We're already watching Venezuela's Vice President Delcy Rodriguez throw cold water on Trump's solution for running the country now that the United States has captured Nicolas Maduro, saying during a televised address that her country "will never return to being the colony of another empire," and calling his capture "barbaric."

And, as TPM's Josh Marshall pointed out on BlueSky, Trump is basically having to strongarm the oil companies into agreeing to invest there:

Very important signal here. You can say it's abt oil. And part of it is. But the White House is actually being forced to strongarm the oil companies to get involved. www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 4:57 PM

And, as MSNow's Jen Psaki discussed during some of their special coverage this Saturday, anyone pretending things are going to go smoothly from here hasn't learned from recent history.

After laying out the events of the weekend and the fact that the Trump administration doesn't have a clear answer for doing what they did and never will, Psaki laid into Trump and his administration for what they've done and where we're headed.

PSAKI: But again, if you're sitting at home and you're watching all of a sudden fold and you're trying to make sense of it all day today and you're wondering if this isn't about an arrest of a bad guy or about drugs or about oil or about regime change.

I get it. mean, it's confusing because the Trump administration has made it all confusing because they don't have a justification for this that makes sense.

I mean, today, Senator Mike Lee said Senator Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the military action we saw in Venezuela overnight by saying it was just to protect and defend the execution of an arrest warrant. Okay.

Now keep that in your mind, because listen to Donald Trump today, listen to what he said, and see if you think it squares with the idea that this was just about executing a search warrant.

TRUMP: We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so. We actually assumed that a second wave would be necessary, but now it's probably not. The first wave, if you'd like to call it that, the first attack was so successful, we probably don't have to do a second, but we're prepared to do a second wave, a much bigger wave, actually.

PSAKI: Okay, so again, that was the president of the United States late this morning after these operations happened overnight. Does that sound like a limited operation to protect and defend the execution of an arrest warrant? Doesn't doesn't sound like that to me. So it doesn't sound like that to you either.

And if this was about bringing a drug trafficker to justice, which is another justification they've used for this escalation over the past couple of months, ask yourself this.

Why did Donald Trump pardon the former president of Honduras back in November, someone who had already been convicted in a U.S. court on very similar drug trafficking charges?

Donald Trump does not have a good answer to that question. He never will, because there is no good answer to that question, because it's not about drug trafficking. In fact, it seems pretty clear what this is really about.

REPORTER: What do you see as the future of Venezuela's oil industry?

TRUMP: Well, I see that we're going to be very strongly involved in it. That's all. mean, what can I say? We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we're going to be very much involved in it. We want to surround ourselves with energy. We have tremendous energy in that country. It's very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves. We need that for the world.

PSAKI: You know how he says the quiet part out loud? That's what he just did. I mean, we need that for ourselves. We need it for the world. So no matter what the rest of the administration says or what defenders say, this is about regime change and this is about oil.

But make no mistake, this is not the end of this story. And history tells us this from past conflicts, this is only the beginning. This is always true of regime change. History shows us that. Iraq shows us that.

The outcome isn't determined by one military operation that takes place overnight one night. It's determined by the road ahead. And the road ahead looks very, very murky tonight.

I mean, at that press conference earlier, you heard Donald Trump say the U.S. would, quote, run the country until a transition takes place. He also said opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, doesn't have the support of the country.

He also said he wants to work with Maduro's vice president, woman named Delcy Rodriguez. And he told the New York Post that the US troops won't be stationed in Venezuela so long as she, as in Rodriguez, does what we want. That's what he said.

Well, in a press conference of her own today, Delcy Rodriguez said Nicolas Maduro is Venezuela's only president, and she called his capture barbaric. So, again, that doesn't sound like someone who's fully on board with doing what Trump wants, does it?

So that's where we are. A war for regime change and oil pushed by a president who is losing support here at home. No clear strategy that we have been told of for tomorrow or the day after, which is hugely important in conflicts like this. And plenty of history that shows us this never ends well.

Yep. It's Iraq 2.0 and these idiots aren't done threatening other countries yet.