As Trump Attacks Maduro, Some See Bid for Florida Votes – The New York Times

“These Democrats like to call themselves progressive,” said Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican. “They’re regressive.”

In the United States, as the Democratic Party moves left, putting forward ambitious climate change proposals like the Green New Deal, Mr. Trump has branded party members as socialists.

He has employed similar language against Mr. Maduro.

“We condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair,” the president said in his State of the Union address this month.

But what might serve the president’s political goals in the United States might backfire when it comes to foreign policy. At least before the speech in Miami, some administration officials said they were concerned that politicizing the issue at home might actually prop up Mr. Maduro in Venezuela, where he is unpopular even among supporters of Hugo Chávez, the former Venezuelan president who founded the country’s socialist party.

And the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, is hardly a right-wing figure, backing social policies that would likely be considered left of center in the United States.

“The politics are not left and right,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas in Washington. “I don’t consider Maduro a leftist. I consider him an authoritarian. This is more about Florida politics.”

Mr. Trump was in Florida for Presidents’ Day weekend, and the speech at Florida International University marked a rare disruption of his familiar routine in Palm Beach, where he had spent the past two days shuttling between his private club, Mar-a-Lago, and the Trump International Golf Club.