President Donald Trump said on Wednesday evening that he expected the US would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves for years, and insisted that the interim government of the country — all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro — is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary”.
“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
Trump’s remarks came hours after administration officials said the US plans to effectively assume control of selling Venezuela’s oil indefinitely, part of a three-phase plan that secretary of state Marco Rubio outlined for members of Congress. While Republican lawmakers have been largely supportive of the administration’s actions, Democrats on Wednesday reiterated their warnings that the US was headed towards a protracted international intervention without clear legal authority.
During the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Trump did not give a precise time range for how long the US would remain Venezuela’s political overlord. Would it be three months? Six months? A year? Longer?
“I would say much longer,” the President replied.
Over the course of the interview, Trump addressed a wide range of topics, including the fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis, immigration, the Russia-Ukraine war, Greenland and Nato, his health and his plans for further White House renovations.
Trump did not answer questions about why he recognised Maduro’s Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader instead of backing María Corina Machado, the Opposition leader whose party led a successful election campaign against Maduro in 2024 and recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. He declined to comment when asked if he had spoken to Rodríguez.
“But Marco speaks to her all the time,” he said of the secretary of state. Trump added: “I will tell you that we are in constant communication with her and the administration.”
Trump also made no commitments about when elections would be held in Venezuela, which had a long democratic tradition from the late 1950s until Hugo Chavez took power in 1999.
Shortly after four New York Times reporters sat down to speak with him, Trump paused the interview to take a call from President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, days after Trump threatened to target the country because of its role as a cocaine hub.
As the call was connected, the President invited the Times reporters to remain in the Oval Office to hear the conversation with the Colombian President, on the condition that its contents remain off the record. He was joined in the room by Vice-President J.D. Vance and Rubio, both of whom left after the call concluded.
After speaking to Petro, Trump dictated to an aide a post for his social media account saying that the Colombian President had called “to explain the situation of drugs” coming out of rural cocaine mills in Colombia and that Trump had invited him to visit Washington.
Petro’s call — which ran about an hour — appeared to dissipate any immediate threat of US military action, and Trump indicated he believed that the decapitation of the Maduro regime had intimidated other leaders in the region to fall into line. During the lengthy conversation with The Times, Trump revelled in the success of the operation that broke into the heavily-fortified compound in Caracas and resulted in the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
He said he had tracked the training of the forces for the operation, down to the creation of a life-size replica of the compound at a military facility in Kentucky.
The President said that as the operation unfolded, he was worried it could end up being a “Jimmy Carter disaster. That destroyed his entire administration”. He was referring to the failed operation on April 24, 1980, to rescue 52 American hostages held in Iran. An American helicopter collided with an aircraft in the desert, a tragedy that haunted Carter’s legacy but led to the creation of a far more disciplined, well-trained special operations forces.
New York Times News Service
