From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

President Trump continues ratcheting up the pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro,

with the latest being a reported drone strike on an alleged drug loading facility on the coast.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with

the Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleague on the editorial page, America's

columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady. After dozens of strikes on alleged drugboats in the Caribbean,

President Trump is now openly discussing what news reports say was a CIA

strike inside Venezuela. News reports saying this was on a dock where American officials think

that Trenda-Iragua, Venezuelan gang, had drugs and was preparing possibly to put them onto boats. Nobody was killed in the strike.

The dock was not manned at the time. Let's listen to President Trump first at Mar-a-Lago, discussing

this with reporters.

There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.

They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all

the boats and now we hit the area. It's the implementation area. That's where they implement. And that is

no longer around. Mary, what do you make of this? And how big of an escalation is this a strike

on Venezuelan territory, reportedly, versus

these strikes on drug boats, which have been in the high seas?

The modus operandi here, the idea of the theory behind what Donald Trump is trying to do continues

the same, which is Trump is trying to tell Maduro that he has the capacity to basically make him

leave power through various forms of kinetic action. And he started with bombing the boats at sea.

If this is, in fact, one of the CIA's actions, I think he's trying to show Maduro that he can actually operate inside of Venezuela without dropping bombs, by the way, that the CIA is active.

He said in the past the CIA is active in Venezuela and that they can carry out these kinds of actions against his government. And I think the idea

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