This summer, President Donald Trump told my colleague Michael Scherer that “America First” means whatever he decides it means. Now—as he blows up boats near Venezuela, amasses military assets near its coast, calls for the closure of its airspace, and tries to oust its leader—he is testing the limits of the term.
Trump took over the GOP promising an “America First” foreign policy to a war-weary nation that had soured on attempts to police and reshape the world. Doing so distinguished him from rivals aligned with George W. Bush and the Iraq War. But Trump was never ideologically committed to restraint. The most outspoken critic of the president’s latest hawkish turn is Senator Rand Paul, who has blamed the influence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Senator Lindsey Graham. If Trump invades Venezuela, the Republican from Kentucky told Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine, “his movement will dissolve.” Trump says land strikes inside Venezuela are coming soon and dismisses Paul as “a sick Wacko, who refuses to vote for our great Republican Party, MAGA, or America First.”
Casting Paul, of all people, as a foe of “America First” is a hard sell. His father, Ron Paul, ran for president three times as an anti-war libertarian. When the GOP was still enamored of Bush, Dick Cheney, and their most hawkish allies, Rand Paul was already a stalwart antagonist of the foreign-policy establishment, critiquing wars launched by Bush and Barack Obama and urging Congress to stop new wars. Campaigning for Trump in 2020, Paul told the Republican National Convention, “He believes, as I do, that a strong America cannot fight endless wars.”
Trump and Paul have shared skepticism of some wars, but for different reasons. Trump trusts his gut and feels entitled to act on it, untethered from any principles or the rule of law. Paul’s positions, meanwhile, are rooted in constitutional conservatism: He is not just consistently skeptical of wars of choice and averse to most foreign interventions; he believes wars detrimental to America are best avoided by adhering to a Constitution that gives the war power to Congress, rather than allowing the president to unilaterally decide the nation’s fate. “As James Madison wrote, ‘No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’ Which is one reason why,” Paul argued in 2016, “the Constitution clearly puts war-making powers overwhelming in the hands of the legislature.”
So far, Trump’s base supports his pivot to hawkish interventionism in Venezuela: 66 percent of MAGA Republicans would favor the United States taking military action in the country, according to a recent poll by CBS News and YouGov. “It’s not just that Trump is a warmonger,” former Representative Justin Amash complained on Tuesday in a post on X. “It’s that he has convinced a large segment of Republicans who said they were done with warmongering to embrace warmongering again.” This seems to include Republicans in the administration: For example, after years of publicly espousing anti-interventionist beliefs, Vice President J. D. Vance called one of the administration’s strikes on a suspected drug boat off the Venezuelan coast “the highest and best use of our military.”
Non-MAGA Republicans seem more skeptical of war in Venezuela: 47 percent favor military action and 53 percent oppose it, according to the CBS/YouGov poll. And some prominent MAGA figures are opposed too, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, and Steve Bannon. Loomer, who previously supported Trump’s targeted strike in Iran (and lambasted Tucker Carlson for his criticism of the bombing), is now speaking out against Republican members of Congress who support intervention in Venezuela. Some anti-immigration advocates on the right have also argued that war would undercut Trump’s broader immigration goals.
Among Americans as a whole, fully 70 percent oppose a war with Venezuela. But assuming Trump does not usurp the constitutional order by trying for a third term, he will never again face voters, so if there are political consequences for a failed war in Venezuela, as there were for the war in Iraq, other politicians––perhaps Rubio or Vance––will suffer them. Maybe that’s why Trump, who has yet to make a forthright case for his Venezuela policy to Congress or the public, acts as though the will of American voters is the last thing on his mind.
Trump’s behavior toward Venezuela illustrates the folly of relying on any president to eschew risky interventions abroad. Though American-led regime change could prove costly, bloody, destabilizing, or counterproductive to American interests in the region, and though it appears less necessary to national security at the outset than did the Iraq War (no one is looking for weapons of mass destruction in Venezuela), Trump talks as if acts of war are imminent––and as if his orders alone matter. Never mind the voters who took his “America First” promises to mean something different.
The post Is MAGA Becoming Pro-War? appeared first on The Atlantic.
