Hours after he was captured by the US forces in an audacious military operation, President Donald Trump posted a picture of the handcuffed and blindfolded Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on his Truth Social.
Dressed in what appeared to be a tracksuit, the 63-year-old South American leader was seen clutching at a plastic water bottle, showed the picture.
Trump said the US is “going to run” Venezuela until a safe transition of power can take place, adding he would allow American oil companies to head into Venezuela to tap its massive crude reserves after a US military operation to seize the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro.
“It was a brilliant operation, actually,” Trump told The New York Times shortly after US forces were cleared from Venezuelan airspace. He later added in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that some US troops were injured in the strike but none were killed.
US-backed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, posted on social media: “the hour of freedom has arrived.”
She called for the opposition’s candidate in the 2024 election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, to “immediately” assume the presidency.
Earlier, Trump said Maduro and his wife would be taken to New York to face federal charges after military strikes and an operation which he described as looking like a “television show”.
The Venezuelan government decried what it termed a “extremely serious military aggression” by Washington and declared a state of emergency.
Countries such as Russia and Iran, which had longstanding ties with Maduro’s government, were quick to condemn the operation but their alarm was also shared by Washington’s allies including France and the EU.
The operation to remove Maduro certainly marks another big moment for Trump’s foreign policy in his second term, as he hasn’t shied away from flexing US military might even as he has vowed to keep America out of war.
Trump has now twice used US forces to carry out risky operations against American adversaries. In June, he directed US strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites.
Saturday’s action stirred fresh anxiety in capitals around the world that have sought to adjust to a new normal in Trump 2.0, where the idea of the US trying to find global consensus on issues of war and peace is now passe.
On Friday, Trump issued a new threat to Iran that if it “violently kills peaceful protesters” – in protests sparked by the collapse of Iran’s currency – the United States “will come to their rescue.”
With the Venezuela operation, Trump followed through on a promise, spelled out in his National Security Strategy published last month, to assert US dominance in the Western Hemisphere.