during an unrelated meeting on August 15, Venezuela came up, and Trump said to me emphatically, “Get it done,” meaning get rid of the Maduro regime. “This is the fifth time I’ve asked for it,” he continued. I described the thinking we were doing, in a meeting now slimmed down to just Kelly and me, but Trump insisted he wanted military options for Venezuela and then keep it because “it’s really part of the United States.”

