Key events
Closing summary
It’s just past 11.30pm in New York and 12.30am in Caracas and we’re about to close this blog and continue our live coverage in another file here. Here’s a recap of latest news – thanks for being with us.
Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado has said in her first televised interview since the US military’s weekend raid on Venezuela that she hasn’t spoken Donald Trump since October 2025.
“Actually, I spoke with President Trump on October 10, the same day the [Noble peace] prize was announced, [but] not since then,” she said on Fox News. Machado – widely seen as deposed president Nicolás Maduro’s most credible opponent – left Venezuela last month to travel to Norway to accept the award and hasn’t returned since.
“I’m planning to go as soon as possible back home,” she told Fox when asked about her plans to return to Venezuela.
Trump on Saturday dismissed the idea of working with Machado, saying: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.” US media reported on Monday that a classified CIA assessment presented to Trump concluded that senior Maduro loyalists, including interim president Delcy Rodríguez, were best positioned to maintain stability.
Despite this, Machado welcomed the US actions as “a huge step for humanity, for freedom and human dignity”.
In other key developments:
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Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic minority in the US Senate, expressed discontent with a classified briefing for Congressional leaders, calling the Trump administration’s “plan for the US ‘running Venezuela’ … vague, based on wishful thinking and unsatisfying”.
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Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House, emerged from the classified briefing insisting that “we are not at war” and “this is not a regime change,” but “a demand for a change of behaviour by a regime”.
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The reported appearance of unidentified drones over the presidential palace in Venezuela’s capital on Monday night filled the night sky with the sound of heavy gunfire and tracer fire as the regime’s security forces reacted to what they mistook for another raid.
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Trump suggested to NBC News that US taxpayers could fund the rebuilding of Venezuela’s infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”
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White House adviser Stephen Miller reaffirmed to CNN the Trump administration’s position on Greenland becoming a part of the US.
Keeping with María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader also denounced the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, accusing her of being a key architect of abuses.
Machado told Fox News from an undisclosed location that Rodriguez was “rejected” by the Venezuelan people and that voters were on the opposition’s side.
“In free and fair elections, we will win by over 90% of the votes, I have no doubt about it,” Machado said, quoted by the AFP news agency.
Rodríguez, who was Venezuela’s vice-president under Nicolás Maduro, has signalled her willingness to cooperate with Washington.
As reported earlier, Machado also said she planned to return home “as soon as possible”.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has said that “a free Venezuela” will become the energy centre of North and South America.
“We will turn Venezuela into the energy hub of the Americas,” the Nobel laureate was quoted as telling Fox News on Monday.
Venezuela is believed to have the largest oil reserves of any country in the world. But according to Donald Trump its oil industry has been “a total bust” for a long time, and he has vowed to take control of it and revive its fortunes with the help of America’s biggest oil companies.
How might this play out, what do experts think about its prospects of success and could it affect the costs motorists pay at the pumps? See our explainer here:
Greenland prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has pushed back against Donald Trump’s renewed calls to annex the Arctic territory, while Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen says the US president should be taken seriously when he talks of wanting Greenland.
Here a video we’ve just published taking us through it.
Interim summary
We are continuing to track the aftermath of Saturday’s US military raid on Venezuela, with little clarity as to what comes next. Here are the latest developments:
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María Corina Machado, the exiled Venezuelan opposition leader, who reportedly angered Donald Trump by accepting the Nobel peace prize he had his heart set on, used an appearance on the president’s favorite Fox News show to offer to share it with him.
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Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic minority in the US Senate, expressed discontent with a classified briefing for Congressional leaders, calling the Trump administration’s “plan for the US ‘running Venezuela’… vague, based on wishful thinking and unsatisfying.”
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Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House, emerged from the classified briefing insisting that “we are not at war” and “this is not a regime change,” but “a demand for a change of behavior by a regime.”
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The reported appearance of unidentified drones over the presidential palace in Venezuela’s capital on Monday night filled the night sky with the sound of heavy gunfire and tracer fire as the regime’s security forces reacted to what they mistook for another raid.
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In an interview with NBC News, Trump suggested that US taxpayers could fund the rebuilding of Venezuela’s infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue”, the president said.
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In an interview with CNN, White house advisor Stephen Miller reaffirmed the Trump administration’s position on Greenland becoming a part of the US.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado says she would share Nobel Peace prize with Trump
María Corina Machado, the exiled Venezuelan opposition leader, used an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday to assure Donald Trump that she would like to share the Nobel peace prize she won last year with him.
Machado, whose failure to immediately surrender the Nobel prize to Trump reportedly angered the US president, also told Fox News on Monday that she plans to return to her country as soon as possible.
In the aftermath of the US military operation to depose Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who is widely believed to have stolen the last election from the opposition, Trump dismissed the idea that Machado should run the country. “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” Trump said. “She doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within, the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”
Two people close to the White House told the Washington Post that Machado had alienated Trump by accepting the Nobel prize, instead of giving it to him.
Although Machado dedicated the award to Trump, her acceptance of the prize was the “ultimate sin” in Trump’s eyes, one of the people told the Post. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” this person said.
Speaking to Hannity, Trump’s close ally, Machado was effusive in her praise for Trump, but she admitted that she had not yet offered to give him the Nobel prize. “It hasn’t happened yet,” she said, “but I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him that we believe, the Venezuelan people, because this is a prize of the Venezuelan people, certainly want to give it to him, and share it with him.”
Gunfire near Venezuela presidential palace was triggered by unidentified drones – report
Agence France-Presse, the French news service, reports that gunfire near the Venezuelan presidential palace on Monday night was a response from local security forces to the appearance of unidentified drones over the Miraflores palace in central Caracas.
A source close to the government said the situation was now under control.
As we noted earlier, the sound of heavy gunfire and images of tracer fire in the sky were captured in video clips uploaded to social media after 8pm local time.
A person who lives five blocks from the palace told the news agency the incident lasted about a minute.
“The first thing that came to mind was to see if there were planes flying overhead but there were not. I just saw two red lights in the sky,” the resident near the palace said.
“Everyone was looking out their windows to see if there was a plane, to see what was happening.”
House speaker Mike Johnson insists US toppling of Venezuela’s leader ‘is not a regime change’
The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, just emerged from a classified briefing by the Trump administration on the US attack on Venezuela insisting that “we are not at war” and “this is not regime change.”
“With regard to the War Powers,” Johnson said, “we are not at war. We do not have US armed forces in Venezuela and we are not occupying that country.”
“The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, that is true, but it also vests the president of the United States, with vast authorities as commander-in-chief,” Johnson added.
The speaker said that he was first informed of the military action at 4am Saturday in a phone call from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
“This is not a regime change,” the speaker argued. “This is a demand for a change of behavior by a regime. The interim government is stood up now and we are hopeful that they will be able to correct their action.”
The speaker, who relies on Donald Trump’s support to keep his job, then echoed the unproven allegations that the deposed president of Venezuela had directed drug cartel violence and drug trafficking in the United States.
The new government of Venezuela, Johnson said, led by the deposed president’s deputy, “cannot participate with narcoterrorist and very dangerous international criminal organizations that harm and target Americans frankly, and traffic all of these dangerous drugs into our country.”
“We have a way of persuasion, because their oil exports, as you know, have been seized and I think that will bring the country to a new governance”, he continued. “So we don’t expect troops on the ground, we don’t expect direct involvement beyond just coercing the new, the interim government.”
After classified briefing, Schumer says administration’s plan for ‘running Venezuela’ is ‘vague’ and ‘based on wishful thinking’
Lawmakers emerged from a classified briefing with sharply different assessments of the Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, told reporters: “This briefing, while very extensive and long, posed far more questions than it ever answered.”
“Their plan for the US ‘running Venezuela’ is vague, based on wishful thinking and unsatisfying,” he said. “I asked for, I would have liked, I did not receive any assurances that we would not try to do the same thing in other countries.”
“When the United States engages in this kind of regime change and so-called nation building, it always ends up hurting the United States,” Schumer added. “I left the briefing feeling that it would again.”
Gunfire reported near Venezuelan presidential palace
Shots were fired near the Venezuelan presidential palace in Caracas on Monday night, witnesses and a source close to presidency told Agence France-Presse, the French news service. The news agency reported that a source said the situation was “under control”.
Multiple video clips posted on social media, which appeared to capture the sound of heavy gunfire and images of tracer fire in the sky, were geolocated to an area just north of the presidential compound by Blake Spendley, an open-source investigator for Hunterbrook Media who previously led investigations for the US Navy and Marine Corps.
Trump suggests US taxpayers could reimburse oil companies for repairing Venezuelan infrastructure
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Donald Trump suggested that US taxpayers could fund the rebuilding of Venezuela’s infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil.
Trump acknowledged that “a lot of money” will need to be spent to increase oil production in Venezuela, but suggested the US government could pay American oil companies to do the work.
“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue”, the president said.
The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, reportedly plans to meet representatives of Chevron, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil at the Goldman Sachs Energy, Clean Tech & Utilities Conference in Miami later this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the major oil companies might be much more reluctant than Trump says to invest in Venezuela, despite its large reserve of oil, in part because there’s so much uncertainty about who will be running the country.
“The oil industry is saying that they don’t know what Venezuela’s government is going to look like tomorrow,” the Journal’s Collin Eaton said in a podcast interview on Monday. “They need sort of a long, stable environment to invest in. So while President Trump has sort of come out and said that these oil companies are going to invest a lot of money in Venezuela, the details are unclear, and we may hear some answers this week as the administration continues to talk about this with oil companies.”
Venezuela produces on average about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, down from the 3.5 million barrels a day produced in 1999 before a government takeover of the domestic industry.
