Trump’s Fmr. Venezuela Envoy Hits President for Declaring US Will Now ‘Run’ the Country: It’s ‘Too Complex For Us’

Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s former special envoy to Venezuela, told CNN Sunday that the president may have taken his staff by surprise when he declared the U.S. would “run” the Latin American country now that Nicolas Maduro is in custody.

“I doubt there’s…been much planning…done for this, but partly because it was necessary to retain operational security,” Abrams said about the surprise U.S. attack that led to the strongman’s abduction. “I don’t think many people in the government knew this was going to happen.”

Abrams declared that the U.S. “cannot run Venezuela,” and neither should Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s second-in-command.

“I think first of all, the United States should be demanding the expulsion of Cuban and Iranian officials from Venezuela,” Abrams said. “We should be demanding the liberation of all political prisoners right now, and we should be supporting Edmundo Gonzalez, who won that election in 2024 with a 70% landslide…That’s what we should be supporting; The guy who won the election should be president.”

Abrams went on to suggest that Trump spoke off-the-cuff when he answered a reporter’s question about who would run the country now that Maduro was in U.S. detention pending narco-trafficking charges.

“You know, nobody else used that word ‘run’ until he did,” Abrams said, continuing:

And my thought is that that didn’t appear in some, you know, paper done through a long interagency process — that it just came out of the president, and that nobody else expected to run Venezuela. It would be extremely difficult. You know, it’s a very big country. It’s twice the size of California, 25 million people, roughly. It’s too complex for us to run.

What we should be looking for is a popular government, a democratic, elected government that can begin to rehabilitate the country with our support and the support of the other democracies that surround Venezuela. That’s possible. But the notion that we’re going to run it from Washington I think is implausible, and it’s just not going to work.

Watch the clip above via CNN.