After US forces whisked Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of the country, Secretary of State Marco Rubio struggled to explain why Donald Trump’s administration hadn’t obtained congressional approval for the operation. After all, during a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews with me for Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles said that Trump would need congressional consent before striking targets on Venezuela’s mainland. “If he were to, you know, authorize some activity on land,” Trump’s chief of staff told me on November 4, “then you’d have to—then it’s war, then Congress.”
Last Sunday, on national television, Rubio disagreed. Not only was congressional approval not required, he insisted, but consulting lawmakers would have jeopardized the security of the mission.
When it comes to Venezuela, those on Trump’s team can’t get their stories straight. At first, they said, toppling Maduro was about stemming the flow of dangerous drugs into the US. Then it was about punishing the Venezuelan dictator for sending criminal gangs across the US border. Rubio has said it’s about denying American adversaries like China and Hezbollah a haven in the western hemisphere. And most recently, Trump has said it’s about seizing Venezuela’s oil.
On November 4, over lunch in her White House office, I asked Wiles what the president was up to in Venezuela.
“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she told me. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
Of course, those people were wrong; despite bellicose threats from Trump, lethal strikes on boats piloted by alleged drug smugglers, and a suffocating US naval armada, Maduro refused to cry uncle and clung to power. So Trump ordered US Special Operations forces to remove him.
But what was the justification for Trump’s Venezuela campaign? In an earlier conversation, Wiles told me it was a war on drugs. Each alleged drug boat, she said, represented a potentially staggering loss of American lives. “The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is, and we don’t either. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed.”
I later asked Wiles: “So his theory is that these boats are part of Maduro’s drug-smuggling network?”
“The narcotics rings, unlike Mexico, are actually state-sponsored in Venezuela,” she replied. “And that’s how Maduro stays in power. You know, he pays the people from the drug profits. And the only way to stop that is to just…we’re very sure—I’m not always sure of everything, but we’re very sure we know who we’re blowing up.”
On October 1, toward the height of the US military campaign against alleged drug boats, I asked Rubio, “What’s the authority for the use of military force here?”
“Well, I refer you to White House counsel because I know they’ve written up on that extensively,” the secretary of state told me. “I’m not in any way disavowing it. I agree with it 100%. I think we’re on very strong, firm footing, but I don’t want to be giving legal answers on behalf of the White House or the Department of War.”
I pointed out that the US had traditionally used lethal force against terrorists, not drug dealers: “The only way this has been done in the past was on targets that were considered hostile combatants or terrorists.”
“Well, the president [believes], and I agree with his view, [that] these are anyone who is involved in the business of smuggling not just drugs, but crime into the United States…They empower and fuel an entire network of criminality that leads to violence, that leads to murders, that leads to all sorts of things that happen in the United States that are drug-related. This is an act of war against the United States.”
