President Donald Trump said Saturday that he wouldn’t shy away from putting American troops on the ground in Venezuela, as he announced at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that U.S. officials would run the country indefinitely.
‘They always say, boots on the ground, oh it’s so – we’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high level actually,’ Trump told reporters. ‘We don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly.’
When asked who would be running Venezuela, he motioned toward Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who flanked him.
‘Well, it’s largely going to be run for a period of time by the people standing right behind me,’ Trump said. ‘We’re gonna be running it.’
The president brushed off the idea that there would be a large-scale military operation in Venezuela, suggesting that most Americans on the ground would be from the oil and gas industry.
Trump explained, ‘We’re going to have a presence in Venezuela in terms of oil.’
‘You may need something, not very much,’ he answered when pressed on boots on the ground.
The president’s comments came after a stunning and successful U.S. military operation that resulted in the capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia in Caracas in the early hours of Saturday morning.
President Donald Trump (center) suggested that Secretary of State Marco Rubio (left) and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (right) would be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future
The commander-in-chief monitored the mission from his Palm Beach, Florida, private club, where he’s been staying for the holiday break, hosting a large New Year’s Eve party and golfing at his nearby West Palm Beach club.
Leading up to the attack, Vice President JD Vance joined the president in Florida Friday afternoon at the president’s golf club, after missing this year’s New Year’s festivities, though he didn’t appear alongside the president at the mid-day Saturday press conference.
With Rubio now tackling Venezuela, that puts another job on the Secretary of State’s plate, who also has been serving as Trump’s National Security Advisor after the ousting of Michael Waltz over Signalgate.
Waltz is now serving as the ambassador to the United Nations.
Rubio also served as the Acting Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was mostly dismantled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency at the beginning of the second Trump administration.
The president also named Rubio as acting Archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Trump argued that the U.S. needed to run the country so that another Maduro-type leader didn’t pop up in his place.
‘We don’t want to be involved with having someone else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,’ the president explained.
Maduro’s 2024 election was disputed, with the U.S. and other Western nations not recognizing it.
The Venezuelan president and his wife were captured by the US Army’s elite Delta Force unit and flown by helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima warship.
Maduro will be taken to New York City to face charges in Manhattan Federal Court.
