Trump releases photo of captured Venezuelan President, Maduro

By Editor

President Donald Trump on Saturday posted a picture of a handcuffed and blindfolded Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro aboard a US warship on his Truth Social hours after he was captured by the US special forces in an audacious military operation.

The photo, posted to Trump’s social media network Truth Social, shows Maduro in a gray sweatsuit, holding a water bottle and wearing what appeared to be sound-suppressing earmuffs and a dark covering over his eyes.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were both captured in the operation that also included strikes on targets in Venezuela, he said. Both are named in a federal indictment accusing them of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and two illegal weapons counts. They will be taken to New York to face the charges, Trump said.

In a news conference, Trump said the United States will “run the country” until a “proper” transition of leadership can take place, without further detailing what U.S. involvement would look like.

The United States captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife in an overnight military operation on Jan. 3, 2026, President Donald Trump said, as explosions rocked Caracas and targets across the country.

The US military operation to extract the Venezuelan president in a nighttime raid in Caracas took “months of planning and rehearsal,” and more than 150 US aircraft were used, top US General Dan Caine told reporters.

“The word integration does not explain the sheer complexity of such a mission, an extraction so precise — it involved more than 150 aircraft launching across the Western Hemisphere,” Caine, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a joint press conference with President Trump.

“It was a brilliant operation, actually,” Trump told The New York Times shortly after US forces were cleared from Venezuelan airspace. He later added in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that some US troops were injured in the strike, but none were killed.

US-backed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, posted on social media: “The hour of freedom has arrived.”

She called for the opposition’s candidate in the 2024 election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, to “immediately” assume the presidency.

Additional report from USA Today.