Trump Has Tried This — and Failed — in Venezuela Before

We’ve been here before when it comes to the Trump administration’s attempts to force a political transition in Venezuela.

In 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration attempted to engineer such a change through pressure, spectacle, and public declarations of inevitability. Military defections were said to be imminent. Regime insiders were allegedly ready to flip. Juan Guaidó was presented as the rightful president-in-waiting. And then — nothing happened. The armed forces held. The institutions stayed put. The promised transition never materialized.

Six years later, the second Trump administration is dusting off the same playbook.

Once again, Donald Trump is announcing outcomes before the material and political conditions exist to make them real. He claims that Nicolás Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is “ready to work with us.” Within hours, she publicly repudiated Trump. Trump says US oil companies are prepared to invest billions of dollars in Venezuela. Politico interviewed the executives themselves that same day, who said — politely but clearly — that this was not true. Trump projects inevitability; the people who would actually have to carry it out contradict him in real time.

This is not a Venezuela problem. It is Trump’s pattern of governance — and a recurring feature of US imperial overreach.

Trump has long treated declaration as leverage, acting as if forceful assertion alone can bend states, markets, and societies to his will. But foreign governments — particularly those rooted in mass political movements and nationalist projects forged in conflict with US power — do not collapse because an American president announces that they will.

While the American public may have grown accustomed to Trump’s sweeping and often false proclamations, what makes this episode more dangerous is that Trump has crossed yet another legal line. As the New Yorker has reported, Trump’s Venezuela operation was not merely controversial; it was brazenly illegal under international law.

Condemnation followed not only from Maduro-allied governments such as China, Russia, and Cuba, but from European leaders and leading legal scholars firmly embedded in the Western liberal order. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that Trump’s actions “constitute a dangerous precedent” and violate the UN Charter. Norway’s foreign minister stated plainly that the US intervention was “not in accordance with international law.” Slovakia’s prime minister described it as further evidence of the breakdown of the post–World War II international order.

In defending his military intervention at a Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump reached for an old ghost: the failed Jimmy Carter–era Iran hostage rescue. But that episode was more than forty-five years ago. Much more recently, the United States has demonstrated that it can carry out precise, surgical operations. No serious observer doubts America’s technical capacity to capture or kill a single individual. The problem for US empire is not operational capability — it is the persistent inability to translate force into durable political transformation.

The United States has shown time and again that it cannot impose an orderly political transition through coercion or violence. Toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 was possible. Capturing Saddam Hussein was possible. Constructing a stable political order afterward was not. Nothing about Trump’s current approach suggests that the American ruling class has internalized this lesson, despite Trump’s campaign trail promises to end the “forever wars.”

Instead, Trump’s latest quixotic foray into Venezuela may strengthen the very forces he claims to oppose. As a recent Associated Press report noted, Venezuela’s ruling class has repeatedly demonstrated that it knows how to close ranks when confronted with external pressure. Whatever internal rivalries or fractures exist within the governing coalition, US intervention has historically disciplined those divisions rather than exploited them. By violating international law and framing regime change as a unilateral American project tied explicitly to oil interests, Trump consolidates Venezuelan, Latin American, and global opposition to US imperial power — while reinforcing the Venezuelan government’s narrative of sovereignty under siege.

At the same time, in classic Trumpian fashion, the president has undermined the Venezuelan opposition forces he claims to support. The same Associated Press report described how Trump publicly embarrassed María Corina Machado — the opposition’s most high-profile leader — by claiming she lacked the popularity and legitimacy to lead the country, stunning and confusing opposition figures. Once again, Trumpian spectacle displaced imperial strategy.

Trump’s oil rhetoric further exposes the underlying logic at work. Venezuela’s energy sector is devastated after years of US sanctions. Its infrastructure is decayed. Any serious reinvestment would require years, massive financial risk, and clear political guarantees. Yet Trump speaks as if billions are already lined up. When Politico asked the executives directly, it became clear that no such guarantees or concrete plans were in place.

These are not the actions of a competent imperial strategist. They reflect Trump in his purest form: confidence without capacity. It is a lesson Juan Guaidó learned the hard way when, assured by US officials that the Venezuelan military would soon back him, he stood outside the La Carlota military base waiting for a coup that never came.

From falsely claiming Delcy Rodríguez was prepared to cooperate, to undermining Washington’s closest opposition ally, to announcing corporate investments that appear illusory, Trump’s imperial incompetence compounds itself. Given the administration’s erratic handling of high-profile legal cases at home, it is also fair to question the capacity of Trump’s Department of Justice to successfully prosecute a criminal case against Maduro — particularly when US law enforcement officials themselves have acknowledged that Venezuela is not a major direct source of drugs entering the United States compared to other trafficking routes.

Perhaps Trump does not care about any of this. Perhaps the raid was intended to distract from the two forces that continue to haunt him: Jeffrey Epstein and the economy. Perhaps it was encouraged by Marco Rubio, eager to notch a regime-change victory during his tenure at the State Department. Or perhaps Trump simply wanted his own Bin Laden–raid moment, unwilling to let Obama retain that singular historical marker. Maybe it’s a combination of all three.

Regardless of Trump’s motives, for Venezuelans this moment carries a deeper sense of déjà vu. This is not the first time the United States has attempted to force a political transition from the outside.

The Bolivarian Revolution has been tested many times: the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez; the 2002–2003 state-owned oil company strike and economic sabotage; the 2004 recall referendum; the 2005 opposition boycott of the National Assembly; the 2014–2016 oil price collapse; US sanctions since 2017; the false presidency of Juan Guaidó; and the Trump administration’s failed effort to spur a military coup in 2019–2020. It survived them all.

One reason the Cuban Revolution has endured decades of siege is the existence of dense, community- and neighborhood-based organizations — the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution — embedded in everyday life. Chávez understood this. In a 2012 televised address now remembered as the Golpe de Timón, Chávez called for a deepening of the revolutionary process by transferring real power away from ministries and into organized popular power, especially through the comunas. These were meant to govern, to produce, and to sustain Venezuela’s revolutionary project even under blockade or leadership loss.

Whether Venezuela’s communal structures have reached that level remains an open question. But history suggests the durability of the Bolivarian project. Like other moments before it, Trump’s capture of Maduro is another test of the Bolivarian Revolution — and of the deeper social structure Chávez and millions of Venezuelans sought to build. In the days and weeks to come, we will see whether the leaders and protagonists of the Bolivarian Revolution heeded one of Chávez’s final declarations, delivered just months before his death: “Comuna o nada!” — “Commune or nothing.”