President Donald Trump said the US would run Venezuela until a transition could be organized, hours after a US operation captured leader Nicolás Maduro, ousting the strongman from power after months of mounting military and economic pressure on his regime.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said Saturday at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
Trump said the US administration of Venezuela would include deploying US oil companies to the country.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said.
Maduro and his wife were traveling via ship to New York to face an indictment on alleged drug trafficking, weapons and conspiracy charges, the US president said. He added that no Americans were killed and no US military equipment was lost in the mission to capture the Venezuelan leader.
The attack offered the latest dramatic demonstration of Trump’s willingness in his second term to deploy US military power to achieve his foreign policy aims with sweeping implications for both Venezuela, a nation with vast oil reserves, and the region.
Trump now faces a number of critical decisions over the country’s future. The president in a Fox News interview earlier Saturday said the administration was deciding on the next steps for Venezuela and pledged the US would be “involved in it very much.”
“We want to do liberty for the people we want to, you know, have a great relationship,” he added.
Trump urged supporters of Maduro still in the country to shift their allegiances, saying “if they stay loyal, the future’s really bad for them.” But Trump also demurred when asked if he would back opposition leader María Corina Machado, who is in an unknown location, to run the country, saying “we’re going to have to look at it.”
Machado on X said the Venezuelan opposition was ready to assume power, calling for Edmundo Gonzalez — her stand-in candidate in recent elections — to take office and urging the armed forces to recognize him.
