How Rubio is winning over Trumpworld on striking Venezuela

At the start of President Trump’s second term, the United States appeared eager to cooperate with Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader. Special envoy Ric Grenell met with Maduro and worked with him to coordinate deportation flights to Caracas, a prisoner exchange deal, and a deal to allow Chevron to exploit Venezuelan oil.

Grenell told disappointed members of the Venezuelan opposition that Trump’s domestic goals took priority over efforts to promote democracy. “We are not interested in regime change,” Grenell told the group, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

But Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, had a different view.

In a side call with María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, two opposition leaders, Rubio affirmed U.S. support “for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela” and called González the “legitimate president” of the besieged nation after Maduro rigged last year’s elections in his favor.

Rubio, who is now also national security adviser, moved closer to Trump and crafted an aggressive new policy toward Maduro that brought Venezuela and the United States to the brink of military confrontation.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio whispers to President Trump during a roundtable discussion at the White House on October 8, 2025.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

Grenell has been sidelined, two sources told The Times, as the United States wages an unprecedented campaign of deadly strikes against suspected Venezuelan drug boats — and builds up its military assets in the Caribbean. Trump said Wednesday that he had authorized the CIA to carry out covert actions in the South American country and that strikes on ground targets could be next.

“I think Venezuela is feeling the heat,” he said.

The pressure campaign marks a major victory for Rubio, the son of Cuban emigrants and an unexpected power player within the administration, who managed to convince top leaders of the isolationist MAGA movement to continue his lifelong effort to topple Latin America’s left-wing authoritarians.

“It’s very clear that Rubio won,” said James B. Story, who served as ambassador to Venezuela under President Biden. “The administration is applying military pressure in the hopes that someone within the regime will bring Maduro to justice, either by exiling him, sending him to the United States, or sending him to his creator. »

In a recent public message to Trump, Maduro acknowledged that Rubio now runs White House policy: “You have to be careful because Marco Rubio wants your hands stained with blood, South American blood, Caribbean blood, Venezuelan blood,” Maduro said.

As a senator from Florida, Rubio represented exiles from three left-wing autocracies – Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela – and for years he has made it his mission to weaken their governments. He says his family was unable to return to Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution seventy years ago. He has long argued that removing Maduro would deal a fatal blow to Cuba, whose economy has been propped up by billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil in the face of U.S. sanctions.

In 2019, Rubio pushed Trump to support Juan Guaidó, a Venezuelan opposition leader who unsuccessfully sought to unseat Maduro.

Rubio then encouraged Trump to publicly support Machado, who was barred from voting in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election and last week received the Nobel Peace Prize for her pro-democracy efforts. González, who ran instead of Machado, won the election, according to the results of votes cast by the opposition, but Maduro declared victory.

Rubio was convinced that only military power could bring change to Venezuela, plunged into crisis under Maduro’s rule, with a quarter of the population fleeing poverty, violence and political repression.

But there was a hitch. Trump has repeatedly vowed not to intervene in other countries’ politics, telling a Middle Eastern audience in May that the United States would “not give you any more lessons on how to live.”

Denouncing decades of American foreign policy, Trump complained that “interventionists were intervening in complex societies they didn’t even understand.”

To counter that sentiment, Rubio portrayed Maduro in a new light that he hoped would pique the interest of Trump, who has been obsessed with fighting immigration, illegal drugs and Latin American cartels since his first presidential campaign.

Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, right, and opposition leader María Corina Machado greet supporters during a campaign rally in Valencia ahead of the country’s 2024 presidential election.

(Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press)

Going after Maduro, Rubio argued, was not about promoting democracy or a change of government. He was a drug lord who fueled crime on America’s streets, an epidemic of American overdoses and a flood of illegal migration to America’s borders.

Rubio has linked Maduro to the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang whose members, according to the secretary of state, are “worse than Al Qaeda.”

“Venezuela is governed by a drug trafficking organization that has empowered itself as a nation-state,” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Meanwhile, prominent members of the Venezuelan opposition have pushed the same message. “Maduro is the head of a narcoterrorist structure,” Machado told Fox News last month.

Security analysts and U.S. intelligence officials suggest the ties between Maduro and Tren de Aragua are exaggerated.

A declassified note The Office of the Director of National Intelligence found no evidence of widespread cooperation between Maduro’s government and the gang. He also said that the Tren de Aragua did not pose a threat to the United States.

The gang does not traffic fentanyl, and the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that only 8 percent of cocaine arriving in the United States passes through Venezuelan territory.

Still, Rubio’s strategy appears to have worked.

In July, Trump declared Tren de Aragua a terrorist group led by Maduro – and then ordered the Pentagon to use military force against the cartels the US government had labeled terrorists.

Trump deployed thousands of U.S. troops and a small armada of ships and warplanes to the Caribbean and ordered strikes on five boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing 24 people. The administration claims the victims were “narcoterrorists” but has provided no proof.

Elliott Abrams, a veteran diplomat who served as special envoy to Venezuela during Trump’s first term, said he believed the White House would carry out limited strikes in Venezuela.

“I think the next step is they’re going to hit something in Venezuela — and I’m not talking about the troops on the ground. It’s not Trump,” Abrams said. “It’s a strike, and then it’s over. It represents a very low risk to the United States.”

He continued: “Now, would it be nice if that kind of activity incited a colonel to lead a coup? Yes, that would be nice. But the administration will never say that.”

Even if Trump refrains from a ground invasion, there are major risks.

“If it’s a war, then what is the purpose of the war? Is it to overthrow Maduro? Is it more than Maduro? Is it to have a democratically elected president and a democratic regime in power?” said John Yoo, a law professor at UC Berkeley who served as a top legal adviser to the George W. Bush administration. “The American people will want to know what the end state is, what the point of all this is.”

“Any time you have two armies this close together, there can be real action,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House think tank. “Trump is trying to do this on the cheap. He may be hoping he doesn’t have to commit. But it’s a slippery slope. It could drag the United States into war.”

Sabatini and others added that even if U.S. pressure ousts Maduro, what happens next is far from certain.

Venezuela is dominated by a patchwork of guerrilla and paramilitary groups that have enriched themselves through gold smuggling, drug trafficking and other illicit activities. No one is encouraged to lay down their arms.

And the country’s opposition is far from unified.

Machado, who dedicated her Nobel Prize to Trump in an obvious bid to gain his support, says she is ready to govern Venezuela. But there are others – both in exile and in Maduro’s administration – who would like to lead the country.

Machado supporter Juan Fernandez said anything would be better than maintaining the status quo.

“Some say we are not prepared, that a transition would lead to instability,” he said. “How can Maduro be a safe choice when 8 million Venezuelans have left, when there is no gasoline, political persecution and galloping inflation? »

Fernandez praised Rubio for pushing the Venezuela issue toward “an inflection point.”

What a difference, he said, to have a policymaker in the White House with family roots in another country long oppressed by an authoritarian regime.

“He understands our situation perfectly,” Fernandez said. “And now he holds one of the highest positions in the United States.”

Linthicum reported from Mexico, Wilner from Dallas and Ceballos from Washington. Special correspondent Mery Mogollón in Caracas contributed to this report.