President Donald Trump has shared a fake version of his Wikipedia page on Truth Social on which he is referred to as the “Acting President of Venezuela.”
The post appeared on the president’s social media platform on Sunday, a joke at the expense of the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez.
Nicolas Maduro’s former vice president was sworn in last week after U.S. forces swept into Caracas in the early hours of Saturday, January 3, and abducted Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, subsequently removing them to New York to answer to narco-terrorism charges.
Maduro pleaded not guilty to the charges in a Manhattan court and insisted he was still Venezuela’s rightful leader.
In the aftermath of the operation, Trump, flanked by senior members of his cabinet, announced that Washington would “run” Venezuela until the country was stable enough to hold free and fair presidential elections.
It was subsequently reported that the power vacuum would be filled temporarily by “a small committee” led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “with the president heavily engaged,” that would also consist of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, CIA Director of John Ratcliffe, White House adviser Stephen Miller, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Rodriguez was strongly advised to cooperate with the committee, and Trump subsequently said he had called off a second wave of attacks on the country because she was doing so.
The president has since met with executives from America’s top oil companies to discuss the management of Venezuela’s natural resources, only to be told by Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, that his corporation considered the country “uninvestable” at present.
“We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here,” Woods told Trump, referring to the fallout from the late president Hugo Chavez’s moves to nationalize Venezuela’s hydrocarbon sector between 2004 and 2007.
“If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela today, it’s uninvestable.”
Clearly angered by Woods’s position, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday, as he returned to the White House from Mar-a-Lago: “I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.”
The president also took to Truth Social on Sunday to threaten Cuba, saying it would receive no further support from Venezuela before joking that Rubio could be installed as its next leader.
“Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of OIL and MONEY from Venezuela,” Trump wrote on his platform.
“In return, Cuba provided ‘Security Services’ for the last two Venezuelan dictators, BUT NOT ANYMORE!”
Rubio issued his own warning to Havana a day after the Maduro operation when he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and said: “I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro.”
