By Noah Rothman
Thursday, January 08, 2026
To hear Donald Trump tell it, it’s mission accomplished in Venezuela.
The days since the Caracas raid and the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Chavista regime in Venezuela is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary,” the president told the New York Times. Indeed, the president maintained, the regime now led by Maduro deputy Delcy Rodríguez doesn’t have much choice.
Trump has repeatedly insisted that the Caracas raid essentially transformed Venezuela from a rogue socialist state into a satrap of the United States. He has claimed that “we’re in charge” now. He’s mused publicly about dispatching American commercial and political assets to Venezuela to “run” the joint. And, in his interview with the Times, Trump revealed his expectation that America will manage Venezuela as though it were a colonial enterprise for the foreseeable future.
When asked how long the U.S. plans to “remain Venezuela’s political overlord” — “three months? Six months? A year? Longer?” — Trump confirmed his interlocutor’s suspicions. “I would say much longer,” the president contemplated, adding, “only time will tell.”
That’s pretty weird. There are moments in this interview in which Trump appears to be aware of the fact that the regime established by Hugo Chávez in 1999 is, save for Maduro’s absence, wholly intact. Indeed, he contends that the United States is now “getting along very well” with Maduro’s equally criminal successor, the head of an illegitimate regime to which the president now refers to as an “administration.”
But Trump seems to have been convinced that Venezuela is now an American vassal state. Thus, its resources are, for all intents and purposes, America’s to do with as we see fit:
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
For an administration beholden to a political movement that regards anti-George W. Bushism as its foundational ideological precept, this statement is even weirder. It is as if Trump and his inner circle internalized the caricature of the Bush administration and the Iraq War crafted and promulgated by the American left — a “war for oil,” a campaign of “conquest,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” — and resolved to do it for real this time. For this iteration of the Trump administration, it’s as though real Bushism has never been tried.
Democratic narratives and the popular myths retailed by progressive content creators in the mid-aughts notwithstanding, the Bush administration bent over backward to mollify its left-wing critics. The American military footprint in Iraq was lighter than necessary — as the 2007 “surge” subsequently confirmed — to avoid confirming the left’s worst suspicions about the colonialist nature of Paul Bremer’s provisional administration. Despite the growing insurgency, Bush insisted on holding elections in Iraq as soon as possible — a firmness that was criticized as “pigheaded, uncompromising, and stubborn” by those who thought the security situation was too dire to risk a national plebiscite.
Not only did the Bush administration not “take the oil” — something that Trump himself has insisted was a grave mistake for decades — but Bremer’s administration privatized Iraq’s oil industry in the early fall of 2003. Congress appropriated billions to support the redevelopment of the Iraqi oil industry, as well as helping Baghdad establish funds and export mechanisms for the crude it produced. By early 2005, the Iraqi government was dependent upon oil export proceeds for over 90 percent of its revenue.
According to the American left, this is a story not about how the United States did everything in its power to return the funds generated by Iraq’s oil wealth to its people. Rather, it’s a tale of how terribly Bush mismanaged his expropriative project in Iraq — the one they just knew he sought all along. How could it be otherwise?
Perhaps Trump himself was persuaded by the left’s delusions. After all, at the time, he was a game show host in relatively good standing among the nation’s liberal cultural icons, content creators, and politicians. Perhaps he took some of those formative preconceptions with him into office, resolved to do imperialism better than his hapless predecessors.
But the U.S. is not Venezuela’s colonial administrator. There are no American viceroys ruling over the Venezuelan people. America can threaten, muscle, cajole, and entice the Chavista regime in Caracas to do its bidding, but the regime’s cooperation is still a prerequisite. After all, the regime remains in place.
The Maduro-era military and intelligence officials are still there. It is still beholden to the militias and the drug cartels for stability at home. It continues to rely on anti-American powers like Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba for support abroad. The Venezuelan people are still captive to a hostile regime that violates their rights as a matter of course. They have earned the emerging “dismay” — a crushing fall from the emotional highs they experienced after Maduro’s downfall. Rather than seeking their liberty, the Trump administration seems content to legitimize the criminals who preside over their oppression and subjugation.
The left talked itself into a variety of untruths about the Iraq War in the first decade of this century. Today, the president and his allies seem to be convincing themselves of their own set of empirically unverifiable beliefs about the conditions that supposedly prevail inside Venezuela. Both phenomena were and are bizarre.
But if the president has persuaded himself that the real problem with the Iraq War was that it didn’t live down to the left’s expectations for it, he may soon discover a new appreciation for how that war and its aftermath — despite its many flaws — were handled.
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