Trump’s Regime Change: Soros-style

Written by Wayne Madsen; Originally appeared on strategic-culture.org

To listen to Donald Trump and his supporters, billionaire international hedge fund mogul George Soros was an inherent part of America’s “deep state” machinery, who financed and directed “regime change” operations around the world. Under Trump, the State Department reportedly severed links to Soros and his organizations, but something strange ensued. The Trump administration is still engaged in regime change operations around the world and, furthermore, it is using some of Soros’s favorite entities, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to install pro-American governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other countries.

Simply put, America’s “deep state” has not gone anywhere. It is thriving under a U.S. president who revels in opaqueness and unaccountability.

NED has pulled out all the stops to overthrow the socialist governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua. These efforts recently received a boost after Colombia elected right-wing narcoterrorist-affiliated Ivan Duque as president. Duque recently met with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who has become the new de facto leader of the Republican Party’s branch of NED, the International Republican Institute (IRI), following Senator John McCain being sidelined with brain cancer.

Rubio has called on Trump to subject new sanctions on the Nicaraguan Government, in addition to U.S. visa bans already imposed by Washington on Nicaraguan government officials, including members of their families. Rubio is tied closely to members of the Nicaraguan opposition, including several wealthy Nicaraguan businessmen who maintain expensive homes in south Florida and who contribute handsomely to Rubio’s political campaign coffers.

The other Republican Senator who has taken up the anti-Sandinista cause is Texas’s Ted Cruz. In June 2018, Cruz and Rubio hosted a group of Nicaraguan right-wing “civil society” activists in Washington, DC. “Civil society” is a notorious code phrase employed by Soros political meddlers around the world. The Nicaraguans’ trip to Washington had been financed by the bank accounts of NED, flush with anti-Nicaragua cash provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a notorious cipher for the Central Intelligence Agency.

One of the largest recipients of anti-Sandinista USAID assistance in Nicaragua is the Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP). Its Managua operations and structure resemble the typical CIA front employed in Latin America’s dark past by Langley to disrupt political systems and economies.

Calling out the Trump administration’s embrace of neo-conservative-style regime change in Nicaragua, the European Committee of Solidarity with the Popular Sandinista Revolution stated, that the Trump administration’s actions are “a new attempt from the right-wing and U.S. imperialism against a sovereign and independent free nation and against it’s democratically elected president, Daniel Ortega.” The European groups singled out “neo-liberal” forces, which include Soros’s regime change entities, in working hand-in-glove with the Trump administration in “attacking frontally” the Ortega Executive and the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Trump and his alt-right surrogates rail against the influence of Soros on the international stage. Yet, Trump, a con-man and simpleton without peers among the crop of current world leaders, simply projects on to others for what he, himself, is guilty. Complementing Trump’s actions to topple the Daniel Ortega government in Nicaragua, is the Soros-funded Global Witness. The London- and Washington-based group has initiated a civil strife campaign among the Miskito indigenous people of the Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region. NED and Global Witness provocateurs are trying to convince the Miskitos, targets of similar manipulation by the CIA during the Contra-led civil war of the 1980s, that the Ortega government opposes indigenous rights, when the exact opposite is true.

Soros and Trump administration are coordinating their efforts to fund anti-government Nicaraguan groups in the public sector, labor unions, student groups, religious organizations, and media. The same scenario is being enacted by Soros and Trump in Venezuela, where the political opposition, flush with money from NED and Soros-funded groups, have all but paralyzed Venezuela’s political system and economy.

Trump, who has lied about his opposition to George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, appears prepared to conduct his own invasion of Venezuela. According to a July 4, 2018 Associated Press report out of Bogota, Colombia, in August 2017, Trump, in an Oval Office discussion with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser Lt. General H. R. McMaster about increasing sanctions on Venezuela, asked the two advisers why the United States just couldn’t invade Venezuela and overthrow its president, Nicolas Maduro. Trump told both officials, who warned against an invasion, that it worked for Ronald Reagan in Grenada in 1983 and George H. W. Bush in Panama in 1989.

Trump continued to harbor a desire to invade Venezuela, pressing the issue with Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos at a dinner held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly plenary session in September 2017. Also cajoled by Trump at the dinner were presidents Michel Temer of Brazil, Juan Carlos Varela of Panama, and Peru Pedro Kuczynski of Peru. All four Latin American presidents refused to join Trump in an invasion of Venezuela and they warned him that the United States would face unprecedented blowback across the Western Hemisphere from such an action. Argentine president Mauricio Macri, a real estate partner of Trump in a building project in Buenos Aires, joined his right-wing Latin American colleagues in warning Trump against military action against Venezuela.

Nicolas Maduro, Jr., the son of Venezuela’s president, using language only in insane bully like Trump could understand, told the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly, “If Venezuela were attacked, the rifles will arrive in New York, Mr. Trump . . . We will take the White House.”

Latin America has witnessed a rightward turn in the last few years, with right-wing governments taking power in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras. The July 1, 2018 election of left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) as president of Mexico reversed the trend in one of Latin America’s most powerful countries. An all-but-inevitable confrontation between AMLO and Trump will provide breathing room for Nicaragua, Venezuela, and two other joint Trump-Soros targets, Bolivia and Cuba. AMLO, unlike his hapless two predecessors, is no shrinking violet when it comes to dealing with the “gringos” of the North. A face off is certainly inevitable over Trump’s splitting apart the families of asylum-seekers from Central America and Colombia.

On the other hand, Trump has an ally in Colombia’s Duque, a right-winger with strong links to that nation’s paramilitary narco-terrorists, individuals who are willing to launch military forays into Venezuela for the right price.

Trump’s supporters in the alt-right community are fond of claiming that Trump is battling against some nebulous and amorphous American “deep state” that seeks to change foreign governments at the flip of a switch. Now, these same alt-right forces are openly calling for “regime change” in Iran. Their heroes include former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, both of whom recently addressed a meeting of the anti-Iranian cult-like terrorist organization, Mohajedin-e-Khalq (MEK), at their annual confab in Paris. Another MEK supporter, Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, is leading Trump’s efforts to bring about regime changes in countries around the world, including Iran.

On December 7, 2016, president-elect Trump delivered a speech in North Carolina that laid out his foreign policy. He declared: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” Trump’s words, along with his other rhetoric, were and remain as hollow as his personal integrity and ethics. But they are music to the ears of the military-intelligence-industrial “deep state” that Trump claims he abhors.