Jan. 7, 2026, 11:38 a.m.
There is a lot that President Trump has been unsure about in the days after he sent American troops, warships, and aircraft into Venezuela to apprehend the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. He doesn’t know how long U.S. forces need to remain on alert, or if he will have to launch a second attack. He doesn’t know who is running the country other than himself. He doesn’t know when he will allow elections. And he doesn’t know what it will cost to, as he promised, “make Venezuela great again.”
But there is one thing he is absolutely certain about: that whatever happens, it can’t be any worse than what it was before he sent the U.S. military in to Caracas. As he told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, “Rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse.”
“Can’t get any worse” looms now as the biggest gamble of Trump’s second term, as he bets that the eventual outcome will be so obviously good that it will surmount his base’s unease over the “nation-building” they thought the president abhorred as much as they do and the Democrats’ sniping over the way he brazenly pushed past all constitutional guardrails to snag the leader of another country.
Those are four words the president may regret saying, words that will be thrown back at him many, many times in the coming months, particularly in the upcoming congressional campaigns, when opposition Democrats will portray him as trigger-happy, reckless, and badly in need of supervision by a freshly energized House and Senate.
The military operation in Caracas will be studied as a textbook example of how different branches and units can work seamlessly together to pull off an intricate mission that experts agree would have proved too daunting for any other military in the world.
Yet the use of American troops on foreign soil rarely works out the way that a president anticipates. While achieving its primary mission of delivering a reviled dictator to face justice in a New York courtroom, the audacious attack now leaves Trump with ownership of a country of almost 30 million people who have not had a legitimate election since 2013 and are suffering from hyper-inflation and persistent shortages of food, medicine, and medical supplies.
This comes 23 years after President George W. Bush donned a flight suit to speak on the carrier Abraham Lincoln, declaring “Mission Accomplished." Bush would soon learn that the aftermath was far more challenging than the invasion.
Bush's is far from the only cautionary tale among Trump's post–World War II predecessors. Four decades earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a promise in the 1964 campaign: “We are not about to send American boys 9- or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
More recently, in 2012, President Obama assured reporters that he would never allow Syria to use chemical weapons. “We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons,” he said.
And, certainly fresh in Trump’s mind is the flat statement President Biden made when asked in 2021 if the upcoming troop withdrawal from Afghanistan could have any parallels to the chaotic American departure from Saigon to end the Vietnam war in 1975. “None whatsoever. Zero,” he responded defiantly. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy … of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
Johnson, Bush, Obama, and Biden did not mean to lie to the American people in these instances. But they ended up being wrong. All suffered politically when the outcome was not what they promised.
Aware of the pitfalls of Bush’s approach to Iraq after seizing the capital, Trump already has gone in a different direction. Where Bush disbanded the military and installed an American viceroy, Trump has kept almost all of Maduro’s regime intact and demanded that the ousted president’s vice president run the government while following American orders. In that, he has chosen “immediate-term stability over the uncertainties of a potential long-term, maybe even drawn-out and slightly chaotic transition,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Christopher Hernandez-Roy, who documented Maduro’s human rights abuses for the Organization of American States, noted that, in keeping Maduro’s cronies in place and delaying elections, the U.S. “has chosen stability over legitimacy."
"But there’s a risk with that," he added. "And the risk is you essentially have a continuation of the dictatorship.”
Berg stressed that there will be problems trying to get Maduro’s people to do Washington’s bidding, predicting “a series of transitions” in the coming months.
Iria Puyosa, a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Democracy+Tech Initiative, said the Venezuelan people today tend to side with Trump’s assessment that things are better. “People feel the country is in a better position today than it was yesterday,” she said. “That doesn’t mean people think the democracy has been restored or the struggle has been completed.” Instead, she added, the uncertainty of Washington’s intentions and the role of Maduro holdovers “make this moment particularly unstable.”
For Trump, with American elections only nine months away and what seems to be a shifting approach to the running of the country he just attacked, both that instability and the political calendar leave only limited time to prove that governance by a White House 2,000 miles from Caracas is, indeed, not worse than what it was a week ago. As it did for his predecessors, the clock is ticking for Trump.
