Approximately one year ago, Donald Trump said that he was considering a “military option” in Venezuela. At the time, virtually no one in Washington thought this was a good idea. “It is an act of supreme extremism,” Venezuela’s defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, said at the time. “As our minister of defense and a Venezuelan citizen, I say it is an act of madness.” In fact, Trump’s own advisers, including former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, reportedly spent at least five minutes “explaining to Trump how military action could backfire and risk losing hard-won support among Latin American governments.” But fast-forward roughly 12 months, and Trump has continued to float the batshit proposal, saying on Tuesday at the United Nations, “It’s a regime that, frankly, could be toppled very quickly by the military if the military decides to do that.”

What has changed, alarmingly, is that now there are some people in Washington who have actually come around to the idea. Last month, Senator Marco Rubio said that while his preference has long been to find a peaceful solution in Venezuela, there is now a “very strong argument” that the situation is a security threat to both Latin America and the U.S., and could very well necessitate U.S. military involvement. Bloomberg notes that “security hawks with an interest in Latin America are taking positions in the administration, adding to a sense that Washington may be warming to intervention.” José Cárdenas, who wrote an op-ed this summer called “It’s Time for a Coup in Venezuela,” is reportedly being considered for a position in the State Department. Mauricio Claver-Carone, who opposes rapprochement with Cuba, is likely going to be appointed senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

Of course, there are still a (whole) bunch of people in the U.S. who strongly oppose the idea. As Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Bloomberg, intervention would “lead to a great deal of concern over a rebirth of United States interference in Latin America, and is far from clear it solves any of your refugee and population problems.” There’s also the U.S.’s long record of military intervention going . . . not so great, not to mention the fact that Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Chile all issued a statement earlier this month rejecting the use or even threat of force in Venezuela.

But there’s another reason Trump might go for it anyway—one that isn’t entirely about freeing Venezuelans from the horrors of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship:

David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, argues against intervention but says if Trump feels he needs an important foreign policy victory with re-election coming up, he may decide to “get this ball rolling.”