Epistemica

In his address from a Florida country club, Donald Trump tried to sell Americans a simple picture of regime change: capture Nicolás Maduro, declare temporary U.S. control, “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition,” and send in U.S. oil companies to “fix” Venezuela’s broken petroleum infrastructure. The U.S. is not afraid of “boots on the ground,” he said.

Decisive, simple, and emotionally satisfying to audiences exhausted by migration headlines, drug-trafficking narratives, and years of watching Venezuelans suffer under a corrupt, coercive state. But as a blueprint for what happens next, it’s laughably simplistic. Modern states are not kiosks you can take over after a raid. They are layered systems of coercion, patronage, law, logistics, and legitimacy. And Trump’s own framing repeatedly collides with facts his administration also acknowledges: the Venezuelan government and military remain functioning, the United States does not actually control the territory, and the “day after” is where reality begins to punish slogans.

The core illusion in Trump’s remarks is the idea that capturing a leader equals controlling a country. Reuters captured the blunt contradiction in the reporting itself: it was “unclear how Trump plans to oversee Venezuela,” because “U.S. forces have no control over the country itself,” and Maduro’s government “appears…to still be in charge” and uninterested in cooperating.

“We will run the country” is a simplistic claim of authority without administrative reality.  Running a state means controlling ministries, budgets, courts, ports, border posts, security services, and the mundane plumbing of daily life: payroll, fuel distribution, electricity maintenance, and the bureaucratic permissions that keep hospitals and pipelines operating. Venezuela’s institutions may be corrupted and politicized, but they exist, and their leadership is not suddenly erased because Maduro was flown to New York.

Within hours, Venezuelan officials were on state TV calling the raid a kidnapping and framing the moment as a sovereignty crisis. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez called Maduro the “only president of Venezuela” and warned that Venezuela would never again be a “colony” of an empire. The defense minister announced deployments and called for resistance against what he described as extraordinary aggression.

Trump’s press-conference narrative leaned on a reassuring back-channel. He told reporters that Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with Rodríguez and suggested she was essentially willing to do what the U.S. wanted: “quite gracious,” as Trump put it, while also implying she had “no choice.”  But the public record immediately undercut the fantasy that a single conversation “settled” the matter. Rodríguez explicitly rejected any idea of colonial submission and insisted that Maduro remained Venezuela’s president.

When confronted on This Week, Rubio said that Trump claimed Rodríguez promised to do “whatever the United States needs,” yet her televised statement said Maduro was still president and that Venezuela would not be a colony. Rubio responded with a hedge: don’t judge by press conferences, judge by actions, because people say things publicly for many reasons in moments of fear and instability. Even the administration’s top diplomat is describing a messy contest of leverage, optics, and coercion. The “we talked, she’ll cooperate” story is part of the simplistic narrative Trump is selling to his gullible base.

Venezuela’s constitutional order divides national public power into multiple branches, including distinct judicial, citizen, and electoral powers, each with its own institutional footprint. Whatever one thinks of how those bodies have been captured or politicized, they create a lattice of authority claims that won’t dissolve because a foreign leader declared a temporary trusteeship at a lectern in Florida. The regime’s durability has clearly been coercive. Venezuela’s armed forces are not a single unit you can “flip” with one announcement. They include conventional branches plus the National Guard with policing functions and a large militia apparatus created precisely for territorial defense and internal control. There are around 123,000 active personnel across the services, supplemented by a Bolivarian militia estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

Layered on top are irregular pro-government armed groups of colectivos and related networks whose role has long been to intimidate opponents and enforce control in neighborhoods where formal state legitimacy is thin. They make administration extremely costly, sabotage-prone, and legitimacy-poisoning.

If the U.S. truly intends to run ministries, protect infrastructure, and impose a new political order, “boots” won’t be a marginal option. They’ll become the central operating system, including patrolling, guarding, raiding, detaining, and inevitably causing civilian harm in a complex urban environment. They’ll fuel nationalist resistance. The Venezuelans celebrating Maduro’s capture today will be celebrating Trump’s in the future.

Trump also framed Venezuela’s oil industry as both prize and proof: U.S. companies will go in, spend billions, refurbish infrastructure, and get oil flowing. But turning Venezuela’s oil sector around would take tens of billions of dollars and at least a decade of sustained commitment.

Consider geology and engineering as well. Venezuela’s reserves are enormous at about 303 billion barrels, much of it heavy crude from the Orinoco region, and production has fallen far below historic levels after mismanagement, underinvestment, and sanctions. It’s obviously not a “flip the switch” industry. It depends on specialized service firms, stable contracts, reliable electricity, secure transport corridors, and a labor force that trusts it won’t be caught between factions.

How is Trump going to rebuild oil infrastructure inside a country without true control and without inviting sabotage, labor disruption, and insurgent-style attacks? Trump’s own posture, talking openly about taking the oil back and keeping military options on the table, makes that risk worse, because it turns every pipeline and port into a symbolic target.  And if the U.S. tries to operate Venezuela’s oil sector while simultaneously sidelining or hollowing out existing Venezuelan structures, the problem becomes Iraq-like very quickly: massive technical systems cannot run on foreign consultants alone. They require local buy-in at every level, from engineers and security to customs officials and refinery managers.

In Iraq in 2003, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein quickly, then made sweeping occupation decisions that crippled the state’s capacity. CPA Order No. 1 institutionalized de-Ba’athification, and CPA Order No. 2 dissolved key security entities, including the Iraqi military, at the very moment stability required disciplined, legitimate security. The orders undermined governance and security, helping create the conditions for insurgency and prolonged chaos.

Afghanistan offered the longer, harsher lesson: even two decades of training, spending, and institution-building can collapse rapidly when legitimacy and local political cohesion fail. The U.S. State Department’s after-action review process for Afghanistan was explicitly shaped by the shock of the government’s collapse and the end of the U.S. presence. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that after the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, the Taliban rapidly regained control and the Kabul government fell.

Overthrow tends to be the “easy” phase for the U.S., while governing is the real war. Trump’s press conference offered the overthrow phase with none of the governing burdens. It was simply laughably simplistic.