US President Donald Trump in his comments so far appears to favour keeping the Maduro-less regime in place over Venezuela's opposition. Photo / Joe Raedle, AFP
It was, said Donald Trump, a “spectacular assault” and an “extraordinary military operation”.
And fair enough: judged solely as a display of military professionalism, the snatching of Nicolas Maduro deserves every superlative.
But what next? Who runs Venezuela now that Maduro has been extracted from his lair?
“We are going to be running it,” was Trump’s emphatic and deceptively simple answer at his Mar-a-Lago press conference. America would be in charge “until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”.
So there you have it. America will rule until some trustworthy Venezuelans might be found to govern their own country.
In reality, that enterprise would be anything but simple and Trump became ever more confused as he tried to explain his plan.
First things first: Venezuela is more than three times the size of the United Kingdom and has 28 million people.
If the Americans are really going to run a nation like this, they would need an occupying Army with hundreds of thousands of troops.
Asked whether he was prepared to put “boots on the ground”, Trump replied: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground, if we have to”, adding that American boots had certainly been on the ground when its soldiers were dragging Maduro from his hiding place.
Later, Trump appeared to contradict himself, saying that America’s “presence” in Venezuela would be limited to taking over the country’s vast oilfields, endowed with the world’s biggest reserves.
And exactly which American would be running Venezuela anyway?
The US President’s answer was to declare that the “people standing right behind me” would be in charge, motioning towards his loyal acolytes Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defence.
Will they really drop their day jobs running the foreign and defence policies of the world’s superpower in order to serve as co-viceroys of Venezuela? And how would they accomplish this without a vast army in their new domain?
In fairness, Trump was not asked those particular questions. Instead, he moved on to say that, in fact, Venezuela possessed a leader after all. Maduro’s loyal vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, had apparently held a long phone conversation with Rubio.
Trump thought that she might now be in charge. “She, I guess, is the president,” he said vaguely, before giving the impression that Rodriguez’s destiny was to be the loyal executor of American orders because she had “no choice”.
Installing a puppet leader to rule Venezuela would be a logical outcome of Trump’s operation.
That time-honoured arrangement would allow America to pull the strings from behind the scenes.
What is remarkable – even astounding – is that if Trump is to be believed, the chosen puppet president is none other than Maduro’s deputy.
Yet some reports suggest that Rodriguez has already fled Venezuela for the safety of Moscow, the destination of choice for deposed anti-American autocrats.
If so, will she now turn around and return to Caracas? Is Rodriguez willing to play the role that Trump seems to have allotted for her?
Nothing in her background suggests that she would be a pliant tool of the American overlords.
She began her ministerial career under Hugo Chavez, the radical socialist leader who paved Venezuela’s path to ruin.
After Maduro took over in 2013, Rodriguez spent three years as his loyal foreign minister, ardently defending his descent into dictatorship and the evisceration of her country’s economy and prosperity. She has been vice-president since 2018, showing no public signs of dissent or independent thinking.
Is Rodriguez going to continue her political career by loyally doing the bidding of the superpower she has spent years scorning and deriding?
The oddity is that a ready answer to the question of who would rule Venezuela after Maduro was available to Trump.
From Iraq to Libya, previous regime- change operations have foundered on the absence of a legitimate successor to the fallen tyrant.
But Venezuela has two legitimate successors. An opposition leader, Edmundo Gonzalez, won the presidential election in July 2024, leading Maduro to announce a fake result and hound his opponent into exile in Spain.
Another opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, was banned from running in that election. She won the Nobel Peace Prize last year and was, until recently, believed to be in hiding somewhere in Venezuela.
Either Gonzalez or Machado would be rightful inheritors of power.
Yet, judging by his words, Trump is not remotely interested in this outcome. He made no mention of Gonzalez.
As for Machado, the US President was dismissive, saying it would be “very tough for her to be the leader: she doesn’t have the support or the respect inside the country”.
Just hours earlier, this Nobel Laureate, whom Trump also described as a “nice person”, had released a statement backing the US operation and saying that Venezuela’s hour of freedom had arrived.
The US President then seemed to return the favour by tossing Machado aside.
Incredible though it sounds, America seems to prefer Maduro’s loyal deputy as the next president of Venezuela.
None of which makes any sense – unless what we are witnessing has all been carefully planned and agreed in advance.
Has the US cut a deal with Venezuela’s regime whereby Maduro is dispatched and the ruling elite are allowed to carry on, provided they give Washington a slice of their country’s oil wealth?
Have we witnessed not regime change but rather an American-enforced reshuffling of the ranks in Caracas, carried out with the co-operation of some of the powerful?
For now, that is the only conclusion that makes sense.
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