Apparently, the ignoramuses at USA Today thought it was brilliant strategy to whine that President Trump deposing a narco-terrorist dictator—who runs an oil-rich state and has been flooding America with deadly drugs—somehow means he's ignoring the economy. This was the headline to set the spin:
How Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctine’ could backfire in midterm fight on economy
President Trump's focus on Venezuela's and push to expand America's reach steers him further from America's top concern: the economy.
Yeah, we couldn’t make sense of that one either. Unless it's simply manufacturing the spin that everything Trump does will eventually hurt him.
USA Today White House correspondent Joey Garrison tried to dunk on Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” in a January 7 piece of propaganda. He lectured that Trump basically gutting the illegal drug industry by deposing one of its main figureheads in Latin America “risks undercutting Trump's push to regain Americans' trust on the economy by handing Democrats a new line for the midterm elections: namely, that Trump and Republicans are fixated on oil and American imperialism rather than on the checking accounts of rank-and-file U.S. citizens.”
It’s clear that Garrison didn’t consider for five seconds that the U.S. gaining greater access to Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, or being “fixated on oil,” could actually be a boon to the U.S. economy.
Marapi Consulting and Advisory senior researcher Beni Sukadis summed up the economic incentive for Trump reducing the influence of China and other hostile nations in the Western Hemisphere and tapping into such a lucrative energy source in a January 6 piece:
Venezuela possesses some of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, yet years of mismanagement and sanctions have crippled its production capacity. President Trump has been unusually explicit in linking regime change to economic opportunity, openly stating that U.S. companies would be welcomed to invest in and rebuild Venezuela’s oil and gas sector after Maduro’s removal. This openness reinforces the perception that access to natural resources is not a secondary consequence, but a core objective of U.S. policy.
Go figure. Using Garrison's logic, seeking “economic opportunity” means Trump is being distracted from the economy.
Even NPR reported January 7 that “U.S. oil companies were the immediate, and stated, beneficiary of the country's attack on Venezuela.” In addition, wrote NPR, “President Trump said during a weekend press conference that U.S. oil companies would now be able to invest in Venezuela, to ‘fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.’"
The outlet also noted that the move signals that Venezuela’s economy will be on the upswing and enable it to finally pay U.S. creditors who own the country’s debt in bonds issued by the government and its state-run oil company. Until now, Venezuela has missed payments on its bonds, “leaving foreign investors, including U.S. financial institutions, holding tens of billions of dollars of its debt.”
Tell us Garrison: how exactly does any of this steer Trump “further from America's top concern: the economy?” Somebody, make it make sense!
Garrison further seized on a Reuters/Ipsos poll to argue that “found that only 1 in 3 Americans approve of the U.S. military strike on Venezuela and that 72% worry the United States will become too involved in the country.” But what he didn’t disclose from that same poll was that Trump’s overall approval rating went up from 39 percent in December to 42 percent in January in a survey of 1,248 people on January 4 and 5 — following the Venezuelan operation. It has a three percent margin of error, but maybe Garrison left that part of the poll out because it undercut the idea that Trump would inevitably suffer.
