Journalist Jonathan Blitzer narrates in The New Yorker how Donald Trump has wanted to bomb Mexico since his first term, but that the number of complications and the direct refusal of his closest people has dissuaded him. Instead, now the efforts of his second government have been concentrated on a target with fewer risks: Venezuela.
Mexico City, October 22 (However).- Last week, after The New York Times would inform that the Government of United States (EU) had rejected an alleged diplomatic offer of Nicolas Maduro to ease the relationship – “he offered his country’s oil and mineral deposits to American companies” – journalist Jonathan Blitzer, of The New Yorkerhe asked a former senior official of the White House whether it was far-fetched to imagine a real American invasion of Venezuela. “His answer, for now, was affirmative.”
“A true total invasion probably requires sixty thousand more ground troops than we currently have,” he said. That doesn’t mean that Trump I would not accept any operation or presence to attract attention. That’s more his style.
He text of the journalist is called: “The real objective of Trump’s war against drug ships.” It tells how Donald Trump has wanted to bomb Mexico since his first term, but the number of complications and the direct refusal of his closest people have dissuaded him.
“During his first term, Trump asked his advisers whether the United States could launch military attacks against Mexico, based on the premise that the country was primarily responsible for the drug problem in the United States. ‘They have no control over their own country,’ Trump told Mark Esper, his former Secretary of Defense. As Esper later wrote in his memoirs, Trump had repeatedly asked if he could ‘launch missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.’ and proposed that, if necessary, it could be done ‘discreetly’. ‘No one would know it was us,’ Trump reportedly said.”
Trump was finally forced to give in after fierce opposition from the Department of Defense: the Mexican government was the United States’ main trading partner and an influential ally in limiting the expansion of regional migration, the text says. The New Yorker. “However, by early 2023, the prospect of drastic measures was becoming an increasingly common position in the Republican Party. Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced, but did not pass, an authorization for the use of military force against the cartels, and argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Adding the Aragua Train to this particular cause was a consequence of the campaign presidential election in 2024. In August, after a video from a housing complex in Aurora, Colorado, showing armed men allegedly belonging to the gang went viral, Trump began constantly talking about the group.
Venezuela then crossed into Donald Trump’s plans. And once back in office, “Trump wanted to see more drastic military action on the international stage.”
–There has been an impulse, an energy to do something aggressive and different – a source close to the Trump Government told the famous magazine. I had to get somewhere. We were going to start killing cartel members. But there was a feeling that if we began to act with greater intensity in Mexico, it would have second and third order consequences that would be disastrous.
“The Mexican government, for its part, was quietly cooperative on the border, and the country’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, managed to balance public opposition to Trump with greater flexibility in private. Venezuela, on the other hand, was an obvious target. ‘There was no direct risk because Venezuela is not on our border,’ the source declared. Maduro has viciously attacked his political opponents and has presided over the economic collapse of the country. Over the past decade, nearly eight million people have fled. On October 10, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado received the Nobel Peace Prize. He immediately dedicated it to Trump, whom he has been trying to recruit for years to overthrow Maduro. ‘We all know that the head of the Aragua Train is Maduro,’ Machado declared to Donald Trump Jr. in his podcast of February. ‘The regime has created, promoted and financed the Aragua Train.’ Under the Maduro government, he added, the country has become a ‘haven for terrorists, drug cartels and groups like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and China,’” details Jonathan Blitzer.
Hawks and moderates
The text of The New Yorker He says that since January, two factions within the current Administration have been in open conflict over how to handle Nicolás Maduro. “One of them, led by Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and acting national security advisor, wanted a regime change or, failing that, a policy of greater sanctions, diplomatic isolation and more threats. Richard Grenell, envoy of the President [Trump] for ‘special missions’, represented the other, more conciliatory, side in the Venezuelan issue.”
And in January, Grenell traveled to Caracas to meet with Maduro. They held discreet negotiations about the release of Americans who had been held in Venezuelan prisons and the possible easing of restrictions on the country’s oil exports, something that Joe Biden’s government had begun to do. “A notable result of such diplomacy was that Venezuela began accepting deportees from the United States, something the Maduro government had resisted for years.”
But in August, the hardliners began to win. Someone with knowledge of the internal deliberations told the reporter that the change appeared to mark a victory for Rubio. But the change did not reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the participation of a new actor in the political fight: Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and director of the White House National Security Council.
Stephen Miller went in less than a decade from a Senate staffer emailing reporters late at night with stories about immigrants committing crimes to one of the most powerful people in America. The man who has outlined Trump’s immigration policy, as journalist Obed Rosas tells in However. After Trump won the election in November, Miller moved his family to Palm Beach, Florida, and played a major role in the transition, according to The New York Times. He is in fact the author of several anti-immigration executive orders including the elimination of birthright citizenship; the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations; and the restoration of Title 42, which allows the United States to close the border with Mexico.
The New York Times exposed a few months ago, in an extensive article by Jason Zengerle, how Miller worked in the four years of the Joe Biden Administration in a group called America First Legal, one of several think tanks and political workshops created by former Trump aides, such as the Center for Renewing America, founded by former budget director Russell Vought; the America First Policy Institute, created by former domestic policy adviser Brooke Rollins; and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, led by Paul Dans, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management under Trump.
The eyes in Venezuela
Miller sided with Rubio not because of a regime change. Rather, it was because Venezuela offered “an escape valve for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an indefinite war on drugs and crime, the text says. The New Yorker.
“Stephen is a big part of the energy behind the attacks,” the source told Jonathan Blitzer. “He’s in charge of the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security affairs and the pursuit of cartels. He convenes task forces almost daily. He’s been very direct with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’”
On October 17th, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a Designated Terrorist Organization, that was operating in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility.
The… pic.twitter.com/1v7oR879LC
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 19, 2025
Nobody resists, adds the journalist. Miller was told no to similar things in his first term. You no longer have people telling you: “No, this is not a good idea.”
“For Miller, military attacks contribute to expanding the power of the President, while reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as ‘enemy aliens’. As one former Trump Administration official put it: ‘This feels like the militarization of domestic politics. How do you stay in power? It creates an ‘other’. It says we are under attack. It creates an the events of war. The other person is blamed for everything. This occurs while the National Guard is deployed in the cities. People are getting used to this type of actions. “This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
The implications of Trump’s use of the military are not going unnoticed by other Latin American countries either, the former White House official said.
–If you are Panama, you think it is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you. You show the Mexicans that you will do what you say. The Brazilians thought it was them. If you think it’s a sign, it’s a sign.
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