The U.S. military announced on Thursday that it had conducted two more strikes on alleged drug boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing five people. The U.S. Southern Command shared a video of the strikes on social media, without providing evidence to support its assertions about the boats or those aboard.
Thursday marked the third day of strikes in a week during the Trump administration’s highly scrutinized, monthslong campaign in the region, which has killed at least 104 people in 28 known attacks.
Although the White House continues to maintain that the strikes are part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on the flow of illegal drugs to the U.S., MS NOW host Joe Scarborough said the release of a magazine profile of one of the president’s closest advisers should put the administration’s actions in a new light .
On Friday’s “Morning Joe,” Scarborough quoted White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who told Vanity Fair that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until [Venezuela’s Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
The MS NOW host said Wiles’ comments exposed the real goal of the administration’s efforts: regime change. He added that trying to explain the strikes as part of a drug crackdown is a “nonsensical argument” that is “just preposterous.”
After the Vanity Fair piece was released, Scarborough said White House officials attempted to “spin” the chief of staff’s comments, but he said Wiles had “made it very clear.”
Scarborough said Trump’s true motivations became more apparent this week, after he demanded that Venezuela pay for oil assets it previously seized from the United States.
With tensions only rising, Scarborough questioned the inaction from lawmakers in Washington, who have done little to rein in the president. “I guess Congress is going to sit back and let him just go ahead and do whatever he wants, for whatever reason he wants, without again questioning the purpose of this?” he said.
The “Morning Joe” co-host then offered “four reasons why they shouldn’t do that: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.” According to Scarborough, those previous instances of U.S. intervention show that “regime change, especially in this century, never ends well.”
He also cited past examples in South and Central America, including in Brazil, Cuba and Nicaragua.
Scarborough asked whether there were historical examples “of the United States going down and using the CIA, or using efforts like this, to remove a Central or South American government where it doesn’t end up blowing up in our face and causing even more chaos on the ground, more destabilization on the ground, and more hatred toward the United States on the ground?”
You can watch Scarborough’s full analysis in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.