White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has suggested that the goal of the US bombing campaign against alleged drug boats in the waters of Latin America is the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, according to a two-part report published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday.
Wiles discussed President Trump’s Venezuela strategy in an interview with Vanity Fair reporter Chris Whipple on November 2, 2025. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” she told him.
While Trump and his top officials have been clear about their desire for regime change in Venezuela, they have framed the bombing campaign against boats as an effort to stop drug shipments to the US. Wiles’s comments suggest that the campaign’s real purpose, at least at the start, is to pressure Maduro.
The US began the bombing campaign by targeting boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela. President Trump claimed the vessels were carrying fentanyl, but the synthetic opioid isn’t produced in Venezuela and doesn’t transit through the country on its way to the US. Contrary to Trump’s comments, Pentagon officials told Congress that the boats were allegedly carrying cocaine, and US officials speaking to the media said the vessels weren’t capable of reaching the US.
At the end of October, the Trump administration expanded its bombing campaign into the Eastern Pacific Ocean, where it has now launched the majority of strikes. In her series of interviews with Whipple, Wiles also defended the bombing campaign and the extra-judicial executions at sea.
“The president believes in harsh penalties for drug dealers, as he’s said many, many times…. These are not fishing boats, as some would like to allege,” Wiles said. The administration has never provided evidence to back up its claims about what the boats are carrying and the Pentagon has acknowledged it doesn’t know the identities of all the people it has killed.
Wiles also pointed to President Trump’s clearly false claim that for each boat the US blows up, 25,000 American lives are saved. “The president says 25,000. I don’t know what the number is. But he views those as lives saved, not people killed,” she said.
Whipple pointed out that drug smuggling is not a death penalty offense in the US. “No, it’s not. I’m not saying that it is. I’m saying that this is a war on drugs. [It’s] unlike another one that we’ve seen. But that’s what this is,” she said.
Wiles also claimed that the president didn’t need congressional authorization for the war despite the requirements of the Constitution, but said if the administration decided to go after “land” targets in Venezuela, it would need Congress. “If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress,” she said.
Amid Trump’s push toward war with Venezuela, a bill has been introduced in the House to block him from launching an attack on the country without congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution, and is expected to be brought to the floor for a vote on Thursday.
