The Trump administration launched a military attack in Venezuela on Saturday morning, leading to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flying them to the United States to face charges. President Donald Trump said the U.S. will temporarily “run” Venezuela.
“We’re there now, but we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place,” Trump told reporters from Mar-a-Lago in Florida. “So we’re going to stay until such time as we’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place.”
Trump did not provide details on how the U.S. would govern the country.
Trump said he didn’t want a new leader to take over following Maduro’s capture who would result in “the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
“We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind,” Trump said.
Trump said a group of people would step in to run Venezuela, including Secretary of State Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He also said U.S. oil companies would have military back up as they move into the region.
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he said. “And we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high level. Actually, we’re not afraid of it, we’re we don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
The U.S. president also said the U.S. will sell seized oil assets and said he expects the money will go to both Venezuela as well as the U.S.
“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country,” Trump said.
Trump also said U.S. oil companies would head to Venezuela to operate in their oil reserves, and the military is set to attack again if necessary.
“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, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” he said.
