Last year, President Donald Trump repeatedly asked aides and foreign leaders about the prospects for invading a foreign country.
No, not North Korea. Trump wanted to invade the South American country of Venezuela. Because why the hell not.
According to multiple reports, Trump continuously asked his top advisers last August about a military option for overthrowing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and quelling the growing political and economic crisis his mismanagement of that country has wrought.
H.R. McMaster, then Trump’s national security adviser, and others pushed back hard on Trump’s idea, explaining to him that an invasion was unlikely to work and that it would turn regional allies against the US.
That apparently didn’t deter Trump.
On August 11, 2017 — the day after he spoke with McMaster — Trump publicly threatened a “military option” for Venezuela while talking to reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. His comments, coming seemingly out of the blue, shocked pretty much everyone — not least Venezuela.
Venezuela’s defense minister called Trump’s threat an “act of craziness” and “supreme extremism.” Experts thought Trump’s threat would actually help Maduro more than hurt him: “No one had helped Maduro as much as Trump and this nonsense he said today,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian on August 11.
It also seemed to have shocked the Pentagon, which quickly tried to walk back the president’s statement by saying it had received no new orders regarding Venezuela.
But it gets worse: Shortly after that press conference, Trump raised the issue during a meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Then, in September, Trump brought it up yet again at a dinner with four Latin American leaders.
