But then the average blue collar American worker today would be a Black or Latina woman who’s a retail store cashier or clerk in a city government agency and that’s not what Trump thinks blue collar looks like.

If Trump and the GOP really wanted to help the working class, they’d focus on raising standards in the service sector where most blue collar workers work today, which means helping them unionize.

3. Rubio and Hegseth were given a long leash by Trump while he was focused on more pressing matters, like naming a football stadium after himself, and when Congress started asking questions, he realized it could end badly and stepped back in. I find this most likely.

2. Orders were given before Trump just changed his mind.

1. This deployment was planned all along as negotiating leverage for the ultimate goal, not regime change but rather some deal involving oil and migration.

Rodrik is correct to say the best way to raise living standards for the most people is to focus on the service sector, where most US workers are now. But he neglects the one thing that secures decent standards. It wasn’t AI that made manufacturing jobs sustainable before, it was unions.

I agree. But there are many people advocating for regime change, both in Venezuela and close to Trump, promising that the outcome will be a stable, democratic, US-friendly government. I would like to hear how that would work.

The closest I’ve seen is Ryan Berg’s (from CSIS) regime collapse idea. I find it implausible that the military would betray Maduro for $50m (they make billions in oil rents), or install Gonzalez, in response to missile strikes. But I appreciate his spelling it out.

I understand when governments push a party line. I don’t understand when random individuals do it. It betrays an inflated sense of self importance to knowingly say things that are untrue about a regime, thinking that your tweet will be crucial to secure its survival or downfall.

That’s a new one for me!

Chile didn’t become a stable democracy overnight. The deal included not only amnesty, but made Pinochet a senator for life, and a military council retained the power to intervene in government in the name of national security. These were later reformed out. But they secured the transition.

Rubio knew Trump doesn’t go for humanitarian intervention, so he sold this to Trump as a counter narcotics operation. As that justification has a lot of holes in it, they’re scrambling for new ones that he’ll care about. It’s the WMDs thing again.

We are in a bizarro world where US military intervention in Latin America is more popular in Latin America than it is in the US