For conservatives, Venezuela has become a one-word rejoinder to any and all liberal policy proposals. Want more government spending? A higher minimum wage? National health care? Venezuela did all that, and more, and it’s become an economic basket case—or so the theory goes. It’s a reductive argument—Venezuela’s national wealth is also tied to the price of oil, which has collapsed in recent years—but it’s a seductive analogy, especially for the president. “The new Democrats are radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela,” Donald Trump wrote in an op-ed last year. He went on to accuse Andrew Gillum of seeking to turn Florida into “the next Venezuela,” and swore that Beto O’Rourke would “never be allowed to turn Texas into Venezuela” either. More recently, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., trolled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a meme suggesting that Americans would starve under Venezuela-style socialism, forcing them to eat dogs for sustenance.

The punch line has become more serious in recent days, as Venezuela’s political system has begun to buckle with a little help from the Trump administration. Last week, the United States officially recognized socialist-lite opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, and called for current president, Nicolás Maduro, to step down. It’s not officially a coup—at least not yet. “This is not a U.S.-sponsored anything,” Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Maduro’s harshest critics in the States, said last weekend. “This is the U.S. supporting the people of Venezuela, who want their constitution and democracy followed.” But it is the sort of Truman Doctrine flexing that led the U.S. to topple several South American regimes in the past.

Trump’s personal fixation on Venezuela is notable, given that he professes to be such an ardent anti-interventionist. For years, he has been among the most vocal voices of dissent in the G.O.P. calling for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria. But there’s something about Hispanic, socialist Venezuela—the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of countries—that makes Trump lust for a “military option.”

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a notorious neoconservative hawk, told Axios’s Jonathan Swan that Trump asked him during the height of the government shutdown if the U.S. should simply invade Venezuela.

Graham, recalling his conversation with Trump, said: “He [Trump] said, ‘What do you think about using military force?’ and I said, ‘Well, you need to go slow on that, that could be problematic.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m surprised—you want to invade everybody.’”