President Donald Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would indefinitely “run” Venezuela stunned the world—and his own officials, who didn’t see it coming either, author Michael Wolff revealed Sunday.
On a live episode of Inside Trump’s Head, Wolff said that the president’s inner circle was surprised by his declaration that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela “until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” Trump made the statement after extracting autocrat Nicolas Maduro, 63, and his wife Cilia Flores in a surprise Saturday raid.
Trump, 79, made the stunning announcement at a Mar-a-Lago press conference, where he was flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on one side and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the other. Other officials onstage included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine.
“About an hour after the press conference, I spoke to a source of mine, very close to Trump, and what this person said—and this was rendered with, I would say, laconic understatement—and this person said, ‘Well, his language was a surprise to all of us,’” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles.
“Now, my interpretation of that is that everyone—all of the people, even the people on the stage—were stupefied by this announcement that we were taking over Venezuela, that we were going to run an entirely dysfunctional country of 30 million people, and that it was going to be done by these people standing behind Trump on the stage,” he went on.
The longtime Trump biographer speculated that the original intention of the press conference was for Trump to take a victory lap, announcing the success of the military operation to kidnap Maduro.
“‘Win, win, victory, everything went as it was supposed to be, and we’re great and we’ve done exactly what we said we were going to do,’” Wolff said. “But instead, he is suddenly saying, ‘We are going to run Venezuela.’ And I think we’re somewhere between grandiosity and dementia.”
The White House responded to Wolff’s remarks with its boilerplate attack: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--- and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said.
American air strikes rocked the capital of Caracas, nearby La Guaira, as well as neighboring states Miranda and Aragua in an attack that killed at least 40 military personnel and civilians, a senior official told The New York Times. No official death toll has been released.
Trump did not seek authorization from Congress to launch the strikes, enraging Democrats and confusing even his own devotees on Capitol Hill. He later announced in a Truth Social post that “The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.”
Maduro and his wife have arrived in New York, where he will face federal charges related to narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.
Trump’s takeover announcement has baffled even his former special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, who told CNN’s Inside Politics on Sunday that he had little confidence in his former boss’s plans.
“You know, nobody else used that word ‘run’ until he did,” he said. “And my thought is that that didn’t appear in some, you know, paper done through a long inter-agency process, that it just came out of the president, and that nobody else expected to run Venezuela. It would be extremely difficult.”
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