Fact-checking Donald Trump following U.S. attacks on Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro

President Donald Trump said a U.S. military assault succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, both facing U.S. charges related to cocaine trafficking under newly unsealed indictments. 

In a Jan. 3 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said the U.S. would "run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition."

Trump also said Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president. Trump said Rodríguez had talked to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and was "essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again."

However, Rodríguez criticized the U.S. military action as "brutal aggression" on state television and called for Maduro’s immediate release.

Maduro, an authoritarian, has led Venezuela since 2013, succeeding an ideological ally, Hugo Chávez, who had been in office since 1999. Under both men, U.S. relations with Venezuela frayed over foreign policy, oil and human rights.

In July 2024, Maduro declared victory following an election that international observers described as fraudulent. The country’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received about 70% of the vote.

Tensions between Trump and Maduro escalated in September after the U.S. government began attacking vessels off the coast of Venezuela, killing more than 100 people, in what Trump described as an effort to thwart drug smuggling.

When a reporter asked Trump during the Mar-a-Lago press event whether he’d spoken to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado following Maduro’s arrest, Trump said Machado "doesn't have the support or the respect within the country."

Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for democracy in Venezuela, had a 72% approval rating from Venezuelans according to a March poll by ClearPath Strategies.

Trump said without evidence that the United States’ role in governing Venezuela "won’t cost us anything" because U.S. oil companies would invest in new infrastructure in the oil-rich country. "It’s going to make a lot of money," Trump said. 

Here, we fact-checked Trump’s and Rubio’s statements from the press conference.

Rubio: "It’s just not the kind of mission that you can prenotify (Congress about) because it endangers the mission." 

The administration’s lack of warning to Congress bucks laws and precedents. 

Rubio said members of Congress were not notified in advance. Trump said the administration was concerned about Congress potentially leaking news of the administration’s decision to capture Maduro.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., praised the operation as a "decisive action."

But Congressional Democrats said Congress should have been notified in advance. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said, "Maduro is terrible. But Trump put American servicemembers at risk with this unauthorized attack."

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said Trump and his cabinet were not forthcoming about their intentions for regime change, so "we are left with no understanding of how the administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation."

The U.S. Constitution assigns Congress the right to declare war. The last time that happened was for World War II.

Since then, presidents have generally initiated military action using their constitutionally granted powers as commander in chief without an official declaration of war. 

Since Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president has had to report to Congress within 48 hours of introducing the U.S. military into hostilities and terminate the use of the military within 60 days unless Congress approves. If approval is not granted and the president deems it an emergency, an additional 30 days are granted for ending operations.

In recent decades, congressional consent has usually been granted through an authorization for the use of military force. But an authorization has not been passed for operations in Venezuela. Kaine and other lawmakers have pursued legislation — so far fruitlessly —  to prohibit the use of federal funds for any use of military force in or against Venezuela without Congressional authorization.

The Trump administration has whittled away at prior notification requirements. Under federal law, eight bipartisan, senior members of Congress must receive prior notice of particularly sensitive covert actions. In June 2025, the administration told Republicans, but not Democrats, about the forthcoming U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. For the Venezuela operation, it appears no lawmakers were notified in advance.

President Nicolás Maduro, accompanied by first lady Cilia Flores, greets supporters during an event marking the anniversary of a 1958 coup ousting dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 23, 2024. (AP)

Trump: Each U.S. boat strike off the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 people. 

Pants on Fire! 

The Trump administration has struck at least 32 vessels killing about 115 people in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September. Trump said previously that the boats were carrying drugs en route to the U.S. and during the press conference he said the drugs on each boat would kill "on average, 25,000 people."

However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S. And the administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of the drugs could have been destroyed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 73,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That means the drugs on 32 boats would have been responsible for 800,000 deaths, nearly 11 times the number of U.S. overdose deaths in one year. 

Trump: "Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide."

There is no evidence Maduro sent members of Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S. 

The U.S. Justice Department indictment against Maduro does not mention Trump’s statement.

An April report from the federal National Intelligence Council contradicted Trump’s statements about links between Maduro and Tren de Aragua. 

"While Venezuela's permissive environment enables (Tren de Aragua) to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States," the report said.

Trump: Venezuela "stole" U.S oil in the past.

This needs context. 

In the early 20th century, Venezuela’s long-serving dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez, allowed foreign companies almost exclusive access to the country’s oil resources. 

In 1975, after decades of seeking greater control of its oil resources, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry.

"Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen oil and land from the U.S. is baseless," Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told The Washington Post. "The U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil — relatively cheap oil — than to have a production collapse in Venezuela," Rodríguez said. As a result, the change was "relatively uncontroversial" at the time.

U.S. oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil and Gulf, now Chevron, lost about $5 billion each in assets and were compensated $1 billion each, according to news reports, the Post reported.

But Rodríguez said the companies didn’t push for additional compensation at the time, in part because no forum existed to do so.

In general, experts have told PolitiFact that invading a country to take its oil would be both illegal and unethical. In 2016, Trump mused about how the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil when it invaded to oust Saddam Hussein.

Experts pointed to the Annex to the Hague Convention of 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War, which says that "private property ... must be respected (and) cannot be confiscated." It also says that "pillage is formally forbidden."

"If ‘to the victors go the spoils’ was legal doctrine, then we would have believed that (then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein) should have been able to keep Kuwait City after he invaded" in 1990, terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told PolitiFact in 2016. "But we viewed that — quite rightly — as an act of aggression under the U.N. Charter."