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President Donald Trump said he does not expect the U.S. to go to war with Venezuela but defended recent military strikes in the Caribbean, accusing Nicolás Maduro’s regime of flooding the U.S. with criminals and agreeing that Maduro’s days as president are numbered.
The U.S. military has carried out more than a dozen strikes on vessels allegedly carrying drugs in international waters near Venezuela, killing dozens of suspected narco-terrorists, while the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group have been deployed to the U.S. Southern Command region. The escalations have raised questions about whether the U.S. may be lining up to topple the Venezuelan president.
In an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” host Norah O’Donnell asked Trump about the repositioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford to the Caribbean and whether the U.S. is going to war with Venezuela.
“I doubt it, I don’t think so, but they’ve been treating us very badly, not only on drugs. They’ve dumped hundreds of thousands of people into a country that… we didn’t want – people from prisons,” Trump said. “They emptied their prisons into our country. They also, if you take a look, they emptied their mental institutions and their insane asylum into the United States of America because Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of our country.”
O’Donnell pressed Trump about the scale of the military operation, asking if it was more about stopping narcotics or removing Maduro.
Trump said the situation was about many things, reiterating that Venezuela allowed its prisons to empty into the U.S.
“To me, that would be almost number one because we have other countries like Mexico has been very bad to us in terms of drugs. Okay. Very bad,” he said. “We have a closed border right now… So think of this: zero people coming into our country through our southern border.”
When O’Donnell asked Trump if Maduro’s days as president of Venezuela are numbered, Trump responded: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”
Later, O’Donnell asked Trump whether there was any truth to reports of possible land strikes in Venezuela, which the president would not address.
“I’m not saying it’s true or untrue,” he said, adding that he would not talk to a reporter about plans to strike another country.
Trump said Friday he was not considering strikes inside Venezuela, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House both pushed back against reports citing unnamed sources claiming any such plan was underway.
A reporter asked Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Saturday at a gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) defense ministers in Kuala Lumpur whether the United States was planning to strike inside Venezuela.
“Appreciate the question. But, of course, we would not share any amount of operational details about what may or may not happen,” Hegseth told reporters Saturday.
Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.
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