What Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller Told Me About Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine”

After US forces whisked Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of the country, Secretary of State Marco Rubio struggled to explain why Donald Trump’s administration hadn’t obtained congressional approval for the operation. After all, during a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews with me for Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles said that Trump would need congressional consent before striking targets on Venezuela’s mainland. “If he were to, you know, authorize some activity on land,” Trump’s chief of staff told me on November 4, “then you’d have to—then it’s war, then Congress.”

Last Sunday, on national television, Rubio disagreed. Not only was congressional approval not required, he insisted, but consulting lawmakers would have jeopardized the security of the mission.

When it comes to Venezuela, those on Trump’s team can’t get their stories straight. At first, they said, toppling Maduro was about stemming the flow of dangerous drugs into the US. Then it was about punishing the Venezuelan dictator for sending criminal gangs across the US border. Rubio has said it’s about denying American adversaries like China and Hezbollah a haven in the western hemisphere. And most recently, Trump has said it’s about seizing Venezuela’s oil.

On November 4, over lunch in her White House office, I asked Wiles what the president was up to in Venezuela.

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she told me. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

Of course, those people were wrong; despite bellicose threats from Trump, lethal strikes on boats piloted by alleged drug smugglers, and a suffocating US naval armada, Maduro refused to cry uncle and clung to power. So Trump ordered US Special Operations forces to remove him.

But what was the justification for Trump’s Venezuela campaign? In an earlier conversation, Wiles told me it was a war on drugs. Each alleged drug boat, she said, represented a potentially staggering loss of American lives. “The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is, and we don’t either. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed.”

I later asked Wiles: “So his theory is that these boats are part of Maduro’s drug-smuggling network?”

“The narcotics rings, unlike Mexico, are actually state-sponsored in Venezuela,” she replied. “And that’s how Maduro stays in power. You know, he pays the people from the drug profits. And the only way to stop that is to just…we’re very sure—I’m not always sure of everything, but we’re very sure we know who we’re blowing up.”

On October 1, toward the height of the US military campaign against alleged drug boats, I asked Rubio, “What’s the authority for the use of military force here?”

“Well, I refer you to White House counsel because I know they’ve written up on that extensively,” the secretary of state told me. “I’m not in any way disavowing it. I agree with it 100%. I think we’re on very strong, firm footing, but I don’t want to be giving legal answers on behalf of the White House or the Department of War.”

I pointed out that the US had traditionally used lethal force against terrorists, not drug dealers: “The only way this has been done in the past was on targets that were considered hostile combatants or terrorists.”

“Well, the president [believes], and I agree with his view, [that] these are anyone who is involved in the business of smuggling not just drugs, but crime into the United States…They empower and fuel an entire network of criminality that leads to violence, that leads to murders, that leads to all sorts of things that happen in the United States that are drug-related. This is an act of war against the United States.”

On November 13, during a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, I asked homeland security adviser Stephen Miller about his policy portfolio and whether he’d discussed Venezuela with the president.

“First of all,” he replied, “I would never talk about…whether a meeting occurred or didn’t occur, or whether [I] was in a meeting that did occur or was not in that meeting if it occurred, which I would never say either way.”

I asked Wiles if Trump and his team had studied the precedent of Panama strongman Manuel Noriega. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered more than 27,000 troops into Panama, along with some 300 aircraft, to arrest Noriega, a former anti-communist ally who was later accused of being a narco-trafficker. I said to Wiles, speaking about Maduro, “Sounds like Noriega all over again, right?”

“I must confess I was having children and not paying attention,” she said of that decades-old episode of gunboat diplomacy in Panama, “but apparently this is very similar. It’s a corollary to [Noriega].”

“Has there been discussion about what authority Bush used to invade Panama?” I asked. “Have you been privy to any of that?”

“Yes,” she said. That was when Wiles told me that Trump would need Congress to approve strikes on Venezuelan land targets. But where did she get that idea? Bush never asked Congress for a declaration of war before launching his incursion into Panama.

Neither, of course, did Trump. And neither Wiles nor Rubio, nor anyone else on Trump’s team, gave members of Congress so much as a hint about Operation Absolute Resolve beforehand—though Trump says he gave a heads-up to executives at American oil companies.

Since the initial, heady success of his Venezuela operation, Trump has spoken about a “Donroe Doctrine.” He’s threatened Colombia’s president and predicted the Cuban government’s demise. Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Miller added that Greenland should be part of the US.

So what’s the next target? Early in his second term, Trump spoke about seizing the Panama Canal and making Canada the 51st state.

I pointed out to Wiles that Trump never threatened to grab the Panama Canal during his presidential campaign, which she co-chaired. Did it surprise her when Trump talked about seizing the canal as president? “What surprised me was that we gave it away,” she said. “Because it was a stupid deal made by a stupid person [Jimmy Carter], which is one of [Trump’s] favorite things. And, you know, the Chinese had moved in. They were managing the canal. They were giving favorable rates to get through the canal to their friends and allies. And they were, at a rapid pace, building, you know, two ports, two entry ports on either side of it.”

What about Trump’s desire to annex Canada? I asked her, “Did that surprise you?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it has a certain logic…. Justin Trudeau…came to Mar-a-Lago within one week of the election. He literally got on his plane and flew down. And they had a great dinner conversation…. When [Trump] won—I don’t know, maybe it happens this way all the time…but foreign leaders, we were collecting [them] like dust in a corner.

“And he asked Justin Trudeau, ‘Well, how much money do we give you?’ And Trudeau gave an answer. And the president said, ‘Well, what would happen if we didn’t?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think I don’t think we could exist. I think it would be the end of Canada if we didn’t…’

“Bad answer,” Wiles said. “[Trump said], ‘Well, then if that’s the case, why wouldn’t you be the 51st state? If we’re giving you that money and you can’t exist without us, why are you an independent country? You should be the 51st state.’”

“What did Trudeau say? Did he have a reply to that?” I asked her.

“Actually, his reply was speechlessness,” she said.

Click here to read Part 1 and here to read Part 2 from Vanity Fair’s portfolio of Trump’s inner circle.