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U.S. President Donald Trump said a U.S. military strike succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, both accused by the United States of cocaine trafficking in recently unsealed indictments.
At a January 3 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said that the United States “lead the country until we can make a safe, appropriate and wise transition.”
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Trump also said Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn in as interim president. The US president said Rodríguez had spoken to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and was “basically willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
However, Rodríguez criticized the US military action as a “brutal aggression” on state television and called for Maduro’s immediate release.
Maduro has led Venezuela since 2013, succeeding an ideological ally, Hugo Chavez, who has been in power since 1999. Under both men, relations between the United States and Venezuela have become strained over foreign policy, oil and human rights.
In July 2024, Maduro declared victory after an election described as fraudulent by international observers. The country’s opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, reportedly received around 70 percent of the vote.
Tensions between Trump and Maduro escalated in September after the U.S. government began attacking ships off the coast of Venezuela, killing more than 100 people, in what Trump described as an attempt to thwart drug trafficking.
When a reporter asked Trump at the Mar-a-Lago media event if he had spoken to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado after Maduro’s arrest, Trump said Machado “doesn’t have the support or respect in the country.”
Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his fight for democracy in Venezuela, had a 72% approval rating among Venezuelans in a March 2025 poll by ClearPath Strategies.
Trump has stated, without evidence, that the role of the United States in govern Venezuela “It won’t cost us anything” because American oil companies would invest in new infrastructure in the oil-rich country. “It’s going to bring in a lot of money,” he said.
PolitiFact fact-checked Trump and Rubio’s statements during the press conference.
Rubio: “It’s just not the kind of mission you can pre-notify [Congress about] because it endangers the mission.
The Trump administration’s lack of warning to Congress flies in the face of law and precedent.
Rubio said members of Congress were not informed in advance of U.S. actions against Venezuela. Trump said the administration was concerned about the possibility of Congress leaking information about the administration’s decision to capture Maduro.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, hailed the operation as “decisive action.”
But congressional Democrats said Congress should have known in advance. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said: “Maduro is terrible. But Trump put the U.S. military in danger with this unauthorized attack.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said Trump and his cabinet have not communicated their intentions for regime change in Venezuela, so “we do not understand how the administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the United States, and we have no information on a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation.”
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war. The last time this happened was during World War II.
Since then, presidents have typically launched military action using the powers granted to them by the Constitution as commander in chief, without a formal declaration of war.
Since Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, the president must report to Congress within 48 hours of the introduction of the U.S. military into hostilities and terminate the use of the military within 60 days, unless Congress approves. If approval is not granted and the President considers it an emergency, an additional 30 days is granted to terminate operations.
In recent decades, congressional consent has typically been granted through authorization for the use of military force. But such authorization has not been granted since operations in Venezuela. Kaine and other lawmakers have passed legislation — so far unsuccessfully — to prohibit the use of federal funds for any use of military force in or against Venezuela without congressional authorization.
The Trump administration has reduced prior notification requirements. Under federal law, eight bipartisan members of Congress must be informed in advance of particularly sensitive covert actions. In June 2025, the administration informed Republicans, but not Democrats, of an upcoming U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Regarding the Venezuela operation, it appears that no legislator was informed in advance.
Trump: Each strike by an American boat off Venezuela saves 25,000 people
Trump administration struck at least 32 ships, killing around 115 people, in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September. Trump has previously said the boats were carrying drugs en route to the United States, and during the press conference he said the drugs on board each boat would kill “on average 25,000 people.”
However, drug and Venezuela experts told PolitiFact that the country plays a minor role in drug trafficking arriving in the United States. And the administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on board the boats. This lack of information makes it unclear how many lethal doses of drugs could have been destroyed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 73,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States between May 2024 and April 2025. This means that drugs on 32 boats, which Trump claims killed 800,000 people, would be responsible for nearly 11 times the number of overdose deaths in the United States in one year.
Trump: “Maduro has sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty Tren de Aragua prison gang, to terrorize American communities across the country. »
There is no evidence that Maduro sent members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to the United States.
The US Justice Department’s indictment against Maduro does not mention Trump’s statement.
An April report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council contradicted Trump’s statements about ties between Maduro and Tren de Aragua.
“Even if Venezuela’s permissive environment allows [Tren de Aragua, or TDA] to function, the Maduro regime likely does not have a policy of cooperation with the TDA and does not direct TDA movements and operations toward the United States,” the report said.
Trump: Venezuela “stole” US oil in the past.
[We probably need an italics statement here about the verdict?]
In the early 20th century, Juan Vicente Gomez, Venezuela’s longtime hard-line leader, granted foreign companies almost exclusive access to the country’s oil resources.
In 1975, after decades of seeking greater control of its oil resourcesVenezuela nationalizes its oil industry.
“Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen U.S. oil and land is baseless,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told the Washington Post. “The United States was much more interested in Venezuela becoming a supplier of oil – relatively cheap oil – rather than in a collapse of production in Venezuela,” Rodríguez added.
As a result, the change was “relatively uncontroversial” at the time, he said.
U.S. oil companies including Exxon and Mobil, as well as Gulf, now Chevron, lost about $5 billion each in assets and were compensated up to $1 billion each, according to reporting by the Washington Post.
But Rodríguez said the companies didn’t push for additional compensation at the time, in part because no forum existed to do so.
Generally speaking, experts told PolitiFact that invading a country to take over its oil would be both illegal and unethical. In 2016, Trump questioned how the United States should have taken Iraq’s oil when it invaded to remove its then-leader, Saddam Hussein.
Experts pointed to the annex to the 1907 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War, which states that “private property…shall be respected.” [and] cannot be confiscated”. It also specifies that “looting is strictly prohibited”.
“If ‘to the victors the spoils’ were a legal doctrine, then we would have believed that [Saddam Hussein] should have been able to keep Kuwait City after its invasion [Kuwait]” in 1990, terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told PolitiFact in 2016. “But we considered this – rightly so – to be an act of aggression under the United Nations Charter. »
