WASHINGTON—President Trump has recently expressed reservations to top aides about launching military action to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, fearing that strikes might not compel the autocrat to step down, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

The debate underscores that the administration’s Venezuela strategy remains in flux, despite a buildup of military forces in the region and public threats by Trump to launch attacks.

What began as a counternarcotics campaign with airstrikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels has transitioned into the most muscular U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean in decades—one now squarely aimed at pressuring, and potentially ousting, Maduro.

But even basic questions, such as whether the goal is to remove Maduro or compel him into concessions, remain undecided, the officials said.

Trump continues to query aides about military options, the officials noted, leading some to suggest the president might eventually order an attack. The options presented to him range from intensifying economic pressure to military action inside Venezuela, including possibly against military and government facilities.

For now, officials say Trump is content with slowly building up U.S. forces in the region and continuing to strike boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific. The latest such attack occurred Tuesday when the U.S. military destroyed a vessel in the Eastern Pacific, killing two alleged drug traffickers.

“We’re blowing them up, linked to the Maduro regime in Venezuela and others,” Trump said Wednesday during a speech in Miami.

There is no timeline for a decision on whether to step up the campaign, officials said. Trump remains wary about getting directly involved in Venezuela after a first-term attempt to oust Maduro by supporting his opposition failed, former officials involved in that effort said. He also has longstanding apprehensions about using the military for possible regime change.

“The president has said he would continue to strike narcoterrorists trafficking illicit narcotics—anything else is speculation and should be treated as such,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.

Trump has been presented with three broad options to increase pressure on Maduro, the officials said.

They include stepping up economic pressure on Venezuela with sanctions and increased tariffs on countries that buy its oil; supporting Venezuela’s opposition while adding more U.S. military assets in the region to raise pressure on Maduro; and finally a campaign of airstrikes or covert operations aimed at government and military facilities and personnel. The options were previously reported by the New York Times.

The Justice Department is working on a legal justification allowing Trump to target the Venezuelan leader as part of a military operation, the officials added. Justice Department officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has branded Maduro a “narco-terrorist,” accusing him of heading a trafficking network that is conspiring to “flood the United States with cocaine.” The U.S. in August issued a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Maduro for narcotrafficking.

The steps taken already by the U.S. to persuade him that he can’t remain in power could prompt some members of the country’s security elite to turn on Maduro and oust him first, U.S. officials say.

The administration has been in touch with the Venezuelan opposition, current and former officials said.

“Maduro has to understand that the hours are running out,” Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said Wednesday, speaking remotely to a Miami business forum that Trump was also attending. “If he accepts a transition, it will move forward orderly and faster—but it will take place regardless of whatever Maduro does.”

Some U.S. officials say there is no need to force out Maduro as long as he agrees to curb drug trafficking, give the U.S. more access to Venezuela’s oil reserves and promises to hold fair elections.

Sen. Jim Risch (R, Idaho), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview that Maduro has conspired with drug cartels designated by the U.S. as terrorists, “and is going to be subject to the same fate.”

But Risch, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, added that he has seen no indication of the U.S. preparing military actions against Venezuela. “The president could change his mind, of course, because he is becoming very impatient and very unhappy with Maduro.”

Some senior Democrats think it is unlikely Trump will actually take military action.

“The press is far more convinced that the United States is going to attack Venezuela in some way than the administration actually is,” Rep. Jim Himes (D., Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an appearance Tuesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I continue to be pretty bearish on the notion that we’re going to get militarily involved in Latin America.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, has played a major role in crafting Trump’s strategy and military campaign against drug boats, officials and State Department aides said. He briefed lawmakers on the plan Wednesday afternoon.

Last week, Trump publicly warned about possible attacks inside Venezuela. “The land is going to be next,” he told reporters, suggesting strikes directly within the country.

But he has toned down his comments since. Asked Friday by reporters if he was considering bombing military targets in Venezuela, Trump flatly said “No.” He then told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday that he doubted the U.S. would go to war with Venezuela. But asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he answered: “I would say, ‘Yeah.’ I think so, yeah.”

Maduro has accused Washington of trying to topple him, calling the military campaign “regime change through military threat.” Yet in a letter to Trump after the initial strikes in September, Maduro promised to produce data showing his country doesn’t traffic drugs. Last month, Trump said Maduro was willing to give “everything” to ease tensions, adding “he doesn’t want to f—around with the United States.”

Trump has switched course on military action before. He initially sought a deal to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, giving Tehran up to two weeks before he would authorize strikes. But within hours, B-2 bombers destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, an operation Trump touts as a major success.

The Pentagon announced Oct. 24 that Trump had ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford and its carrier strike group to the Caribbean, where it will join eight naval warships already in the region. The arrival of the Ford and its accompanying warships will give the U.S. additional firepower in the event Trump decides to order airstrikes, using jet fighters and long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The carrier spent the past 12 days making its way across the Mediterranean, a much slower pace than anticipated. It is likely the ship is moving slowly to complete additional training, including flight operations, to prepare for the Caribbean deployment, experts said. It is also due to undergo routine maintenance before entering a potential war zone, according to two U.S. officials.

“When they deployed, they probably didn’t prepare for this scenario, this operation in the Caribbean,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “I think this is probably the need for them to make sure that they are proficient at the kinds of actions they would need to do in the Caribbean.”

In recent years, the construction of public housing in the Nordic hermit kingdom has all but collapsed, plunging from 7,000 units annually to a projected 2,800 this year. The combination of a speculative housing bubble, soaring land prices, and rising construction costs has made it impossible for housing associations to operate within the government’s strict spending cap—a policy originally intended to keep rents low, but which now serves as an iron collar strangling the sector.

The regime’s proposal, which arrives just two weeks before voters go to the polls in upcoming local elections, is clearly designed to stem a mounting crisis at the ballot box. The housing crisis is a central issue in the campaign, and polls suggest that it is a real possibility that the Social Democrats will lose their centuries-long stranglehold on Copenhagen’s lord mayoralty.

Line Barfod, the pro-democracy Red-Green opposition party’s candidate for lord mayor of Copenhagen, described the timing as “grotesque,” accusing the government of having “sat on its hands for so long.” She drew attention to the conspicuous irony that Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil, the current Social Democrat mayoral hopeful and former housing minister, failed to enact these very measures when she had the direct authority to do so.

At the heart of the regime’s plan is a temporary, ten-year relaxation of the cost cap for non-profit public housing projects. In high-cost cities like Copenhagen and Aarhus, the cap will be lifted by 20 percent, a move justified by Nicolai Wammen, head of the Social Democrat-controlled Ministry of Finance, as necessary to get projects moving. “The rules have been too strict,” he told state media, candidly acknowledging that the increases in construction costs will inevitably be passed on to tenants in the form of higher rents. “The alternative is that these homes are not built at all,” he insisted, painting the rent hikes as the only conceivable path forward.

Rosenkrantz-Theil echoed this economic fatalism, brushing off suggestions of providing truly affordable housing without raising rents as naïve and unrealistic. “When people say, ‘can’t you just?’ No, you can’t just,” she declared, dismissing any alternative as beyond the pale.

Yet, outside the suffocating confines of the regime’s capitalist realism, functioning alternatives demonstrably exist. The Vienna model, in operation for over a century, treats housing as a public welfare service rather than a commodity. Unlike social housing in Denmark, where all costs must ultimately be recuperated from tenants, and where the regime regularly raids the National Construction Fund, which tenants pay into to fund new construction and major renovations, to finance unrelated social policy initiatives, The Austrian capital directly subsidizes construction, levies a dedicated housing tax, and leases public land on long-term contracts to non-profit developers. This model enables 60% of Vienna’s residents to live in cost-controlled public accommodation, with rents that run nearly half those of Copenhagen’s, and even remains fully compliant with EU’s strict state subsidy rules.

Meanwhile, pro-democracy opposition groups outside the political establishment, such as the Communist Party, offer practical, material solutions. Their platform includes mandating that at least 50 percent of all new developments be public housing, seizing vacant properties from deadbeat landlords, granting tenants the right to convert for-profit rentals into social housing, prohibiting the privatization of public land and improving financing schemes for public housing in order to drive down rents.

“Housing is a human right – not a commodity,” said Hans Skou, a Communist Party candidate in Copenhagen. His proposals emphasize reclaiming control from property speculators and strengthening the ability of municipalities to build housing based on need, not profit.

Despite this, it is unlikely that the communists will have electricians success. Non-market ideas are systematically ignored by the mainstream press, creating a firewall that prevents these ideas from threatening the political elite.

Experts anticipate that the regime’s proposal could allow for the construction of up to 1,400 additional public homes annually in the largest cities. However, this marginal expansion comes at a steep price: rents for new Copenhagen units are expected to rise by as much as 10 percent, sending a typical modest family apartment from an already eye-watering DKK 12,000 per month to over DKK 13,000.

While the regime frames this as a necessary compromise to house the middle class, critics argue it abandons the principle of affordable housing for the poor and reinforces a system where the logic of the market is presented as the only possible reality. As the political elite celebrates itself for an unimaginative and insufficient bandaid solution, the hundreds of thousands mired on public housing waiting lists finds little solace or hope for change in Denmark’s stunted political imagination.

Sources:

• Regeringen vil tillade flere og dyrere almene boliger: ‘Reglerne har været for stramme’ , DR (state media) , November 3rd 2025
• Mangel på almene boliger er ingen naturlov, Arbejderen, November 4th 2025
• Wien viser vejen: Billige boliger uden markedets lænker, Arbejderen, November 4th 2025

Congress’s simmering discontent with the Pentagon’s recent decision-making and lack of transparency with its lawfully-mandated oversight body boiled over during a routine nomination hearing Tuesday, one of the few venues lawmakers have had to get answers from defense officials since the second Trump administration began in January. Austin Dahmer was ostensibly before the committee to answer questions about how he would tackle the job of assistant secretary for strategy, plans, and forces—a job whose title and responsibilities have changed in ways that the committee was only told about on Sunday night, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the committee chairman, said during the hearing. But because Dahmer has already been performing the duties of another high-level Pentagon official—and because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has restricted communication between the department and Congress, requiring every interaction be cleared through legislative affairs—a bipartisan group of senators took the opportunity to grill him on a host of recent department moves, some of which they contend are in direct opposition to President Trump’s stated foreign-policy positions.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, listed several: the pause in Ukrainian security assistance, the uncoordinated review of the AUKUS agreement, opposition to deploying more U.S. troops to the Middle East during the Iran-Israel war in June, the cancellation of a meeting among top Japanese and U.S. officials, and the recent cancellation of a rotational Army brigade deployment to Romania. “I understand that media reports can be wrong, believe me, but it just seems like there’s this Pigpen-like mess coming out of the policy shop that you don’t see from, say, intel and security and acquisition and sustainment,” Cotton said. Asked why the policy undersecretary’s office, led by Elbridge Colby, has been at the center of so many controversies, Dahmer blamed “fake news” and “inaccurate reporting” while claiming ignorance of details. “This decision did not appear to reflect the policy mandate of President Trump,” Wicker said of the withdrawal of troops from Romania. “Just two weeks ago, the president had said that troops would not be withdrawn from Europe. It is unclear to me how the move fits with the commander-in-chief’s direction.”

Asked why the decision hadn’t been coordinated with Congress, Dahmer claimed the committee had received three briefings on the move. During the hearing, Wicker confirmed with committee staff that no such briefings had occurred. “Are we confusing ‘notifications’ with ‘briefing’? Check on that; will you do that?” he told Dahmer. Dahmer claimed that both Romanian and NATO officials had been briefed on the decision, but couldn’t name any of the officials or when the discussions took place. Wicker said there has been a distinct lack of coordination between the Pentagon and Congress, in contrast with the first Trump administration. “Members and staff of this committee have struggled to receive information from the policy office and have not been able to consult in a meaningful way with the shop, either on the National Defense Strategy or the Global Posture Review,” he said. The policy office is “the worst in the administration,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said, in that it is harder to get in contact with than Hegseth or the president himself. “Man, I can’t even get a response,” Sullivan said. ”And we’re on your team!”

Sullivan admonished Dahmer and his office for not coordinating with the committee on the National Defense Strategy, a document that only exists because Congress mandated it in law. “Where do you think the requirement for the NDS comes from? Yeah, it comes from us,” he said. “Don’t you think it would be smart to maybe preview it?” And in some cases, Wicker pointed out, it appears the policy shop hasn’t coordinated with the White House, as shown by President Trump’s surprise upon learning that the administration had paused security assistance to Ukraine in July. Dahmer claimed that there had been no such pause, despite a Pentagon spokesman confirming one on July 2. “My impression today is you cloaked your testimony in a veil of ignorance. You don’t know what’s happened in many different cases, when in fact, you were basically the stand-in and the surrogate for Secretary Colby,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the committee’s ranking member, told Dahmer. “Again, as the No. 2 in policy, what were you doing?”

Reed also asked about the change to Dahmer’s own prospective job title. The job has long been called assistant secretary for “Strategy, Plans and Capabilities”; that’s what the department’s website still says, and it’s how the nominee was introduced at his confirmation hearing. But Dahmer responded to pre-hearing questions using the title of assistant secretary for “Strategy, Plans and Forces,” reflecting an Oct. 8 OSD memo ordering up that change and others. Reed said the change was described to him as “cosmetic,” even though it directs a reorganization that moves three deputy assistant secretaries under Dahmer’s prospective office. “Normally, when the department conducts such a reorganization, it will send to the committee a summary of those changes for our review and consideration before the committee proceeds with the nomination,” Reed said. “This is important because the Senate has a constitutional duty to advise and consent on all Senate conferred nominees. As such, having a basic understanding of a nominee’s duties is imperative to our oversight role. Unfortunately, that did not happen in this case.” Dahmer said he took responsibility for the late notification and lack of consultation with the committee. He said the Pentagon’s office of legislative affairs should have reached out, and it was his responsibility as the policy deputy to make sure that happened.

Lawmakers have stopped short of levying any threats against the department, though as Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., pointed out, they have made clear the unseriousness with which they regard the current chain of command in one regard: neither the House nor the Senate version of the draft National Defense Authorization acts include a statutory change of the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, despite the administration’s insistence on using what amounts to an official nickname without congressional approval. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no effort for Congress to make the name change. The president did this by executive order, but acknowledged it would take a congressional authorization, and it was an alternate name,” Kaine said. “I view it as a form of political cosplay. Cosplay isn’t my thing, but to each his own.” It’s not clear whether the senators’ ire for the Pentagon’s policy shop will upend Dahmer’s chances at confirmation. A spokesman for Wicker did not respond to a query from Defense One about whether the senator intended to vote in the affirmative. “Mr. Dahmer, you’re clearly avoiding answers to questions that you should have been acutely aware of in your position,” Reed said. “That does not bode very well for your future role in the Department of Defense, since it’s essential that this committee has accurate and specific knowledge, and I think you’ve essentially indicated to us that you won’t cooperate with us.”

If he doesn’t get the votes, he would be the only the second of several controversial Trump defense nominees to face real opposition to confirmation, after Hegseth’s vote required a tie-breaker from Vice President JD Vance.

Note: A Cotton spokesperson later clarified that the senator meant a "Pigpen-like mess,” alluding to the Peanuts character, and not a "pigpen-like mess,” referring to a pen for pigs.

well thanks senator, I was really confused there for a bit!

also, I’m pretty sure the character Pigpen’s name is itself a reference to the concept of a pen for pigs, so, uh, not sure exactly what we’ve achieved with this clarification