Republican Rep. Says Quiet Part Out Loud on “Need” to Invade Venezuela

The GOP is finally being honest about why it’s itching for military intervention in Venezuela. Shocker—it wasn’t about the drugs, it was always about the oil. 

“I would love to see a change in government,” Fox News host Larry Kudlow said to Republican Representative Maria Salazar on Monday. “My wife’s from Nicaragua.… The dictators there rely on Venezuelan oil. But at the same time, a lot of Americans don’t want actual U.S. participation in regime change in Venezuela. They would much prefer the Venezuelans to do it on their own. Do you think the pressure that [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro has received will force him to leave on his own?”

“Maduro is not Fidel Castro, Maduro is not a brave boy.… He is on that very nefarious list of the terrorist organization, that the airspace above Venezuela has been closed off and the commercial airlines from the United States are not flying. He’s understanding that we’re about to go in,” Salazar replied.

She then went on to outline the top three reasons for more U.S. intervention in the Latin American country. Reason number one? Oil. 

“Venezuela—for the American oil companies—will be a field day. Because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix the whole oil rigs,”  she said.

Salazar continued. 

“We’re gonna be doing a favor to us, to our children, to our economy, to our oil companies, and to the Venezuelans.” 

Regardless of your issues with Maduro (and there are many), Salazar’s language here is undeniably imperialistic. It feels like it’s ripped straight from the banana republic era of Latin America, or the Bush era before the invasion of Iraq. Republicans and the Trump administration have made such a big show of bombing drug boats to save “thousands” of American lives, when they really just wanted an excuse to enact the intervention Salazar refers to. But now they’ve gone fully mask-off. 

“Wow, at least with Iraq they had the decency to try and convince the American public about weapons of mass destruction,” one X user wrote. “Now they are just straight up telling us what they really want and no one can stop them.”

A regime change would not be some chill, bloodless agreement that sees Maduro willfully stepping aside and handing over all of his country’s most valuable resource. It would most likely be met with violence that would hurt the Venezuelans more than anyone else. 

“U.S. military action could trigger a crisis on the same order as happened in Iraq after the U.S. regime change effort there,” Caracas-based International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson told The New Republic. “If the U.S. does decapitate the government, the multiple armed actors could bring about a degree of anarchy. None of these different groups have any incentive to just lay down their arms. There have been several decades of accumulated resentments on various sides, and it’s not fanciful to imagine that there could be lynchings. There could be bombings or selective assassinations.”

Salazar saying  “us,” “our children,” and “our economy,” before she even mentions the citizens of the country she wants to invade so badly tells you everything you need to know about where U.S. priorities are. 

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik is scrambling to recover her gubernatorial campaign’s messaging after President Donald Trump had a cozy meeting with her political foil, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Stefanik’s already botched bid to become governor of New York was thrown into flux Friday after a googly-eyed Trump shut down her wildly racist claim that Mamdani was a “jihadist.” Instead, he called the mayor-elect a “very rational person” and said he would feel safe living in New York City during Mamdani’s tenure.

In an interview with News12 Monday, Stefanik doubled down anyway, saying that she and Trump would have to “agree to disagree.”

“I stand by my statement. He is a jihadist,” Stefanik said of Mamdani. “This is an area where President Trump and I disagree. But what we all want to work toward is making New York more affordable and safe, and that’s where I have a very strong record and working relationship with the administration.”

Amid a massive meltdown over the meeting, Laura Loomer, the self-described “proud Islamaphobe” with the president’s ear, noted that Trump had put Stefanik in a bad position. “Dems just need to run clips of the presser today to defeat Elise,” Loomer wrote on X Friday.

Within a matter of minutes into the joint press conference with Mamdani, Trump managed to blow up Republicans’ talking points about the incoming mayor, which might have given them a leg up in the upcoming midterm elections in 2026.

Donald Trump is on a legal losing streak.

The president’s defamation lawsuit against The Guardian fell apart Monday when a Florida judge granted motions to dismiss, crushing his latest attempt to peel money out of a media institution.

The case was brought in 2023 by Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG, the corporate owner of Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. It sued the British newspaper for defamation, arguing that it—as well as a local Florida daily that picked up the story—had published false statements about the financial machinations of the company.

In a March 2023 article, The Guardian reported that TMTG had accepted “$8 million” in emergency loans from shadowy entities. That included a $2 million loan from Paxum Bank, as well as $6 million from a group known as E.S. Family Trust. The paper also noted at the time that one of the trustees of E.S. Family allegedly had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York were investigating whether the loans violated federal money-laundering laws.

“According to that report, one of the executives of TMTG floated the idea of returning the money given the lack of details and transparency about who was providing the loans. TMTG co-founder Will Wilkerson—who eventually became a whistleblower in the federal investigation—told SDNY that Chief Financial Officer Phillip Juhan was uncomfortable about the murky nature of the two entities,” reported Alternet.

But merely reporting information is not enough to fulfill the legal prerequisite in a defamation case of “actual malice” against a public figure.

Judge Hunter W. Carroll of Florida’s Twelfth Judicial Circuit granted an anti-SLAPP motion to The Guardian, a sign that the court interpreted the suit as a meritless attempt to silence criticism.

Instead, The Guardian’s reporting “was based on multiple sources familiar with the investigation, review of internal TMTG communications, investigation of the entities who made the loans, and fruitless requests for further information from the Department of Justice, the investigators’ office, and outside counsel for TMTG,” Carroll wrote in his ruling.

It was the third courtroom loss for Trump in just a handful of hours, following another decision in which a federal judge dropped the criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey (and by extension New York Attorney General Letitia James), deciding that the prosecutor who brought the charges in both cases—Lindsey Halligan—was not lawfully appointed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says “all orders” from President Trump are “lawful orders,” and troops have no right to question him.

“All lawful—all orders—lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our service members. You can’t have a functioning military if there is disorder and chaos within the ranks,” Leavitt told reporters outside the White House on Monday. “And that’s what these Democrat members were encouraging. It’s very clear. And not a single one of them since they’ve been pressed by the media … can point to a single illegal order that this administration has given down because it does not exist.

“You can’t have a soldier out on the battlefield or conducting a classified order questioning whether that order is lawful or whether they should follow through,” Leavitt argued earlier, in a twisted reading of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Leavitt’s comments came as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighs court-martialing former astronaut, retired Naval officer, and now–Democratic Senator Mark Kelly for his role in a video that the right is claiming to be “seditious.”

“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home,” Kelly said in the clip, along with Senator Elissa Slotkin and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—all former military or intelligence veterans. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

Kelly later responded to threats from the Department of Defense.

“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.… I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death,” he wrote. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Unfortunately for the White House’s arguments, there have been illegal orders to the military from the Trump administration. Just last week, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into Washington, D.C., was illegal. But Leavitt is doing what she does best: mindlessly supporting and justifying everything the president does.

Are Americans supposed to think that the Trump administration canceling the release of economics reports is somehow a good sign for the economy?

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced Monday that it had officially canceled releasing the advance estimate on gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter of 2025. The Trump administration had previously delayed the release, which was initially slated for October 30, due to the government shutdown—but now it seems to have been abandoned altogether.

Last week, the Labor Department called off releasing its monthly jobs report for October, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics scrapped its own report on inflation.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the Democrats two weeks ago for such delays, saying the liberal party “may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system.” She hinted at further cancellations, saying that data from October “will be permanently impaired.”

The Trump administration’s decision to get stingy with publishing economic data comes amid concerns that President Donald Trump’s policies aren’t all that good for the economy. Trump’s mass deportation scheme is estimated to reduce the GDP by between 4.2 to 6.8 percent, according to the American Immigration Council. Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs are also expected to place a strain on GDP, according to the Tax Foundation.

If Trump would like to argue against these assertions, then the government may want to start publishing some actual data.

The BEA has also pushed the release of another report that tracks consumer earning, spending, and saving. That report will now be released on December 5. Three other reports on economic data from 2024 “will be rescheduled.”

The Commerce Department previously published that the U.S. economy contracted 0.5 percent in the first quarter, and then grew at a rate of 3.8 in the second quarter, leaving GDP in the first half of the year with an annual growth rate of roughly 1.66 percent, according to Fox Business.