US will attack Venezuela on land as well as sea says Trump
Donald Trump says his campaign against Venezuela is about saving American lives as Pete Hegseth says the second strike on a drug boat was made ‘in the fog of war’.
Donald Trump says his campaign against Venezuela is about saving hundreds of thousands of American lives and confirmed plans to start attacking land targets inside the country as he defended a contentious “double tap” strike on a suspected drug boat in early September.
Speaking at his final cabinet meeting for 2025 after meeting the prior evening with his National Security to discuss next steps in Venezuela, the US President vowed to begin launching attacks on land targets and said it would be much easier than firing on vessels at sea.
Mr Trump said America lost more than 200,000 people because of drugs and the numbers were down “because we’re doing these strikes.”
“And we’re going to start doing those strikes on land too. You know the land is much easier. And we know the routes they take. We know everything about them,” he said. “We know where they live … We’re going to start that very soon too.”
Mr Trump also defended his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth after it emerged that two defenceless survivors of a drug boat strike in the Caribbean on September 2 were killed in a follow-up attack by the Pentagon.
While Mr Hegseth did not order the second strike and said he did not personally see the survivors, the administration has faced accusations of war crimes and concerns from both Republicans and Democrats that the targeting of the wounded may have fallen outside the laws of war.
“All I know is this,” Mr Trump said. “Every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000 on average lives.”
“They’ve been sending enough of this horrible fentanyl … to kill our entire nation.”
The US President said the controversial “double tap” strike was best described as an “attack. It wasn’t one strike, two strikes, three strikes.”
He also defended the way the situation was handled, praising the man identified as having ordered the second strike, Admiral Frank M Bradley, as an “extraordinary person.”
“I want those boats taken out,” he said. “And, if we have to, we’ll attack on land also, just like we attack on sea. And there’s very little (drugs) coming in by sea. I think we’ve knocked out over 90 per cent of that.
“We’re saving hundreds of thousands of lives with those pinpoint attacks,” he said.
Mr Hegseth said that 20 million people had invaded America over the past four years because of lax border protection policies, leading to the “poisoning of the American people” through illegal drugs.
He said that, once the drug cartels were designated by the President as terrorist organisations, they became fair game for lethal strikes and needed to be treated on the same basis as Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
“The President had the courage to designate these cartels as designated terrorist organisations,” he said. “A number of us here served in the military and spent twenty years fighting terrorists like Al-Qaeda and ISIS on the other side of the world.
“How do you treat Al-Qaeda and ISIS? Do you arrest them and pat them on the head and say ‘don’t do that again’ or do you end the problem directly by taking a lethal kinetic approach? And that’s the way President Trump has authorised the War Department to look at these cartels.”
He argued the attacks were “evidence based” and were conducted only after a detailed and methodological approach had determined that “every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organisation. We know who is on them, what they are doing, what they are carrying. All these white bails are not Christmas gifts from Santa.”
Mr Hegseth said he had witnessed the initial strike on September 2 and made clear that a “lot of intelligence” had gone into building that case. “I watched that first strike live,” he said. “I didn’t stick around.”
“A couple of hours later I learned that that commander (Admiral Bradley) had made – which he had the complete authority to do and by the way Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” he said. “It was the right call. We have his back. And the American people are safer.”
“I did not personally see survivors … because the thing was on fire,” he said. “This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in The Washington Post.”
Earlier in the day, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said that the Department of War was prepared for the possibility of Nicolas Maduro leaving Venezuela because of the administration’s pressure campaign.
“The department has a contingency for everything,” she said. “We are a planning organisation. If anything were to happen around the world, we have a response planned and ready.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that 2025 was the “most transformational year in American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.”
“For the first time in probably four decades the American foreign policy is driven by what is good for America and Americans,” he said.
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