To add to his list of questionable Twitter remarks, President Donald Trump casually tweeted the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Venezuela.

In the tweet posted on Jan. 30, Trump recognized the leader of the National Assembly of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, rejecting Nicolás Maduro just two weeks after the current president began another six-year term.

Shortly after, Guaidó swore himself in as president in front of a crowd of his supporters calling for the overthrow of Maduro. This contradicts the pretext of defending democracy and freedom — there is no justification for this type of meddling in Venezuela.

Just imagine if Hillary Clinton declared herself president at the Women’s March in January because U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May tweeted that she does not recognize Trump as president. This would undoubtedly cause civil unrest, and that is exactly what the United States is supporting in Venezuela.

Spinning the narrative that Maduro is a “brutal dictator” who won a “disputed election” after all the talks of meddling here in the United States is ironic even for Trump. Venezuela has had 25 elections in the past 20 years. The reason why the latest elections in Venezuela are being called contested or disputed, according to Guaidó, is because of allegedly illegitimate elections.

The glaring problem in Guaidó’s claim is that he boycotted the elections. When you boycott an election, you hand your opponent a victory. It is hard to claim that these elections were rigged against Guaidó since he refused to participate in them.

To claim that we must stop dictators abroad because of “freedom” does not hold much weight, due to the fact that the Trump administration tends to side with dictators across the world, as seen recently with Saudi Arabia. The final ridiculous justification for intervention in Venezuela is that it is a humanitarian effort.

Previously, the United States was hesitant to impose oil sanctions on Venezuela because it was known that the sanctions would affect ordinary people the most. However, those concerns are being ignored now.

Former Secretary of the U.N. Human Rights Council Alfred-Maurice de Zayas has called the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela illegal under international law because they were not approved by the U.N. Security Council, but rather by a unilateral blockade on a single country, according to The Independent.

The sanctions could be considered crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. De Zayas even said that “sanctions kill” because food and medicine shortages affect the poorest people in society.

National Security Adviser John Bolton has been on an unprecedented public relations campaign promoting regime change in Venezuela due to “illegitimate elections,” according to Time.

However, Bolton recently came clean in a Fox News interview, saying that in Venezuela, “It’ll make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil. Trump has come out on more than one occasion regarding other countries, touting that we should have gone in and “we should have kept the oil.” That raised some eyebrows.

Venezuela currently has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and the United States happens to be one of the leading oil producers in the world.

The problem is the U.S. reserves are only 10 percent of what Venezuela has, according to United Press International. It’s safe to say if Venezuela’s leading export was bananas, the Trump administration would not be discussing a military coup to instill a more business-friendly regime.

There are also more recent international conflicts involving the United States. The countries involved like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Russia and Libya also happen to have the largest oil reserves in the world.

To pretend this is a humanitarian effort for democracy and not a U.S. oil business conflict is naive. Merriam-Webster defines a coup d’état as “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics, especially: the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”

Whether or not one agrees about the intentions of U.S. intervention in Venezuela, a coup d’état by attempting to force a regime change is exactly what is happening. Economic sabotage and endorsing an unelected leader as the new head of state are nothing but exercises of force in international politics.