U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt is defending President Donald Trump’s decision to favor Nicolás Maduro’s appointed vice president as the new leader of Venezuela, even though some of his Republican colleagues have called the now-detained president’s regime illegitimate.
It comes as Democrats have assailed Trump and Republicans for backing Saturday's invasion and seizure of Maduro - and for contradicting the GOP president’s campaign rhetoric against military interventions.
After Trump ordered the early Saturday attack on Venezuela, the president and administration have acknowledged Delcy Rodríguez as the de facto leader of the South American country. Maduro appointed Rodríguez vice president in 2018. She harshly criticized Trump and the United States for Saturday’s invasion, calling Maduro the "only" president and demanding his return to Venezuela.
Trump chose to back Rodriguez even though a bipartisan group of Illinois and Missouri lawmakers called Maduro’s presidency illegitimate, based on widespread reports of fraud during the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election. Trump declined to back opposition leader María Corina Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was the driving force behind Edmundo González’s 2024 presidential campaign.
In an interview Tuesday, Schmitt said having Rodríguez serve as acting president is about short-term stability. He also said it shows how Trump isn’t actually enacting “regime change,” as many of his critics contend.
“Because if that's what this is, you would have toppled the whole government. That didn't happen,” Schmitt said. “You only had boots on the ground for about three hours, and now we still have the leverage of the quarantine on their sanctioned oil.”
“But I think the chief concern initially here was the continuity of government,” he added. “You have a VP that's now been sworn in, and they'll have plenty of opportunities, I think, to figure out what the future looks like for Venezuela.”
Hawley mum
As of Tuesday afternoon, Missouri’s other U.S. senator, Republican Josh Hawley, still hadn’t commented about Trump’s move on Venezuela.
Like Schmitt, Hawley has been opposed to American involvement in foreign conflicts – particularly providing weapons to Ukraine. He was quoted in the British publication the Times on Saturday as having previously said: “My views haven’t changed about landing ground troops or offensive operations in Venezuela. I’m not a forcible regime change guy.”
University of Missouri-St. Louis political science professor Anita Manion said Hawley’s lack of comment is notable. If he ends up breaking from Trump on Venezuela, Manion said it could spur more speculation that he could be planning a presidential bid in 2028.
“And so it makes me curious if he thinks that potentially this could be unpopular with the American public in general and also to the MAGA base,” Manion said. “So if, for example, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio are very entwined in this action and it's unpopular, then Josh Hawley could set himself apart from the field by not supporting it.”
U.S. Rep. Wesley Bell, D-St. Louis County, said Trump’s decision to embrace Rodriguez, at least for now, showcases the incoherence of his foreign policy decision-making.
“I do study history. And Americans do not have an appetite for more wars for oil,” Bell said in an interview on Monday. “And considering that, right out of Trump's mouth, he spoke with oil CEOs prior to these strikes before even talking and getting authorization from Congress, I think it's legitimate and reasonable to question his agenda.”
Bell also criticized how Trump insisted that his administration would “run” Venezuela during a Saturday press conference. Secretary of State Rubio effectively walked back that statement during appearances on various Sunday talk shows, stating that the United States would effectively coerce Rodriguez into making decisions that align with American interests.
“Venezuelans should decide the future of Venezuela – and not Donald Trump,” Bell said. “He can't competently run this country. And so what makes any of us think that he can run another?”
Others question Trump’s policy
While Republicans generally praised Trump’s decision to invade Venezuela, it wasn’t universally well received.
Some GOP officials like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia questioned if the decision to detain Maduro amounted to Trump embracing a more interventionist foreign policy.
And Democrats like Bell and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois said Trump lied to the American people when he promised during the 2024 campaign he would stop American involvement in wars; he has since launched attacks in Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
“He changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War,” Bell said. “So to then turn around and say, ‘Oh, I don't have any intention of starting wars.’ Well, you renamed an entire department.”
Duckworth said at a Capitol Hill press conference on Tuesday that the action in Venezuela reminds her of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, a war in which Duckworth lost her legs piloting a helicopter that was shot down.
“We fought a war in Iraq for oil,” she said. “We sent troops there, myself included, looking for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. It was a war that was built on bluster and bravado — from ignorance and arrogance of those in leadership — and yet here we are again in Venezuela.”
While Duckworth said she found the American military’s performance “remarkable” over the weekend, the second-term senator also believes Trump’s intervention in South America runs antithetical to his America First campaign promises.
“It is not the American people's responsibility to go around the world removing dictators from power and then run foreign countries when we have problems here at home,” she said, citing the affordability issue and the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Schmitt has generally been wary of the United States intervening in military conflicts. He opposed sending American weapons to Ukraine. And during a speech at the National Conservatism Conference last year, Schmitt blasted conservatives for cheering “foreign intervention after foreign intervention, not to defend America's actual national interest, but to pursue the same fantasy of a world safe for democracy” that presidents like Woodrow Wilson pursued for nearly a century.
Asked why Trump isn’t following Wilson’s footsteps by intervening in foreign conflicts after promising not to on the campaign trail, Schmitt said Trump is rejecting “this wandering foreign policy you end up in far corners of the world trying to create some Madisonian democracy.”
“This is about a foreign policy where the core interests of the United States of America reign supreme, and we have a core interest in making sure we don't have an illegitimate dictator sending drugs and playing host or adversaries in our own backyard,” said Schmitt, alluding to Maduro’s closeness with China and Russia and allegations that he help protect drug cartels. “And so a very strategic action was taken, a very limited action was taken here, and I support that.”
Manion said that while Republicans are generally supporting Trump now, that could change if the situation in Venezuela deteriorates.
“It seems to me that some in the MAGA movement are trying to thread the needle here using the Monroe Doctrine, or the Donroe Doctrine as President Trump is referring to it, that things that happen in the Americas and in our hemisphere are our purview, as opposed to interventions in the Middle East or Ukraine or other places,” she said.
Reporter Will Bauer contributed to this report
