The New York Times Simultaneously Wages Infowar on Trump & Maduro
The New York Times revealed that US officials previously met with Venezuelan coup plotters.
It’s not a secret that the US is conspiring to overthrow the democratically elected and legitimate government of Venezuela, nor that it probably at some point considered a military coup there just like the ones that it supported throughout Latin America all throughout the Old Cold War, but the publication of the story itself at this specific time and the latest details that it purports to have revealed are insightful because of what they imply about the US “deep state’s” war on Trump and also the country’s infowar on Venezuela.
About the first, it can’t be discounted that the so-called “leak” was designed to make Trump question the loyalty of his permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies even more than he already does, coming on the heels of Bob Woodward’s explosive book and the outlet’s earlier publication last week of a supposedly anonymous high-ranking official’s op-ed alleging that the “Resistance” is undermining him at every turn. To the second possible point, which doesn’t have to necessarily be mutually exclusive with the first, the claims that the US has been secretly meeting with Venezuelan coup plotters – even if it supposedly didn’t end up providing them with the technical assistance that they requested – could trigger the same paranoia from President Maduro as it might also do from Trump, potentially getting him to overreact by carrying out a military purge that could weaken the armed forces and possibly facilitate the very same coup scenario that he’s trying to avoid.
On the other hand, the New York Times’ report could also backfire against its planners by reinforcing Trump and Maduro’s domestic positions, with the former using it as proof that there are indeed high-level traitors trying to sabotage a very sensitive part of his administration’s foreign policy in Latin America while the latter’s government has already said that this is evidence that the US is trying to carry out a regime change against it.
Neither of the possible motives mentioned nor the likely outcomes that were touched upon are unexpected, with each of them confirming what the public was pretty much aware of already instead of enlightening them about anything new. This, however, just underscores the manipulative psychological reasons behind its publication, with the intended audience being the head(s) of state of the US and/or Venezuela and everyone else just being curious bystanders watching this “deep state” influence operation unfold before the public’s eyes. The vehicle for executing it is one of the world’s most recognizable media outlets, which thus reaffirms what many people already knew about the journalism industry’s very close ties to the intelligence sphere despite its repeated insistences that it’s functionally independent of these forces. Whichever way one tries to explain it, there’s no denying that the New York Times is therefore once again being wielded as an infowar weapon, one whose targets might be both international and domestic.
