Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried on Sunday to shed more daylight on the Trump administration’s plan for a path forward in Venezuela after the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, the country’s president, and his wife in a military raid on Saturday.
But the secretary was unable to clearly say who the U.S. saw running the country even in the immediate term or explain why Maduro was being treated differently than former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump pardoned for drug trafficking offenses last month.
Rubio was pressed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on the pardon of Hernández, and dodged questions about whether he supported the pardon by claiming he wasn’t involved in the relevant White House discussions.
“The president is the one with the pardon authority,” Rubio insisted. “He’s the one that viewed the file.”
“I wasn't involved in those deliberations. I haven't looked at the case file,” added the secretary. “I've got a bunch of other things going on.”
During another appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rubio was directly asked: “Mr. Secretary, who is in charge? Are you running Venezuela right now?”
The secretary did not give a clear answer, instead replying: “Yeah, I mean I keep-- ...people [keep] fixating on that. Here’s the bottom line on it, is: We expect to see changes in Venezuela. Changes of all kinds, long term, short term, we’d love to see all kinds of changes but the most immediate changes are the ones that are in the national interest of the United States. That’s why we are involved here. Because of how it applies, and has a direct impact on the United States.”
“We are not going to be able to allow, in our hemisphere, a country that becomes a crossroads for the activities of all of our adversaries around the world. We just can’t allow-- we can’t have a country where the people in charge of its military and in charge of its police department are openly cooperating with drug trafficking organizations,” he continued. “We’re not going to allow that.”
Rubio seemed to indicate that the existing governmental infrastructure in Venezuela, home to roughly 30 million people, could be upheld under its current leadership, presumably including Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez. The question around whether remnants of Maduro’s government will remain in power remains an open one as U.S. President Donald Trump himself has thrown cold water on the idea that Maria Corina Machado, the country’s most prominent opposition leader, was seen as a legitimate replacement among Venezuelans.
His statements come as the country’s vice president reportedly fled to Russia to escape a potential similar fate and the U.S. has been unclear in its stance on who should fill the power vacuum that threatens to arise.
Rubio told Stephanopoulos that the U.S. did not view Rodriguez or the remainder of Maduro's government as legitimate, while giving no indication of who the U.S. expected would be in power in the days ahead.
Maduro arrived in New York late on Saturday, where he is expected to face criminal charges in the Southern District.
“I assure you the people left behind in Venezuela now that are in charge of the police and everything else, I assure you they are gonna probably be a lot more compliant than Maduro was as a result of this,” Rubio said on Sunday.
The secretary went on to call questions about holding elections in the country “premature” while holding to a line he’d offered a day earlier, flanked by the president and other top aides including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a press conference discussing the strike: that the U.S. held firm to its convictions under Trump’s leadership, in contrast to other presidential administrations.
At the same time, however, Rubio couldn’t say for sure whether the U.S. would be taking over Venezuela’s oil industry and “take back the oil” with the help of American companies, as Trump had promised just a day earlier.
Instead, he claimed the U.S. didn’t “need” Venezuela’s oil, and claimed that the priority of the Trump adminsitration was oriented around keeping Venezuela’s oil industry from being traded with countries like Iran, Russia and China.
“No more using the oil industry to enrich all our adversaries around the world and not benefiting the people of Venezuela and frankly, benefiting the United States,” said the secretary.
“We don't need Venezuela's oil. We have plenty of oil in the United States,” claimed Rubio. “Why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? Why does Iran need their oil? They’re not even in this continent.”
“We’re not going to allow the western hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States,” he added, insisting that the U.S. wants to “see the oil proceeds of that country benefit the people of Venezuela.”
“Ultimately, this is not about securing the oil fields,” Rubio said.
On Saturday, at a press conference the president brashly claimed that the U.S. would be directly running Venezuela for the time being and force a transition of power, indicating an Afghanistan-style removal of the entire Maduro regime. The authoritarian left-wing leader ruled the country from 2013 to 2025 and held on to the office after elections in 2024 that were widely condemned in Venezuela and around the world as fraudulent.
"We’re there now, and we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place," Trump said on Saturday, in terms Rubio would not use a day later. "We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
“We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind,” added the president. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we need to do so.”
Trump went on to say that he wasn’t afraid of ordering a sustained U.S. military presence within Venezuela and told reporters: “We don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
He turned from that press conference to Truth Social for the remainder of the day, where he unleashed long spree of posts and “re-truths” that included glowing praise of his military strikes as well as a return to the latest fixation of conservatives in the U.S.: Alleged instances of fraud among daycares run in Minnesota’s Somali-American communities, which have become the Trump administration and broader right wing’s latest target of fury. In many cases, the criticism has devolved into naked racism and Trump himself has been accused of stoking that hate by referring to Somali-American communities as “garbage”.
On Saturday, the president re-truthed another Minnesota-related post that supported a conspiracy theory about a murdered Democratic lawmaker and accused Gov. Tim Walz, also a Democrat, of ordering her assassination. Friends and family of Melissa Hortman, the slain former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, have called the insinuations shared by the president despicable and false.
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