Instant Reaction: Trump Says US to ‘Run Venezuela’ in Interim After Maduro
Bloomberg Surveillance
Bloomberg
4 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
President Donald Trump said the US would run Venezuela until a transition could be organized, hours after a US operation captured leader Nicolás Maduro, ousting the strongman from power after months of mounting military and economic pressure on his regime.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said Saturday at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
Trump said the US administration of Venezuela would include deploying US oil companies to the country, though indicated that his embargo “on all Venezuelan oil remains in full effect” and that US forces would stay on alert.
Bloomberg's Joe Mathieu and Christina Ruffini speak with:
- Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Illinois)
- Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
- Jeanne Sheehan Zaino, Democracy Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center and Bloomberg Politics Contributor & Lester Munson, Principal of the International Practice at BGR Group and Republican Strategist
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| 1:05.0 | Live from Mar-a-Lago on Bloomberg TV and radio, |
| 1:08.7 | answering a series of questions alongside the defense secretary, |
| 1:11.7 | Pete Hegeseth, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Cain. |
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| 1:28.2 | YouTube with breaking news on this Saturday, the 3rd of January. Mission Absolute Resolve, |
| 1:35.0 | the name of the operation that took place last evening in Venezuela. Dan Kane describing |
| 1:40.6 | months of work by Intel to find Nicholas Maduro, who is now on his way to New York to face charges. |
| 1:47.3 | Months of work he described to understand where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets. |
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