Will Trump's Venezuela attack fracture his 'America First' base?

Washington, D.C. - Just days before the US military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump said he wished for world peace in the year ahead.

“Peace on Earth,” the US president told reporters after being asked about a resolution as he walked through Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve.

It was a sentiment he had repeated for at least a decade, when the real estate heir with no political experience started his unlikely run for president, and one that would raise questions among some of his most ardent supporters around a decade later.

“It is concerning to see what’s happening and the direction that the Trump administration is moving in,” said recently retired congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene during an interview with CNN shortly after Maduro was seized.

Greene announced her retirement in November after saying she and her family were threatened following Trump’s attacks on her on social media after she was outspoken about releasing files on convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who had reportedly been a friend of Trump’s.

“We can say thankfully that Maduro has been arrested, we can say we’re happy for the Venezuelan people, but we can also look to all the regime changes before in Iraq and Libya and Syria,” she continued.

Trump’s criticism of the US-led invasion of Iraq was a watershed moment in the Republican primary, when, during the 2016 presidential debate, he criticised Jeb Bush, at the time considered a top contender, for his brother George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

He described the decision to invade Iraq as “a big, fat mistake”.

The jab was met with roaring applause and marked a major shift in the Republican Party’s support for foreign wars, particularly when it came to US tax dollars paying for actions that could kill US troops.

It was around this time that “America First” became a repeated slogan for Trump’s campaign. The slogan historically has strong racial undertones and has been used by some of the country’s most notorious racist leaders, including David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Though not a new concept, one that goes back to at least the 1850s and was again popularised by Woodrow Wilson in his 1916 presidential campaign, it energised a Republican base that had become disenfranchised from a cost-of-living crisis that many attributed to US wars and economic outsourcing of formerly US jobs, which disproportionately hit rural America.

Now, many eyes are turned to his base.

“We very much need our government and our government leaders to focus on the American people and the issues that we care about on Main Street, USA,” Greene said in her CNN interview.

She was one of multiple candidates who successfully ran with the “America First” slogan following Trump’s first presidential win.

From the beginning of his first term, Trump began steering away from this mantra, which should not have been surprising given some of his other statements about wanting to attack other countries.

Nevertheless, the slogan stuck, and many of his supporters saw it as a sign that the US was turning a page away from spending money on wars to taking care of its citizens.

Any lingering uncertainty from Trump’s first term about the scope of his territorial ambitions was dispelled early in his second, as he spent the campaign and then his time in office threatening multiple countries with invasions. These include Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Panama.

“This is a decisive step. They certainly do not want troops on the ground. Whether there will be in the next few days or months has yet to be seen,” Paul Beck, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, told The New Arab.

“Most of them are supportive of Trump, no matter what he does. If it goes badly, and if we were to incur casualties, the MAGA [Make America Great Again] base will judge based on the outcome,” he said.

According to a poll by the Washington Post, 80 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 supported the use of military force to capture Maduro, with 46 percent saying they would support the US taking control of Venezuela and choosing a new government.

However, when asked who should decide the future political leadership of Venezuela, only nine percent of Trump voters said the US should decide, with 91 percent saying it was up to the Venezuelan people.

For Richard Groper, a lecturer in political science at California State University in Los Angeles, the bigger question is what happens after Trump leaves office.

“I don’t think much happens until he leaves office. The populist right has those isolationist tendencies, and Trump has tried to play those,” he told TNA.

“It will be interesting in two years. That’s when we’ll see what happens to the Republican Party.”

Brooke Anderson is The New Arab's correspondent in Washington, D.C., covering US and international politics, business, and culture.

Follow her on Twitter: @Brookethenews

Edited by Charlie Hoyle