President Donald Trump seems to care deeply about the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela — but it might not necessarily be for the reasons you’d think. His focus on Venezuela today is little more than a ploy to help his chances against Democratic challengers in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump used a Monday speech in Florida to trash Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for having run his country into the ground — and he has good reason to. Under the dictator’s rule, inflation and hunger rates have skyrocketed, and diseases once thought eradicated from Venezuela have sparked a new health crisis. Unsurprisingly, all of this and more have made Maduro an unpopular leader both at home and around the world.

But Trump’s aim was not only Maduro the man, but Maduro the socialist. In fact, the president spent ample time making the case that socialism is the real culprit for Venezuela’s ills.

“Socialism has so completely ravaged this great country that even the world’s largest reserves of oil are no longer enough to keep the lights on,” Trump said at Florida International University. “The socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they’ve had a chance to rule. The results have been catastrophic.”

Trump proceeded to say the word “socialist” nine times, “socialism” 20 times, and “Maduro” only 10 times during the entire address.

We are here to proclaim that a new day is coming in Latin America. In Venezuela and across the Western Hemisphere, Socialism is DYING - and liberty, prosperity, and democracy are being REBORN...https://t.co/hPL5W48Pmg — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2019

So why is Trump suddenly railing against the evils of socialism so fervently? Three words: 2020 Democratic candidates.

There are a few reasons why, but at its core is Trump trying to scare Republican voters in Florida and elsewhere that the Democrats are a bunch of socialists that could soon turn American into a Venezuela-like hellscape.

Case in point, mere hours after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced Tuesday that he’s running for president in 2020, Trump’s campaign put out a statement attacking Sanders’s left-leaning ideology and comparing it to Maduro’s.

“Bernie Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism,” Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in an emailed statement. “But the American people will reject an agenda of sky-high tax rates, government-run health care, and coddling dictators like those in Venezuela.”

This isn’t a new play. Politicians have long connected domestic rivals to foreign problems in order to draw sharp ideological contrasts. In this instance, Trump’s tactic is to persuade voters that America will go the way of Venezuela if people like Sanders take charge. It’s a natural extension of the Republican Party’s decades-long effort to label Democrats as far left-wing nut jobs, using some of their sympathies for foreign socialists against them.

Venezuela’s troubles, then, provide a tantalizing and convenient illustration for the GOP to repeat that message over and over again, although very few Democrats have come out in support of Maduro’s governance.

“The ‘Venezuela’ the Trump administration is dealing with is not a real country so much as it’s an ideological construct designed to have maximum domestic impact,” says Paul Musgrave, a US foreign policy expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Which means the next time you hear Trump speak negatively about “Venezuela,” remember that he’s also using it as a proxy for “Democrats” he aims to defeat next year.