Trump Says U.S. Is ‘In Charge’ of Venezuela, While Rubio Stresses Coercing It

The secretary of state said that a military “quarantine” on some oil exports would stay in place to put pressure on the country’s acting leadership.

President Trump on Sunday night asserted again that the United States was “in charge” of Venezuela, hours after his top diplomat had pivoted away from such earlier suggestions of direct control to say that the administration would instead coerce cooperation from the new leadership in Caracas.

“We’re dealing with the people that just got sworn in,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington from Florida. “And don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I’ll give you an answer, and it’ll be very controversial.”

“What does that mean?” a reporter asked.

“It means we’re in charge,” the president said.

Mr. Trump did not provide details, but he appeared to be referring to control over the Venezuelan government, whose top officials made defiant statements after the U.S. military entered the country early Saturday and seized Nicolás Maduro, the autocratic leader.

The acting leader of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, a vice president under Mr. Maduro, struck a more diplomatic tone on Sunday night, saying, “Our people and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war.”

When asked what he needed from Ms. Rodríguez, Mr. Trump said: “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”

On Sunday morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to recast Mr. Trump’s assertion a day earlier that the United States would “run” Venezuela, saying instead that the administration would keep a military “quarantine” in place on the country’s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there.

When asked how the United States planned to govern Venezuela, Mr. Rubio did not lay out a plan for a U.S. occupation authority, like the one that the George W. Bush administration put in place in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but spoke of leverage over a Venezuelan government run by allies of Mr. Maduro, now jailed in Brooklyn, to force policy changes.

U.S. forces will continue to prevent oil tankers on a U.S. sanctions list from entering and leaving the country until the government opens up the state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment — presumably giving priority to American companies — and makes other changes, he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News.

“That remains in place, and that’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes, not just to further the national interest of the United States, which is No. 1, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” he said.

And in a testy exchange later on “Meet the Press” on NBC News, Mr. Rubio complained that people were “fixating” on Mr. Trump’s declaration at a news conference in Florida on Saturday that the U.S. government would run Venezuela. He added that “it’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this.”

Mr. Rubio said on CBS that the U.S. naval force that Mr. Trump massed in the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela over recent months — “one of the largest naval deployments in modern history, certainly in the Western Hemisphere” — would remain in place to enforce the quasi blockade, with the aim of “paralyzing that portion of how the regime, you know, generates revenue.”

And he added that Mr. Trump could put U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela beyond the recent operation in which Army Delta Force soldiers seized Mr. Maduro, if it served American interests. The president “does not feel like he is going to publicly rule out options that are available for the United States,” Mr. Rubio said.

A White House official said Mr. Rubio had detailed in his interviews on Sunday what Mr. Trump had meant when he used the word “run,” and that there was no contradiction in their remarks. The official said top Trump aides “will continue to diplomatically engage” with the current leadership in Venezuela.

In Venezuela, the official line of the government remains fierce resistance to the United States. Vladimir Padrino López, the defense minister, gave a speech demanding the return of Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were flown to a Brooklyn detention center on Saturday. “Our sovereignty has been violated and breached,” he said, backed by uniformed soldiers.

The Venezuelan government’s count of the number of soldiers and civilians killed during the U.S. incursion rose to 80 on Sunday, according to a senior Venezuelan official. Mr. Padrino López said that U.S. forces had killed a “large part” of Mr. Maduro’s security detail in the attack. No American service members were killed, though several were injured by hostile fire, U.S. officials said.

Mr. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday that if Ms. Rodriguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Mr. Rubio led an effort in the Trump administration to oust Mr. Maduro that was supported throughout the fall by Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, The New York Times reported in September.

As Mr. Trump did in his news conference on Saturday, Mr. Rubio focused in his Sunday interviews on oil as the main prize for the United States in its operation against Mr. Maduro. Mr. Trump said earlier that “we’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”

Mr. Rubio told CBS News that the oil industry in Venezuela, which is controlled by the government and under U.S. sanctions, needed to be “reinvested in.”

“It’s obvious they do not have the capability to bring up that industry again,” he said. “They need investment from private companies, who are only going to invest under certain guarantees and conditions.”

Mr. Rubio’s and Mr. Trump’s remarks over the weekend suggested that the administration intended to force Ms. Rodríguez to allow American oil companies to invest and operate in the country under favorable conditions.

The statements by the two men amount to an explicit declaration of gunboat diplomacy and an embrace of the kind of 19th-century U.S. imperialist policy in the Western Hemisphere that has been widely criticized across Latin America.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that decades-long efforts by the United States to prove it is not a colonial power in the Americas has been “all thrown out” now, and that Mr. Trump’s actions could “potentially turn the whole region against us.”

He added that the administration’s aim of dominating the Western Hemisphere — including forcibly seizing leaders in the region — could spur China and Russia to try to do the same in their perceived “spheres of influence.”

There’s “an extraordinarily high risk that adversaries around the world will use the same theory of the case to act with further impunity,” he said.

Mr. Rubio was unapologetic about the idea of hemispheric dominance, saying on NBC on Sunday: “This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live, and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”

China is the biggest foreign investor in Venezuela’s oil industry, and Chinese private companies buy about 80 percent of the country’s oil exports. Russia also has stakes in the industry.

For years, Chevron has been the only U.S. oil company operating in Venezuela, in several joint ventures with the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA. The Biden and second Trump administrations gave Chevron a license to operate there as an exception to sanctions imposed on Venezuela’s oil industry by Mr. Trump in his first term. Other American oil companies had a large presence in Venezuela over decades, but left the country during two periods when the government exerted state control over the ventures.

U.S. forces boarded two oil tankers last month that were transporting oil from Venezuela to Asia. The second one, the Centuries, was not on the Treasury Department’s sanctions list.

For days, the U.S. Coast Guard has been pursuing a tanker on the sanctions list, the Bella 1, which had been going to Venezuela to pick up oil.

The Trump administration has said all weekend that it hopes to work with Ms. Rodríguez, and Mr. Rubio deflected questions on Sunday about why it was not supporting any leadership bid by Venezuela’s main opposition figures.

He was in contact throughout last year with figures in the opposition movement. And as a senator from Florida, he signed a formal letter of support for María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was awarded that prize last year, which frustrated Mr. Trump, who had been openly campaigning to win it himself.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump said in his news conference that Ms. Machado lacked the “respect” within Venezuela to govern, even though international election experts say a candidate she supported, Edmundo González, beat Mr. Maduro in a 2024 election by a wide margin. The Biden administration and the second Trump administration have recognized Mr. González’s victory.

In January 2025, right after starting his new job, Mr. Rubio spoke with both Ms. Machado and Mr. González, whom he called the “rightful president,” and “reaffirmed the United States’ support for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela,” according to a State Department summary of the call.

On Saturday, Ms. Rodríguez sounded a defiant tone, denouncing the U.S. raid against Mr. Maduro and saying he was the country’s rightful president. When asked on Sunday on CBS whether the United States could work with her, Mr. Rubio said: “We’re going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what we know of what they’ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward. So we’re going to find out.”

Mr. Rubio also said there were no immediate plans to send U.S. troops into Venezuela to seize other officials who have also been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on drug trafficking charges, as Mr. Maduro was in 2020, during the first Trump administration.

Mr. Rubio said that the United States planned to ensure that Venezuela stopped trafficking drugs. The Trump administration stated last year that curbing “narco-terrorism” from Venezuela was a main reason for its campaign against the country, which has included carrying out legally questionable military strikes on boats that have killed at least 115 people. A U.S. official said on Sunday that the military would continue doing the attacks.

However, Venezuela’s role in the drug trade is limited. Mr. Maduro allowed some Colombian cocaine producers to send their product through Venezuela, mainly to Europe, but the country does not produce fentanyl, which has long been Mr. Trump’s stated focus.

When asked in the NBC interview whether Communist-run Cuba, an ally of Venezuela, was the next target of the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio did not deny the possibility. He said that “the Cuban government is a huge problem” and that “they are in a lot of trouble, yes.” Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has said for decades that the leadership of Cuba must be removed, and that toppling the Maduro “regime” in Venezuela would help lead to a transformation in Cuba.

In another interview on Sunday, on “This Week” on ABC News, Mr. Rubio said that congressional authorization of the military operation to seize Mr. Maduro was not necessary because it was “a law enforcement operation” rather than an “invasion.”

Tyler Pager, Minho Kim and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Jack Nicas contributed from Mexico City.

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