‘We Are Going to Run the Country’: Trump Speaks on U.S. Capture of Venezuela’s Maduro

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‘We Are Going to Run the Country’: Trump Speaks on U.S. Capture of Venezuela’s Maduro

After U.S. strikes, Trump says the U.S. is going to run Venezuela until there can be “a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

WSJ

President Trump said the U.S. would run Venezuela until there can be a “proper” transition, after the U.S. carried out strikes against the country and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“We are going to run the country,” Trump said at a news conference from his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump said U.S. oil companies would spend billions of dollars in Venezuela to fix its oil infrastructure. The U.S. plan for the country includes “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground” and sharing it in part with Venezuelans, he said.

Trump also said it would be “very tough” for Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado to lead the country. The president said Machado, who has applauded Maduro’s removal, “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

The U.S. captured Maduro and his wife and extracted them from the country on the USS Iwo Jima in a military operation carried out in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement, according to Trump.

The Justice Department charged Maduro and five others with playing roles in a drug-trafficking network called the Cartel de los Soles and of helping to move large shipments of cocaine toward the U.S.

Venezuela’s capital was rocked by a series of explosions during the operation. Venezuela’s government said the coastal states of Miranda, Aragua and La Guaira were also hit.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the operation, dubbed “Operational Absolute Resolve,” was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal. More than 150 aircraft launched from 20 different land and sea bases across the Western Hemisphere, he said, adding that one U.S. aircraft was hit but that there was no loss of American life.

Venezuela ordered a general mobilization of all the country’s social and political forces to counter what it said was an imperialist attack.