Right-wing exiles in South Florida want regime change. Rubio is selling it with a false narrative about drug trafficking.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****DECEMBER 1, 2025****

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**Marco Rubio’s sales pitch: War in Venezuela**

**Right-wing exiles in South Florida want regime change. Rubio is selling it with a false narrative about drug trafficking.**

I spent a chunk of the holiday week reading a new history of the Spanish-American War, which was in part a product of media prodding. The signature, probably apocryphal quote of the era, paraphrased in

**Citizen Kane**, is reputed to have been said by William Randolph Hearst to photojournalist Frederic Remington, who was stationed at a sleepy outpost in Cuba. Remington hadn’t seen any signs of battle, he cabled to Hearst, who allegedly replied: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

While you were shoving the last of your Thanksgiving leftovers into the microwave, another war was being furnished, not by a media mogul or corporate titan—though certainly some defense contractors are **counting up future bonuses** [link removed] inside their mansions in Northern Virginia. No, the secretary of state has been ginning up this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and probably a side benefit of the imminent incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way of thinking about it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing South Florida exile friends.

Venezuela was used in the last presidential election as a way for Trump to attract skittish voters by scaring up visions of gangs taking over **random slumlord complexes in Colorado** [link removed]. But Rubio, long a proponent of Venezuelan regime change, didn’t want things to end there. Appeasing his home state’s exile ring is a rather parochial origin story for an international incursion, but it happens to be true.

Trump was reportedly not buying the pitch until Rubio related it to something the president’s terminally 1980s brain recognizes: the war on drugs. Vaporizing alleged drug boats through summary executions, including **what appears to be a patently illegal order** [link removed] of a second strike, has a visceral appeal for Trump. The inconvenient problem is that **almost no fentanyl is produced** [link removed] in Venezuela, but fortunately for Rubio, Trump doesn’t read past the first page of the briefing book, and also doesn’t read that page either.

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Invading Venezuela to stop drugs from flowing into America would be ridiculous even if Trump weren’t preparing to **pardon** [link removed] former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker who **once vowed** [link removed] to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses” and helped move 500 tons of cocaine into the country. It’s part of a litany of drug dealers connected to Trumpworld, like cannabis distribution kingpin Jonathan Braun, whom Trump let out of jail with a commuted sentence and who is now **back in jail again** [link removed], or Orlando Cicilia, a **convicted cocaine trafficker** [link removed] who is the former brother-in-law of … Marco Rubio.

The boat strikes are the prelude. The administration has **led aircraft carrier groups** [link removed] and 15,000 troops into position, **authorized CIA covert operations** [link removed], assured that a land invasion would commence “**very soon** [link removed],” and most recently **declared the closure** [link removed] of Venezuelan airspace, unilaterally, after saying in a **private conversation** [link removed] with president Nicolás Maduro that he would **get safe passage if he surrendered** [link removed] and left the country immediately. Trump later **downplayed the airspace closure** [link removed] as merely a social media post, but Venezuelans at least are taking it literally and seriously.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that this is all being done to flatter a few power-mad expats with little concern for American interests. It even managed to sweep in the Nobel Committee, which made the disastrous decision to give opposition leader María Corina Machado the Peace Prize, an epic misstep that will take its place alongside Henry Kissinger in the ignominious annals of that award’s history. As Maureen Tkacik **laid out** [link removed] in a dynamite long read last week, the same people who bankrupted Venezuela when in control of a shadow government, and who stage-managed the failed mercenary-led coup attempt at the end of Trump’s first term, are the ones agitating to return, despite having stunningly bad reputations in the country they want to lead.

The largest proven oil reserves in the world are more the spoils of war than its cause. Last week, a federal judge **approved** [link removed] the sale of Venezuelan-owned oil refiner Citgo to Elliott Investment Management, whose founder Paul Singer has been a **Rubio backer for a decade** [link removed]. But neither hemispheric control nor petroleum futures nor interdicting drug supply is the main point of this mad rush. Right-wingers want to get back in charge of Venezuela, and they have a friend in the State Department. QED.

We don’t have an anti-war movement in this country anymore, just scattered remnants that fail to cohere whenever the war drums beat. Along with investigating possible war crimes in the Caribbean, it would be nice if Congress made any effort at all to assert its war powers, before we send soldiers to die for nothing.

**–DAVID DAYEN**

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