To ‘run’ Venezuela, Trump presses existing regime to kneel

WASHINGTON— Senior officials in the Trump administration have clarified their stance on “governing” Venezuela after seizing on president Nicolás Maduro over the weekend and pressuring the regime that remains in power to accede to U.S. demands on oil access and drug enforcement or face further military action.

Their aim appears to be to establish a flexible vassal state in Caracas that has largely kept the current Maduro-led government in place for more than a decade, but finally bowed to Washington’s whims after estranged from the United States for a quarter-century.

This leaves little room for the rise of the democratic opposition that won the last national elections in Venezuela, according to the State Department, European capitals and international monitoring bodies.

Trump and his top aides have said they will work with Maduro’s hand-picked vice president and current interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, to govern the country and its oil industry “until we can have a safe, appropriate and reasonable transition,” without offering any time frame for the proposed elections.

Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem highlighted the strategy in a series of interviews Sunday morning.

“If he doesn’t do the right thing, he’s going to pay a huge price, probably a bigger price than Maduro,” Trump told the Atlantic, referring to Rodríguez. “Reconstruction and regime change there, whatever you want to call it, is better than what you have now. It can’t be worse.”

Rubio said the US maritime quarantine on Venezuelan oil tankers will continue unless Rodríguez begins to cooperate with the US administration, describing the blockade and the threat of additional military action from the fleet off the Venezuelan coast as “leverage” on the remnants of the Maduro regime.

“That’s the kind of control the president was pointing to when he said that,” Rubio told CBS News. “We are continuing the lockdown and expect to see changes not only in the management of the oil industry for the benefit of the public, but also in stopping drug trafficking.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN that he has been in contact with the administration since the Saturday night operation that kidnapped Maduro and his wife from their bedroom and took them to New York to face criminal charges.

Trump’s promise to “govern” the country “means Venezuela’s new leaders must meet our demands,” Cotton said.

“Delcy Rodríguez and other ministers in Venezuela now understand what the US military is capable of,” Cotton said. “It is a fact that he and the other accused and sanctioned people are in Venezuela. They are in control of the military and security forces. We need to face this fact. But that does not make them legitimate leaders.”

“What we want is a pro-American Venezuelan government in the future that will contribute to stability, order and prosperity not only in Venezuela but in our backyard. This probably needs to include new elections,” Cotton added.

Whether Rodríguez will cooperate with the management is an open question.

Trump said in a call with Rubio on Saturday that he appeared ready to “make Venezuela great again.” But the interim president gave a speech hours later demanding Maduro’s return and vowing that Venezuela “will never again be a colony of any empire.”

The developments have worried senior figures in Venezuela’s democratic opposition, led by last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado and opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who won the 2024 presidential election that was eventually stolen by Maduro.

At Saturday’s press conference, Trump rejected Machado, saying the respected opposition leader was “a very fine woman” but “didn’t have the respect to lead within the country.”

Elliott Abrams, Trump’s first-term special envoy to Venezuela, said he suspected Rodríguez, an aide to Hugo Chavez and an open supporter of Chavismo during the Maduro era, would betray the cause.

“The insult against Machado was bizarre, unfair and completely ignorant,” Abrams told The Times. “Who said he wasn’t respected?”

Maduro was booked in New York and flown at night via the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn; where he is held in federal custody at an infamous facility that has housed other famous inmates like Sean “Diddy” Combs, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bernie Madoff, and Sam Bankman-Fried.

The suspect is expected to be arraigned as soon as Monday on federal charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.

While few in Washington complained about Maduro’s ouster, Democratic lawmakers criticized the operation as another act of regime change by a Republican president that could violate international law.

“The invasion of Venezuela has nothing to do with American security. Venezuela is not a security threat to the United States,” said Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “This is about making Trump’s oil industry and friends on Wall Street rich. Trump’s foreign policy (Middle East, Russia, Venezuela) is fundamentally corrupt.”

Trump and Rubio said at press conferences on Saturday and in subsequent interviews that targeting Venezuela is in part about restoring U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere, reasserting President James Monroe’s philosophy as China and Russia seek to strengthen their presence in the region. The Trump administration’s national security strategy, released last month, heralded a renewed focus on Latin America after the region faced decades of neglect from Washington.

Trump has left it unclear whether his military operations in the region will culminate in Caracas, a long-time US foe, or whether he intends to turn US armed forces into America’s allies.

In an interview with the Atlantic, Trump suggested “individual countries” would be handled on a case-by-case basis. On Saturday, he repeated his threat to the president of Colombia, a key non-NATO ally, to “watch his ass” over an ongoing dispute over Bogota’s cooperation on drug enforcement.

On Sunday morning, the United Nations Security Council was called to an emergency meeting to discuss the legality of the US operation in Venezuela.

It was Colombia, a non-permanent member that joined the council less than a week ago, that called the session, not Russia or China, the council’s permanent members and long-time rivals, or France, whose government questioned whether the operation violated international law.