American forces’ surgical capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, carried out in a daring raid shortly after 1 a.m. local time today, had been planned and rehearsed for months. Informants monitored the first couple’s movements, more than 150 aircraft provided cover starting late last night, missile strikes on military installations knocked out air defenses, and low-flying helicopters landed Delta Force soldiers in the center of Caracas. U.S forces engaged in a shoot-out with Venezuelan guards, then apprehended the dictator in his lavish presidential palace just as he sought refuge in a steel safe room. But a few hours later, President Donald Trump almost eclipsed the dramatic operation’s success when, from behind a podium on a makeshift stage in a gold-clad room at Mar-a-Lago, he unveiled another surprise: America now runs Venezuela, he said, and wants the country’s oil reserves to foot the bill.
Maduro and his wife were taken to the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship usually used to carry troops and cargo ashore. This evening, they arrived in New York facing charges of narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and other weapons-related offenses. Trump posted a photo of the deposed leader in U.S. custody: Maduro dressed in a gray sweatsuit, his cuffed hands clenching a bottle of water, his eyes covered, his ears covered by sound-blocking muffs. It was a far cry from some of the recent images of a defiant Maduro dancing onstage in front of supporters, vowing to remain in power, and singing John Lennon’s peace anthem Imagine at a rally.
Maduro’s capture—a high-risk, high-yield military operation—offered Trump a moment of triumph in his months-long quest to topple the Latin American despot. But even some of Trump’s closest allies told us that they were unnerved by the president’s brash, no-plan-for-tomorrow approach to ousting a sovereign nation’s leader. Trump provided few details as he declared that a group of officials who were standing near him at the news conference, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, would “run” the country until a “safe, proper, and judicious transition” could take place. It was a stunning announcement for a president who campaigned on the perils of nation building. And Trump made no mention of wanting to spread democracy or allowing Venezuela’s opposition, which the United States has recognized as the legitimate winners of 2024’s election, to take power.
Rather, in his lengthy press conference, the only Venezuelan politician Trump spoke about other than Maduro was Maduro’s own vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. She was sworn in as interim president soon after Maduro’s departure but maintains that Maduro is the legitimate president and condemned his arrest. Trump said she had already told Rubio that the new government in Caracas would do whatever the U.S. wanted—something she denied. In summary, Trump said, the U.S. is looking to “make Venezuela great again—very simple.”
The vagaries of the administration’s plans stood out in contrast with the precision of Maduro’s capture. They also invited questions about how deeply the U.S. would become involved in Venezuela’s future, as well as about the legality of the operation. Trump didn’t try to get congressional authorization for war or even notify it of today’s operation in advance, citing the Hill’s propensity to leak. (Lawmakers were briefed after the operation was complete.) Trump also did not address questions about the implications of removing a sitting president for Russian President Vladimir Putin as he seeks to control Ukraine, or for China’s Xi Jinping as he sizes up the possibility of taking Taiwan. “If China declared Taiwan a rogue province, could they go after its leaders?” Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked us in an interview. “If Russia declares Zelensky a criminal, could Putin extract him from Ukraine and that’d be okay?”
Trump dismissed the idea that deposing Maduro contradicts his “America First” mantra, which has been widely interpreted as noninterventionist. “It is” America First, Trump insisted today, “because we want to surround ourselves with good neighbors. We want to surround ourselves with stability.” He even embraced the possibility of putting “boots on the ground” after years of preferring to use strikes from afar to achieve his foreign-policy goals. He dubbed his new approach, without much apparent enthusiasm, the “Donroe Doctrine,” an awkward mashup of his own name and that of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which aimed to cement U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
At the root of it all, Trump made clear, is oil, something that his critics had long claimed while the administration portrayed the months-long pressure campaign as principally about stopping the drug trade. Today, Trump didn’t hide his intent. The U.S. wants to revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry, with U.S. oil companies leading the charge, even though Venezuelan crude is heavy and hard to refine by international standards. That revenue, he added, would go to the Venezuelan people, and to the U.S., for what the administration has claimed is recompense for Venezuela’s nationalization of the industry years ago. Until recently, Trump had seemed open to a deal with Maduro that would achieve the same goal. But overnight, as explosions echoed over the hills of Caracas, Maduro’s time ran out.
“Nicolás Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this,” Rubio said at the Mar-a-Lago press conference. “He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man.”
So the Trump administration removed him by force. But a former senior U.S. official noted: “This was the easy part. Let’s see what they do next.”
The CIA put operatives in Venezuela in August after Trump ordered covert operations. Those operatives studied what Maduro wore, what he ate, where he traveled, what pets he kept. Delta Force trained for his capture using a mock safe house. For weeks, U.S. aircraft approached Venezuelan airspace but stopped short of crossing the line, instead seeking insight into how the Venezuelan military might respond to an attack, defense officials said.
A core group of senior officials—Rubio; Hegseth; General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; and Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff—led the planning with Trump, one official told us.
“They finally—about two weeks ago—gave Maduro a final warning. It was through official channels, in a way that communicated the seriousness of it,” a person familiar with the planning told us. “There was no ambiguity,” this person said. “This was Maduro’s last chance for an off-ramp.”
By early last month, the U.S. was ready to move in when the weather was right. That moment came as Friday turned to Saturday, when the skies over Venezuela’s seaside capital cleared. Trump gave the order to proceed at 10:46 p.m. EST.
The U.S. conducted strikes to disable Venezuela’s air defenses, Caine said. Across the hills of Caracas, Venezuelans could see the assault unfold. They felt the ground shake. Then the city lost communications and power. As U.S. forces approached, they came under heavy fire, which caused injuries among U.S. forces and likely deaths among Venezuelans, defense officials told us. A U.S. helicopter was damaged.
“There was a lot of gunfire,” Trump said during his press conference; at least two U.S. troops were hospitalized. Minutes later, at 2:01 a.m. local time, U.S. forces entered Maduro’s compound and found the Venezuelan leader and his wife sleeping. Trump said the longtime tyrant ran to open a heavy door leading to a safe room but couldn’t manage it in time. The couple surrendered, were loaded into helicopters, and were out of Venezuelan airspace by 3:29 a.m.
Military officials stressed that the weather was a guiding factor in the timing, but an administration official suggested that political undercurrents were also at play. It was “now or never,” this person said. A number of officials told us that in recent weeks, the window for Trump to remove Maduro had seemed to be closing. Bipartisan support in the U.S. for any kind of military action in Venezuela was diminishing, and officials worried that the longer Maduro remained in power, the more entrenched he would become.
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Trump is “kicking off the year with a win,” this administration official said. Another former senior administration official who remains in frequent contact with the White House acknowledged that Trump needed a victory amid tough headlines and slumping poll numbers. Trump is fond of symbolic dates, as well, and originally had eyed the period around Christmas for the assault. Instead, on Christmas Day, Trump ordered a different set of military strikes—on alleged Islamic State targets in Nigeria. Trump has grown fond of these one-off, splashy shows of force, counting last year’s bombing of Iranian nuclear sites as one of his triumphs. Trump said there had been a plan for a second phase of the Venezuelan operation, but that it wasn’t needed—at least not yet.
The Trump administration never laid out a consistent case for Congress or the public in advance of today’s operation as to why Maduro had to go. Much of the pressure campaign in recent months focused on lethal strikes against alleged drug boats, even though little of the drugs that flow through Venezuela are destined for the U.S.
At the Mar-a-Lago press conference, Rubio emphasized that the arrest and extraction of Maduro and his wife was a “law enforcement” operation. “At its core, this was an arrest of two indicted fugitives of American justice, and the Department of War supported the Department of Justice in that job,” Rubio said, using Trump’s title for the Department of Defense.
Conspicuously absent from the press conference was the top U.S. law-enforcement official, whose department’s indictment of Maduro provided the legal justification for the operation. Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that Maduro and his wife “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” and she later shared a link to a newly unsealed 25-page indictment filed by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. (It was in many respects similar to an indictment issued toward the end of Trump’s first term, with a few new charges and the addition of Maduro’s wife and his son.) The indictment alleges that Maduro and his associates used Venezuelan state and military resources to facilitate and profit from drug trafficking over two decades.
An administration official told us that the arrests of Maduro and his wife were made by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which ultimately reports to the attorney general. The operation, conducted by the Department of Defense and the DEA, was made at the request of the Justice Department.
More than a dozen FBI and DEA personnel were seen disembarking from a plane with Maduro at a New York Air National Guard Base this evening. The FBI declined to comment on the agency’s role in the operation, and the DEA did not respond to requests for comment.
In recent weeks, Trump and other administration officials asserted that the U.S. had a claim on Venezuela’s oil reserves—an apparent reference to a 2007 decision by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, to nationalize various foreign-owned oil projects. The U.S. oil giants ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips were kicked out of the country after they refused to allow Venezuela to acquire majority stakes in their Venezuelan operations. “The stolen oil must be returned to the United States,” Vice President J. D. Vance said in a post on X today.
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Venezuela has the largest estimated oil reserves in the world—accounting for about 17 percent of global reserves, or more than 300 billion barrels, according to the Oil & Gas Journal. But Venezuela produces only 1 million barrels of oil per day. Its potential is largely unrealized because of poor infrastructure, mismanagement, limited resources, and U.S. sanctions. What little is produced has to be sold on the black market for Venezuela to profit. About 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil, which is of low quality, currently goes to China, at least 15 percent goes to the U.S. via a remaining joint venture with Chevron, and the remainder goes to Cuba.
Trump today talked about the potential to revitalize Venezuela’s oil sector and the role that U.S. companies would play—something the country’s opposition has emphasized as a critical part of its economic plans.
“The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago. “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, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
This would be a massive, costly, and time-consuming undertaking.
“Venezuela could produce 4 million barrels instead of the 1 million barrels it produces per day, but it would take maybe a little bit less than a decade and $100 billion in total over that period to get it to 4 million barrels,” Francisco Monaldi, an expert in Latin American energy policy at Rice University, told us. “Very few countries can do something like that.”
How much opposition Venezuela’s military put up to defend Maduro is not clear. But the low number of U.S. casualties suggests that Washington likely had at least some support from within the Venezuelan military, helping make the operation a success, former and current officials told us. “An action like this would not be possible without significant help or at least intentional ‘self-restraint’ from the local military,” a Pentagon adviser and Special Forces veteran told us.
The military’s longer-term response to Maduro’s ouster will likely be key to the fate of the nation. Recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan does not bode well for U.S. efforts at nation building, but much will depend on the choices that Venezuelan military leaders make about where their loyalties lie. The big question, the former Pentagon official said, is whether the U.S. can stave off the unrest and regional instability that could result from the sudden power vacuum left behind when Maduro was removed after nearly 13 years in power.
The role of Venezuela’s democratic opposition is also unknown. María Corina Machado, who secretly left Venezuela last month after a year in hiding to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, said in a statement today that “the time has come for Popular Sovereignty and National Sovereignty to govern our country. We are going to restore order, free political prisoners, build an exceptional nation, and bring our children home.”
She urged Venezuelans inside the country to “be ready to take action.” Trump, however, said today at Mar-a-Lago that Machado couldn’t govern the country, because she doesn’t have “the support or the respect” of the Venezuelan people. Carlos Giménez, a Republican representative from South Florida, told us he assesses Machado’s capabilities differently, calling her “formidable.” He said that he spoke with her on Saturday, and described her as “upbeat that Maduro is no longer there, but realistic that there’s more work to be done, and that this is just the beginning.” A spokesperson for Machado declined to comment, and other representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.
For now, Venezuelans don’t know who is running their country, even as Venezuelan news networks broadcast images of celebratory flag-waving in the streets. Armed civilian militias, known as colectivos, were patrolling Caracas. “There is a lot of confusion,” a Venezuelan activist in Caracas told us. “The government officials have called their followers to the streets, but nobody—except the colectivos—have answered.”
Simon Shuster, Ashley Parker, and Gisela Salim-Peyer contributed reporting for this article.
