Trump Blows $8 Million a Day for Vanity Venezuela Military Escapade

While Arizona families are pinching pennies on groceries and rent, Donald Trump is torching hundreds of millions of dollars in a vanity naval escapade off Venezuela — an operation so lopsided that each small‑boat kill can cost as much as a new hospital MRI system.

At a cost of roughly $8 million per day, the Navy has sunk about 31 motorboats and killed more than 100 people, many of whom have never been identified.

The latest stunt: Trump boasts that he “blew up a dock” at some unnamed place, at some unidentified time — vague, made‑for‑TV bravado with a very real price tag.

While he rambles, the Pentagon burns through cash to keep a supercarrier battle group loitering off an undeveloped coastline of mangroves and islands, pounding tiny boats and hijacking defenseless tankers.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller are hyping “Operation Southern Spear” to look tough in a pointless campaign against motorboats and empty ships. The reality: a $40 billion aircraft fleet, roughly 15,000 ship and aircraft crew and support personnel, $6.5–8 million per day just to keep the armada at sea, and $200,000 missiles detonated over open water.

“It is needlessly and recklessly escalating a potential conflict,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D‑Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Trump seems to be stumbling into war without any endgame or strategy. He seems to be making decisions without telling the American people, let alone Congress, what his plan is in seizing tankers or killing supposed drug traffickers who come from Venezuela.”

This stumblebum flotilla took five days to catch the aging Bella‑1 tanker as it tried to get away — an empty ship carrying no oil at all.

A billion-dollar hammer for a tin‑can nail

At the center of this boondoggle is the USS Gerald R. Ford, a floating monument to excess costing roughly $13–14 billion to build, with the class’s R&D pushing the bill toward $17–18 billion. It’s parked off Venezuela’s coast, wrapped in escorts and a submarine — a full carrier strike group that costs an estimated $6.5 to $8 million per day to operate.

That daily burn pays for thousands of sailors, continuous flight operations, maintenance, and nuclear support that produce grainy strike videos of speedboats disintegrating while the Treasury hemorrhages cash.

“Donald Trump has offered precisely zero explanation — zero — to the American people for what he’s trying to accomplish in the Caribbean,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Most Senate Republicans, meanwhile, appear to have no interest in doing any congressional oversight in a serious way of the administration’s military buildup.”

In just a few months, Southern Spear’s operating costs have exploded into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even as Trump’s allies whine that “we can’t afford” fully funded schools, affordable housing, or health insurance in Arizona.

Six-figure shots at meaningless targets

The cost of the weapons for Southern Spear reads like a defense contractor’s dream:

• Hellfire missiles: about $150,000–$220,000 each.
• Griffin missiles: about $127,000 each.
• GBU‑39/B Small Diameter Bombs: around $40,000 per bomb.

Each is marketed as a “precision” solution to the political purpose of looking tough on TV. Multiply that by multiple weapons per target, and you get a grotesque picture: hundreds of thousands of dollars in ordnance to annihilate a single small craft, often crewed by a small, desperate crew.

“You can’t just go in and kill people just because you think that they might conduct future operations against you. It just violates all sorts of international laws of warfare. It’s illegal on so many levels,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL).

A single strike costs as much as a rural fire engine.

Take a “typical” Southern Spear strike package: a 2‑hour F‑35 sortie, a air tanker in support, and two precision weapons.

• The F‑35 alone costs about $40,000 per flight hour, so a 2‑hour mission is $80,000 before the jet even drops anything.
• A tanker adds roughly $11,000 per flight hour, or about $22,000 for those 2 hours.
• If the pilot fires two Hellfires, that’s roughly $400,000 in missiles.

Total: about $500,000 for one engagement — and that still doesn’t include any share of the carrier’s $6.5–8 million daily operating tab. Even swapping in two cheaper small-diameter bombs (around $80,000 total) still leaves you with a $180,000–$200,000 fireworks show to blow up a speedboat.

Once you allocate even a fraction of the carrier strike group’s daily cost to each sortie — say, dividing $6.5–8 million over 10–20 missions per day — the effective price per engagement can easily climb toward or above $1 million. That’s a million dollars to obliterate a vessel that might barely be worth $50,000 on the open market.

Poverty politics at home, blank checks at sea

Here’s the outrage: the same Republicans who clutch their pearls over “runaway spending” on Medicaid and SNAP, education grants, scientific research, public media, and justice grants have no problem lighting $500,000–$1,000,000 per target on fire to keep Trump’s Caribbean reality show on the air. Grants initially valued at roughly $820 million for law enforcement, violence prevention, and victim services were defunded, even as Southern Spear burns through comparable sums in a matter of weeks.

Operation Southern Spear is a floating campaign ad paid for by everyone who pays federal taxes — including every teacher in Tucson, every nurse in Phoenix, and every working family in Yuma. And it’s all so Trump can grandstand on television while your money explodes over empty water.