President Donald Trump admitted in a new interview that he expects his imperialist experiment in Venezuela to last for years.
After capturing President Nicolás Maduro in a shock special forces raid on Saturday and declaring himself “in charge” of the South American country, Trump announced this week that Venezuela is providing the U.S. with 30 to 50 million barrels of oil.
The president said he plans to sell the oil and personally “control” the money, which he will hold in bank accounts outside the U.S. Treasury—in other words in offshore accounts, sources told Lisa Desjardins of PBS News Hour.
As reporters, lawmakers, and the general public struggled to understand what all of this means in practice, reporters from The New York Times asked the president on Wednesday how long he plans to remain Venezuela’s political overlord.
“Only time will tell,” he replied.
The reporters then pushed him to give a more precise answer, asking if it would be three months, six months, a year, or longer.
“I would say much longer,” Trump said.
He refused to say when elections would be held in Venezuela, which had a strong democratic tradition from the late 1950s until Hugo Chavez took power in 1999.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The president’s inner circle was surprised when the president announced Saturday during a press conference following the attack on Maduro’s heavily fortified compound that the U.S. would be “running” Venezuela, author Michael Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles during the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head.
Afterward, members of the administration—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio—tried to downplay the U.S.’s involvement in the politically volatile country, which is home to 30 million people.
Trump, however, has continued to thwart any efforts to soften his rhetoric. Asked Monday by NBC News who was in charge of Venezuela, the U.S. president replied, “Me.”
The administration is allowing Maduro’s allies in government to remain in power—for now—under the threat of further military intervention if they don’t do what the U.S. says. Trump told the Times that the interim government is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary.”
The president didn’t answer the paper’s questions about why he decided to recognize Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader instead of backing opposition leader María Corina Machado or her surrogate Edmundo Gonzàlez, who won the 2024 presidential election.
In the middle of the interview, Trump stopped to take a call from Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, who apparently explained the actions he has taken against drug kingpins in his country.
Trump had previously threatened to invade Colombia next, back when the administration’s official line was that deposing Maduro was just a drug enforcement operation, not a scheme to pillage oil.
Following the call, which lasted about an hour, Trump dictated a social media post to an aide saying that Petro had “explain[ed] the situation of drugs and other disagreements that we have had,” and that the U.S president had invited his Colombian counterpart to the White House.
The post Billionaire Trump Makes Staggering Admission About His Invasion Plot appeared first on The Daily Beast.
