President Donald Trump has embarked on his own regime-change mission. And this time the United States intends to keep the oil.

American Special Operations Forces captured Nicolás Maduro in a daring raid, nabbing the Venezuelan leader from his bed early Saturday morning before sending him north aboard the USS Iwo Jima to New York, where he will face criminal charges related to an alleged narco-terrorism conspiracy.

The leftist strongman had ruled the South American state for more than a decade.

Now Trump will take over. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he told reporters during a Mar-a-Lago press conference, deputizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to manage in the interim as “a team.”

Though long a critic of the foreign entanglements that defined the presidencies of his Republican predecessors, Trump insisted he could do regime change right. “We’ll run it properly. We’ll run it professionally,” he said. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going in.” He will not, however, clean house.

Trump claimed Delcy Rodríguez, a Maduro loyalist and the current Venezuelan vice president, was already willing to work with the United States to remake the country. He said it would be “very tough” for opposition leader María Corina Machado to assume power. Just hours after perhaps the most consequential decision of his tenure, the once ostensibly isolationist president was suddenly and remarkably open-ended in his commitment to rebuild a nation thousands of miles away from his own. Of a potential American occupation force, Trump said, “We are not afraid of boots on the ground.”

Even if the newly announced nation-building mission may be something of a flashback to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Trump did not echo the language of the War on Terror. He spoke for nearly an hour. Not once did the president, or his assembled people, say the word “democracy.”

He ordered the removal of the foreign head of state to instead preserve American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela under Maduro had opened its arms to China, Cuba, Iran, and........

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