The latest assignment for Elliott Abrams, after decades of damaging Central American and Palestinian politics and people, is to be Trump’s fixer in the overthrow of Venezuela’s government.

Elliott Abrams testifies at a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington DC on 13 February 2019 Alex Wong · Getty

When US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed the neoconservative provocateur Elliott Abrams as special envoy in charge of US policy designed to overthrow the government of Venezuela, the press treated the announcement as a statement of Pompeo’s independence from President Donald Trump. Pompeo’s predecessor, the hapless Rex Tillerson (formerly CEO of ExxonMobil), had hoped to hire Abrams as his deputy. But Trump refused to allow it, despite what was said to be vigorous lobbying by rightwing political funder Sheldon Adelson (who otherwise gets whatever he wants from Trump), because Abrams had joined other neoconservatives in denouncing Trump during the 2016 Republican primary. The president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner joined the effort, but Trump’s then advisor Steve Bannon convinced Trump to say no, not so much because of the attacks as because Trumpists considered Abrams to be a ‘globalist’.

A Bloomberg News report claimed Abrams’s new gig demonstrated a ‘shift’ toward ‘positions [and] foreign policy thinking that Trump had derided on the campaign trail — including his strong support for the Iraq war, which Trump has long criticised. But Abrams, like Trump, appears to have moved on’. Abrams was occasionally forced to use similar language to explain what he and his supporters deem to be the irrelevance of his ignominious role in Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, when he pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress, and was disbarred in the District of Columbia. George HW Bush pardoned him after losing the 1992 presidential election. ‘I don’t think it’s an issue,’ was Abrams’s assessment of all this. ‘We are not focused on the events of the 1980s. We are focused on the events of 2019’.

A ‘responsible’ Republican voice

If events in Abrams’s past are any indication, then 2019 will be a disaster for the people of Venezuela, and anyone connected to its fate. I have been following Abrams’s career for (...)