In the low light of a bar in Capitol Hill last week, a Republican strategist shook his head in frustration.
“I thought we were done with regime change and endless foreign wars,” he said of Donald Trump’s confrontation with Venezuelan despot Nicolás Maduro.
“The voters’ priorities at the election last year were clear – it was the economy and immigration. No one was calling for regime change in Venezuela.”
Many Republicans share that unease as the standoff with Maduro threatens to consume Washington and drag the Trump administration into a political and legal quagmire.
While a US taskforce remains stationed in the Caribbean, back in Washington, Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has faced allegations of war crimes over a series of airstrikes on boats that the White House claims were carrying drugs bound for the US.
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Reports that US forces launched a second “double tap” strike to kill the survivors of one attack in September have seen prominent Republicans join Democrats to demand a full investigation. The White House’s shifting accounts of the incident and a move to push responsibility on to a three-star admiral have enraged many on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon.
The crisis is now fracturing the GOP and Trump’s Maga base. While foreign policy hawks urge the president to attack Venezuela, opinion polls suggest that public support for the strikes on drug boats is tumbling amid growing concern about the state of the US economy.
Nervous Republicans in Congress are breaking ranks, fearing that Trump’s preoccupation with foreign policy will condemn them to defeat at next year’s midterms.
Among Maga loyalists, Trump’s march to war with Venezuela is a nother betrayal of his America First doctrine and his pledge to end US involvement in needless foreign conflicts at last year’s election. In the eyes of many supporters, the president is now in thrall to the very neoconservative wing of the Republican party that Maga was created to destroy.
“He ran against this – against the Rinos [Republicans in name only] and neocons,” the strategist said. “Republicans in swing districts next year are very nervous and the base is getting restless.”
After a meeting of top national security officials at the White House last week, Trump threatened to expand the military operation against Venezuela to the mainland.
The boat before the strike
“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land, too,” the president said during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “We know the routes they take… We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon too.”
Trump’s ultimate goal as he dials up the pressure on Maduro remains unclear, however. The two presidents spoke in late November, with Trump reportedly rejecting Maduro’s demand to keep his multi-million-dollar fortune and amnesty for a coterie of allies in a deal to step aside and leave the country.
The US has deployed a small armada to the region, including the Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier strike group, F-35 stealth jets, a nuclear submarine and some 15,000 troops. But experts note that the taskforce – which is estimated to cost $6m a day – is both excessive for a counter-narcotics operation and totally inadequate for a land invasion.
“It’s unclear, from an intelligence perspective, exactly what their targets really are,” said Cedric Leighton, a retired US Air Force colonel and a former deputy director at the National Intelligence Agency. “I think the deployment was originally designed to pressure Maduro to leave. And I think Maduro is looking at this and saying, ‘I might be able to stick this out.’ The risk is that it’s going to be a real quagmire.”
Sources around the administration say that the Venezuela strategy has been driven by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and architect of the migrant crackdown at home. The confrontation with Maduro is a useful foil for the war against immigration and Trump’sdeployment of the military to US cities.
Miller is supported by secretary of state Marco Rubio, the child of Cuban immigrants and a foreign policy hawk, who has long supported regime change in the region, including Havana.
On Capitol Hill, however, there is mounting bipartisan anger at Trump’s move to launch military action without making the case to Congress, which retains the power under the constitution to declare war.
“We have not been briefed,” Nebraska’s Republican congressman, Don Bacon, told The Observer. “The president needs to tell the American people if there’s indeed a planned invasion or a planned operation within Venezuela itself.”
Bacon added that Maduro was “a terrible leader” who had wrecked Venezuela’s democracy and squandered its wealth. “But invading for that reason, I think many Americans would disagree,” he said. “And I’m very hesitant to involve America’s forces in a regime change, if that’s the mission. But we haven’t been told.”
The Trump administration doubled the bounty on Maduro’s head in August, offering $50m for information leading to his arrest for drug trafficking, a charge he denies.
But the White House’s insistence that it is targeting Maduro for his involvement in narcotics was further undermined last week when Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. Hernández was serving a 45-year jail term for conspiring to smuggle 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US after an investigation that began during Trump’s first term as president.
The move to pardon one Latin American drug kingpin while threatening to topple another has sparked uproar in Congress and fuelled unrest among Maga supporters online.
“My audience sees this the same way I do – that it’s another lie to justify regime change, particularly given that Trump pardoned one of the most prolific drug traffickers,” said Clint Russell, host of the Liberty Lockdown podcast. “Obviously these guys don’t give a shit about trafficking drugs.”
Russell, a libertarian who voted for Trump in 2024, said his listeners reflected growing anger at the administration’s focus on foreign policy while the US economy teeters on the brink of recession.
“He campaigned on ending the endless wars … and now it looks like we’re migrating straight back to George W Bush and talking about regime change in Venezuela. I just feel as if we’re being betrayed on an astronomical level, and I’m pissed.”
That unrest has spread to Capitol Hill as Republicans prepare to face voters at next year’s midterms. With the party’s slender House majority in danger of being swept away, many Republicans are in open revolt, complaining that they have squandered a year in which the GOP had total control of the government. Trump will this week kick off a nationwide tour to tout his economic achievements. But the president is irritated by the suggestion that voters do not share his rosy view of the economy. At last week’s cabinet meeting, the president again insisted that concerns about the cost of living were a “hoax” and a “con job by the Democrats”.
“It’s gaslighting. It’s insulting in the extreme,” said Russell on Trump’s insistence that the economy is booming. Unless the administration changes course, he added, Republicans are “going to get slaughtered” in the midterms.
“And personally, I think that’s a good thing,” Russell said. “Not because I like the Democrats, I despise them. But when the Republicans have the House, the Senate, the supreme court and the White House, and they failed this egregiously, the only message we can send as the American people is, ‘Get to packing.’”
Photographs by US Southern Command/X