“My people tell me this is not a good idea, but . . .” Trump said in the private meeting before raising the possibility of an invasion or regime change in Venezuela, according to officials.

Said one senior White House official on why Trump kept bringing it up: “Even when the staff says no, I think he holds out hope that he’ll find someone who thinks it’s a good idea.”…

“He would be like, ‘Do this, do that, slap a tariff on this country or that country, let’s blow everything up, let’s go to war,’ ” a former White House official said. “Then we would come back the next week and Trump would say, ‘What happened with X?’ And he would get mad that no one had done it. And it was a never-ending cycle.”