Report: Trump Issues Ultimatum to Maduro, Land Operations Appear Imminent
“They’re now one of the prime drug trafficking networks into the United States and Europe, and use their military positions … to grow and accelerate those movements.”
On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump declared on social media that “the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela” should be considered closed “in its entirety.”
To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2025
The seemingly abrupt announcement followed a Friday report in The New York Times that Trump had spoken by phone with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also joined the call.
The call came after months of U.S. efforts to ratchet up pressure on Maduro. The strikes on Venezuelan drug boats, which began on September 2, have continued as the military has expanded its presence in the region. Additionally, the State Department formally designated Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, as a foreign terrorist organization last week.
A Sunday report in The Miami Herald shed some light on what was discussed during the call. According to “sources familiar with the exchange,” Trump demanded that Maduro leave the country right away. He “offered guaranteed evacuation for Maduro, his wife Cilia Flores, and their son” on the condition that he step down immediately.
The sources told the Herald that the sides were too far apart to reach an agreement.
It’s become increasingly clear that the Trump administration is gearing up for a more aggressive phase of operations against Cartel de los Soles, which Washington alleges is led by Maduro and other senior government officials.
The Herald noted that, in 2020, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and more than a dozen others, “calling the regime a narco-terrorist enterprise. … The U.S. has placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro —the largest reward ever offered for a sitting head of state — and $25 million for ruling-party strongman Diosdado Cabello.”
During a virtual address to service members on Thursday, Trump signaled that land operations against the drug cartels would begin “very soon.” He said, “You probably noticed that people aren’t wanting to be delivering by sea, and we’ll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon.”
The sources described the call “as a last-ditch effort to avoid a direct confrontation” and cited three reasons for its failure.
First, Maduro asked for global amnesty for any crimes he and his group had committed, and that was rejected:
Second, they asked to retain control of the armed forces — similar to what happened in Nicaragua in ’91 with Violeta Chamorro. In return, they would allow free elections. The arrangement resembled a “Cuban model” that left the Ortega brothers as the real power behind the scenes and ultimately helped pave their return to government. The administration rejected that proposal as well.
The third sticking point was timing: Washington insisted Maduro resign immediately, and Caracas refused.
The call — initially brokered by Brazil, Qatar, and Turkey — has not been repeated. After Trump’s announcement on Saturday that Venezuelan airspace should be considered “closed in its entirety,” the Maduro government attempted to place another call to Washington but received no response.
Fox News spoke with defense expert and former Venezuelan diplomat Vanessa Neumann on Sunday, who believes that military action on land is imminent. I’ve included most of her comments here, as they offer valuable context for understanding the situation:
The clearing of the airspace is an indication and a very clear public warning that missiles might be coming to take out command and control infrastructure or retaliatory infrastructure. This will not be like breaking a jar into a thousand pieces, this is where you can lift the concentration of power, and it’s easier to manage.
The targets have been identified through covert operations over the last several years by people on the ground. So they’re well-mapped. This is a capture-or-kill scenario, but there’s a limit to how many people you can remove quickly.
Maduro also doesn’t have that many options, and his military is very weak. You can’t go after 30 people simultaneously, who are spread all around, but certainly high on the list would be Maduro himself.
Their material [military equipment] is extremely old, decayed, and has not been serviced.
They’ve got junk from the Russians. The stuff they originally had from the Americans is decades old and has not been serviced.
So, they have neither the personnel, foreign support, nor the material.
Ahead of shuttering the airspace, the U.S. also officially designated the cartel allegedly linked with Venezuela’s government, the Cartel de los Soles, as a foreign terrorist organization.
This cartel turned Venezuela’s main oil company into a narcotics trafficking money laundering operation, using the company’s access to international finance, until it was sanctioned.
They were using Venezuelan military jets to bring in cocaine from Colombia, process it in Venezuela, and then move it into Central America and then into Europe.
Jet pilots were making a lot of money off that, and they’ve tortured people. They target people, anybody who tells on them, they’re disappeared. They’re now one of the prime drug trafficking networks into the United States and Europe, and use their military positions, including their military-to-military relations, to grow and accelerate those movements.
The Cartel de Los Soles is also a key collaborator and financier of Hezbollah and some of the drug money has been used to fund terrorist attacks that have killed American citizens, even in the Middle East.
The decision is President Trump’s because when he says, ‘Go’, we go. And nobody knows when he’ll say that. He has mobilized so many assets down there now. But what President Trump is doing now is long overdue.
The timing is right now. Because even Maduro’s biggest backers, Russia and Iran, are both on the back foot, and China will not go that far in backing Maduro as it has bigger and broader interests throughout the region.
Maduro is also weakened because his partners are weakened and have their own issues to deal with. We also now have a concentration of power and deep repression within the country that’s quite unified, which means it’s easy to flip.
…
It’s because of the brutality of the counter-intelligence that they do to their own military, and hundreds of soldiers are tortured. That said, the Venezuelan people have made it clear that they wanted Maduro out and fought democratically but lost.
They voted in elections, protested peacefully, lobbied for sanctions, and lobbied for international support.
For some additional perspective:
I’ve been told that Maduro wants to leave Venezuela, but if he tries he will be killed by the Cubans and his own cartel. There are 1000 of them who are not going to let him leave and take the fall without him.
— Patrick Byrne (@PatrickByrne) November 30, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Oh, goody. Another country to fifght, kill off some of the present generation, then build billions in infrastructure for our several-decade occupation.
Well, we could just break stuff and kill people and let the survivors clean up the mess themselves or not, their choice, so long as they stop doing things to harm US Citizens. No requirement to send boots on the ground or finance rebuilding via shoving tax $ at US Corporations or grift, graft and corruption.
No one need die. The ball is in Maduro’s court.
Venezuela, through it’s institution and ownership of the embedded source codes in Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines, has been manipulating elections- not just in the US but all over the world.
THIS is what Trump intends to end.
Read Elizabeth Nickson’s substack a couple days ago for the long-form info on this.
That’s so NOT what Trump or the current R Party is about.
I’m not falling for the “Big Hammer” arguement. I voted for this, and just think of the casualties prior to the attempt to halt the flow of dangerous substances that have caused so much collateral damage to America. In closing…don’t you think the USA has some damning intel on Maduro and narcoterrorism, and is not reacting blindly?
The Monroe Doctrine isn’t just the punch line in a bad Milton Berle joke.
I’m surprised Democrats aren’t all over this one 🤔
I’m confident they have at least TWO federal judges lined up.
They know two out of three ain’t bad.
There are thousands of ME terrorists there, is my understanding
I think this is multifaceted, but who the hell is going to run the country?
I feel like Trump is trying to make them feel small, like me. And that’s not nice. We need more niceness in the hemisphere.
Aw gee, ReselyupJR, didya find yerself a new screen name?
Poor lil troll.
A Thought: Cubans are deeply embedded in Maduro’s security apparatus. It stands to reason that they’d be high value targets in any operation. Start taking out the Cubans and odds are Maduro’s regime will rapidly collapse.
I would prefer Gunboat diplomacy. Mount a 16inch gun on a monitor and lob a few shells into his Presidential compound. Afterwards charter a jet from Quatar to transport him to a new home. I would suggest Yemen or the Sudan.
He could go down like Scarface.
I would suggest underground.
Well…, removing the government in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan didn’t ultimately turn out so well. The Philippines is better albeit still wobbly and corrupt. Panama is okay… with just your normal levels of South American corruption. South Africa doesn’t seem to have prospered after forced regime change.
Still, I suppose it has to be done. I don’t think we can just remove the head of government and then walk away saying, “Good luck everybody!”
Perhaps Venezuela will be the serpent held to our bosom that won’t eventually bite us. There has to be one eventually, right?
Didn’t the Venezuelan citizens already choose a new leader? Seems an obvious alternative to Maduro, were he to be deposed.
The simple solution is to just say no to drugs. I think powerful drugs should be made free to all Americans. After a couple of months only cleaning living productive people would be left.
Will the college protest kids come out screaming hands off Venezuela – the grand socialist paradise they hope to recreate here in America? Just wondering since socialism is so hipster ? Or is the Omni cause “Palestine “ still the only thing those losers care about ? Poor Mamdopey losing one of his mentors in the world must be rough on the young lad. I’m sure he was hoping him and Maduro could brainstorm awesome ideas together on how to destroy a once beautiful country.
Why don’t people proposing ANY plan to disrupt the drug deaths start EVERY speech, article and other communications (video of all sorts) with a line akin to: Do you realize 100,000 ( this is 100 thousand properly indicated) youth have died because of these unlawful perpetrators and their drugs? Say so every time.
My take is that this is all just leverage for a regime change.
At most, he’ll bomb some drug sites in Venezuela.
Zero chance he’ll send ground troops in.
He wants Maduro and his cronies out. The drugs to stop flowing to the US. A new regime that will kick out the Cubans, the Iranians, the Chinese, and Hamas/Hezbollah – and a resumption of normal trade.
This is hugely important for the Venezuelan people, the entire region, and the United States.
Note well that this is largely Marco Rubio’s agenda being put into practice.
What Trump, and everyone in leadership in the R Party today, absolutely do NOT want are US troops on the ground or anything resembling the Bush era “nation building” nonsense. They’ve all had as much of that as they can stomach from the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.
Notice that Trump has not, and will not, commit US troops to Gaza or Ukraine either.
His foreign policy is, essentially: Make money, not war. He wants to build trade ties as a barrier against future wars. That can’t happen in Venezuela with the current regime in power.
Speaking of which, a large part of what they are offering Russia in exchange for peace with Ukraine is a resumption of normal trade, the end of sanctions, and a vast array of exchanges of investments between US and Russia that will bind our economies, to the benefit of both (but having a massive impact on Russia) which would preclude a future war because it would cost Russia far too much to break the trade agreements. Also attempts to pull Russia into the US sphere, excluding China. And screws the EU in the process.
Well according to the true conservatives at National Review and the WSJ the good Maduro is right to resist the evil dictator Trump.
National Review has become a sewer.
It became a sewer well over a decade ago.
“nor the material”
*materiel, perhaps?
One of the strengths of Trump, and a fact that he campaigned upon, was that unlike presidents before and after him, he did not start new wars and ended old ones.
I am not thrilled with the idea of sending troops to a foreign land with no direct foreseeable benefit to the United States.
If he wants to keep blowing up drug boats, that’s fine by me as I have seen the direct and long term effects of illicit drugs.
We can do that type of interdiction without putting boots on the ground in a foreign land.
If Venezuela’s people want to remain in a horrible country without affecting change, that’s on them – not the United States.
The laws of stateless vessels.
The laws of a country extend 12 miles out from its shores. All vessels within that limit are subject to that country’s jurisdiction. Beyond that limit all vessels must fly the flag under whose jurisdiction they are sailing. Someone committing a crime in international waters is subject to the laws of the country under whose flag he is sailing. In addition, that country is responsible for the actions of a vessel flying its flag.
These boats are not flying Venezuela’s flag, and thus Venezuela is not legally responsible for them. They’re not flying *any* flag — so no country is responsible for their actions, but they don’t receive the protections of any country either. They are stateless vessels and, under the law, essentially pirates.