It was a warm autumn afternoon in the Oval Office, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was helping President Trump steer the administration’s discussions about Venezuela to a concrete military phase.
The two men sat with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to consider how to go beyond conducting lethal boat strikes in waters near Venezuela to moving harder against Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader.
Diplomacy was over, Mr. Trump said. In front of the other men, he called Richard Grenell, a special envoy who had been meeting throughout the year with Mr. Maduro. The president praised Mr. Grenell’s efforts but said it was time for military action, according to an official with knowledge of the meeting.
That meeting on Oct. 2 was critical for Mr. Rubio in pushing the administration to meet his yearslong goal of ousting Mr. Maduro. The offensive culminated early Saturday, when Mr. Rubio, the president and the Pentagon officials, ensconced in a makeshift situation room in the Trump mansion in Florida, watched on video as Army Delta Force soldiers moved in to seize Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a bunker in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.
The two Venezuelans were spirited out of the country in shackles aboard helicopters and eventually taken to a detention center in New York, to be tried on charges of cocaine trafficking. At least 80 people were killed in the operation, a senior Venezuelan official said.
Decapitating the Maduro government might have been the easy step. Now comes a much riskier proposition for Mr. Rubio, who is also the White House national security adviser and the national archivist: Mr. Trump says the United States is “in charge” of the impoverished country of 30 million people, and his top diplomat is expected to run it.
That includes getting Mr. Maduro’s leftist allies, who are still in power, to give Mr. Trump what he calls “total access” to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world.
“This is the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’” Miguel Tinker Salas, a Venezuelan American historian at Pomona College, said on a podcast on Saturday soon after Mr. Trump announced the capture of Mr. Maduro. “This is Marco Rubio, now the viceroy of Venezuela.”
It is the trickiest high-wire act of Mr. Rubio’s career, which included 14 years representing Florida in the Senate before his current post.
“Governing Venezuela will be challenging for Rubio, especially since he is doing it through the existing power structure,” Mr. Tinker Salas said in an interview. He added that governance of Venezuela was much harder than “the spectacle of empire” that Mr. Trump was performing.
The long shadow of what many people call failed U.S. regime-change efforts — including in Iraq and Afghanistan — looms over Venezuela. If the administration ends up in a conventional war or counterinsurgency in the country, where an anti-American government has held power all of this century, then Mr. Rubio will draw the ire of many American citizens. That includes those on the right who suspect he is a “neocon” who promotes ideological U.S. military interventions overseas.
If the administration is seen as pillaging Venezuela’s natural resources and keeping the population impoverished, then that will fuel anger against the United States not just in Venezuela, but across Latin America.
And a poor outcome could jeopardize Mr. Rubio’s chances at higher office — he ran for president against Mr. Trump in 2016, and could try for that office again.
“It’s obviously high risk,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, who worked closely with Mr. Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’m not sure the American people are up for another nation-building project based on going after oil reserves.”
Some lawmakers have criticized Mr. Rubio and Mr. Hegseth for telling them in congressional briefings last month that the administration had no plans to remove Mr. Maduro from power or attack Venezuela.
On Monday, Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser and an important shaper of hard-line Latin America policy, said Mr. Trump had assigned Mr. Rubio to take the lead in overseeing Venezuela.
When asked about Mr. Rubio’s role for this article, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that he was among a team of six top aides executing Venezuela policy. They include Mr. Miller, Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Caine, Vice President JD Vance and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director. “He is a team player, and everyone loves working with him in the West Wing,” she said.
No cabinet member is more steeped in policy on Latin America than Mr. Rubio, a Spanish speaker and the son of Cuban immigrants who has long advocated toppling or crippling the leftist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, its ally.
On Sunday, when asked on NBC News whether he was running Venezuela, Mr. Rubio got into a testy exchange, saying people were “fixating” on that.
“Here’s the bottom line on it,” he said. “We expect to see changes in Venezuela, changes of all kinds, long term, short term.”
Asked on CBS News how he planned to run the country, Mr. Rubio focused on the use of military force to keep up a “quarantine” of Venezuela’s oil exports.
He said the U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean Sea and the quasi blockade of oil tankers going to and from Venezuela would put pressure on Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s vice president under Mr. Maduro and now the acting leader, to accede to the wishes of the Trump administration.
“That remains in place, and that’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes that not just further the national interest of the United States, which is No. 1, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” Mr. Rubio said.
Robin Lauren Derby, a historian of Latin America at the University of California at Los Angeles, said Mr. Trump could have lifted the sanctions he imposed on Venezuela in his first term to try to reach Mr. Rubio’s “better future.”
“This is a deeply troubling situation,” she said. “The U.S. ‘running’ Venezuela would be very costly and deeply unpopular there.”
Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday night that he might reopen the embassy in Caracas. Mr. Maduro ordered American diplomats to leave the country in 2019 after Mr. Trump recognized a young opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the rightful president, in an effort to oust Mr. Maduro that ultimately failed.
On Monday, a State Department official said the agency was “making preparations” to reopen the embassy if Mr. Trump decided to do that.
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, told CNN on Sunday that Mr. Rubio was in touch with officials in Mr. Maduro’s government as well as with the opposition movement.
The opposition is led by María Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October. Her ally, Edmundo González, ran against Mr. Maduro for president in 2024 and won by a wide margin, according to international election experts and Biden administration officials. Mr. González fled to Spain after Mr. Maduro held on to power.
Mr. Rubio spoke with the two opposition leaders on his second day in office, Jan. 22, 2025, calling Mr. González the “rightful president” and reaffirming “the United States’ support for the restoration of democracy” in Venezuela, the State Department said in a summary of the call.
In 2024, Mr. Rubio and seven other Republican senators wrote a formal letter of support for Ms. Machado’s nomination for the Nobel Prize. Her getting the prize frustrated Mr. Trump, who had campaigned for it.
Last fall, as Mr. Rubio was planning military actions against Venezuela, he recommended to Mr. Trump that they back Ms. Rodríguez for the leadership role if Mr. Maduro were no longer in power. He argued that Ms. Machado had little support in the military, a view reflected in a recent classified C.I.A. analysis. Mr. Trump later said she lacked “respect” in the country.
And Mr. Rubio has not talked publicly in recent months about restoring democracy anytime soon to Venezuela — a goal that Mr. Trump has said little about and that many of his supporters reject as suspect “neocon” ideology.
“This outcome is likely unsettling for Rubio, given his longstanding record as one of Machado’s strongest allies in Washington,” said Francesca Emanuele, a researcher on Latin America at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
“Domestically, one of Rubio’s central challenges is managing pressure from Florida’s Republican base and from lawmakers from his own state,” she said, “many of whom expected a U.S.-military-led regime-change operation that would install an opposition government headed by María Corina Machado and Edmundo González.”
“Instead, at least for now, Machado and González have been sidelined,” she added.
Mr. Rubio told NBC News on Sunday that Ms. Machado was “fantastic” but that “unfortunately, the vast majority of the opposition is no longer present inside of Venezuela.” Ms. Machado left secretly by boat last month.
At a news conference in Miami on Saturday, after the raid in Caracas, three Cuban American Republican members of Congress were quick to praise Mr. Rubio. One of them, Representative Carlos Gimenez, even said the success of the raid was “due to the leadership of Marco Rubio.”
The congressman quickly corrected himself and credited Mr. Trump.
Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Patricia Mazzei from Doral, Fla.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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