{"id":56588,"date":"2025-12-09T20:51:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T04:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=56588"},"modified":"2025-12-09T20:51:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T04:51:14","slug":"trump-says-ground-attack-on-venezuela-imminent-plus-colombia-mexico-also-in-us-crosshairs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/09\/trump-says-ground-attack-on-venezuela-imminent-plus-colombia-mexico-also-in-us-crosshairs\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Says Ground Attack on Venezuela Imminent \u2013 Plus Colombia, Mexico Also in US Crosshairs"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump<\/a> said in an interview published Tuesday that a US land attack on Venezuela<\/a> is coming and signaled that he is open to launching similar military action against Colombia<\/a> and Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re gonna hit \u2018em on land very soon, too,\u201d Trump told<\/a> Politico<\/em>\u2018s Dasha Burns, citing the pretext of stopping fentanyl from entering the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump repeated his baseless claim that during the administration of his predecessor, the \u201cvery stupid\u201d former President Joe Biden<\/a>, Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro \u201csent us millions of people, many from prisons<\/a>, many drug dealers, drug lords,\u201d and \u201cpeople in mental institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burns then noted that most of the illicit fentanyl sold in the United States \u201cis actually produced in Mexico,\u201d which along with Colombia is \u201ceven more responsible\u201d for trafficking the potent synthetic opioid into the US. She asked Trump if he would \u201cconsider doing something similar\u201d to those countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would,\u201d Trump replied. \u201cSure, I would.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pressed on his contradictory pardon<\/a> of convicted narco-trafficking former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez while threatening war against Venezuela, Trump feigned ignorance, claiming that \u201cI don\u2019t know him\u201d and asserting that \u201che was set up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s latest threat against Venezuela comes amid his deployment<\/a> of warships and thousands of troops off the coast of the oil-rich South American nation, his approval<\/a> of covert CIA<\/a> action against Maduro\u2019s government, and more than 20 airstrikes on boats his administration claims without evidence were smuggling drugs in the southern Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s targeting of Venezuela evokes the long history of US \u201cgunboat diplomacy\u201d in Latin America<\/a> and continues more than a century of Washington\u2019s meddling in Venezuelan affairs<\/a>. It also marks a historic escalation of aggression, as the US has never attacked Venezuelan territory.<\/p>\n

Officials in Venezuela and Colombia, as well as relatives of men killed in the boat bombings, contend<\/a> that at least some of the victims were fishermen who were not involved in drug trafficking.<\/p>\n

The strikes have killed at least 87 people since early September, according to<\/a> administration figures \u2013 including shipwrecked survivors slain in a so-called double-tap bombing. Legal experts<\/a> and some former US military<\/a> officials contend<\/a> that the strikes are a violation of international law<\/a>, murders, war crimes<\/a>, or all of these.<\/p>\n

Critics also assert that the boat strikes violate the War Powers Act, which requires the president to report any military action to Congress<\/a> within 48 hours and mandates that lawmakers must approve troop deployments after 60 days. The Trump administration<\/a> argues that it is not bound by the War Powers Resolution, citing<\/a> as precedent the Obama administration\u2019s highly questionable claim of immunity from the law when the US attacked Libya<\/a> in 2011.<\/p>\n

A bipartisan bid to block the boat bombings on the grounds that they run afoul of the War Powers Act failed<\/a> to muster enough votes in the Senate in October.<\/p>\n

\u201cNote that it\u2019s now taken as a given \u2013 as an unremarkable and baked-in fact about our politics \u2013 that Trump is mulling a ground invasion of Venezuela and<\/em> a dramatic expansion in his bombing campaign with no congressional authorization,\u201d New Republic<\/em> staff writer Greg Sargent observed<\/a> Tuesday in response to the president\u2019s remarks to Politico<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat emerges from this interview,\u201d he added, \u201cis that Trump is pulling all of this \u2013 the substantive case for these bombings, the legal justification for them, the rationale for mulling a massive military escalation in the Western Hemisphere \u2013 out of his rear end.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump said in an interview published Tuesday that a US land attack on Venezuela is coming and signaled that he is open to launching similar military action against Colombia and Mexico. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna hit \u2018em on land very soon, too,\u201d Trump told Politico\u2018s Dasha Burns, citing the pretext of stopping fentanyl from entering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":372,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[806],"class_list":["post-56588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"\u201cIt\u2019s now taken as a given... that Trump is mulling a ground invasion of Venezuela and a dramatic expansion in his bombing campaign with no congressional authorization,\u201d said one critic."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/372"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56591,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56588\/revisions\/56591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56588"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=56588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}