His senior advisers universally support unseating Maduro. And people close to Trump say he takes a markedly different view of Venezuela than Middle Eastern war zones.

He sees Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq as beyond help, a waste of American lives and money. Venezuela, in his view, is different: It's a neighbor, and a crisis there directly affects the U.S., via trade and migration. Trump thinks Venezuela should be rich and peaceful.

"Venezuela is not anything like the Middle East; it is a western country, with western institutions and western cultural leanings," said Rubio, a key player in Trump's Venezuela policy.

"The president sees this country with extraordinary economic potential, which has been run into the ground," Rubio told me. "I think he believes some of these issues in the Middle East are intractable and just can't be fixed. But he actually thinks Venezuela and the western hemisphere can ."

"He also takes some of this stuff personally. The fact that Maduro and others have reacted the way they have ... Ultimately there comes a point, for this president, where he become personally invested in it...he becomes an enemy and then he goes after you pretty hard."

Political opportunism also plays a big role. "It's a real-life example of the failure of socialism and there's an appeal in that," a senior White House official told me.

Trump and his advisors see their approach as a way to court Venezuelan expats, who may be friendly to the American right-wing because of the failure of Maduro's leftist government.

The fact that the bulk of those expats live and vote in Florida, of all states, is not lost on Trump and his political team.

https://www.axios.com/venezuela-donald-trump-foreign-policy-strategy-7f04c3da-fd30-4038-8fd1-e057b15c7f83.html

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For the record I did not and will not vote for 45 but
the enemy of my enemy is my...
Apologists for Maduro and socialism in general are playing with fire in Florida when it comes to 2020 elections
We hear it all the time: "how can some Latinos vote repug?"
This is one of the reasons why
Just like there's white single issue voters (abortion, guns, supreme court)
there's a single issue voter among Latinos as well (socialism and anything that smells like it)

Cubans (Castro)
Nicaraguans (Ortega)
Colombians (FARC/ELN)
and now Venezuelans (Chavez/Maduro)

To put it bluntly, the hard line Cuban movement was on its last legs in Miami
You saw it this last midterm: Ros-Lehtinen and Curbelo got the boot
A Dem (Shalala) now represents Little Havana (which is barely Havana these days. It's a majority Honduran/Salavadorian neighborhood now)

When Obama opened relations with Cuba, much of Miami supported it
a clear majority supports lifting the embargo

Along comes the Venezuelan humanitarian catastrophe
What Max Blumenthal doesn't mention in the article above is that Venezuela is a Cuban puppet state
So Cuba, that paragon of an open society with multi-party democratic governance, is now the model?

Marco Rubio, a do-nothing absentee senator, gets re-elected AFTER complaining about his job (thanks to FL Dems nominating a complete ass clown) is now a rock star and main cheerleader of 45's policy

We're now right back where we started: the Cuban hard right wing is back from the dead and setting the agenda

Thanks a lot, Dems