US President Donald Trump said a US military strike successfully captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are facing US charges related to cocaine trafficking in a newly unsealed indictment.
At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 3, President Trump said, “We will run America until there is a safe, appropriate and wise transition of power.”
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President Trump also said that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in as interim president. The U.S. president said Rodriguez has spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is “willing to basically do whatever we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
But Rodriguez criticized the U.S. military action on state television, calling it a “brutal invasion” and calling for Maduro’s immediate release.
Maduro has led Venezuela since 2013, succeeding his ideological ally Hugo Chávez, who had been in power since 1999. Under both men, relations between the United States and Venezuela deteriorated over foreign policy, oil, and human rights.
In July 2024, President Maduro declared victory after an election that international observers deemed fraudulent. The country’s opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, reportedly won around 70% of the vote.
Tensions between Trump and Maduro escalated in September after the U.S. government began attacking ships off the coast of Venezuela, killing more than 100 people, in what Trump described as an effort to stop drug smuggling.
When a reporter asked Trump during a Mar-a-Lago media event if he had spoken to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Colina Machado after Maduro’s arrest, Trump said Machado was “not supported or respected in the country.”
Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his fight for democracy in Venezuela, had an approval rating of 72% among Venezuelans in a March 2025 poll by ClearPath Strategies.
President Trump said without evidence that the U.S. role in governing Venezuela “will cost us nothing” as U.S. oil companies invest in new infrastructure in the oil-rich country. “It’s going to make a lot of money,” he said.
PolitiFact fact-checked Trump and Rubio’s statements at the press conference.
Rubio: “It’s not the kind of mission that you can notify (Congress) in advance because that would jeopardize the mission.”
The Trump administration’s failure to warn Congress is contrary to law and precedent.
Rubio said members of Congress were not informed in advance of U.S. actions against Venezuela. President Trump said his administration was concerned that news about Maduro’s decision to detain him could be leaked to Congress.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, praised the operation as “decisive action.”
But Congressional Democrats argued that Congress should have been notified in advance. “President Maduro is terrible, but President Trump put American service members at risk with this unauthorized attack,” said Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire said that because President Trump and his Cabinet have not been forthright about their intentions for regime change in Venezuela, “we have no idea what the administration is preparing to do to reduce the risks to the United States, and we have no information about its long-term strategy after today’s extraordinary escalation.”
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war. The last time this happened was during World War II.
Since then, presidents have typically used their constitutional authority as commander-in-chief to initiate military action without a formal declaration of war.
Since Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, presidents must report to Congress within 48 hours of committing U.S. troops to hostilities and end their use within 60 days unless Congress approves. If approval is not obtained and the president deems an emergency, there will be an additional 30 days to complete the operation.
In recent decades, parliamentary consent has typically been granted through authorization to use military force. However, no such authorization has been granted for operations in Venezuela. Kaine and other lawmakers have pushed, so far to no avail, for legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds to use military force inside or outside Venezuela without Congressional approval.
The Trump administration reduced advance notice requirements. Under federal law, the eight bipartisan senior lawmakers must be notified in advance of particularly sensitive covert actions. In June 2025, the administration informed Republicans, but not Democrats, about an upcoming U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It appears that lawmakers were not notified in advance of the Venezuela operation.
President Trump: 25,000 people are saved every time a U.S. military vessel collides off the coast of Venezuela
The Trump administration has attacked at least 32 ships in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing about 115 people. President Trump previously said the ships were carrying drugs en route to the United States, and at a news conference said the drugs on board each ship would kill “an average of 25,000 people.”
However, drug and Venezuela experts told PolitiFact that Venezuela plays a small role in drug trafficking reaching the United States. And the government has not provided any evidence about the type or amount of drugs allegedly on board the boat. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of drugs have been destroyed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 73,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States from May 2024 to April 2025. This means that the drugs on board the 32 boats, which would have killed 800,000 people based on President Trump’s claims, were responsible for nearly 11 times the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States in one year.
President Trump: “President Maduro has sent brutal and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Torren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities across the country.”
There is no evidence that President Maduro has sent members of the Venezuelan prison gang Torren de Aragua to the United States.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment against Maduro does not mention President Trump’s statements.
An April report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council contradicted President Trump’s statements about Maduro’s relationship with Torren de Aragua.
“Although Venezuela’s permissive environment allows for (Tren de Aragua, TDA) operations, the Maduro regime likely has no policy of cooperating with the TDA and has not directed its movement to or operations in the United States,” the report said.
President Trump: Venezuela has ‘stolen’ US oil in the past.
In the early 20th century, Venezuela’s long-time hardline leader Juan Vicente Gómez granted foreign companies near-exclusive access to the country’s oil resources.
In 1975, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry after decades of seeking greater control over its oil resources.
“President Trump’s claims that Venezuela stole oil and land from the United States are baseless,” Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told The Washington Post. “The United States was far more interested in getting Venezuela to supply oil, relatively cheap oil, than it was in Venezuela’s production collapsing,” Rodriguez added.
As a result, the change was “relatively uncontroversial” at the time, he said.
The Washington Post reported that U.S. oil companies including Exxon, Mobil, and Gulf (now Chevron) each lost about $5 billion in assets and each received $1 billion in compensation.
However, Rodriguez said the companies did not request additional compensation at the time, in part because there was no forum to request additional compensation.
In general, experts told PolitiFact that invading a country to steal oil is illegal and unethical. In 2016, President Trump mused about how the United States should have taken Iraq’s oil when it invaded to remove then-leader Saddam Hussein.
Experts noted that the annex to the 1907 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War states that “private property…shall be respected (and) shall not be confiscated.” It also says that “looting is officially prohibited.”
“If ‘spoils go to the victor’ were the law, we would have believed that[Saddam Hussein]could have held on to Kuwait City after he invaded[Kuwait]in 1990,” terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told PolitiFact in 2016. “But we considered it – quite rightly – an act of aggression under the Charter of the United Nations.”
