A Democratic Senator and time-tested target of President Donald Trump’s vitriol has accused the MAGA leader of royally flipping off his followers with a shocking attack against Venezuela over the weekend.
“This is a big, militaristic middle finger to the MAGA base by Donald Trump,” Adam Schiff told MS NOW of the White House kidnapping Venezuelan tyrant Nicolas Maduro from his Caracas palace in the small hours of Saturday morning.
Schiff, whom Trump has repeatedly dubbed “Shifty Schiff” over the years, pointed out that Trump repeatedly promised voters last year he’d engage in “no more foreign wars, no more nation-building” should he win a second term in office.
The senator alleged Monday that Trump has instead chosen to deliver on what he framed as a “campaign promise to the oil industry that if they spend hundreds of millions or a billion dollars on his campaign, he would richly reward them.”
“It’s about oil!” as he put it to the network. “It’s about oil, it’s about the oil wealth of Venezuela, which has reportedly some of, if not the largest oil reserves in the world.”
Following his Saturday capture of Maduro, Trump has asserted the United States will now “run” Venezuela, while declining to provide further details of what exactly that means.
As part of any envisioned takeover, the president has said he plans to seize control of the country’s oil industry, which accounts for roughly 30 percent of Venezuela’s GDP and more than 80 percent of its national export, so that American companies can revive the sector.
Answering questions about Saturday morning’s attack aboard Air Force One on Monday, Trump, who is accused of illegally failing to notify Congress about the assault, let slip that he had flagged the seizure ahead of time to a number of U.S. oil firms.
“They want to go in, and they’re going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela, and they’re going to represent us well,” he told reporters. “The infrastructure is rusty, rotten, most of it is unusable. It’s old, it’s broken. You see pipes lying all over the ground, nothing’s been invested for years.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
