Trump Declares U.S. Will Run Venezuela After Regime Change

After bombing Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in the middle of the night, President Trump has declared that he will “run the country” in the meantime.

“We’re going to run the country until such time, as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said at a press conference on Saturday. “So we don’t wanna be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we have for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country.”

Trump on Venezuela: "We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition" pic.twitter.com/hNwViQPZk4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 3, 2026

Trump also dedicated a significant portion of the presser to discussing the future of U.S. oil companies in Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves on the planet. “As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long time,” he said. “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 … and start making money.”

Trump: "The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust…We're going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure, and start making money." pic.twitter.com/tQtrNmQetW

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) January 3, 2026

Could you imagine if another country sent a team of special agents to kidnap President Trump and his wife Melania from the White House while they slept? And then went on air the next morning saying they’d plug and play someone else as president?

That someone else could very well be María Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner who has already displayed her eagerness to serve Trump and the U.S. agenda. For now, Trump hasn’t yet signed off.