Sen. Murphy: Trump Is Increasingly, It Seems, Painting Himself Into A Corner With Venezuela
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, weighed in on the capture of Nicolas Maduro in an interview on CNN with host Kasie Hunt.
KASIE HUNT, CNN: What do you think is what is the thing that you want to see the administration do next? Because we heard Chuck Schumer say they don’t seem to have a plan for day two, day three, day four. Should the Trump administration be supporting the opposition leader in Venezuela or should they be continuing on this path with Maduro’s number two? SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Well, that’s kind of an unfair question, right? It’s kind of like you break an egg in front of me and then you ask me what my plan is to put the egg back together as a whole egg. I don’t know what you do now. They have created a mess because they have gone in, deposed a dictator with zero plan for what comes next and apparently massive open disagreement in the administration about what the purpose of this whole operation was. You got Mike Wall saying this isn’t a war. This is just about executing a rest warrant. You have Donald Trump saying, no, this is all about the oil. We want the control of the oil. There seems to be no consensus inside the administration. There seems to be no plan for what comes next. And so I don’t actually have a great answer for you as to how to manage themselves out of a situation that may be, as your own reporting suggests, descending into chaos on the streets of Caracas. HUNT: What do you think is the biggest mistake the Trump administration could make right now? MURPHY: Well, obviously the biggest mistake they could make is to insert new U.S. ground forces. And my impression is that Trump thinks that he is going to be able to get Del C. Rodriguez or whatever government takes Maduro’s place to do what he wants on specific issues and the issues he seems to only care about is making money for his Wall Street and oil friends under the threat of a second invasion. So what happens if Rodriguez or whoever topples Rodriguez in the next 48 hours says no to Trump? Are we going to be looking at U.S. ground forces inside Venezuela? That would be truly cataclysmic. So the biggest mistake Trump could make is to double down on the military campaign to put troops on the ground. But I’m not sure that he is left with a lot of good options. He is increasingly, it seems, painting himself into a corner.
