Photo: Alamy
President Donald Trump said he does not expect the United States to go to war with Venezuela, even as he defended a series of recent military strikes targeting vessels in the Caribbean and accused President Nicolás Maduro’s government of sending criminals into the United States.
The U.S. military has carried out more than a dozen strikes in international waters near Venezuela on boats it says were transporting drugs. These actions have killed dozens of suspected traffickers. The USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group were recently repositioned to the U.S. Southern Command region, prompting questions about whether the administration is preparing to move against Maduro.
In an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” the president was asked about the carrier movement and whether the U.S. is headed toward war with Venezuela.
“I doubt it, I don’t think so, but they’ve been treating us very badly, not only on drugs. They’ve dumped hundreds of thousands of people into a country that… we didn’t want, people from prisons,” President Trump said.
“They emptied their prisons into our country. They also, if you take a look, they emptied their mental institutions and their insane asylum into the United States of America because Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of our country,” he continued.
President Trump also answered whether the operation was aimed more at stopping narcotics or removing Maduro. He said the situation involved several issues and again accused Venezuela of pushing criminals into the U.S.
“To me, that would be almost number one because we have other countries like Mexico has been very bad to us in terms of drugs. Okay. Very bad,” he said. “We have a closed border right now… So think of this, zero people coming into our country through our southern border.”
When asked whether Maduro’s time in office is nearing an end, Trump replied, “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”
President Trump said Friday that he was not considering strikes inside Venezuela, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with the White House, rejected reports citing unnamed sources that suggested otherwise.