Gunfire rocked Caracas on Monday night not far from the Venezuelan presidential palace hours after President Trump told NBC that he was now personally responsible for running the country.
What appeared to be drones and anti-aircraft fire could be seen in videos verified by CNN. Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication and Information told the outlet that police officers had fired at drones “flying without permission.”
“No confrontation occurred, and the entire country is completely calm,” it added.
According to CNN, the gunfire was happening amid confusion between security forces, with one member saying there was a “misunderstanding.”
The White House told CNN that it wasn’t “involved.”
And yet, Trump said on Monday that he was not in charge of the nation.
Asked by Kristen Welker on NBC, “Who will be the top person if there is one?” Trump responded: “Me.”
The president ordered the capture in Caracas of President Nicolás Maduro, in the early hours of Saturday morning. He said the U.S. would “run” the country, with an emphasis on its oil reserves.
At Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, Trump told reporters that the U.S. would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” He didn’t explain what the transition would be to.
“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place,” Trump said.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, to go in, spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he added.
Trump admitted to reporters that he had alerted oil companies, but not members of Congress, to the operation before it commenced.
“They want to go in, and they’re going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela, and they’re going to represent us well,” Trump said on Air Force One on Sunday night while returning to D.C. from Mar-a-Lago, where he ordered and watched the operation with top members of his Cabinet. “The infrastructure is rusty, rotten, most of it is unusable. It’s old. It’s broken. You see pipes lying all over the ground, nothing’s been invested for years.”
