President Donald Trump has said that the US will now ‘run’ Venezuela following the ‘capture’ of President Nicolás Maduro.
“We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said in a press conference.
The capital city of Venezuela, Caracas, was struck in the early hours of Saturday by the US military.
Videos showing the military strikes on Venezuelan city Caracas
Trump later took to Truth Social to confirm the US’ involvement and drop another bombshell – that President Maduro had been captured and taken out of the country, along with his wife, Cilia Flores.
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Trump held a press conference on Saturday (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
On Saturday (January 3), Trump held a press conference where he praised the US military.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said.
“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years, so we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.
“And it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about. We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country, it’s their homeland.”
Trump said the US will now ‘run’ Venezuela (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
He also said that US companies are ready to go into Venezuela to ‘start making money for the country’ adding that the US is ‘ready’ to stage another ‘much larger’ attack if necessary.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” he said.
“So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so. We actually assumed that a second wave would be necessary, but now it’s probably not.
“The first wave if you’d like to call it that, the first attack was so successful, we probably don’t have to do a second, but we’re prepared to do a second wave, a much bigger wave, actually.”
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Maduro was ‘captured’ (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
Earlier on Saturday, while speaking to Fox News, Trump offered more details on the strike, explaining: “We were going to do this four days ago, but the weather was not perfect.
“The weather has to be perfect… all of a sudden it opened up and we said go.”
Trump said when President Maduro was captured, he was ‘in a house that was more like a fortress than a house’ with ‘solid steel all around’.
Referring to US soldiers, he added that ‘a couple of guys were hit, but they came back, and they’re supposed to be in pretty good shape’.
Trump also told Fox News that he watched the capture ‘literally like I was watching a television show’.