María Corina Machado is having a bad year.
The exiled leader of Venezuela’s opposition has pinned her hopes of returning to lead the country on President Donald Trump, who overturned the hostile government of Nicolas Maduro after a raid to capture the former Venezuelan president. After Maduro’s removal in January, Machado attempted to position herself as the natural leader of a new government in Caracas, and travelled to Washington to personally present Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize—a distinction Trump has openly coveted. But those hopes have been repeatedly disappointed, as Trump has instead preferred to work with a continuation government headed by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez.
“I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” Trump said of Machado. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
This is at least partly untrue—Machado is one of the more popular and unifying figures in the country, and her surrogate almost certainly won the fraud-ridden 2024 Venezuelan presidential election in a landslide—but the Trump administration was perceptive enough to realize that Machado and her allies in the opposition would not be able to govern Venezuela. The Venezuelan state is still built on the foundations laid by Hugo Chavez. Without the support of existing institutions, especially the Venezuelan military, the country would be easy prey for socialist militias, Colombian narcos, Mexican cartels, and the various other armed groups that have secured a foothold in the country.
Instead the administration has used a delay-and-deny strategy: In public it makes friendly noises towards Machado, who is overwhelmingly popular among Venezuelans in the U.S. and their hawkish allies in the Republican Party, and promises that it will put the Venezuelan government on a democratic basis in the future. In private, however, it does its utmost to stymie Machado’s efforts to make herself a player in Venezuelan politics and, as one administration official told The American Conservative, it has no interest in pushing the government to hold legitimate elections. (After all, it’s unlikely that any government Venezuela could select would be more compliant with U.S. interests than the current one: When Marco Rubio says, “Jump,” Delcy Rodriguez asks, “How high?”)
Now reports are surfacing that Washington has blocked Machado from returning to the country after a pair of devastating earthquakes last month killed thousands of Venezuelans. The earthquakes, which took place on June 24, provoked protests against the government, which has had trouble responding to the crisis despite American assistance—an unsurprising outcome, given that Venezuelan state institutions have been thoroughly hollowed out by decades of socialist governance and that the head of state, Rodriguez, has had to put together a new governing coalition from the scraps of Maduro’s regime over the past several months.
Machado seems to have hoped to use the earthquakes as the catalyst for a triumphant return to Venezuela, seizing on the ongoing political discontent to provoke a confrontation with the weak Rodriguez government. Machado may even have hoped to force the U.S. into making the country hold democratic elections. Rodriguez, on the other hand, has implied that if Machado returns to Venezuela, she could be arrested—a disastrous result for the Trump administration.
To avoid such a confrontation, the administration sabotaged an attempt Machado made to return to Venezuela in late June by way of Curaçao, forcing her plane to turn around and return to the U.S. mid-flight. When the administration realized that the mercenaries Machado had employed to smuggle her out of the country last year were staged to smuggle her back in, they called up the Dutch authorities that manage Curaçao’s foreign affairs and convinced them to revoke her clearances. Machado tried again a couple days later, hoping to return via Panama, but was turned away by the airline, which did not allow her to board.
At present, both sides are publicly playing dumb on the issue, which has confused some commentators. Machado has not said anything about the Trump administration’s decision to cut off her return journey, and Trump has declared that he has never told her she can’t go back to the country.
“Oh, no, no, no, not at all,” he told reporters who asked whether he had told Machado not to return to Venezuela. “I did not tell anyone not to go back.”
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
But the silence is perfectly rational for both sides. Machado almost certainly won’t publicly oppose the Trump administration because its support is probably her only hope for securing control of the country, although she must be aware by now that the Trump administration has little interest in seeing her at the helm in Caracas. Likewise, the Trump administration has avoided openly disavowing Machado to keep her allies and sympathizers (including, allegedly, Rubio) on board with the administration’s efforts. Machado’s influence in places like the Florida Republican Party is immense.
But as it becomes increasingly clear that the Trump administration has no interest in turning Venezuela over to Machado and her allies, the relationship between that camp and the administration is becoming significantly more oppositional. Many Florida Republicans hoped that Trump would channel George W. Bush closer to home, bringing regime change, freedom, and democracy to the Western Hemisphere, starting with Venezuela. The more distant that prospect appears, the more restive they grow; comments from pro-Machado figures like Elliott Abrams and Roger Noriega are becoming progressively more critical of the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy.
This kind of song and dance can only continue for so long; eventually the conflict will break out into the open. When that happens, the Trump administration will have to decide what it values more: stability and American influence in Venezuela, or the Florida Lobby.
