Nobody is buying it, and we don't even know what they're
trying to sell.
Paul Waldman
For a man who spent a lifetime using showmanship to con
people into believing things that aren’t true, Donald Trump has run an
absolutely dreadful propaganda campaign in support of his latest foreign
military adventure.
Nothing about what just happened in Venezuela is clear — who
is now running the country, what will happen from this point forward, or why we
did it.
We don’t even know what to call it. An invasion, a kidnapping, a coup,
a takeover? Who knows? In the long run, it will probably turn out badly for the
people of Venezuela and for US foreign policy interests, but it’s already a
case study in incompetent public relations.
Let’s be honest: Getting the American people to support a
fun little war has never been all that hard, at least at first. When things
eventually go sideways they’ll realize it was a mistake, but the beating of the
war drums gets their toes a-tapping, and it isn’t long before a majority of
them are clapping along.
But despite spending months laying the groundwork for
the incursion that happened Saturday morning — bombing boats supposedly
carrying drugs, moving an aircraft carrier to the region, making an endless
series of threats to Nicolás Maduro — Trump never got anything like a majority
of the public behind him.
If you want a preview of how chaotic, self-contradictory,
and ultimately futile the Venezuela policy will be, you have only to look at
how inept the PR campaign has been.
Granted, skill at public relations doesn’t necessarily
correlate with policy competence. In 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration
conducted what may be the most extraordinary public persuasion effort in
American history, to convince Americans that we absolutely had to invade Iraq
lest Saddam Hussein obliterate us all with his terrifying arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction.
As propaganda, it was a smashing success. Before the war
began, overwhelming
majorities believed the twin lies the administration was pushing —
that Saddam had WMD and was involved in the 9/11 attacks. But the skill of
their communication was not reflected in the implementation of the war and its
aftermath, which turned out to be probably the most catastrophic blunder in the
history of American foreign policy.
Nevertheless, the incoherence of the Trump administration’s
communication suggests that what happens next in Venezuela will be an unfolding
series of screwups. If these clowns can’t even get the American public to
support a war, do we really think they’ll be able to manage an infinitely more
difficult task of nation-building?
They can’t get their story straight
Start with the most basic question: Why, precisely, did we
attempt a takeover of the Venezuelan state through military force? If the first
answer is “Well, it’s not exactly a takeover, we arrested Maduro, but we’re not
really running Venezuela,” then that illustrates the problem. What was all this
about?
Maduro and his wife have now been indicted for drug
trafficking. Was that the reason for this whole thing? Not exactly — after all,
President Trump recently
pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who
was convicted of helping to send hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United
States. Maduro’s indictment also mentions cocaine, but we’ve been told that the
real drug problem is fentanyl, of which almost none comes through Venezuela.
The point is, if you’re going to invade another country, you
have to at least put some effort into convincing the public that this will
solve a serious problem that faces them. How many people believe that taking
over Venezuela is going to change America’s relationship with drugs?
Here’s the truth, and it isn’t exactly a secret: Multiple
key administration figures had their
own motivations for wanting to overthrow the Venezuelan government,
none of which are about drugs.
