Trump has been accused of going easy on authoritarian leaders — here's why the White House says Venezuela is different

President Donald Trump has been criticized for taking a soft approach to authoritarian leaders in other countries.
But his administration has made aggressive moves to censure the Venezuelan government, adding more sanctions on Monday.
The approach to Venezuela is motivated by the severity of the crisis facing the country, Trump administration officials said.

The Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions on Venezuela on Monday, further limiting government officials there from selling debt and other assets "

And in a March phone call, Trump reportedly congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his reelection, despite guidance from his national-security team not do so.

Some leaders have been reluctant to offer Putin similar compliments, given the state's control of much of the media in Russia as well as restrictions on opposition candidates. Election monitors said the most recent contest was "overly controlled" and "lacked genuine competition." (President Barack Obama congratulated Putin after the latter's 2012 election victory, though his administration also publicly expressed concerns about that vote.)

A few days later, when asked whether Russia's election was free and fair, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "We're focused on our elections. We don't get to dictate how other countries operate."

"What we do know is Putin has been elected in their country, and that's not something that we can dictate to them, how they operate," she added at the time. "We can only focus on the freeness and the fairness of our elections."

"The effect on a close ally of the United States, Colombia, is enormous and is threatening to drag that country into the abyss from an economic standpoint as well," the official said. "So this is a true catastrophe in every sense of the word, within the region."

The US is not the only country that has reproved Maduro and his government.

The Lima Group — made up of 14 countries in Latin America — rebuked the Maduro government over the election when it was announced in January and said on Monday that it did not recognize Sunday's vote as legitimate.

The US has reportedly offered lawyers and policy experts to help other Latin American countries draft similar measures.

Venezuela experts have warned that sanctions themselves are unlikely to force Maduro out and cautioned that harsher sanctions — such as ones against the oil industry on which the country is heavily reliant — could only cause additional pain for the Venezuelans.

"If you added up the 12 nations in the Lima Group and the United States together, it's about 95% of the hemisphere," another senior administration official said on Monday. "So everybody is truly together on this, and it's a unity in the hemisphere, frankly, that is almost unprecedented in approaching a crisis of democracy."

Trump has been accused of going easy on authoritarian leaders — here's why the White House says Venezuela is different

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