Maria Machado intends to return to Venezuela to help with relief efforts after earthquakes devastated her country. President Trump should do everything in his power to facilitate and celebrate that return. The time to demote Delcy Rodriguez—the interim placeholder who rose to power after the military deposal and incarceration of Communist and alleged narco-trafficker Nicolas Maduro—is at hand. The upheaval of nature and panoply of death and suffering have provided the perfect opportunity.
Why was Rodriguez, a fixture of the old, corrupted order, who many Venezuelans, both expatriated and still in the Commie-ravaged country, regard as nothing so much as a regime henchwoman, installed by the U.S. in the wake of Maduro’s fall? The easy three answers are: oil, money, and control.
Reports before the earthquake indicated that administration officials harbored doubts that Machado, who incontrovertibly won Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election and subsequently handed her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, was ready to take the helm of her troubled sovereign nation. It’s presumed that she would win again if a free and fair election were held.
Leaving Rodriguez in place bought time. Her “administration” is coercible; under the thumb of the President, she’s not going to rock the boat, or challenge plans to remake Venezuela as a key oil ally in the Western Hemisphere, and to channel the energy output of the former Crown Jewel of South America away from global adversaries like China and Cuba.
Machado’s a Trumpian figure. She’s seen by the masses as the agent of deliverance from years of tyrannical rule, crippling anti-Communist international sanctions (the most crippling of which were placed by U.S. Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump) and mismanagement of a trillions+ dollar oil industry, the result of which catastrophically lowered the country’s standard of living.
While Machado might shape up as an even more compliant partner, the power of her cult-figure populism introduces Donald Rumsfeld’s “known-unknown” factor into the equation. Despite her apparent fealty to Trump, a sweeping democratic victory in a free election would enable the banished pro-democracy advocate and folk-heroine in ways that can’t be predicted.
It’s time to cast off those fears and welcome Machado back onto the streets of Caracas. There’s no need to throw Rodriguez onto those streets, but the message should ring clear to the people of a nation in mourning—her days as interim president are numbered. Elections are coming.
Trump has pledged and delivered disaster relief to a county he calls our “new friends.” He should now secure the safety of Maria Machado, enable the potential for a Venezuelan democracy, and bring her home.