Top Trump aide hints boat strikes target Maduro’s ousting
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has implied that the U.S. military's attacks on suspected drug boats in Latin America are ultimately intended to undermine Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
In comments published by Vanity Fair magazine on Tuesday, Wiles appeared to contradict the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationale behind the bombing campaign – combating drugs, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
“He [Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” Wiles was quoted as saying.
Vanity Fair released a lengthy profile on Wiles on Tuesday, hours after the Pentagon announced three more boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that it said killed eight people.
“So not a war on the cartels. It’s regime change,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to Wiles’s comments. “Either way, totally illegal and nonsensical.”
The US administration has been intensifying attacks on vessels as it ramps up its military presence near Venezuela, raising speculations that Washington may be plotting another regime change war against Maduro’s left-wing government.
Trump has repeatedly asserted over the past months that the Venezuelan president’s “days are numbered”.
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