President Donald Trump called for the US to “run” Venezuela on Saturday, shortly after the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro amid US strikes on the country’s capital of Caracas. The attack is a major escalation in Trump’s months-long pressure campaign against Venezuela and pushes the US into uncertain territory legally, politically, and militarily. Here’s what we know.
What just happened?
US forces launched attacks against an unspecified number of targets in Caracas, Venezuela, overnight, and successfully located and captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple has since been flown out of the country, Trump said in an early morning social media post, and will be taken by ship to face criminal charges in the US. Much is still unclear, but Trump claims US troops are thought to have been killed in the attack.
Maduro has been under indictment in the US since March 2020, when the Southern District of New York charged him with narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and corruption, along with 14 others. On Saturday, the Justice Department unsealed a new superseding indictment that brought additional charges against Maduro and also charged Flores and other members of Maduro’s family, and FBI agents reportedly worked with US special forces to detain Maduro; the chair of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, described it on Saturday as an “unprecedented operation” conducted “in unison with our intelligence agency partners and law enforcement teammates.”
Under Trump, the US has also described Maduro as the head of a cartel called Cartel de los Soles, which it designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in November. As my colleague Josh Keating has explained, though, that designation stretches the definitions of both “terrorist” and “organization”: “Cartel de los Soles” is a term used in Venezuela to refer generally to criminality by government and military officials in Venezuela, but not any one unified organization.
What’s the context?
This is the culmination, for now, of a US military effort that began with US strikes on alleged drug boats this September. The strikes, which are believed to have killed at least 115 people, targeted alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific, including those affiliated with the Venezuelan cartel Tren de Aragua.
At the same time as those strikes were ongoing, the US staged a substantial military buildup in the Caribbean — far more than would be needed for relatively limited anti-drug operations, including dispatching the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier group, B-52 bombers, and special operations helicopters generally used for ground operations. Trump also authorized the CIA to take covert action within Venezuela, and the US further stepped up its anti-regime efforts in December with the seizure of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.
However, Trump’s relationship to Venezuela substantially predates tensions this summer: Early in 2025, he attempted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act against Tren de Aragua, threatened tariffs on countries buying oil or gas from Venezuela, and canceled (and then renewed) an oil export license allowing Chevron to operate in Venezuela.
More significantly, Trump has threatened military action in Venezuela long before this year. Early in his first term, in response to a 2017 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Venezuela, he warned that “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary.” Around that time, he also reportedly asked advisers about options for invading the country.
That experience set the tone for the rest of his first-term policy toward Venezuela, including a US-led effort to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president and force out Maduro, which ultimately collapsed. Now, more than eight years after his first threat of military force, Trump has pulled the metaphorical trigger.
Is this a regime-change operation?
It’s too early to say for sure, but it’s starting to sound like one.
For now, while Maduro himself has been removed, his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is still in place, as is the rest of the Maduro government. Trump, however, repeatedly said in a Saturday press conference that the US intends to “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition” — presumably to a more US-friendly government.
In the same address, Trump also indicated US oil interests in Venezuela were a consideration, and warned that more US action could be forthcoming: “We’re going to run [the country], essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust,” he said. “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.”
Venezuelan opposition leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado also sounded a similar note on Saturday, releasing a statement titled “The hour of freedom has arrived.”
If so, however, what such an operation would look like is extremely unclear. The US history of regime change efforts, both in Latin America and more recently in the Middle East, is fraught, to say the least. And despite Machado’s anti-Maduro activism, there’s no clear government-in-waiting that the Trump administration could help into power: Trump told reporters Saturday that “I think it would be very tough for [Machado] to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
Lastly, it’s still possible the Trump administration simply won’t follow through: As of Saturday, there was no evidence of a sustained US presence in Venezuela itself, though the US military buildup in the Caribbean is still in place.
The post How Trump went from boat strikes to regime change in Venezuela appeared first on Vox.
