- - The surprising US plan in Venezuela comes with huge risks for Trump

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNNJanuary 4, 2026 at 11:00 PM

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President Donald Trump speaks with reporters while in flight on Air Force One on January 4, 2026. - Alex Brandon/AP

President Donald Trump’s defenders had it half right.

The US overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro isn’t an exact copy of the haunted regime change that gutted Iraq’s government and civil society.

The emerging White House strategy instead looks more like a regime decapitation that is evolving into coercion of Maduro’s left-behind lieutenants. The administration is demanding acquiescence to Trump’s dream of an obedient, MAGAfied Western Hemisphere.

The focal point of the effort is Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, the interim leader in Caracas since a spectacular US special forces operation spirited Maduro out of his bed and to New York, where he’ll appear in court Monday.

Trump declared Sunday evening that the US was running Venezuela through its pressure on Rodríguez, now the acting president. “Don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I’ll give you an answer, and it’ll be very controversial,” he told reporters. “It means we’re in charge. We’re in charge.”

The spectacle of an American president claiming to be “in charge” of a sovereign nation around 1,000 miles from the US mainland — even if it is not strictly true — shows just how fundamentally Trump has hardened the country’s posture to the rest of the world and reveals his ambition to wield expansive power. And Trump apparently feels emboldened by the Venezuela raid, telling reporters Sunday that Colombia is “very sick” and that “Mexico has to get their act together.”

Co-opting Maduro’s remnant regime would require less US blood and treasure than failed nation-building efforts in the post-9/11 wars. But that route brings its own complications and has uncertain odds given the volatile political landscape. And it could create an unexpected and immediate consequence of Maduro’s fall: a counterintuitive US turn away from Venezuela’s democracy movement.

Hurried efforts in Washington to piece together a viable path forward in Venezuela coincided Sunday with rising fury among Democrats over Trump’s failure to seek congressional authorization for what looked like an act of war. Early signs indicate that Republicans are standing firm behind a president they’ve rarely challenged. But it will take time to gauge whether yet another foreign policy adventure will widen splits in Trump’s MAGA movement.

What the policy is supposed to do

People view an apartment building on January 4, 2026, in La Guaira, Venezuela, that residents say was damaged during US military operations. - Jesus Vargas/Getty Images

The Trump administration is now wrestling with the complex aftermath of their boss’s headline-grabbing order of a daring military raid. It is walking a fine line in seeking to secure a stable source of authority in Caracas. And it’s looking to avoid the kind of purges of top officials that could bring the government crashing down and lead to civil strife, which could turn Trump’s latest triumph into a political disaster in a midterm election year in the United States.

Trump created a storm Saturday when he said the US would “run” Venezuela ahead of a political transition. He also fueled fears of 21st century imperialism by fixating on getting the US a piece of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on Sunday news shows to dispel comparisons to Iraq from what he called “clown-hour” analysts.

He said the US would maintain its “quarantine” oil embargo to force Venezuela’s remaining leaders to obey Trump’s orders. The freshly demonstrated might of the US military is also supposed to concentrate minds in the Venezuelan capital.

“We want drug trafficking to stop. We want no more gang members to come our way. We don’t want to see the Iranian and, by the way, Cuban presence in the past,” Rubio said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”

“We want the oil industry in that country not to go to the benefit of pirates and adversaries of the United States, but for the benefit of the people. … We insist on seeing that happen,” Rubio said.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, a key Trump ally, summed up the thrust of the strategy on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He told Dana Bash, “When the president said that the United States is going to be running Venezuela, it means that the new leaders of Venezuela need to meet our demands.”

In short, Trump’s plan for Venezuela is to coerce its acting president to become a vessel for his power inside her own country. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told CBS News on Saturday, “President Trump sets the terms. … (He) has shown American leadership and he will be able to dictate where we go next.”

Washington wants ‘deals’ in Caracas

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez holds a news conference in Caracas on March 10, 2025. - Ariana Cubillos/AP

The spectacular special forces smash-and-grab raid that captured Maduro and his wife looks in the immediate aftermath like one of the more successful CIA and US military attempts to shape the geopolitics of America’s backyard — a preoccupation of presidents for more than 200 years.

If Trump succeeds after years of Washington neglecting Latin America, he may turn an enemy into a pliant state and advance his effort to shape the Western Hemisphere into a region of pro-US powers. He might ease deprivation in the Venezuelan economy by getting oil revenues flowing; disrupt drug cartels; and drive out Russian and Chinese influences that threaten US national security.

Washington wants a partner in Caracas to do the deals at which Maduro balked. “We just could not work with him. He is not a person that had ever kept any of the deals he made,” Rubio told CBS.

The assumption that Rodríguez or another regime survivor will help the US is fine in theory. Outsiders are not privy to conversations and behind-the-scenes work from American diplomats and intelligence agencies with regime figures. Sources told CNN that Rodríguez had been identified as potentially providing more stable governance than Maduro.

Yet the vice president has been publicly scathing about Maduro’s ouster, and other key figures have vowed to stand behind the regime. Rodríguez may need to avoid any public show of betrayal to keep herself safe in Venezuela. But after portraying her as cooperative on Saturday, Trump issued a dark threat on Sunday. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” he told The Atlantic.

On Sunday evening, Rodríguez issued a more conciliatory statement offering an “agenda of cooperation” with the US.

Trump and several key members of his administration have warned that if Venezuelan officials don’t play ball, they could court another, bigger US attack. But their threats raise a key question: Can Washington really force Venezuelan leaders to comply through the leverage of an offshore naval armada, special forces raids, intelligence operations or the threat of air attacks?

Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO, told CNN on Sunday that it was impossible for the Trump administration to “run” Venezuela without committing the resources needed to properly govern it.

“This disconnect between the means that we have deployed and the goals that we have set is going to come and bite us in the back,” Daalder said.

It already looks like the US risks falling yet again into one of the recurring traps of its modern foreign policy — creating plans that seem sound in Washington but that dissolve on contact with the reality of a foreign nation.

Rodríguez might seem like a stabilizing force to US officials. As a former diplomat, she has good contacts abroad and in the oil industry.

But she’s long been a key face of the Maduro regime and that of his predecessor Hugo Chávez. There’s been no sign that she’s renounced the far-left ideology of the revolution. And Rodríguez herself may have limited room for maneuver​ or cooperation with the US in the snake pit of competing currents and strongmen that characterize the inner sanctums of the regime in Caracas.

“She doesn’t have the support among the various armed actors,” Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, a geopolitical risk consultant, told CNN’s Boris Sanchez on Sunday. “She’s going to have to straddle keeping the people who do have good contacts there, keeping them balanced with whatever instructions she is supposedly getting from DC.”

The acting president’s emerging importance to the administration means she risks becoming a fragile platform for Trump’s entire gamble in Venezuela.

“Delcy Rodríguez is a very powerful figure in her own right, handpicked by Maduro,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said on “State of the Union.”

“There’s really no explanation for how American interests are changed at all with a Rodríguez administration that right now seems to be intent on carrying through and carrying forward the policies of Nicolás Maduro,” Murphy said.

Even Cotton will wait and see. “I don’t think that we can count on Delcy Rodríguez to be friendly to the United States until she proves it,” he told CNN’s Bash.

The US turn away from Venezuela’s democrats

A woman holds a banner depicting Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Doral, Florida, on January 3, 2026. - Marco Bello/Reuters

Perhaps the most shocking moment in Trump’s Saturday news conference at Mar-a-Lago was the president’s dismissal of María Corina Machado. The Nobel Peace laureate is credited with masterminding the campaign of opposition candidate Edmundo González, who is regarded as the winner of last year’s election — a result Maduro refused to recognize.

The US government has consistently said that González is the rightful president of Venezuela. Many people assumed that any US ouster of Maduro would swiftly lead to González’s installation as president.

But Trump said Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”

The administration’s shift away from the democratic movement and engagement with regime remnants is a blow to Venezuelans hoping their long political torment would end.

Rubio, who has long supported Machado and democratic movements across Latin America, tried to square a politically uncomfortable circle. “There has to be a little realism here,” he told CBS.

“They’ve had this regime … in place for 15 or 16 years and everyone’s asking why 24 hours after Nicolás Maduro was arrested there isn’t an election scheduled for tomorrow. That’s absurd,” Rubio said.

Rubio argued that “these things take time” and that while he hoped to see Venezuela transition to a democracy, US national interests were the immediate concern.

This Trump administration pragmatism is fueling anger on Capitol Hill.

“My God, we’re the United States of America, right?” Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on “State of the Union.”

“We care — or at least we used to care — about democratic norms. We used to care about the idea that the people ought to have a little something to say about who governs them,” Himes said.

Trump is clearly rushing for Venezuelan oil — and he wants to dominate the Western Hemisphere. But in courting Maduro’s regime remnants, the US risks becoming complicit in the repression imposed by a government it has long reviled.

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