Trump praises Maduro capture as “incredible” operation

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump hailed the U.S. op­er­a­tion to cap­ture Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro as an “in­cred­i­ble” achieve­ment dur­ing an ap­pear­ance on Fox and Friends on Sat­ur­day morn­ing.

Maduro and his wife were first tak­en to the USS Iwo Ji­ma and will be trans­port­ed to New York. Trump said they trav­elled by he­li­copter.

"They're on a ship, and they'll be head­ing in­to New York.. The he­li­copters took them out. They went by he­li­copter on a nice flight. I'm sure they loved it."

Trump said he watched the op­er­a­tion in re­al time and praised the mil­i­tary’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism and lead­er­ship. “I’ve nev­er seen any­thing like this. I was able to watch it in re­al time, and I watched every as­pect of it. It was amaz­ing to see the pro­fes­sion­al­ism — the qual­i­ty of lead­er­ship… Amaz­ing,” he said.

Com­par­ing the op­er­a­tion to the U.S. with­draw­al from Afghanistan, Trump said, “Com­pare this to Afghanistan, where we were a laugh­ing­stock all over the world. We’re not a laugh­ing­stock any­more. We have the great­est mil­i­tary in the world — by far.”

On ques­tions about the next steps for Venezuela, Trump said the U.S. is still de­ter­min­ing its course. “We’re mak­ing that de­ci­sion now. We can’t take a chance on let­ting some­body else run it and just take over where he left off,” he said. He said the peo­ple of Venezuela sup­port­ed the ac­tion.

"If they stay loy­al, the fu­ture is re­al­ly bad, re­al­ly bad for them... They have Amer­i­can flags be­ing waved on the streets, so I think he's got very lit­tle sup­port. He was a dic­ta­tor that the peo­ple hat­ed."

Trump crit­i­cised De­mo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers who ques­tioned the op­er­a­tion. “These are weak, stu­pid peo­ple… It’s the same old stuff that we’ve been hear­ing for years and years. We’re sav­ing lives,” he said.

De­scrib­ing prepa­ra­tions for the mis­sion, Trump said a sec­ond wave was ready if need­ed, but the ini­tial op­er­a­tion was suf­fi­cient. “This was so lethal, this was so pow­er­ful, that we didn’t have to… We were out there with an ar­ma­da like no­body’s ever seen be­fore,” he said.

Trump al­so out­lined his re­cent in­ter­ac­tions with Maduro, say­ing he had urged him to sur­ren­der. “He was close, but in the end, we had to do some­thing that was re­al­ly much more sur­gi­cal, much more pow­er­ful… This was a very im­por­tant sym­bol,” he said.