In a forceful and layered interview on 60 Minutes, President Donald Trump dismissed speculation about a pending U.S. war with Venezuela, even as he defended a flurry of military activity in the Caribbean and delivered some of his harshest remarks yet against the Maduro regime.
With the USS Gerald R. Ford strike group repositioned to the U.S. Southern Command and a string of high-profile military strikes targeting drug-smuggling vessels off the Venezuelan coast, many observers have wondered if the United States is preparing to escalate into full-scale intervention.
Trump, characteristically blunt, downplayed the idea of war—but didn’t shy away from explaining why Venezuela is under close watch.
“I doubt it, I don’t think so,” he said when asked about a war scenario. But he quickly pivoted to a more urgent concern: mass migration of criminals. According to Trump, Nicolás Maduro’s government has been deliberately offloading Venezuela’s prison population—along with mentally ill individuals—into the United States, exploiting what Trump calls the Biden administration’s “open border disaster.”
“They emptied their prisons into our country. They also… emptied their mental institutions and their insane asylum into the United States of America,” Trump charged, tying the issue not just to Maduro but to Biden’s border policies. “Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of our country.”
While O’Donnell pressed him on whether recent naval deployments were truly about drug interdiction or something broader, Trump made clear that the crisis was multidimensional. He acknowledged drug trafficking as a major factor but returned repeatedly to the idea of criminal migration as the most pressing threat. “To me, that would be almost number one,” he said, while also condemning Mexico’s role in trafficking.
When asked whether Maduro’s grip on power was nearing its end, Trump answered without hesitation: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.” Though he declined to confirm any reports about future land strikes inside Venezuela, Trump refused to rule them out, offering a pointed rebuke to media speculation: “I’m not saying it’s true or untrue,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t discuss military operations with a reporter.
Meanwhile, administration officials echoed his caution. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied reports of any planned incursions into Venezuela, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth followed suit, offering a curt response to reporters in Kuala Lumpur: “Of course, we would not share any amount of operational details about what may or may not happen.”
For now, Trump’s posture remains aggressive but measured. There is no formal declaration of war, no confirmed invasion plans—but the message to Maduro is unmistakable: the U.S. military is watching, and Trump isn’t bluffing about protecting American borders or stopping what he called “a foreign-engineered criminal invasion.”
