What’s notable is not the novelty of Trump’s inter-American imperialism but the broad continuity with past U.S. policies.View this email in your browser [link removed]

[link removed]

****OCTOBER 27, 2025****

We’re midway through our fall fundraising campaign, and we’re so grateful for the support from our community of readers—

**thank you**. But we still need your help to reach our goal. Each donation goes directly to funding reporting and analysis from our team of reporters and editors.

If you understand the need for our reporting at this critical moment in politics, please consider contributing. Independent journalism is one of the strongest defenses against authoritarianism, and your support keeps it alive. Every gift directly helps us continue the work that our democracy depends on.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM [link removed]

****Kuttner on TAP****

**Monroe Doctrine II, Trump style**

**What’s notable is not the novelty of Trump’s inter-American imperialism but the broad continuity with past U.S. policies.**

As his coziness with dictators around the globe suggests, Trump likes and admires fellow autocrats, from Orbán to Netanyahu to Putin. But not just any autocrats. In Argentina, Javier Milei, with his pro-Trump sycophancy, his MAGA imitation, and his war on the poor, is Trump’s kind of despot. Not so Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Trump, with the help of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, just pulled off a rescue that few thought possible. Bessent promised $40 billion to shore up the faltering peso, $20 billion in U.S. Treasury swap lines and another $20 billion to be assembled from U.S. banks. Trump declared explicitly that continuing U.S. support for the peso was dependent on Argentine voters supporting Milei. One thing you can say for Trump—there is nothing covert about his meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.

For now, the bribe worked. In yesterday’s national elections, with one-third of House and half of Senate seats at stake, Milei’s party made big gains. He won about 41 percent of the national vote, nearly doubling his party’s seats, weakening the Peronist opposition, and giving him the crucial one-third threshold in Congress needed to uphold his vetoes. The win also reassures money markets that U.S. support will continue, shoring up the peso and thus reducing the need for direct U.S. aid. So austerity will continue.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the continent, it’s increasingly clear that Trump’s tactic of murdering people on small fishing boats in the Caribbean is less about interdicting alleged drug smugglers and more about provoking open warfare with Venezuela’s Maduro. Just before Trump left for Asia, the U.S. dispatched the

**Gerald R. Ford**, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, to the Venezuelan coast. The U.S. already has other **warships, drones, fighter planes, and surveillance aircraft** [link removed] in the nearby Caribbean.

While many of Trump’s impulsive foreign-policy moves are unprecedented, the attempt to destabilize the Maduro regime is all too precedented. Over the years, the CIA has toppled leftist/nationalist regimes in nations as diverse as Chile, Nicaragua, and Iran.

But compared to the covert tradecraft of those U.S.-sponsored coups, Trump’s harassment of Maduro is overt, scattershot, and incoherent. Flagrant murders of fishermen on the high seas? Open threats with aircraft carriers? In August, the U.S. **announced a $50 million reward** [link removed] for Maduro’s capture—twice the bounty once offered for Osama bin Laden. But while supposedly working for Maduro’s ouster, the administration has revoked Temporary Protected Status for an estimated 600,000 Venezuelan refugees in the U.S., and has been coordinating with the Maduro regime on deportation flights back to Caracas.

prospect.org/donate

Meanwhile, Trump has added Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, to his personal enemies list, accusing him of drug trafficking. In fact, Petro is a competent and honest moderate leftist, democratically leading a nation long beset with civil strife and drug cartels. Petro is no friend of Maduro, and even less of a friend of drug traffickers. His only sin is to have criticized Trump.

If anyone deserves to be toppled, it is Maduro. He is both monumentally unpopular and personally corrupt. In that respect, as a dictator he is reminiscent of nobody so much as Donald Trump.

Maduro wrecked the Venezuelan economy, once among Latin America’s richest, causing some seven million Venezuelans to leave their homeland. Even so, the U.S. has no business sponsoring crude regime change.

I wish I could report that Trump’s policies are a disgraceful break with past U.S. policies. But they are all too in keeping with a long history of hemispheric meddling and worse. What’s different are Trump’s crude tactics.

In Argentina, the U.S. has a long history of using dollar debt, the International Monetary Fund, and support for hedge funds to push that nation’s economy into austerity. This time, the U.S. has found a local leader to do the job. In Venezuela and elsewhere, the U.S. was fine with dictators as long as they were pro-U.S. dictators.

Trump’s opposition would have more credibility if Washington had cleaner hands.

**– ROBERT KUTTNER**

Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]

****On the

**Prospect **website****

[link removed]

Montanans Go After ‘Citizens United’ [link removed]

A proposed 2026 ballot measure would limit the powers that the state grants in its corporate charters.

**BY HAROLD MEYERSON** [link removed]

[link removed]

Another Rail Headache for New York and New Jersey, Courtesy of Trump [link removed]

It’s impossible to move forward on New York’s Penn Station overhaul without next-generation Hudson River tunnels.

**BY GABRIELLE GURLEY** [link removed] [link removed]

[link removed]

Politicians Aren’t Heroes [link removed]

Ideas matter. If the public is moved to support them, the politicians will come along.

**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed] [link removed]

[link removed]

To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe [link removed]

**Click to Share This Newsletter**

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

To manage your newsletter preferences, use our preference management page [link removed].

To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, follow this link to unsubscribe [link removed].

Sent to: [email protected]

Unsubscribe [link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States