Venezuela Is Taking the Doublethink Approach with the Trump Administration

Update: Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now flat-out stated that the U.S. will enforce its will in Venezuela with the direct threat of more military intervention and killing. His prepared remarks for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say that “Make no mistake, as the President has stated, we are prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation if other methods fail.”

It’s a delicate game that Delcy Rodríguez is playing. The theoretically “interim” President of Venezuela and successor of Nicolás Maduro, following his abduction by the U.S. military to stand trial on a variety of charges in the U.S., Rodríguez finds herself forced to fend off two existential threats at once. On one hand, she must put up a token show of resistance against the imperialist swine of the big, bad USA, which invaded her country, killing hundreds while abducting the man she still publicly claims is the true President of Venezuela. If she isn’t seen to be resisting enough, Rodríguez could find herself targeted or toppled by pro-Maduro security groups or radicals who believe she has betrayed the spirit of “Chavismo,” the animating philosophy of socialism and anti-imperialism that has powered the country since the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013. But at the same time, Rodríguez also must obviously appease the U.S. and Donald Trump, most notably in the cessation of economic and diplomatic ties to countries like China and Cuba, and by paving the way for American companies to exploit the Venezuelan oil industry. Her seeming solution so far: Badmouth the U.S. and Trump in addresses seen by the Venezuelan public, while privately doing exactly what Trump wants her to do.

Oh, and Rodríguez also says that the U.S. threatened to kill her if she doesn’t comply; is that relevant? That revelation comes courtesy of leaked video in Venezuela that was recorded a week after the U.S. invasion, in which Rodríguez can be heard addressing a collection of pro-government influencers/propagandists, seeking to unify their messaging on her legitimacy as President among other things. In the footage, she tells the influencers that when U.S. forces moved against Maduro, she was initially told by the U.S. military that he had been killed, and that she and other members of the cabinet were given 15 minutes to decide whether to comply with U.S. demands, “or they would kill us.”

“The threats began from the very first minute they kidnapped the president,” says Rodríguez in the recording. “They gave Diosdado [Cabello, the interior minister], Jorge [Rodríguez, the acting president’s brother and congressional president,] and me 15 minutes to respond, or they would kill us. And I tell you, we stand by that statement to this day, because the threats and the blackmail are constant, and we have to proceed with patience and strategic prudence, with very clear objectives, brothers and sisters, to preserve peace … to rescue our hostages … and to preserve political power.”

A leaked video shows Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez telling pro-government influencers that U.S. forces threatened to kill senior officials unless they cooperated after Maduro’s capture. She claims leaders were given 15 minutes to comply, citing “constant pressure and blackmail.”

— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) Jan 24, 2026 at 10:20 AM

And that’s the heart of Rodríguez’s challenge: To preserve her own political power while also appeasing both sides, all as a “temporary” or “acting” President who is supposedly meant to step aside at a time of future democratic elections, which have naturally not been scheduled. Nor will said elections be scheduled, unless Donald Trump isn’t getting what he wants. Trump certainly seems to believe that Rodríguez will be a good lapdog, although he also understands that he should dangle the threat of replacement as well to ensure compliance, recently telling U.S. media that he would like to see Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado “involved” in the country’s leadership at some point. Trump was in the midst of swapping favors when he said this, calling Machado an “unbelievably nice woman” after she had prostrated herself before him, surrendering her Nobel Peace Prize in the knowledge that Trump is very easily bought by flattery and praise.

Delcy Rodríguez must thus convince those wielding any amount of power in Venezuela that kowtowing to U.S. interests is in fact what Maduro would have wanted, among other things. In the same meeting with influencers, her communications minister Freddy Ñáñez spun an incredible yarn that “everything happening today,” including the U.S. takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry, was in fact “simply the plan that Maduro put on the table,” saying that “It’s not a concession, a gift or a defeat; selling oil to the U.S. has always been our plan.” Wow, I guess it was super convenient for Maduro’s plan that the U.S. invaded and deposed him, then! Fortuitous stuff.

For as we all know, in Trump’s mind in particular, the question of Venezuela all comes back to oil–heavy, sulfur-rich oil that is of relatively little value to the U.S. except in a number of Gulf Coast refineries. Perhaps the true motivation is more accurately to withhold that oil from buyers in China, or especially in Cuba, which is poised to starve and descend into anarchy without the lifeline of Venezuelan crude to sustain it, as U.S. companies lick their lips and prepare to profit from Cuban regime change.

In Venezuela, Rodríguez continues to decry the U.S., saying this week that she’s had “enough” of “Washington’s orders” while addressing oil workers in Puerto La Cruz.

“Enough already of Washington’s orders over politicians in Venezuela,” she said. “Let Venezuelan politics resolve our differences and our internal conflicts. This Republic has paid a very high price for having to confront the consequences of fascism and extremism in our country.”

At the same time, however, Rodríguez’s aides have been ramming sweeping reforms of the country’s hydrocarbons law through the National Assembly, which when approved will increase access to the oil industry for foreign companies. There is still question, especially from the bigger American oil companies, of how willing any of them are to take the risk of entering this market while oil prices continue to hover around five year lows, making the promise of big profits unrealistic–unless of course the U.S. government subsidizes oil production in Venezuela with American tax dollars. But smaller, independent oil companies or “wildcatters” are apparently far more willing to take on that risk, to potentially strike it rich with newly discovered oil sources.

“The small guys are willing to take the risk, Venezuela is the lost world,” said Matthew Goitia, a director at Pelorus Terminals, to Reuters.

We’ll have more on Minnesota in a moment but this shouldn’t get lost: despite the protestations, oil companies are fine with extracting crude from Venezuela as long as the U.S. government guarantees the profits. Those guarantees are in motion, writes @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social.

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— David Dayen (@ddayen.bsky.social) Jan 26, 2026 at 9:52 AM

Even as she promises to carry on Maduro’s legacy, however, Delcy Rodríguez finds herself increasingly removing from power Maduro’s own loyalists in an effort to shore up her own authoritarian power and install people with personal loyalty to her, rather than to Maduro. In January, Rodríguez reportedly worked with the U.S. military to force a tanker ship carrying oil owned by businessman/Maduro loyalist Alex Saab to return to Venezuela, while also removing Saab from his government positions. And despite the headlines of the releases of political prisoners from Venezuelan prisons, likely to fulfill U.S. requests, Rodríguez’s regime seems to be adding new political prisoners just as quickly, on trumped-up charges of terrorism.

It’s clear what Delcy Rodríguez wants: To stay cemented in power in Venezuela, in a regime no less authoritarian and repressive than Maduro’s, while appeasing enough U.S. demands to be left mostly to her own devices. In order to do so, she’s making it clear that ideology is no concern: She merely needs to read as Chavismo enough in order to avoid the wrath of her own people while she consolidates power. The influence of the U.S. is just too big to ignore; not when her predecessor was yanked out of his home less than a month ago. When the alternative is “being killed by the U.S. military,” you can hardly blame her. It remains to be seen whether the Venezuelan people will accept their new U.S. doublethink standard.