The success of President Donald Trump’s shocking raid in Venezuela will likely embolden him to “disrupt” the midterm elections on his home turf this year, a Democratic congressman warned.
Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump’s earlier remarks about messing with the midterms are “absolutely a possibility.”
On Tuesday, the 79-year-old president joked about canceling the midterms as he took the stage at the Kennedy Center for the House Republican retreat.
“I won’t say ‘Cancel the election, they should cancel the election,’ because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator,” Trump said mockingly.
For Moulton, however, the quip shouldn’t be brushed off as a joke—especially after U.S. forces launched air strikes in Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, in a surprise operation in the early hours on Saturday.
“I would go further and say, most likely scenario [is] that he tries to disrupt the midterms, cancel them, delay them, whatever else. I mean, this is a guy who just took Maduro out of Venezuela,” he told host Joanna Coles.
Moulton, 47, pointed out that Trump didn’t replace the long-sitting autocrat with the leader of Venezuela’s opposition. Instead of naming Nobel Peace Prize winner and opposition figurehead María Corina Machado as the South American nation’s new president, Trump installed Maduro loyalist Delcy Rodriguez as the interim leader.
“It’d be very tough for her to be the leader [because she] doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country,” Trump said of Machado. But two White House insiders later told The Washington Post that Trump was offended when Machado accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which he had openly coveted for months in a campaign that cast him as “the Peace President” who had supposedly ended eight wars.
“So out of personal jealousy, he did not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people,” Moulton said. “And now he’s saying, ‘Oh, well, we just need to be in charge for a while. They shouldn’t have elections until things simmer down.’ That sounds to me like a trial run of what he can use.”
In August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky explained during an Oval Office meeting with Trump that they were unable to hold elections due to the war with Russia.
“So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections?” Trump quipped. “I wonder what the fake news is gonna say.”
Moulton mused that “maybe this is part of why he’s starting so many wars.”
Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has ordered strikes in Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria. He has also repeatedly threatened further military action against foreign targets in late-night Truth Social rampages.
“So I think we should take this deadly seriously,” Moulton said. “And if there’s one lesson I’ve learned from Donald Trump over two terms, is that when he says he’s going to do something bad, he almost always does something worse.”
The White House responded by accusing Moulton of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, a made-up illness that supposedly inflicts the president’s critics.
“Seth Moulton’s TDS has tragically reached such an advanced stage that he decided to go on the Daily Beast podcast to defend an illegitimate dictator and indicted narcoterrorist while spewing gibberish conspiracy theories to the show’s two listeners. Sad!” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
The last episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, released Monday, garnered over 241,000 views on YouTube alone.
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