US President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Venezuela, arrest its president and temporarily run the country marks a striking departure for a politician who long criticised others for overreaching on foreign affairs and vowed to avoid foreign entanglements.

His vision for US involvement in ‍Venezuela, sketched out in a midday news conference, left open the possibility of more military action, ongoing involvement in that nation’s politics and oil industry and “boots on the ground”.

The term suggests military deployment of the sort that presidents often avoid for fear of provoking domestic political backlash.

“We ​are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said.

He gave little sense of how far he was willing to go to gain control of Venezuela, where Maduro’s top aides appeared to be still in power.

As recently as his inauguration for a second term in January 2025, Trump told supporters: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, by the wars we never get into.”

Since then, Trump has bombed targets in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia, blown up dozens of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and made veiled threats to invade Greenland and Panama.

The overnight attack on Venezuela was his most aggressive foreign military action yet, striking the capital Caracas and other parts of the country and capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife to face drug-trafficking charges in New York.

These developments ran counter to some Republican hopes that the president would focus more on voters’ domestic concerns – affordability, health care and ‌the economy.

Trump told the news ​conference that intervening in Venezuela was in line with his “America First” policy.

“We want to surround ourselves with good neighbours. We want to surround ourself with stability. We want to surround ourself with energy,” he said, referring to ‍Venezuela’s oil reserves.

But the emerging political stakes were captured by a social media post from US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, who has broken with Trump because of what she said has been his departure from the America First rhetoric of limiting foreign adventures. She is resigning from Congress next week.

“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”

Trump’s ongoing attention to foreign affairs provides fuel for Democrats to criticise Trump ahead of midterm congressional elections in November, when control of both houses of Congress is likely to turn on just a few races across the United States. Republicans narrowly control both right now, giving the president a largely free hand to enact his agenda.

Polls have shown that, before the attack, the prospect of US military action in Venezuela was unpopular, with roughly one out of five Americans supporting ​force to depose Maduro, according to a November Reuters/Ipsos survey.

Trump’s top diplomat and national security adviser Marco Rubio called several members of Congress early on Saturday in an effort to blunt opposition to military action.

For a president who has consistently contrasted himself with the Republican “neo-conservatives” of the late 20th ​century, Trump’s foreign policy has developed striking similarities with that of his predecessors.

In 1983, under former president Ronald Reagan, the US invaded Grenada, claiming that the government at that time was illegitimate, a claim Trump has also made with respect to Maduro.

In 1989, former President George HW Bush invaded Panama to depose dictator Manuel Noriega who, like Maduro, was wanted on US drug-trafficking charges. In that case, the US installed Noriega’s replacement.