Watch: Trump profanity to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro
President Trump made a statement to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro when answering why the U.S. was offered a stake in Venezuela’s natural resources.
In late January, President Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell, smiled as they shook hands in the Venezuelan leader’s gold-embossed Caracas palace.
The deal they’d just sealed meant six Americans detained in the country would be freed in exchange for hundreds of Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
It marked the first time in years that a U.S. official met face-to-face with Maduro, a protege of strongman Hugo Chavez. Maduro is in his twelfth year as president after what international observers say was a rigged 2024 vote.
Some hoped Grenell’s deal would lower tensions between Washington and Caracas – and perhaps even renew access to Venezuela’s rich oil reserves.
But the U.S. has drastically shifted gears since that glowing moment at the palace. Instead, experts say, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears to have taken Grenell’s place and is spearheading an aggressive campaign to bring down Maduro.
Nine months after Grenell and Maduro’s pact, eight U.S. warships are circling the waters off Venezuela, and the largest U.S. aircraft carrier and its three escorts are cruising toward the region. Roughly 10,000 troops are stationed in the area. B-1 and B-52 bombers have approached Venezuelan airspace three times in two weeks, in an undisputed threat of force.
At least 61 people, many of them Venezuelans, have been killed in U.S. strikes on boats in international waters, which the Trump administration said, without providing evidence, were carrying drugs. The strikes, which the Trump administration has said are part of an “armed conflict” with cartels, were ordered without congressional approval.
Trump has turned aside Maduro’s offer of access to Venezuela’s rich oil reserves in exchange for maintaining power in the country. Instead, his administration has gone all-in on a campaign led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to force Maduro from office.
The president has amped up the pressure on Maduro with at least 14 maritime strikes off the coast of South America. In the latest offensive, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that another four people were killed in the eastern Pacific on Oct. 29.
Maduro has indicated that he understands exactly what Trump and Rubio are doing: “They promised they would never again get involved in a war, and they are fabricating a war,” Maduro said on Oct. 24 after the Pentagon announced the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest warship, was headed toward South America.
Trump’s offensive comes after Maduro and his top generals were indicted in 2020 for their alleged involvement in a drug trafficking conspiracy.
“The Administration’s policy is ‘maximum pressure’ on the Maduro regime,” a White House official told USA TODAY on Oct. 27. “No negotiations that could potentially benefit the regime are occurring.”
Trump scraps Maduro’s offer of Venezuelan oil
Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany who served as an intelligence official in Trump’s first term, sought to extract economic wins from Maduro, in line with Trump’s dealmaking style in Ukraine and Gaza.
Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security advisor, is pushing for an end to a regime that has opposed the U.S. for decades and sparked an exodus of nearly 7.9 million migrants, including more than 700,000 who have made their way to the U.S.
Grenell continued talks with Maduro’s government through the summer, analysts and people close to the administration say. But they say the pressure campaign on Maduro and the strikes on boats bear Rubio’s stamp.
Grenell had negotiated an opening of Venezuela’s oil sector in exchange for allowing Maduro to keep his post, according to Francisco Monaldi, director of the Baker Institute’s Latin America Energy Program.
Maduro “offered everything,” Trump told reporters on Oct. 17. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to f— around with the United States.”
The deal clinched by Grenell didn’t meet the mark for Rubio, who has long reviled Maduro for his ties to Cuba and refusal to sever economic ties to Russia and China.
Rubio was able to “reframe” the issue for Trump, by narrowing in on Maduro, changing “from a focus on democracy and regime change to a focus on drug trafficking and criminality,” Monaldi said.
Rubio’s rejection of Maduro’s oil concessions upset U.S. energy interests eager to tap Venezuelan reserves. Three people with knowledge of those interests said there was consternation among insiders that forcing Maduro out could foment chaos and unrest and impede their access.
On Sept. 2, Trump announced the first strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, which he said had killed 11 Venezuelans. By early October, Trump ordered Grenell to quit negotiating with Caracas.
“Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans,” State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Piggot said in an Oct. 28 statement to USA TODAY.
Deja vu for toppling Maduro
Concrete plans to push out Maduro surfaced during Trump’s first term. They crystallized in 2019, when the U.S. endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaido’s failed attempt to seize power.
That January, Guaido declared Maduro’s presidency illegitimate and announced he was Venezuela’s interim president, claiming he had popular and military support. Protests erupted, but Guaido ultimately failed to gain military backing and provoke an uprising. By late 2022, he had lost the support of the opposition, and he fled the country.
As a U.S. senator concerned with preserving Latin American democracies and business interests, Rubio pressed Trump to recognize Guaido.
“Rubio was the architect of ‘maximum pressure’ in the first term,” said Brian Fonseca, director of Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy. In Trump’s first term, “maximum pressure” referred to the strategy of tough sanctions on Venezuela and charging Maduro and his top officials with narcoterrorism.
In his years representing Florida as a Republican senator, Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who immigrated to the U.S. before the island’s revolution, frequently blasted Maduro’s “Cuban-style dictatorship.” Rubio consistently praised the Venezuelan opposition headed by Maria Corina Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. (Machado later deftly praised Trump, who aspired to win the prize, for supporting her cause.)
Edmundo Gonzalez, who ran with Machado’s backing, claimed victory in an election against Maduro last year after ballots counted by the opposition showed Gonzalez had won resounding support. Maduro refused to yield power, despite international calls for him to step down.
Now, with a bevvy of warships off his coastline, the resistance could be different. Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner, has welcomed foreign military intervention as a route to democracy in Venezuela.
The opposition already has a transition plan ready made for after they take control of the country, David Smolansky, a representative of Machado, told USA TODAY. That includes privatizing Venezuela’s oil reserves and opening them up for business, he said.
Trump officials are still hoping that Maduro’s generals decide it’s “best to save their skins and take matters into their own hands,” Evan Ellis, a U.S. Army War College research professor focused on Latin America.
That strategy didn’t work during Guaido’s coup in 2019, or when a ragtag group of mercenaries reportedly in communication with Trump officials tried again to overthrow Maduro the next year. The difference now, analysts said, lies in the amount of military might Trump has concentrated around Venezuela and his willingness to use deadly force.
In his first term, members of Trump’s inner circle reportedly urged him away from ideas he floated about invading Venezuela.
“Back then, you had lots of people within the structure who said, ‘Mr. President, we can’t do this, this is not a good idea,’” Ellis said.
“This time around, you don’t have people saying [that].”
Boat strikes useless against fentanyl
Many of the 61 people slain in U.S. military strikes on boats in international waters were Venezuelans.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro said some of the victims were fishermen from his country and that one targeted vessel had sent up a distress signal before the U.S. hit. Two people who survived a strike were returned to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. A third survivor was rescued from the water by Mexican forces after surviving a different attack on Oct. 27, according to Hegseth.
Their repatriation complicated the Trump administration’s assertion that those killed in the strikes were armed combatants against the U.S., who would legally be treated as prisoners of war, or alleged terrorists, who previously have been held in Guantanamo or other bases outside the U.S.
The Trump administration has said intelligence showed the boats were headed to the U.S. with deadly drugs such as fentanyl.
“Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump said, implying that the boats carried enough fentanyl to kill thousands.
Fentanyl causes the majority of American overdose deaths. But no proof has been made public indicating that the vessels hit in the Caribbean were carrying the deadly drug. Trafficking experts also say strikes on individual boats would do little to curtail mass distribution.
“The vast majority of the drugs come across the legitimate ports of entry along the Mexico border,” said Mike Vigil, who previously headed international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration and served in the agency for three decades.
“American citizens are primarily the ones who distribute it,” he said.
Trump is also taking a leap when he says that an international gang from Venezuela is perpetrating this narcotrafficking off the coast of the country, according to Vigil.
Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that Trump has tied to the boats, “does not engage in transportation of drugs… especially using the maritime routes,” Vigil said.
Yet the administration shows no signs of halting the strikes, even as the 60-day legal deadline for the U.S. to declare war or cease the extrajudicial attacks approaches. Trump has repeatedly hinted that he plans to engage in future strikes on land in Venezuela.