WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday he will inform Congress of his plans to attack land-based cartel targets in Venezuela as he looks to expand his thus-far seaborne military campaign.
“We’re going to go [to Congress]. I don’t see any loss in going — no reason not to,” Trump told reporters at a White House event touting a federal crackdown that’s arrested roughly 3,200 alleged drug cartel members over the past month.
“You know they will always complain, ‘Oh, we should have gone.’ So we’re going to definitely,” Trump said.
The president turned to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, seated to his right, and told him, “I’d like to just tell you, ‘Let’s go.’ We’ll go. We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do, and I think they’re going to probably like it, except for the radical left lunatics.”
Trump has threatened land-based strikes for weeks after the administration on Sept. 2 began targeting vessels smuggling drugs off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela.
“I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like dead, okay?” Trump said.
Trump said that his campaign against drug cartels, coupled with his summit meeting next Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, would accelerate the decline of overdose deaths in the US, which peaked under former President Joe Biden.
Trump told reporters that fentanyl, which has killed nearly 330,000 Americans over the past five years according to federal data, is now being routed by Chinese manufacturers through Venezuela to bypass tightened US and Mexican port controls.
“They are doing that, yes,” he said.
“The first question I’m going to be asking [Xi] about is fentanyl,” Trump said.
“[China is] paying right now a 20% tariff because of fentanyl. That’s billions and billions of dollars that they’re paying. On November 1, the tariff on China goes to 157% which is record setting territory. And we don’t want that, because it’s not sustainable for them,” Trump said.
“They make $100 million selling fentanyl into our country — $100 million. They lose $100 billion with the 20% tariff. So it’s not a good business proposition. That’s $100 billion approximately, that they have to pay. It’s a big penalty… So I think they want to do something. They want to put it on the list. It’s on the list.”
Trump added “it will be the first thing on the list.”
