Venezuela

Donald Trump and his top advisers have refused to rule out the potential for open conflict with Venezuela as Nicolás Maduro urged his navy to escort oil tankers defying the largest US fleet deployed in the region in decades.

In an interview broadcast on Friday morning, Donald Trump told NBC News that going to war with Maduro’s regime remains on the table. “I don’t rule it out, no,” he said in a phone interview with the network.

And at a year-end press conference at the state department, Marco Rubio doubled down on remarks by other top Trump advisers that the US could coerce Maduro through its campaign of strikes on alleged drug boats travelling toward the United States.

Nicolás Maduro is chased out of office by a massive popular revolt but the Venezuelan military takes to the streets, turning its guns on the civilians who have brought him down.

A palace coup sends Venezuela’s authoritarian leader into exile, sparking a bloody power struggle between members of his disintegrating regime.

Maduro or a key ally is assassinated by a US “decapitation” strike but – as foreign soldiers commandeer Caracas and key airports and ports – leftwing insurgents tighten their grip on the country’s mineral-rich hinterlands and regime loyalists launch guerrilla-style attacks on oil refineries and pipelines.

Donald Trump has exerted more pressure on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, expanding sanctions and issuing fresh threats to strike land targets in Venezuela, as the South American dictator accused the US president of ushering in a new “era of criminal naval piracy” in the Caribbean.

Late on Thursday, the US imposed curbs on three nephews of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, as well as six crude oil supertankers and the shipping companies linked to them. The treasury department alleged the vessels “engaged in deceptive and unsafe shipping practices and continue to provide financial resources that fuel Maduro’s corrupt narco-terrorist regime”.

One of the worst “narratives” about Venezuela’s dictatorship revolves around whether the socialist hellhole is a narcostate, justifying President Trump’s emerging military buildup in the Caribbean, including Naval strikes on speedboats transferring state-produced cocaine to the U.S. If the Venezuelan state is, it’s a narcostate.

The Democrat-deep state-news media complex has been spreading the piece-by-piece narrative that they aren’t.

US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, President Donald Trump said, marking a sharp escalation in Washington’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro’s government.

“We have just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Releasing a video of the seizure, Attorney General Pam Bondi described the vessel as a “crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.

🚨 BREAKING: Video has been released of US forces SEIZING CONTROL of a massive oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela

Per President Trump, this is the LARGEST tanker ship ever seized.

The DOJ and FBI believe this ship was being used to deliver sanctioned oil from Venezuela to… pic.twitter.com/VlLVIMprmO

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 10, 2025

🚨 Q: What happens to the oil on the tanker you seized near Venezuela?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: We keep the oil, I guess! 🤣

Q: Where does it go?

TRUMP: You're a good news man. Just get a helicopter and go follow the tanker!

He is the best 😭😭 pic.twitter.com/Dp9duwUxT7

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 10, 2025

In the Caribbean, we should worry about what is decent and smart, not about what activists say is lawful.

nce again, the United States is using lethal force off its shores. In recent weeks, American drones and warships have sunk or disabled a string of speedboats in international waters off Venezuela. Washington says the vessels belonged to narcoterrorist networks tied to the Maduro regime and Tren de Aragua and that they were carrying cocaine and fentanyl precursors bound for the United States. At least 83 alleged traffickers and others are dead. Caracas calls this extrajudicial murder. Human-rights groups call it assassination. Cable-news panels and UN press releases are already rehearsing the same ritual question: Is this legal under international law?

You may or may not know at this time that Hugo “El Pollo (The Chicken)” Carvajal, former head of Venezuela’s General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) is currently in federal prison awaiting sentencing for drug trafficking charges. If you depend on the Elitist Media for news coverage, you DEFINITELY don’t know that he just published a bombshell allocution that lays out the Maduro regime’s long campaign against the United States.

Venezuelan president’s blanket amnesty demand for top officials is deal-breaker for Washington

Venezuela’s president asked to keep $200m of his private wealth, amnesty for his officials and safe harbour in a friendly country as part of a deal with Donald Trump to step down and flee, sources said.

Those familiar with a phone call between the two leaders told The Telegraph that the plan fell apart owing to Nicolas Maduro’s demands for a blanket amnesty for as many as 100 top officials.

During the 15-minute call, the two leaders also disagreed on how to set up a transitional government and on the location Mr Maduro would flee to from Venezuela.

US President Donald J. Trump’s condemnation of Venezuela’s illegal leader Nicolás Maduro includes his regime’s facilitation of trafficking illegal drugs into the United States. The leader of Venezuela’s democratic opposition, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corrina Machado, has accused Maduro of being chief of a criminal narcotics organization, Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”). US military forces have destroyed several speedboats laden with cocaine and other illegal drugs leaving Venezuelan ports.

This month, as President Trump travelled to his Mar-a-Lago estate, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had “sort of” made up his mind about whether to launch US military strikes on Venezuela. “I can’t tell you what it would be,” he added.

Publicly the president has been keeping his options open. But behind the scenes, some of the most powerful people around him have been trying to persuade him to attack Venezuela — and remove its president, Nicolás Maduro — in what would be an extraordinary escalation of months-long military build-up in the Caribbean.

Those in favour of the strikes say they could bring democracy and prosperity to Venezuela and provide a way for the eight million people who have fled the country in the past ten years to return. These include hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who came to the US and who the Trump administration would like to deport from the country.

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that airlines and pilots should consider the airspace over Venezuela to be shut down.

The United States has designated the Cartel de los Soles (Spanish for Cartel of the Suns) – a group it alleges is headed by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and senior figures in his government – as a foreign terrorist organisation.

Labelling an organisation as a terrorist group gives US law enforcement and military agencies broader powers to target and dismantle it.

In recent months, the US has been ramping up pressure on Maduro, saying his government is illegitimate following last year’s election, which was widely dismissed as rigged. The designation gives it another way to turn up the heat.