Trump’s Ties to Venezuela’s Elite Sowed Nostalgia for Golden Age

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President Donald Trump’s years-long crusade to dislodge Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, a mission he finally accomplished this month, was billed as a way to thwart drug-trafficking, check migration and revive Venezuela’s oil industry. But behind the president’s preoccupation with the South American nation is also the story of lifelong personal and business relationships with Venezuelan elites in New York and Miami.

From this tiny privileged class whom he got to know as a military academy student and jet-setting businessman, Trump would have absorbed memories of a country where petrodollars built a clutch of glittering ...