstrikes on Venezuelan soil, much less an invasion with even a small number of troops or special forces.
However, the sources say, Trump definitely wants the Maduro government and other players in Venezuela to think those are possibilities. There are some top officials in the new Trump administration who are more stridently committed than the president is to the idea of regime change in Caracas, and are hoping that a vast pressure campaign, or even some forms of military action, could lead to other Venezuelan political actors “taking care of Maduro for us,” one senior official says.
In 2017, Trump told reporters: “We have many options for Venezuela, and by the way, I’m not going to rule out a military option.” Trump also noted that the U.S. has “troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away. And the people are suffering and they’re dying. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.”
Trump’s Department of Defense at the time would later be forced to clarify that it was not going to invade Venezuela.
From Rolling Stone US
