All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 3, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:50
As Trump Continues Military Build-up, Republicans Sour On Venezuela Invasion

After several weeks of US military build-up near Venezuela - and dozens of "narco-terorists" killed offshore by US missiles - a new poll shows that even Republican support for a military operation on the country is cratering. While Democrats overwhelmingly oppose any attack on Venezuela, even Republican support is fading fast. What will Trump do? Is he in a box?

|

Time Text
Starting High, Trusting Less 00:11:37
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Very well.
Thanks.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Thought we would talk about a few things we've talked about before.
You think there shouldn't be nothing new, doesn't it?
Didn't we report it and it's all over?
No, you get a leak about what's happening or an impression was happening, such as in the Caribbean and Venezuela.
And it just feeds on itself.
You know, it should be information that people can use, but unfortunately, it's always expanding.
And we're talking about the military occupation or interference around the world at this particular time.
There's quite a few places, but no, they're concentrating on Central and South America.
So that's a big issue.
But we also know that we're not the only ones that get a little frustrated and annoyed by all this activity.
The American people are frustrated with how much they had to pay for their groceries, but they don't have an equal amount of frustration with our foreign policy.
They go along with this nonsense, this aggressive foreign policy.
But in a way, they're very, very connected because this one thing that they haven't cut a penny from, well, the whole budget.
I don't think anything has been cut yet.
I don't expect it to be.
But we know darn well that the DOD budget is going to be increased.
They never decrease it.
There's always an emergency.
And that's what we've been living with.
But it'll come to an end.
The dollar will collapse and we'll have to quit and change our ways.
But Republicans, though, there's signs that they might be thinking this over.
And I think the one thing that they talk about when Republicans are frustrated is the inflation.
And when they do a good polling, they find out that inflation of currency of prices, and that's a difference in understanding what the Fed's doing.
The Fed inflates and then you get high prices.
So that is getting their attention.
There's not a true connection.
But even though the polling now is starting to shift a little bit, and we've talked about this maybe for quite a few months, there's hits and that people are starting to change their mind.
Maybe it started with Ukraine.
Maybe we were doing too much up there.
But right now, today, it might be that we haven't even sent the troops here.
But we've been engaged for a long time and we've sure thrown a lot of threats around that the American people, especially Republicans now, are starting to say, maybe, maybe we're too much involved in Venezuela.
Hopefully that's some good news.
Yeah, and you know, when this first started, there was a lot of support out there.
And I think as this, as the ships are off the coast, as the U.S. gets more involved, I think people are starting to wake up and think about it a little bit.
And you mentioned we have covered this quite a bit.
People may ask, well, why are you talking about it over and over?
Because it's an important thing.
If the U.S. intends on invading a country the size of Venezuela, which is the size of Germany and France, plus a few other European countries all put together.
It's a massive, massive country.
This will be a massive undertaking.
And America should understand it, should know what's going on, at least what we know right now, because Congress has completely done nothing except for, you know, someone like Senator Paul, who we've talked about, says, hey, hang on a minute.
Shouldn't we be part of this process?
We have no idea what the strategy is, what the goals are, how they're going to reach the goals.
We only have President Trump sitting down in interview after interview saying, am I going to attack?
Well, I'm not going to tell you.
It's not for you to know.
I'll decide when I decide.
You know, it's like, Bush, I'm the decider.
That's what we're having again.
And I think that's why we're covering this because a new poll came out over the weekend that's encouraging.
And we always cover polls that bolster our view.
That's just the rule here at the Liberty Report.
Well, here's Axios covering the poll.
Republicans sour on Trump's military buildup near Venezuela.
Now, that is great news, I think, for America.
Republicans are looking at it and thinking this doesn't really seem like that great of an idea.
Go to the next one.
Here are a couple of the numbers.
This is a YouGov poll that occurred in the latter half of October.
And what it finds is very interesting.
The number of Republicans who approve of President Trump's assembling the military off the coast of Venezuela fell by 10% over the past month, according to a new survey analysis from YouGov.
Why it matters?
While most Republicans still back the military show of force, the falling approval comes at a time when some Republican lawmakers have questioned Trump's claim that he has unilateral power to conduct lethal strikes on boats allegedly smuggling drugs into America.
And here are the numbers, Dr. Paul.
If you go to this, now these are just Republicans, just Republicans.
YouGov found that 58% of Republicans support the U.S. military presence.
You'd say, oh, no, that's terrible.
Well, it's down from 68 in September.
It is sinking like an anchor to the bottom of the sea.
However, only 28% of Republicans would support invading the country's mainland, with 38% opposed.
So a solid opposition among Republicans for the invasion.
That's still far fewer than the amount of Democrats, 73% who oppose it, and Independents, 55% who oppose it.
Okay, fine, but it's important that Republicans are turning against this, and hopefully they're vocal about it.
Right.
You know, and there'll be more fuel to the fire coming.
And maybe they already know about it because in the last week or so, all of a sudden we're getting a new statistic that we have to look at.
Not other preparation and the tough language, which is not very good diplomacy.
That we started a week or two ago.
The United States started bombing small vessels because they were going to take over the world.
And I believe the number of vessels they've blown up is 11 or so.
But the other thing is, there's more than 60 people being killed over this.
And it's just astounding.
But people do get a little bit of information that should make the people a little bit more concerned about this.
So I think that the trend is going to be that way.
But, you know, you say that Trump, when people, when they talk to the people and the people of the media, you don't need to know what we're going to do.
And of course, the people do know what they should be doing.
And the only thing they really imply, and when they're very, very frank and very authoritarian, we need more bombs.
We're going to keep bombing these people.
And right now, you know, Russia expressed a little bit of interest in this.
You know, the world is getting smaller.
Russia is closely monitoring this crisis here as the U.S. builds up.
60,000 troops right off the border.
You think, well, what are they there for?
Are they fishing?
Or are they up in there for trouble?
And I would say just, though, I don't think they're planning.
I may be definitely wrong because I don't know.
I don't think they're there to have a beach landing.
I don't think that's what they're going to do is try to scare people and intimidate them because that's one of the tools the administration uses.
But all these troops are on here and all they say is send us more money.
And they don't always connect.
Every time something like this came up, if they say, okay, we're going to do this, we're going to put 16,000 troops around there.
It's going to cost us $10 billion.
A little high, but billions of dollars is going to cost.
And it's going to, we don't, the people don't have that much money.
So what we're going to do is, well, we know there's a little bit of risk, but we'll print the money up and we'll keep buying it.
They'll trust us.
They'll trust us and our dollar.
And that's where they're going to go wrong.
Because once they still take it from the people, because when they pay that increase in prices, they're paying for all this stuff.
They're already, people are starting to recognize that they hear how much it costs to occupy some of these areas and how much it costs to be in Ukraine and the Middle East and who knows what.
But here we have another one.
And I think later in the program, we're going to mention another place.
They've just opened up another outlet for their extravagance interference.
And it's a policy question because the people too often accept the policy of military intervention overseas because it's a sign of political strength.
And yet, in spite of all that, I think the people better soon wake up and some of them are.
You used an important word, I think, scare.
Because I do think, and a lot of people are saying this, this is the strategy.
And if it is the case, and I really believe it is, this is classic neocon tactics, right?
I am sure Marco Rubio is whispering in Trump's ear, just put all the ships over there offshore, just knock over a few boats.
You are going to scare Maduro so much that he's going to change his skivvies and then give up power as president.
This is going to be easy.
And you know, Dr. Paul, this is how the neocons operate, because we remember from Iraq, it's going to be a cakewalk.
They will greet us as liberators.
This war will pay for itself and be over in two weeks.
When you asked the one neocon how many American troops, oh, none are going to die.
Remember that, Richard, what's his name?
But this is how they do it.
And what they're doing is that they are putting Trump in a trap.
They're going to spring the trap because Trump will be putting the ships there.
And then they'll say, well, you can't just back down now.
You'll look weak.
The American people will think you're weak.
And he'll have no other excuse, no other, nothing else he can do.
But they have a visual that they can show if people question them about the promise that it would be a short trip because we saw the victory signs.
Mission accomplished.
Yes, that's right.
That was what, two weeks?
Yeah, mission accomplished.
But, you know, there's a limited amount of time you can get away with this nonsense.
It's amazing how long you can get away with just printing up money.
But that requires a very, very wealthy country such as ours and other countries that are very, very poor.
So we've been better off, but it looks like we're racing to the bottom because in some statistics, we're starting to see where we were always on the top.
Almost Half America Strongly Oppose 00:04:18
We're starting to say, oh, we're sixth on that or eight on that when it comes to education and different things like that.
And I think when people see the dollar tumbling and the dollar is much weaker than they'll admit to, and they're related.
They have to get to understand that that is related.
But that's one area where I feel pretty good about calling attention to how this thing gets started.
And you can't deal with this without talking about the Federal Reserve and how they can print up money and deceive the people into allowing people to use that money.
And they steal the money out of their wallets without even the IRS knocking on their door.
And they need to understand that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's look at some numbers from this YouGov poll because there's some fascinating things in here.
Now, these two, I just, these are not related to Venezuela, but I picked them up because it's actually pretty interesting because it gives you an interesting snapshot on the American people.
This is 1,109 adult U.S. citizens were polled between the 17th and 22nd of October.
Listen to the answer to these two questions.
How would you describe your stance on the U.S. involvement in foreign affairs?
Isolationist prefer or interventionist.
I'm sorry, first one is interventionist, prefer extensive involvement.
Only 9% of Americans view themselves as interventionists.
Isolationist, you would say the other extreme, prefer minimal involvement.
Well, that's 23%.
That's almost three times as many.
And then you have almost half of America, 49% somewhere in between.
So many more Americans consider themselves isolationist than interventionists.
And number two, do you think that U.S. foreign military interventions more often improve or worsen the situations in countries where they occur?
23% said they improve, but 31% said they worsen.
So the plurality of Americans quizzed here believe that our interventions make things worse overseas.
That almost is something we can be cheerful about.
They're getting it finally.
That's really good news, I think.
They think it makes it worse.
But now on these specific questions, put that next one up.
I'll go through this quickly.
Do you approve or disapprove of the U.S. sending Navy ships to the sea around Venezuela?
Aside from not sure, the most Americans said they strongly disapprove 21%.
And that's the plurality.
Now go to the next one.
Here's a couple of questions related to Venezuela.
Do you approve or disapprove of the U.S. military attacking and destroying ships in the sea around Venezuela?
Once again, the number one answer is strongly disapprove at 27%.
Only 15% strongly approve.
Would you support or oppose the U.S. military attacking and destroying targets on land in Venezuela?
Once again, aside from not sure, the strongest answer is strongly oppose.
33% strongly oppose versus only 10% who strongly support U.S. military intervention on land.
And now the last one here, would you support or oppose the U.S. using military force to invade Venezuela?
Now, this is the strongest one of all.
Strongly oppose 42%, almost half of America, while strongly support is only 6%.
It's clear from these numbers, Dr. Paul, that America is absolutely uninterested.
But go to the next one because there are a couple more here.
Using force to overthrow Maduro, again, number one answer, strongly oppose.
What about supporting the CIA doing covert actions?
Nope.
Number one answer, strongly oppose at 24%.
It's clear that the U.S., even Republicans, really have no stomach for this, no interest in attacking Venezuela.
The people out there, and I think instincts has been my argument.
The instincts of most people are that they want peace and prosperity, but they are always bamboozled into believing the demagogues and the neocon.
Could Privacy Be Next? 00:13:36
And there's a lot of that going on these days.
You know, they listed on what this one article some of the ships that were surrounding Venezuela.
And I don't know the size of each one of these, but the names suggest to me these are these are real warships.
Yeah, yeah.
USS Iwo Jima, USS San Antonio, USS Stockdale, USS Jason Dunham, USS Gravely, US Lake Erie, US Wichita, uh-oh, USS Gettysburg.
Oh, my bombon are there.
I might ask them to be careful.
You can imagine how much it costs for each one of these groups, these carrier groups, each one of these ships, to stay over there for weeks, weeks at a time.
It's going to cost an absolute fortune.
Now, go to that next clip.
You've already covered this.
This is the Russia is monitoring it because Maduro has requested military assistance from Moscow, especially missiles and radars.
But if you go to the next one, the buildup is continuing, Dr. Paul.
The Washington Post indicated the American military buildup in the Southern Caribbean includes 10,000 soldiers and 6,000 sailors, as you pointed out, bringing up a total of 16,000 troops.
And U.S. forces in the Caribbean include eight Navy warships, a special operations vessel, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine.
When the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford arrives in the Caribbean next week, it will bring with it three more warships and more than 4,000 additional troops.
So we're talking 20,000 soldiers and sailors and airmen parked offshore of Venezuela for an indefinite period of time with no real mission that we know about.
You know, it's so ironic.
We're having this activity and making sure in our strength and we're protecting our country.
At the same time, I see the real war right back here at home, our own government with regulations, invasion of our privacy, destroying the currency.
And I could go on and on what they do to us.
So the threat is here and it's philosophic in the acceptance of everything from inflationism to interventionism to corporatism.
And that's where our freedoms are being undermined.
So what do we do?
We send 16,000 troops to Venezuela.
And if we attack them, we're going to be more free and more prosperous.
And there'll be more peace.
It's insane what they're doing.
But it's been going on.
This isn't the first administration that did.
No, no, no, definitely.
It's a policy.
And the policy has changed a long time ago.
And a lot of people will say, oh, you're, you know, you're a bunch of isolationists and the people who have good jobs in the arms manufacturing business, they're going to be upset.
And that thing goes on.
But I'll tell you what, the real war is here and it's a war on our freedoms.
And you could name it too, like the IRS and a few other agencies of government that are pestering us.
And that's getting worse because there's less privacy every single day.
And that's been moving along.
And we hardly even have time to talk about that.
But personal freedom and privacy is still under attack.
And you're right.
I mean, we're not singling him out.
He's not the first president.
In fact, they all do it.
They've all done it.
But the one thing we would point out is that he explicitly promised that he wouldn't do this.
He'd say, well, all politicians break their promises.
That's true as well.
But nevertheless, he appealed to a lot of people by saying, I'm literally not going to do what I've been doing right now.
And I think the other thing that you say that I think is very important is for Americans to understand how much this costs.
Now, I do a lot of the shopping for my family and I keep a really part of the reason is because I'm really interested in inflation.
I want to see how much things cost.
And I memorize how much they cost.
And inflation is an absolute killer right now.
But when you go to that, now go to that next clip.
When you see something like this, Americans should, of course, be wary of war, and they naturally are wary of war.
But they should also be asking the question, Dr. Paul, how much does this cost?
Now, this is an article from Reuters, how the U.S. is preparing a military staging ground near Venezuela.
You'll never guess what they're doing.
Go to the next one.
The U.S. military is upgrading a long-abandoned former Cold War naval base in the Caribbean.
They are extensively, Dr. Paul, reconstructing an old abandoned military base.
They're putting in airstrips, all sorts of things.
You can't even imagine how much they're spending to do this.
And the question is, how many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars are being put into something that was rightly decommissioned after the Cold War?
No need for it whatsoever, bringing it back online.
Someone's getting rich off of this.
The argument will be it's a good thing because there'll be a lot of money injected into the economy down there, and they'll welcome this.
And on the short run, for a few people, that is true.
But it is something that people just don't understand that it serves no purpose.
And they've done this for a long time, that wars are good for weak economies.
Some people still believe the depression ended because we had World War II.
And all it did was extend the depression into the 40s, is what happens.
But I think that a lot of people just don't pay enough attention to this.
And I am convinced that it's going to end.
I don't worry about when it's going to end.
I worry about what's going to happen after that.
Because the adjustment is tremendous.
That's why I think I concentrate as much as I can on the philosophy of interventionism.
And some of these questions were asked correctly.
Do you believe that we should be intervening in these places?
And that's where they say no.
And because they don't work and they cost a lot of money.
But that's not enough.
Because then you also have the deep state and the military-industrial complex.
You know, the arms manufacturers, they make tons of money.
So there'll be lots of, by doing this, I'll bet you the people in Puerto Rico, except one I know that lives there, won't understand, you know, but they're going to say, you know, there's going to be money pumped into our economy down here.
And they're going to go along with it.
But they'll pay.
They'll pay through it.
We'll all pay for it because we'll pay for it through the inflation tax.
And even though we're heartened to see so many Americans really opposing this and also understanding that these interventions really leave things worse, despite what the neocons say, the problem always is that the neocon side has all the control of the propaganda.
You know, remember the Colon Powell with a little vial of chemical weapons.
They have control of the media.
The media loves a good war because people may finally turn on Fox News or MSNBC again because they want to find out what's going on.
And they also have control over the false flags.
And there could be a number of false flags that could happen down there.
What if, you know, God forbid one of our ships gets shot at?
You know, it's not beyond, I think, some of these factions in the neocon camp to put something like that together.
And when that happens, all bets are off.
That's exactly what they did in Iraq.
But their sights aren't stopped in Venezuela.
And this is why it's dizzying and frustrating.
Because if you go to the next one, NBC News came out with a report today.
Go on to the next one.
I think we covered this one.
It went well.
NBC News revealed that the Trump administration begins detailed planning for a new mission to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to target drug cartels, according to two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials familiar with the effort.
Now, these unnamed officials could be lying or could be misinformed.
Nevertheless, this is the news that's coming out that they're going to put a new mission together that's going to be under the command of the intelligence community rather than the military.
So it's more like an intelligence operation.
But certainly the Mexican government would not welcome U.S. troops, U.S. paramilitary forces inside Mexico.
So this will be an illegal incursion in violating the sovereignty of Mexico to go in there and kill people and smash things.
See, they prepare well.
You know, if the war is winding down in Ukraine, which hopefully really is, we have to have a new target.
And I think that's what they are.
But what about the other one that they're really working on is Nigeria?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's another big one going on.
That's been going on for a long time.
And nobody could be opposed to it.
And I'm not opposed to what they're talking about in principle, but not the way they're trying to solve the problem.
And that is discrimination against Christians.
But you know, there's a little bit of that in this country, too.
You know, a little bit of invasion of our freedom of speech.
And so it's a bother here.
And that's where the responsibility is, is here.
And if we do a good job, maybe somebody would want to follow us.
But instead, we send these ships off and with a, it's always a good purpose.
Of course.
We're going to punish people for, you know, killing a Christian.
But once again, the point that was made out last week by Rand was, how do you know who you're killing?
You know, do you even talk to them?
And here now we're up as soon as at the rate they're going, there's soon going to be over 100 people that have been killed just in a miscellaneous manner, pretending that they were all monsters.
There were probably some monsters there.
But the fact that they could really solve the problem of Venezuela, who knows who were in these boats.
But anyway, there was no judge and jury.
No.
This foreign policy almost feels like when you dangle a shiny thing in front of a cat, they'll jump up the wall.
They'll do other things because you're right.
All of a sudden, out of the blue, we're hearing about Sudan.
And if you go to that last clip, President Trump on Truth Social posted, this is how he, I guess, conducts his presidency.
He went to Truth Social and said that if the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria and may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns ablazing, to completely wipe out Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.
I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action.
If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our cherished Christians, warning the Nigerian government better move fast.
That's President Trump.
To which Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, replied, yes, sir.
The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria and anywhere must end immediately.
The Department of War is preparing for action.
Either the Nigerian government protects Christians or we will kill the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.
I would say two things to this, Dr. Paul.
Number one, one of the chief Islamic terrorists is now in charge of Syria, thanks to the U.S. government.
And the other thing, and I posted this on X and it blew up huge, and a lot of people didn't get it.
But I said, this is the same administration that literally gave the bombs to kill Christians in Gaza.
That's literally.
So don't get all high and mindy about protecting Christians.
There are plenty of Christians in Gaza that were slaughtered with U.S. weapons and U.S. money.
And most Americans actually, the responses were interesting because most Americans didn't even know and very violently oppose the idea that there actually are Christians in Gaza.
They have been convinced by the propaganda that the only people who live in Gaza are Hamas and terrorists and they all need to die.
You know, I think the president or whoever wrote the speech forgot the last line that we're supposed to say.
And they say, and we are diligently working with our congressional leaders because we believe that we should have proper moral and constitutional permission to start a war.
Don't hold your breath.
Yeah, I'm afraid some people, if they say that, they don't get to hold their breath.
They do them in.
Well, I'm going to close out thanking everyone for watching the show today.
Maybe you're tired of us covering this, but it's an important thing, guys.
Trust me.
When the bullets start, you're going to wish you'd pay better attention if you're not, because this is a big deal.
And the time to oppose a war, as you keep saying, Dr. Paul, is before the first shots ring out, because that's when the propaganda takes over and it's a lot harder.
So make your voices known.
You know, these polls are strong.
You can call your congressmen, your senators, and let them know we do not want to go to war with Venezuela.
We don't like drugs.
We don't like drugs in the cities, on the streets.
Why We Must Oppose War 00:02:17
But invading a country and spending a couple hundred billion dollars doing it is not the way to solve the problem.
Very good.
You know, the principle that we're dealing with here, and especially with foreign policy, is non-interventionism, that we don't have moral authority to go into countries and try to straighten out all their problems.
It doesn't mean that what people always say and accuse us of, and they say, well, oh, you're a bunch of isolationists.
You don't care.
You won't do this.
You know, the United States and the people of the United States have been very, very generous.
And I think voluntarism was the answer to some of these problems.
And also, when other countries and people here have problems, their charity is there, and yet they still want to have control and they want to have control of people.
So no matter what, they want to expand the size of government.
But it isn't, we would emphasize foreign policy today, but it's everything.
It's monetary policy, budgetary policy, welfareism, corporatism, and all these things.
Everything is interventionism and planning, economic planners.
I think this administration is dead set on being the biggest economic planners we've ever had.
And it will do it in the name of, I don't know what they're going to call it, freedom and liberty.
It will deliver it to the American people.
And I just don't think that is coming across as telling the truth.
And we should do our best with the Liberty Report to get our best judgment on why the American people put up with this and how is a better way and how leaving it up to the people is not harmful.
It's helpful.
It doesn't mean you can't do anything.
But the people say the people aren't capable.
They won't take care of themselves.
And they're too dumb to do this.
And we have to take care of them.
So what do you want to do?
Hire them up and send them to Washington to do the same thing for the whole country much quicker and much worse.
So I think there's an answer to that, and the founders understood it.
They tried to give us a guideline.
Unfortunately, we have not been very good in following those recommendations.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Export Selection