Just hours after the news broke that U.S. forces had invaded Venezuela early Saturday morning to capture the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, both of Iowa’s senators and all four of its U.S. House members issued statements praising President Trump for ordering the attack.
Trump was at his Florida home/members-only country club on Friday night when he ordered the U.S. military to launch Operation Absolute Resolve. According to Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the operation involved more than 150 aircraft launched from more than 20 bases, both on land and at sea. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesth said nearly 200 members of the military participated in Absolute Resolve, working with agents of the CIA and the FBI.
The president did not seek the approval of Congress for his actions, or even inform any member of Congress that was launching an attack on Venezuela. On Saturday, Trump defended not informing Congress by saying members would have leaked news of the attack before it happened. On Saturday, Semafor reported that news of the attack had been leaked to both the New York Times and Washington Post shortly before it happened, but both papers decided to withhold reporting what they learned until after it concluded.
U.S. forces crossed the borders of Venezuela at 1:01 a.m. (EST) on Saturday morning, Caine said, and approximately two and a half hours later, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were in custody aboard the USS Iwo Jima, an aircraft carrier.
No members of the U.S. military were killed in the operation, and no aircraft was lost. On Saturday, it was estimated that approximately 40 people in Venezuela, both military and civilian, were killed during the attack. On Sunday, that estimate was raised to more than 80.
Before holding a press conference on Saturday to explain the attack and capture to the public, President Trump did what he has routinely done since entering politics in 2015 — he called into the Fox News program Fox & Friends.
“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” the president said about the assault on Venezuela’s capital city. “And if you would have seen the speed, the violence — you know, they say that, the speed, the violence, they use that term — it’s just, it was an amazing thing. Amazing job that these people did.”
“This is big stuff,” Trump said at the beginning of the press conference.
The president sounded tired as he read from a prepared text, but was more lively as he interjected the asides that frequently come up in his speeches.
“We’re going to run the country until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at the beginning of his remarks. “So, we don’t want to be involved with having someone else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
Trump repeatedly used the word “judicious” to describe his approach to controlling Venezuela.
“It has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about,” he said.
Maduro and Flores were arrested by FBI agents in Caracas after surrendering to U.S. troops. Both had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan in October 2020, during President Trump’s first term, along with Venezuela’s former justice and interior minister, its current justine and interior minister, and Nicolás Maduro Guerra, a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly and the son of Maduro and his first wife. None of those three were seized or pursued on Saturday.
Maduro had served as president of Venezuela since 2013, but the U.S. and many other countries do not recognize him as a legitimate head of state, and consider him an autocrat who has suppressed democracy and subverted free elections. The charges in the 25-page indictment presented in a Manhattan federal court on Monday when Maduro and Flores were arraigned go back as far as 1999.
Maduro and Flores are accused of conspiring with designated terrorist groups, conspiring to traffic cocaine into the United States and possessing machine guns and other prohibited weapons in furtherance of the conspiracies. (Neither Maduro nor Flores is accused of having machine guns, etc., while in the U.S.)
But before getting to Maduro and the charges against him, President Trump talked about oil during his Saturday news conference. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.
“As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” Trump said. “They were pumping almost nothing compared to what they had been pumping and what could have taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go and spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
If the Venezuelan government, now headed by Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, interferes with U.S. plans for the country’s oil, Trump warned, “we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”
The president said the U.S. would keep the flotilla of warships in the Caribbean to maintain its readiness to attack Venezuela again.
According to Trump, if Rodríguez cooperates, the U.S. and Venezuela will establish a “partnership” that will make the people of Venezuela “rich, independent and safe.”
The president then turned to why Maduro should be considered a national security threat to the United States. His first accusation was that Maduro had personally overseen Cartel de los Soles, which the Trump administration had been characterizing as a narco-terrorist group, even though there isn’t any organized group called that.
“Cartel de los Soles” is a Venezuelan slang term referring to military officers corrupted by money from drug traffickers. As the New York Times explained in November, “The term gained traction after a 1993 scandal when the C.I.A. worked with the Venezuelan military to send a ton of cocaine to the United States in a bid to infiltrate Colombian cartels.”
The original 2020 indictment cited Cartel de los Soles as one of the narco-terrorist groups Maduro conspired with. But the revised indictment published on Monday dropped all references to Cartel de los Soles.
Trump went on to say that Maduro had “waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror and subversion against the United States of America.”
“Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide,” he said.
As the PBS Newshour pointed out after Trump’s press conference, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded last year there was no cooperation between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua.
“While the indictment against Maduro says Venezuelan officials worked directly with the Tren de Aragua gang, a U.S. intelligence assessment published in April, drawing on input from the intelligence community’s 18 agencies, found no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government.”
Trump began accusing Maduro of being a mastermind behind Tren de Aragua during his last campaign for president, going so far as to falsely claim that the criminal gang had taken over entire cities, such as Aurora, Colorado. The Tren de Aragua accusations were part of Trump’s standard racist and xenophobic rhetoric about Venezuelan immigrants and refugees. Trump returned to the rhetoric on Saturday, saying that Maduro’s government “sent everybody bad into the United States.”
The president then engaged into a rambling aside about sending the National Guard — and in the case of Los Angeles, the National Guard and Marines — into American cities, claiming that those deployments had been a great success. (“Now we have no crime in Washington D.C,” he claimed.) Later Trump had another rambling aside about tariffs, claiming they “made our country rich and they’ve made our national security strong, stronger than ever before.”
The aside about the National Guard and Marine deployments was somewhat related to the topic of Saturday’s news conference. The Trump administration has argued that those deployments are legal because the troops are not engaged in law enforcement, they are just supporting and protecting law enforcement officers, including agents from ICE and the Border Patrol. The Trump administration’s official position on Operation Absolute Resolve was not a military operation, even though it involved more than 150 military aircraft and nearly 200 members of the armed forces.
“This was a law enforcement operation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday to explain why it wasn’t necessary to inform congressional leaders about the attack. “[Maduro] was arrested on the ground in Venezuela by FBI agents … Obviously, this was not a friendly territory, so in order to arrest them, we had to ask the Department of War to become involved in this operation.”
This is the obverse of the justification the Trump administration used during its months-long campaign of using the military to destroy small boats and kill their crews on the grounds the administration believed they were smuggling drugs that could be sold in the U.S. The administration said that stopping the small boats wasn’t a matter for law enforcement, it was a military matter because the drugs constituted an attack on America by narco-terrorists. The president and his supporters claimed the boats were carrying fentanyl, and therefore each boat was going to kill many thousands of Americans.
Venezuela is not known to be an exporter of fentanyl, and the indictments of Maduro and Flores do not mention fentanyl, only cocaine. According to experts on the international trade in illegal drugs, almost all the cocaine Venezuela exports goes to Europe.
As he moved towards the conclusion of his prepared remarks on Saturday, Trump returned to Venezuela’s oil resources. He called Venezuela’s nationalization of oil production in the 1970 “constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country” and then immediately increased it to “the largest theft of property in the history of our country.”
Trump complained that no president before he took office last year was willing to do anything about that theft. (Trump, of course, was one of those presidents who served previously.)
The president then accused Maduro of “hosting foreign adversaries in our region, and acquiring menacing offensive weapons that could threaten U.S. interests and lives. And they used those weapons last night.”
Trump did not seem to be aware that the fact no U.S. troops were killed during the attack, and no aircraft were lost, undermined his claim that those the weapons could “threaten U.S. interests.”
The president then turned to general principles.
“All of these actions [Maduro is accused of] were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries,” Trump said. “Not any more. All the way back dated to the Monroe Doctrines [sic]. And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot. By a real lot. They now call it ‘the Donroe Doctrine.’”
The president did not say who the “they” calling it the Donroe Doctrine were.
“American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said. According to the president, his actions just reflect “the iron laws that have always determined global power.” He added, “And we’re going to keep it that way.”
“The American armada remains poised in position and the United States retains all military options, until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied,” Trump said. “All political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro could happen to them, and it will happen to them if they aren’t just, fair, even to their people.”
The president finished his prepared remarks by saying, “America is a safer nation this morning, it’s a prouder nation this morning, because it didn’t allow this horrible person, and this country that was doing very bad things to us, it didn’t allow it to happen [sic].”
Most of the questions asked by reporters during the Q&A section of the press conference were about what “we are going to run the country” meant.
“We’re going to be running it with a group, and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly,” Trump said in reply. “We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly. They will be reimbursed for what they’re doing, but that’s going to be paid.”
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, President Trump changed his position, suggesting the U.S. government may pay the oil companies for rebuilding the oil production infrastructure in Venezuela, explaining the companies may “get reimbursed by us or through revenue” they make selling the country’s oil.
In his answers on Saturday, the president kept using the word “we,” which sometimes meant the U.S. government, sometimes U.S.-based oil companies and sometimes both. It was not always clear how he was using “we” in some of his responses.
Asked if running Venezuela would involve deploying ground troops in the country, Trump replied, “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground, if we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high level actually. We’re not afraid of it.”
But in a reply to a later question, the president said there would be no widespread troop presence: “Well no, we’re going to have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil, because we’re sending out expertise in. So you may need something, not very much.”
“But no, we’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground. And that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
Pressed to say who exactly will run Venezuela, Trump replied, “It’s all being done right now. We’re designating people, we’re talking to people, we’re designating various people. We’re going to let you know who those people are.”
It does appear that the Trump administration plans to leave Maduro’s government in place, and work with Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as interim president following the seizure of Maduro. The president said Sec. Rubio had been speaking directly to Rodríguez prior to the press conference.
“I think she was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice,” Trump said.
Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican who represents Iowa’s 2nd District and is currently running for Senate, praised Trump for his resolve in a statement after the Saturday press conference, writing, “President Trump doesn’t just talk, he takes action & follows through — as Maduro now knows.”
At roughly the same time, Rep. Zach Nunn, who is running for reelection in the 3rd District, posted his praise for Operation Absolute Justice: “I applaud the United States and our troops for carrying out a mission sending a clear message: the U.S. will defend its citizens and hold terrorists accountable wherever they hide.”
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, running for reelection in Iowa’s 1st District, posted her praise of Trump and the troops about two hours before Hinson and Nunn on Saturday.
“I commend our dedicated troops and law enforcement professionals for executing this swift and precise operation,” she wrote. “Under President Trump’s bold direction, we’re sending an unmistakable signal: those who exploit and endanger our citizens will face accountability.”
In her statement, Miller-Meeks also condemned Maduro for “flooding our communities with fentanyl.” As noted above, Venezuela is not known to be an exporter of fentanyl, and the drug mentioned in the indictment of Maduro is cocaine.
Miller-Meeks also appeared on Fox News on Saturday afternoon to talk about the attack on Venezuela and the seizure of Maduro. The three-term congressmember told Fox News that Maduro needed to be removed because he shipped fentanyl to the U.S. and was involved with Tren de Aragua. It’s unclear if Miller-Meeks is unaware of the conclusion by U.S. intelligence agencies that Maduro isn’t connected to Tren de Aragua, or if she doesn’t believe the work of the 18 agencies.
“I’ve met with mothers, I’ve met with fathers, brothers and sisters in Iowa and in D.C. who have lost their loved ones, and sometimes children under age 18, to the fentanyl scourge, the fentanyl poisoning,” she said. “People who have had criminal activities perpetuated by Tren de Aragua. So we know that this was a national security issue that President Trump and many of us campaigned on ending the scourge of fentanyl, ending the gang members that were here through the open border policies of President Biden. And they carried this out in a precise, small, minute way.”
Later on Saturday afternoon, Rep. Randy Feenstra, who represents Iowa’s 4th District and is currently running for governor, posted his statement.
“Thank you to President Trump for authorizing the capture of Nicolas Maduro who is a drug trafficker and narco-terrorist,” Feenstra wrote in his brief message.
“I’m grateful for the bravery of our troops who flawlessly executed this critical mission.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, who is not running for reelection, posted her praise of Trump early Saturday afternoon: “For years, Maduro and his narcoterrorist cartels have illegally trafficked deadly drugs into our country, killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens.”
“President Trump took decisive action to hold him accountable and stand up for American lives.”
Shortly before 1 p.m., Sen. Chuck Grassley posted on X, using the unique style he has developed for his tweets.
“Pres Trump directed military forces 2bring narco-terrorist Maduro to justice after his role in trafficking drugs resulting in death of far too many Americans” [sic]
“25 yrs ago Venezuela WAS a prosperous economy 1 third of ppl hv left country PROOF A DICTATOR WAS NOT GOOD FOR VENEZUELA”
In his next post, Grassley tried to provide historical context for Trump’s attack on Venezuela.
“REMEMBER In 1989 Pres Bush deployed a large ground force to capture Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega following his indictment for drug trafficking #realhistorychannel”
As is often the case, Grassley’s invocation of history omits important facts and ends up distorting the truth.
President George H.W. Bush did order an invasion of Panama in December 1989 — Operation Just Cause — to overthrow and capture Gen. Manuel Noriega, the military leader who ran Panama and had been a U.S. ally and intelligence asset for decades before he was indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking. That invasion, also done without congressional approval, was widely considered a violation of international law at the time, but the post-Noriega government did not protest. There were also two important facts that distinguish the operation in Panama from the one in Venezuela that Grassley didn’t mention.
First, on Dec. 15, 1989, Noriega gave a speech announcing he was now head of state and declaring war on the United States. The following day, Lt. Robert Paz, a Colombian-born U.S. Marine stationed in Panama, was shot and killed at a roadblock set up by the Panamanian Defense Forces. President Bush used that killing and Noriega’s declaration of war as the justifications for the invasion, which began on Dec. 20, 1989. Noriega was eventually captured and sent to the U.S., where he was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
It’s worth noting that none of the members of Iowa’s D.C. delegation mentioned oil, the topic President Trump spent most of his time talking about at the press conference.
In a late Tuesday afternoon post on Truth Social, President Trump announced he was already taking control of millions of barrels of Venezuela oil.
“I am pleased to announce that the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States! I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Editor’s note: The story was updated after it was first published to add President Trump’s announcement on his Tuesday afternoon Truth Social post.
