President Donald Trump early Saturday morning removed the greatest source of instability in the Western Hemisphere: Nicolás Maduro. In a dramatic raid, U.S. special forces snatched the Venezuelan strongman and his wife, Cilia Flores, and brought both to American soil.
By afternoon, Trump made clear that the intervention in Venezuela wouldn’t end there. “We are going to run the country,” he said in a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. “We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind.” And he promised an eventual transfer of power to the Venezuelan people, saying the U.S. would govern “until such a time as a proper transition can take place.”
Maduro, who stole Venezuela’s last two elections, was driving the country to ruin. His misrule was responsible for creating a massive refugee crisis. Recent studies estimate that eight million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014. China has also lured Venezuela into a debt trap, propping up a failed economy with tens of billions of dollars of loans since the 2000s. Venezuela has also done smaller but similar deals with Russia’s state-owned energy companies. Maduro’s regime has pursued defense alliances with U.S. adversaries such as Iran and Cuba.
All of that said, Trump’s ostensible casus belli for regime change in Venezuela is narco trafficking. That builds on an argument Trump has made since his first term. The Justice Department in 2020 indicted Maduro and other top regime officials for an alleged 20-year conspiracy to flood America with cocaine. Attorney General Pam Bondi invoked that case on Saturday when she posted on X that Maduro and Flores “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” They will be charged in Manhattan.
