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Trump Says the U.S. Will “Run” Venezuela

This is what unchecked power looks like...

Olga Lautman Jan 3

Fire at Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela’s largest military complex, is seen from a distance after a series of explosions in Caracas on January 3, 2026. STR/AFP via Getty Images

All of this is so insane that I had to stop and figure out how to even write this post, and in doing so, realized that, like many others, I am left with far more questions than actual insight. And let’s be clear, because facts still matter even when everything else has gone off the rails. Nicolás Maduro is a criminal, an illegitimate ruler who stole elections, brutalized his own population, and for years functioned as a corrupt proxy of Russia until the Kremlin, as it so often does, abandoned yet another client state when the costs outweighed the benefits. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute, and what should deeply alarm everyone, is what followed.

This is not even regime change, and that is, in fact, the most revealing part. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, a core loyalist of the regime, has already been sworn in and remains openly defiant, publicly calling for Maduro’s release and vowing that Venezuela will not become a colony of the United States, meaning the power structure Maduro built remains intact. Yet Trump stood at his presser and told the American people that the United States “will run Venezuela,” openly describing a de facto takeover while simultaneously leaving the same authoritarian apparatus in place, which raises an unavoidable question: What does “running the country” actually mean when the regime loyalists remain in control?

And what does this actually mean in practice when the newly sworn-in president of Venezuela remains defiant, and the regime apparatus is still intact? Does it mean U.S. troops on the ground to enforce compliance if Delcy Rodríguez refuses to submit? Does it mean she is removed next, by force or by decree signed by Trump? Does it mean Washington will decide which Venezuelan officials stay in power and which are sidelined, arrested, or eliminated? And what happens to the Russian and Chinese presence tied to Venezuela’s security apparatus—through training, equipment support, and surveillance infrastructure—alongside their entrenched energy and infrastructure interests; are they expelled, negotiated with, absorbed, or confronted?

Trump himself said that Venezuela is now being run by him, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and others in his cabinet, a statement so extraordinary and batshit crazy that it defies comprehension, yet whose implications are staggering, because it openly asserts direct executive control over another country without law, congressional authorization, or any defined limits, reducing sovereignty itself to a discretionary privilege granted by the White House.

This moment does not fit any of the traditional narratives the United States has used to rationalize intervention, because Trump did not claim to be promoting democracy, removing weapons of mass destruction, restoring stability, or overseeing a transition. He spoke instead about taking over the oil, fabricated reimbursement, extraction of oil, and boots on the ground, treating a sovereign country like a seized asset to be exploited while leaving the same authoritarian machinery intact, which raises an obvious and unsettling question: does Trump genuinely believe the United States will be welcomed, just as the Kremlin convinced itself it would be “welcomed” in Ukraine, or Georgia?

But the ultimate blame for this chaos does not lie with Trump, because this is what happens when the United States no longer has a functioning Congress capable of exercising its most basic constitutional responsibilities. Republicans have long abandoned oversight and transformed Congress into a rubber stamp indistinguishable from the Duma in Russia, enabling a president who has been carrying out extrajudicial killings since September to escalate without hearings, authorization, or consequence. When accountability collapses at home, lawlessness abroad is no longer an aberration but the operating model.

And this is clearly not stopping at Venezuela. The Trump regime has issued explicit threats toward Cuba, with Marco Rubio warning Havana to be “concerned,” while Colombia has now been pulled directly into the crosshairs as well, with Trump using the same press conference announcing Maduro’s capture to publicly single out Colombian President Gustavo Petro, accuse him of drug-related activity, and warn that he “has to watch” himself.

Are we now operating under a doctrine where any leader the United States labels criminal will be removed at will, where public dissent from U.S. military action becomes grounds for intimidation, and where borders, sovereignty, and international law are treated as optional whenever they become inconvenient to the executive?

Then there is the brutal Iranian regime. Trump has once again threatened to bomb it. Are we now heading toward regime change there, too? Is it next week? Or is escalation simply deployed whenever the Trump regime needs to dominate the news cycle and reset momentum, regardless of the regional consequences, the risk of wider war, or the absence of any legal or strategic framework to contain what follows?

Europe should be paying close attention, because once a U.S. president openly claims the right to seize countries and announce occupation missions in broad daylight, the postwar order stops being theoretical and becomes conditional. Scenarios once dismissed as unthinkable by Europeans, including Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, should move from fringe rhetoric to contingency planning, not because they are inevitable, but because the logic driving them has already been normalized at the highest level of power.

What we are witnessing is a pattern of escalating instability unfolding within a rapidly shifting world order where lawlessness is increasingly normalized rather than restrained. If there are more questions than answers, it is because the situation is so insane, unprecedented, and reckless that events are now outpacing any coherent framework for accountability or control. Lawlessness of this scale never remains confined to foreign policy, and in the U.S., it is already turning inward. Left unchecked, Trump will continue to escalate abroad and at home until there are no meaningful limits left on executive power.