Trump Wants to Drag the U.S. Into a Brand New War

President Donald Trump’s illegal airstrike campaign targeting Latin American vessels allegedly linked to drug trafficking has led him to a new target: Venezuelan military sites.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that in weighing whether to expand the president’s military campaign to dry land, the Trump administration had identified the Venezuelan armed forces as a potential target, in what would be considered a major escalation into all-out war.

The Trump administration has alleged that the Latin American country’s cartels are being run by none other than Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has taken a central role in the Trump administration’s campaign to see Maduro out of power, claimed last week that there was “a narco-state in Venezuela run by a cartel,” and compared the government to Al Qaeda.

Last week, Trump stated his intention to expand his lawless strikes to dry land—bragging that Congress wouldn’t stop him. Trump also ordered America’s most advanced aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean in a major escalation of military tension between the U.S. and Venezuela.

Since the beginning of September, the U.S. has executed 14 military strikes on vessels and killed 61 people, according to The New York Times. Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs told CNN Thursday that Pentagon officials claimed they “do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”

Donald Trump has called for an end to the Senate filibuster, effectively ordering Republicans to not only defy the will of their base but also backtrack on long-standing party policy to end the congressional stalemate.

“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option—Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post Thursday night.

The directive will add monumental pressure on the Senate to find a resolution to the funding blockade, but it’s not clear whether Republicans will bend.

Republican leaders have fought for years to maintain the Senate filibuster, a policy they view as particularly useful as it lends power to the minority party. The upper chamber filibuster requires a bill to gain more than 60 votes in order to advance, an act that rarely happens without bipartisan agreement. Those in favor of the filibuster have argued that the policy encourages compromise. But Republicans have a specific affinity for the unique power as they historically weaponize it to prevent Democrats from enacting sweeping legislative reforms.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune already signaled earlier this month that Republicans would not consider altering the rules to conclude the shutdown, referring to the filibuster as “something that’s been a bulwark against a lot of really bad things happening with the country.”

But with Republicans now controlling every branch of the federal government, Trump expects different results.

“Now WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN,’” he continued on Truth Social. “If the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster, the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it.

“BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT THE DEMOCRATS HAVE GONE STONE COLD ‘CRAZY,’ THE CHOICE IS CLEAR—INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,’ GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump added in a separate post.

The government has been shut down for more than 30 days as of Friday, making it the second-longest federal closure in U.S. history. It’s only bested by a 35-day shutdown between 2018 and 2019 that occurred during Trump’s first term.

Four Republican senators were brave enough to join Democrats in a vote Thursday to end Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs. This was the Senate’s third vote this week to end Trump’s tariffs.

Senator Rand Paul, who served as the Republican sponsor for the resolution alongside Democrat Ron Wyden, and Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski joined the 51–47 vote to end Trump’s tariffs on more than 100 countries.

McConnell said in a statement earlier this week that “tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive.”

“The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule. And no cross-eyed reading of Reagan will reveal otherwise,” McConnell added, taking a shot at Trump’s meltdown over a Canadian ad of former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs. “This week, I will vote in favor of resolutions to end emergency tariff authorities.”

The one-page resolution the Senate passed on Thursday ends Trump’s national emergency declaration, which he announced on April 2 to start his global trade war. While this vote sends a message of bipartisan disapproval directly to Trump, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is likely to kill the resolution in the House.

The Trump administration has admitted that they are not trying to identify anyone aboard boats they accuse of sending drugs to the U.S. before bombing the vessels. 

Speaking to CNN Thursday, Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs said she was told in a Pentagon briefing “that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes” and that was part of the reason why the administration has not sought to detain or prosecute the survivors of the strikes, “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”

As far as the legal justification the White House is using to blow up boats in the waters surrounding Latin America, that information has only been available to select Republicans.

“There’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence,” Jacobs said, adding that she was told that the only drug targeted in the strikes so far was cocaine, which Pentagon officials called “a facilitating drug of fentanyl.” 

The U.S. has killed at least 61 people in more than a dozen airstrikes on boats in the western hemisphere that it claims are smuggling drugs and are part of “designated terrorist organizations.” The attacks have prompted criticism from countries in the region, including Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, and several of the people killed in the strikes have been identified as fishermen.  

Even some Republicans in Congress, such as Representative Mike Turner and Senator Rand Paul, have expressed misgivings about the strikes, with Paul calling them “extrajudicial killings.” Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be planning to go even further, with the president bragging that he wants to begin strikes on land and Hegseth moving 14 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet to the Caribbean Sea. It seems that a war has been declared in all but name. 

Vice President JD Vance appears to think that his wife is going to hell.

At a Turning Point USA town hall Wednesday at the University of Mississippi, in honor of the late right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, Vance was questioned about the contradictions between his public statements on race, immigration, and religion, and his personal relationship with his Hindu, Indian American wife, Usha Vance. “You are married to a woman who is not Christian.… She still calls herself Hindu. You are raising three kids in interracial, cultural, racial religious household. How are you maintaining, how are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion?” a young South Asian woman asked Vance.

“Yes, my wife did not grow up Christian, I think it’s fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not a particularly religious family in either direction,” Vance replied, before stating that the two were both “agnostic or an atheist” when they met. “Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here. The way that we’ve come to our arrangement is she’s my best friend and we talk to each other about this stuff. So we decided to raise our kids Christian.… That’s the way that we have come to our arrangement.”

The crowd erupted with applause.

“You just gotta talk to the person that God has put you with,” Vance continued, as his answer became more strange. “Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I’ve told her, and I’ve said publicly, and I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends: Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I do wish that. Because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”

Many rightfully saw this as Vance rejecting his wife’s own religion and culture.

“Watch as Vance denies his wife’s religious identity as Hindu. Instead, he labels her as currently without a religion and a future Christian,” South Asian history professor Dr. Audrey Trushcke wrote on X. “Folks, believe the far-right when they say Christian is the only legitimate religious identity. They mean it.”

“When JD Vance had hit his lowest, it was his ‘Hindu’ wife and her Hindu upbringing that had helped him navigate through the tough times,” Indian author Monica Verma wrote. “Today in a position of power, her religion has become a liability. What a fall. What an epic fall for the man.”

For the record, Usha Vance has described her Hindu upbringing as something that helped make her parents “good people.”

“I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people,” she said in an interview with Fox News last year.

“When you convert to Catholicism it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that,” she said in a more recent interview with Meghan McCain. “We had to have a lot of real conversations about how do you do that, when I’m not Catholic, and I’m not intending to convert or anything like that.… The kids know that I’m not Catholic, and they have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition from books that we give them, to things that we show them, to the recent trip to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit.”

This “arrangement” does not sound like a compromise, especially when Usha’s husband is proudly proclaiming that he hopes she’ll abandon the religion she grew up with.

Vance also faced questions by the same woman about his vehemently anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.

“You sold us a dream. You don’t owe us anything, we have worked hard for it. Then how can you as a vice president stand there and say that we have too many [immigrants] now, and we are going to take them out?”

“I’m talking about people who came in in violation of the laws of the United States of America, and I’m talking about, in the future, reducing the number [of immigrants].”

“You just said you are not stopping with the people who came here legally, right?” the woman replied. “But you are pushing out policies that hurt us. And these policies are not even solving the problems. These problems are just creating chaos.”

“I can believe that the United States should lower its levels of immigration in the future, while also respecting that there are people who have come here through lawful immigration patterns that have contributed to the country,” Vance said. “Just because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed to the United States of America, does that mean we are thereby committed to let in a million, or 10 million, or 100 million? … My job is not to look out for the interests of the whole world. It’s to look out for the people of the United States.”