Trump Declares U.S. Will Run Venezuela After Regime Change

After bombing Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in the middle of the night, President Trump has declared that he will “run the country” in the meantime.

“We’re going to run the country until such time, as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said at a press conference on Saturday. “So we don’t wanna be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we have for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country.”

Trump also dedicated a significant portion of the presser to discussing the future of U.S. oil companies in Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves on the planet. “As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long time,” 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 … and start making money.”

Could you imagine if another country sent a team of special agents to kidnap President Trump and his wife Melania from the White House while they slept? And then went on air the next morning saying they’d plug and play someone else as president?

That someone else could very well be María Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner who has already displayed her eagerness to serve Trump and the U.S. agenda. For now, Trump hasn’t yet signed off.

A suspicious new user on the prediction market Polymarket just made bank on the Trump administration’s military strikes on Venezuela.

The account, which was created on December 27, has only bet on two things: the U.S. invading Venezuela, and its president, Nicolás Maduro, being forced out of leadership by January 31. The user bet $35,000 when the market estimated the probability of intervention in Venezuela at only 6 percent.

Thanks to their very lucky bets, they made over $400,000 in less than a day.

The timing of the account’s bets—and its creation—is certainly suspicious. According to reports, U.S. military officials initially discussed bombing Venezuela on Christmas Day, but reversed course after deciding to pursue airstrikes against ISIS in Nigeria instead. In the days following Christmas, officials held off on the attacks due to the weather.

Trump announced his strikes on Venezuela, and his abduction of Maduro and his wife, early Saturday morning. While he did a good job at keeping the attack from being leaked to the media, it seems someone on his team had no problem leaking the news to Polymarket—and making themselves quite a bit richer in the process.

After the U.S. bombed Venezuela in the middle of the night and abducted its president, Nicolas Maduro, President Donald Trump warned that more attacks could be on the way in the region.

Trump hinted at a future conflict with Mexico in particular in an interview with Fox News Saturday morning.

“Your vice president, JD Vance, said that the message is pretty clear: that drug trafficking must stop. So was this operation a message that you’re sending to Mexico, to Claudia Sheinbaum, the president there?” Fox’s Griff Jenkins asked.

“Well, it wasn’t meant to be, we’re very friendly with her, she’s a good woman,” Trump began. “But the cartels are running Mexico. She’s not running Mexico.”

“We could be politically correct and be nice and say, ‘Oh, yes, she is.’ No, no. She’s very, you know, she’s very frightened of the cartels. They’re running Mexico. And I’ve asked her numerous times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’ ... Something is gonna have to be done with Mexico.”

Trump also told Fox that a “second wave” of strikes could take place in Venezuela and warned Maduro’s supporters will have a “bad future” if they stay loyal to him.

Just hours after President Donald Trump bombed Venezuela and abducted its leader, Nicolás Maduro, he began talking about the Latin American country’s oil industry.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, with 303 billion barrels worth of crude, or about a fifth of global reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And that fact has clearly been at the top of Trump’s mind.

Appearing in a Fox News interview Saturday morning, Trump was asked what he sees for the “future of Venezuela’s oil industry.”

“Well, I see that we’re going to be very strongly involved in it, that’s all. I mean, what can I say? We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.”

This wasn’t the first time that Trump has admitted his war with Venezuela is at least partly motivated by oil. Earlier last month, the U.S. military seized two Venezuelan oil tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump replied, “we’re going to keep it,” then added: “Maybe we will sell it, maybe we will keep it. Maybe we’ll use it in the Strategic Reserves. We’re keeping the ships also.”

President Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday that the United States had bombed Venezuela, the most oil-rich country in Latin America, and abducted its president, who is now being flown back to the United States.

“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” he wrote on Truth Social at 4:21 a.m. “This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement.” He said he will give more details on the attack in a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida at 11 a.m.

Maduro is expected to be flown to New York, where he will face charges in Manhattan federal court.

“Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted in the Southern District of New York,” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on X Saturday morning. “Nicolas Maduro has been charged with Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States. They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

Trump did so without the approval of Congress, which is supposed to sign off on all acts of war.

“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change,” Democratic Senator Andy Kim said after the bombing. “I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress. Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”

Shortly after the U.S. attack, the Venezuelan government accused Washington of an “extremely serious military aggression.”

“Venezuela rejects, repudiates, and denounces before the international community the extremely serious military aggression perpetrated by the current government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and people,” the Venezuelan government said.