President Donald Trump said Saturday that the United States will “run” Venezuela following the capture of former President Nicolas Maduro.
The president’s comments came during an 11 a.m. press conference in Florida, hours after he announced the American attack on Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and subsequent apprehension of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
MADURO ‘CAPTURED’ AND TAKEN OUT OF VENEZUELA AFTER US MILITARY OPERATION IN CARACAS: TRUMP
“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in,” the president, who entered office heavily criticizing U.S. nation-building efforts in the Middle East, told reporters. “So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
Furthermore, Trump confirmed that he will bring in American energy companies to take over Venezuela’s oil industry, which he claimed Saturday “has been a total bust.”
“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,” he continued, later noting that the U.S. would, at least, partially finance the ongoing and future operations within Venezuela by selling oil produced from the country.
A WELCOME END TO THE MADURO REGIME
The president closed his opening remarks by reiterating that U.S. forces will maintain their deployment in the region and that he retains “all military options until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied.”
“All political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro can happen to them, and it will happen to them if they aren’t just fair, even to their people,” he closed.
Trump’s allies have cheered the military operation, arguing specifically that the president’s actions were not equivalent to the nation-building efforts carried out by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the early 21st century.
But during the question and answer session following his remarks, the president seemed to undermine that exact argument.
“That’s when we had different presidents, but with me, that’s not true. With me, we’ve had a perfect rack record of winning. We win a lot,” he told reporters when asked about U.S. failures in the Middle East. “With me, you’ve had a lot of victory. You’ve had only victories. You’ve had no losses.”
Trump also seemed to signal that the U.S. plans to carry out military operations against cartels in Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba.
Trump had previously accused Columbian President Gustavo Petro of running cocaine factories, and on Saturday, he said he’d “stick by [his] first statement” and that Petro “does have to watch his ass.”
“I think Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about, because Cuba is a failing nation right now, a very badly failing nation, and we want to help the people,” the president stated in response to a question on the island nation.
Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis for Defense Priorities, cautioned Saturday that, based on Trump’s press conference, “it is not clear the U.S. has a plan for how to manage a political transition in the country,” and that the U.S. could be entrenched in Venezuela for significantly longer than anticipated.
“This affair sounds very similar to the plans for Iraq, with the United States removing a leader they deemed a threat to U.S. interests and then planning to temporarily govern the country,” she wrote in a statement. “We all know how that turned out. There are many ways such a plan could go wrong: infighting in what’s left of Maduro’s regime or collapse into chaos.”
“The bottom line is that U.S. interests were not at risk and Americans are not safer as a result of this morning’s military action,” Kavanagh concluded.
You can watch Trump’s comments in full below.
