Trump’s Affinity for Strongmen Has a Big Exception
It all seemed so sudden. Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, had made yet another power grab, one of many over years of democratic decline in the country. Yet what followed from Washington wasn’t the usual condemnations and expressions of concern. Within days, the Donald Trump administration declared Maduro illegitimate, and more than a dozen other countries did the same, recognizing instead the National Assembly’s president, Juan Guaidó, as the constitutionally legitimate ruler.
But if the crisis has moved quickly in the past week, culminating in the U.S. imposing a de facto oil embargo on the country and vowing to clamp down on the Maduro government’s assets and gold trade around the world, it’s been building for much longer. The president, emotionally invested in the issue from the get-go, has proved receptive to the arguments of an array of advisers—from Florida Republicans opposed to Cuban influence on Venezuela, to freedom evangelists like Vice President Mike Pence, to hard-line interventionists like National-Security Adviser John Bolton—who have now made their influence felt at a critical moment.
The result is that a U.S. president who campaigned in part on to American interventions overseas, and a reputation as friendly to authoritarian rulers, has come to embrace the idea of regime change in Venezuela.
