President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States will “very soon” begin targeting Venezuelan drug trafficking networks by land, escalating a military campaign that has so far focused on striking suspected cartel boats off the Caribbean coast.

Speaking during a Thanksgiving Day call with U.S. service members, Trump said drug traffickers have already shifted tactics in response to his administration’s naval offensive, and warned that his next phase will hit them where it hurts.

“In recent weeks, you’ve been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers, of which there are many,” Trump told the troops. “You’ve probably noticed that now people aren’t wanting to be delivering by sea anymore.”

According to the president, cartel-linked maritime activity has fallen 85% since September, when the U.S. began authorizing strikes on drug-carrying vessels. The administration has carried out at least 21 fatal maritime strikes to date.

“From sending their poisons into the United States — where they kill hundreds of thousands of people a year — but we’re going to take care of that situation,” Trump said. “We’re already doing a lot… It’s about 85% stopped by sea.”

Now, he says, the battlefront is shifting.

“We’ll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon,” Trump declared.

Trump has openly mulled land-based operations for weeks. In late October, he announced he would notify Congress of planned attacks on cartel targets inside Venezuela, a procedural step the administration previously sidestepped.

“We’re going to go [to Congress]. I don’t see any loss in going — no reason not to,” Trump told reporters during a White House event touting a sweeping federal crackdown that has resulted in roughly 3,200 cartel-related arrests in the past month.

“You know they will always complain, ‘Oh, we should have gone.’ So we’re going to definitely.”

The president then turned to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth beside him and said, “I’d like to just tell you, ‘Let’s go.’ We’ll go. We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do, and I think they’re going to probably like it — except for the radical left lunatics.”

Administration officials have not detailed what “land-based” operations will entail or how such action would intersect with Venezuelan sovereignty under Nicolás Maduro, who has vowed to resist any U.S. military incursion.

Since early fall, the administration has maintained that targeting cartel vessels in the Caribbean is necessary to choke off the routes that feed America’s fentanyl and cocaine crisis. Trump has repeatedly cited cartel-linked “poisons” as killing “hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)