Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and prominent Republicans swiftly backpedaled from Donald Trump’s assertion that the US will run Venezuela in transition after US forces snatched the president, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to the US to face federal criminal charges.
Rubio appeared on numerous US politics shows on Sunday morning to defend the US operation in the early hours of Saturday to capture Maduro and his wife despite critics calling the operation illegal on multiple levels and the White House failing to demonstrate how it would run the South American nation.
The secretary of state was challenged repeatedly in a number of appearances to confirm whether the US would run Venezuela.
Rubio said on ABC that the US had “leverage” over the country and that: “We expect that it’s going to lead to results here. We’re hope so … hopeful that it does. Positive results. For the people of Venezuela, but ultimately, most importantly, for us, in the national interests of the United States.”
He added that the US would “set the conditions” so that Venezuela is no longer a “narco-trafficking paradise” aligned with US adversaries including Iran and militant proxies such as Hezbollah.
ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos asked a follow-up question. “What is the legal authority for the United States to be running Venezuela?”
Rubio responded: “I explained to you what our goals are and how we’re going to use the leverage to make it happen.”
The previous day Trump, speaking at a press conference in Florida just hours after the strikes and raid on Caracas and elsewhere in Venezuela, said the US would run Venezuela “with a group” and would be “designating various people” in charge, while pointing to Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Dan Caine, behind him.
Trump also said that Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, now considered the interim president by Venezuelan leadership, had spoken to Rubio and had told the US she would do whatever it needed, with Trump adding: “She really doesn’t have a choice.” Rodríguez appeared on state television in Venezuela not long afterwards and, in contrast, was sharply critical of the US actions and insisted that the country “will never again be anyone’s colony”.
Rubio told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning that actions were different from rhetoric and it was too soon to know how the Venezuelan leadership would now respond to the US’s audacious action in the country and, now, pressure to conform to US plans to stop drug trafficking and control its oil operations.
“We are going to make our assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly. We’re going to find out. Do I know what decisions they’re going to make? I do not. But I know that if they don’t make the right decisions the United States will retain multiple levers of influence to ensure our interest are protected and that includes the oil quarantine that’s in place, among other things … we’re going to see what they do.”
Rubio also told NBC that the US was not at war in Venezuela and did not currently have US forces on the ground there.
In response to anchor Kristen Welker asking if he, Hegseth or any of the US leadership Trump indicated was going to be running Venezuela during its transition, Rubio said: “Well, it’s running policy … we want Venezuela to move in a certain direction.”
Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, also rowed back on Trump’s assertions, saying there were “still a lot of questions to be answered” about what happens next in Venezuela.
When asked who was running Venezuela right now he responded: “Who is not running Venezuela is Maduro.”
Cotton said Rubio was in consultation with the Venezuelan government and with the opposition to “see what a transition government would look like … we will see whether they [the post-Maduro Venezuelan leadership] will let the opposition back into the country and hold elections.”
Trump on Saturday was dismissive of the opposition, headed by recent Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado, who is in exile, saying she did not have sufficient support and respect in Venezuela, without being more specific about whether he was referring to leadership, the military or voters.
Meanwhile, on Sunday Trump threatened Rodríguez that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
In a telephone interview with the Atlantic magazine Trump also appeared to acknowledge US aspirations in the country as amounting to something congressional Democrats say they were explicitly told was not the plan – regime change.
“You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse,” Trump said.
Cotton said the US did not recognize Rodríguez as legitimate. Maduro was widely considered to have lost the 2024 presidential election in Venezuela, but stayed in power anyway.
He added: “The new leaders of Venezuela need to meet our demands,” he said. “Our demands are … that we want them to stop the drug trafficking. We want them to stop the weapons trafficking. We want them to expel the Cubans and the Iranians and the Islamic radicals.”
Congressman Jim Jordan, a Republican representing Ohio and the chairman of the House judiciary committee, also could not confirm that the US would run Venezuela.
When asked directly on CNN what Trump meant when he indicated that the group standing behind him at the press conference would be in charge of the plan for the US to run the country, Jordan said: “We do not know exactly what that means.” When asked what is next for Venezuela, he said: “We’ll see.”
And despite the mandate of the US Congress to act as a check on executive power and interrogate controversial actions such as the Venezuelan operation, Jordan said he trusted Trump, Rubio and Hegseth in “making the best decisions” and he trusted the US military.
The Democratic congressman Jim Himes said that Jordan’s answers were “giving the game away” that the Republican-controlled Congress was not interested in acting as a check on the White House and condemned the intervention in Venezuela as an “imperial adventure”.
Meanwhile, earlier on CBS, Rubio referred to the current Venezuelan regime and defended the US decision not to remove more of Maduro’s inner circle.
“You’re gonna go in and suck up five people?” he said. “Okay, they’re already complaining about this one operation. Imagine the howls we would have from everybody else if we actually had to go and stay there four days to capture four other people … we got the top priority, the number one person on the list.”
• This article was amended on 4 January 2026. Jim Jordan is a congressman, not a senator as an earlier version said.
