WASHINGTON- Senior Trump administration officials clarified their position on “governing” Venezuela after taking over its president, Nicolás Maduro, over the weekend, pressuring the government that remains in power there on Sunday to accept US demands on oil access and the fight against drugs, or else face further military action.
Their goal appears to be the establishment of a docile vassal state in Caracas that largely maintains the current government, led by Maduro for more than a decade, but eventually bows to Washington's whims after distancing itself from the United States for a quarter of a century.
It leaves little room for the rise of Venezuela's democratic opposition, which won the country's last national elections, according to the State Department, European capitals and international monitoring bodies.
President Trump and his top advisers said they would seek to work with Maduro's hand-picked vice president and current interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, to lead the country and its oil sector “until such time as we can make a safe, adequate and judicious transition,” without offering a time frame for the proposed elections.
Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem underscored the strategy in a series of interviews Sunday morning.
“If he doesn't do the right thing, he will pay a very high price, probably higher than Maduro's,” Trump told Atlantic magazine, referring to Rodríguez. “The reconstruction there and the regime change, whatever you want to call it, is better than what there is now. It can't be worse.”
Rubio said the U.S. naval quarantine of Venezuelan tankers would continue unless and until Rodriguez begins cooperating with the U.S. administration, referring to the blockade — and the fleet's persistent threat of additional military action off the coast of Venezuela — as “influence” over the remnants of Maduro's government.
“That's the kind of control the president is referring to when he says that,” Rubio told CBS News. “We continue with this quarantine and we hope to see that there will be changes, not only in the way the oil industry is managed for the benefit of the people, but also to stop drug trafficking.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN that he had been in contact with the administration since the Saturday night operation that removed Maduro and his wife from their bedroom and rushed them to New York to face criminal charges.
Trump's promise to “lead” the country, Cotton said, “means that Venezuela's new leaders must meet our demands.”
“Delcy Rodríguez and the other ministers in Venezuela now understand what the US military is capable of,” Cotton said, adding: “It is a fact that she and other accused and sanctioned individuals are in Venezuela. They have control of the military and security forces. We have to deal with that fact. But that does not make them legitimate leaders.”
“What we want is a future Venezuelan government that is pro-American, that contributes to stability, order and prosperity, not only in Venezuela but in our own backyard. That will probably have to include new elections,” Cotton said.
Whether Rodriguez will cooperate with the administration is an open question.
Trump said Saturday that she seemed ready to make “Venezuela great again” in a conversation with Rubio. But the interim president gave a speech hours later demanding Maduro's return and promising that Venezuela “will never again be a colony of any empire.”
The developments have worried senior figures in Venezuela's democratic opposition, led by María Corina Machado, last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.
At his news conference Saturday, Trump dismissed Machado, saying the revered opposition leader was “a very nice woman” but “doesn't have the respect within the country” to lead.
Elliott Abrams, Trump's special envoy to Venezuela during his first term, said he was skeptical that Rodríguez, an acolyte of Hugo Chávez and an outspoken supporter of Chavismo throughout the Maduro era, would betray the cause.
“The insult to Machado was strange, unfair and simply ignorant,” Abrams told The Times. “Who told her there was no respect for her?”
Maduro was booked in New York and flown overnight over the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, where he is in federal custody in a facility that has housed inmates such as Sean “Diddy” Combs, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried.
He is expected to be arraigned on federal charges of narcoterrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices as soon as Monday.
Although few in Washington lamented Maduro's ouster, Democratic lawmakers criticized the operation as another act of overthrowing a foreign government by a Republican president that may have violated international law.
“The invasion of Venezuela has nothing to do with American security. Venezuela is not a threat to the security of the United States,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “This is about enriching Trump's oil industry and his friends on Wall Street. Trump's foreign policy (Middle East, Russia, Venezuela) is fundamentally corrupt.”
At their press conference on Saturday, and in subsequent interviews, Trump and Rubio said that targeting Venezuela was in part to reestablish American dominance in the Western Hemisphere, reaffirming President Monroe's philosophy as China and Russia work to improve their presence in the region. The Trump administration's national security strategy, released last month, anticipated a renewed focus on Latin America after the region faced neglect by Washington for decades.
Trump did not make clear whether his military actions in the region would end in Caracas, a former U.S. adversary, or whether he is willing to turn the U.S. military against U.S. allies.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Trump suggested that “individual countries” would be addressed on a case-by-case basis. On Saturday, he reiterated his threat to the president of Colombia, a major non-NATO ally, to “watch his ass” over an ongoing dispute over Bogotá's anti-drug cooperation.
On Sunday morning, the United Nations Security Council held an urgent meeting to discuss the legality of the US operation in Venezuela.
It was not Russia or China (permanent council members and long-time competitors) that called the session, nor France, whose government has questioned whether the operation violated international law, but Colombia, a non-permanent member that joined the council less than a week ago.
