David McCloskey

as the aggressor here, whereas the drug issue is,

I think does allow, obviously there's the reality that Maduro and associates around him are involved in the drug trade and have profited from it extensively, right?

And the reality that Maduro has overseen socioeconomic and cultural collapse in Venezuela that has seen 8 million people or so leave the country, and he's an incredibly corrupt and awful dictator.

So you have all of that going for you if you're Trump,

it makes it very easy to paint what happened over the weekend

in almost defensive terms.

We're defending the American people from somebody who's seeking to corrode us from within with his cocaine and fentanyl.

Yeah.

I mean, he's talked about it constantly, although since he was very adamant and open in his press conference over the weekend that the opening of the Venezuelan oil industry was

in particular to U.S.

companies is very much top of mind for him.

It's clearly played a role in this.

And I think also you go back into the summer and the spring as this idea about what you do about Venezuela is starting to kind of gel inside the White House.

I mean, the genesis for a lot of this was

This kind of conflict between different interest groups in the states of like you have these kind of anti Maduro, you know, Venezuelans in the states, anti kind of leftist, you know, Latin Americans, Cubans in the states who want Maduro gone.

Right.

They sort of want these leftist.

dictators pushed out.

And then you also have the reality that Chevron, the US oil and gas company, pushing Trump to kind of potentially force Chevron to get out of Venezuela, which Trump doesn't want to do.

So you have this weird nexus of like, how do I solve both of these problems at the same time, and potentially get more American companies involved in developing what could be the rich prize of Venezuela's crumbling and shambling oil infrastructure.