We’ve been here before when it comes to the Trump administration’s attempts to force a political transition in Venezuela.
In 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration attempted to engineer such a change through pressure, spectacle, and public declarations of inevitability. Military defections were said to be imminent. Regime insiders were allegedly ready to flip. Juan Guaidó was presented as the rightful president-in-waiting. And then — nothing happened. The armed forces held. The institutions stayed put. The promised transition never materialized.
Six years later, the second Trump administration is dusting off the same playbook.
Once again, Donald Trump is announcing outcomes before the material and political conditions exist to make them real. He claims that Nicolás Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is “ready to work with us.” Within hours, she publicly repudiated Trump. Trump says US oil companies are prepared to invest billions of dollars in Venezuela. Politico interviewed the executives themselves that same day, who said — politely but clearly — that this was not true. Trump projects inevitability; the people who would actually have to carry it out contradict him in real time.
This is not a Venezuela problem. It is Trump’s pattern of governance — and a recurring feature of US imperial overreach.
Trump has long treated declaration as leverage, acting as if forceful assertion alone can bend states, markets, and societies to his will. But foreign governments — particularly those rooted in mass political movements and nationalist projects forged in conflict with US power — do not collapse because an American president announces that they will.
While the American public may have grown accustomed to Trump’s sweeping and often false proclamations, what makes this episode more dangerous is that Trump has crossed yet another legal line. As the New Yorker has reported, Trump’s Venezuela operation was not merely controversial; it…
Auteur: Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
