WATCH: President Trump’s FULL Press Conference and Q&A After Arresting Maduro * 100PercentFedUp.com * by Noah

The United States just conducted the most overwhelming, the most precise, the most successful and the most stunning show of military force that has been seen since World War II.

And it was a complete success.

No loss of American life.

No loss of American property.

In fact, only one helicopter took minor enemy fire, and it was still flyable throughout the entire operation.

An absolutely stunning success.

If you’d like to watch the full Press Conference (with captions that I added in), I highly recommend it and I have it for you right here, together with a Full Transcript and a backup video down below if needed:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

We appreciate you being here. Late last night and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power, air, land, and sea, was used to launch a spectacular assault.

And it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II. It was a force against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of Caracas to bring outlaw dictator Nicolas Maduro to justice. This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.

And if you think about it, we’ve done some other good ones like the attack on Soleimani. The attack on al-Baghdadi and the obliteration and decimation of the Iran nuclear sites just recently in an operation known as Midnight Hammer, all perfectly executed and done.

No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday or, frankly, in just a short period of time. All Venezuelan military capacities were rendered powerless as the men and women of our military working with U.S. law enforcement successfully captured Maduro in the dead of night.

It was dark. The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have. It was dark and it was deadly, but captured along with his wife, Cilia Flores, both of whom now face American justice.

Maduro and Flores have been indicted in the Southern District of New York for their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens. I want to thank the men and women of our military who achieved such an extraordinary success overnight with breathtaking speed, power, precision, and competence.

You rarely see anything like it. You’ve seen some raids in this country that didn’t go so well. If you look back to Afghanistan or if you look back to the Jimmy Carter days, they were different days. We’re a respected country again, like maybe like never before.

These highly trained warriors operating in collaboration with U.S. law enforcement caught them in a very ready position. They were waiting for us. They knew we had many ships out in the sea, just sort of waiting. They knew we were coming.

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So they were in a ready—what’s called a ready position. But they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated. If you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it, but it was an incredible thing to see.

Not a single American service member was killed, and not a single piece of American equipment was lost. We had many helicopters, many planes, many people involved in that fight. But think of that. Not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed.

The United States military is the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet by far, with capabilities and skills our enemies can scarcely begin to imagine. We have the best equipment anywhere in the world. There’s no equipment like what we have.

And you see that even if you just look at the boats. You know, we’ve knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by sea. Each boat kills, on average, twenty-five thousand people. We knocked out 97 percent. And those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela.

We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.

So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious because that’s what we’re all about. We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country.

It’s their homeland. We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. We’ve had decades of that. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re there now, and what people don’t understand, but they understand as I say this, we’re there now, but we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place.

So we’re going to stay until such time as we’re going to run it essentially until such time as a proper transition can take place. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time.

They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.

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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.

This was pinpoint, but we have a much bigger wave that probably won’t have to do. This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America, a country that everybody wants to be involved with because of what we were able to do and accomplish, will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe.

And it will also make the many, many people from Venezuela that are living in the United States extremely happy. They suffered. They suffered. So much was taken from them. They’re not going to suffer anymore.

The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States. As alleged in the indictment, he personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison, responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.

Hundreds of thousands over the years of Americans died because of him. Maduro and his wife will soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil. Right now, they’re on a ship. They’ll be heading to, ultimately, New York, and then a decision will be made, I assume, between New York and Miami or Florida.

But we have people where the overwhelming evidence of their crimes will be presented in a court of law. And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what we have. It’s both horrible and breathtaking that something like this could have been allowed to take place.

For many years after his term as president of Venezuela expired, Maduro remained in power and waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States of America, threatening not only our people but the stability of the entire region.

In addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs that inflicted untold suffering and human destruction all over the country, in particular the United States, Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.

And he did indeed. They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called police. They were brutal. But they’re not so brutal now. And I just have to congratulate our military and everybody in our National Guard.

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The job that they’ve done, whether it’s in Washington, D.C., where we have a totally safe city where it was one of the most unsafe cities anywhere in the world, frankly. And now we have no crime in Washington, D.C. We haven’t had a killing in a long period of time, 6 or 7 months.

We used to have, on average, 2 a week in Washington, our capital. We don’t have that anymore. The restaurants are opening. Everyone’s happy. They’re walking their daughters, their children, their wives. They walk to restaurants. Restaurants are opening all over Washington, D.C.

So I want to thank the National Guard. I want to thank our military. And I want to thank law enforcement. It’s been amazing. And they should do it with more cities. We’re doing it in Memphis, Tennessee, right now. And crime is down. We’ve just sort of started a few weeks ago, but crime is down now 77 percent.

The governor of Louisiana called, great person, and he wanted us to help him in a certain very nice part of Louisiana. And we have done that. It was a rough section, and we have crime down. I understand it’s down to almost nothing already after two and a half weeks. New Orleans, it’s down to almost nothing.

And we’ve only been there for two and a half weeks. Can’t imagine why governors wouldn’t want us to help. We also helped in Chicago. Then crime went down a little bit there. We did a very small help because we had no working ability with the governor. The governor was a disaster, and the mayor was a disaster.

But it knocked down crime. But we’re pulling out of there when they need us. Likewise, Los Angeles, where we saved Los Angeles early on, where the head of the police department made a statement that if the federal government didn’t come in, we would have lost Los Angeles.

That’s long after the fires. That’s when they had the riots in Los Angeles. We did a great job. Got no credit for it whatsoever, but that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need the credit. But we’ll be pulling out when they need us. They’ll call or we’ll go back if we have to.

We’ll go back. But we did a great job in various cities. But the thing, the place that we’re very proud of is Washington, D.C., because it’s our nation’s capital. We took it from being a crime-ridden mess to being one of the safest cities in the country.

But the gangs that they sent raped, tortured, and murdered American women and children. They were in all of the cities I mentioned. Tren de Aragua. And they were sent by Maduro to terrorize our people, and now Maduro will never again be able to threaten an American citizen or anybody from Venezuela.

There will no longer be threats. For years, I’ve highlighted the stories of those innocent Americans whose lives were so heartlessly robbed by this Venezuelan terrorist organization. Really one of the worst. Americans like 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungary from Houston.

Beautiful Jocelyn Nungary. What happened to her? They kidnapped, assaulted, and murdered her by Tren de Aragua animals. They murdered Jocelyn and left her dead under the bridge. There was a bridge that will never be the same to so many people after seeing what happened.

As I’ve said many times, the Maduro regime emptied out their prisons, sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives. And they came from mental institutions and insane asylums. They came from prisons and jails.

The reason I say both is they sound similar. Actually, prisons are a little bit more hostile, a little bit tougher. A mental institution isn’t as tough as an insane asylum, but we got them both. They sent from their mental institutions, their jails, and prisons. They were drug dealers and drug kingpins.

They sent everybody bad into the United States, but no longer, and we have now a border where nobody gets through. In addition, Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets, and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars.

They did this a while ago, but we never had a president that did anything about it. They took all of our property. It was our property. We built it. And we never had a president that decided to do anything about it. Instead, they fought wars that were ten thousand miles away.

We built the Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill. And the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations, and they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.

Massive oil infrastructure was taken like we were babies, and we didn’t do anything about it. I would have done something about it. America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere.

Furthermore, under the now-deposed dictator Maduro, Venezuela was increasingly hosting foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing offensive weapons that could threaten U.S. interests and lives. And they used those weapons last night, potentially in league with the cartels operating along our border.

All of these actions were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy, dating back more than 2 centuries. All the way back, it dated to the Monroe Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a real lot. They now call it the Donrow Doctrine.

We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore. Our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere, will never be questioned again. It won’t happen.

So just in concluding, for decades, other administrations have neglected or even contributed to these growing security threats in the Western Hemisphere. Under the Trump administration, we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way in our home region.

And our home region is very different than it was just a short while ago. We did this in my first term. We had great dominance in my first term and we have far greater dominance right now. Everyone’s coming back to us.

The future will be determined by the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security. Just like tariffs, they’ve made our country rich and they’ve made our national security strong, stronger than ever before. These are the iron laws that have always determined global power.

And we’re going to keep it that way. We will secure our borders. We will stop the terrorists. We will crash the cartels. And we will defend our citizens against all threats, foreign and domestic. Other presidents may have lacked the courage to defend America, but I will never allow terrorists and criminals to operate with impunity.

This extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives. Very importantly, the embargo on all Venezuelan oil remains in full effect. The American Armada remains poised and in position.

The United States retains all military options until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied. All political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro can happen to them, and it will happen to them if they aren’t just and fair to their people.

The dictator and terrorist Maduro is finally gone. People are free again. America is a safer nation and a prouder nation this morning because it didn’t allow this horrible person and this country that was doing very bad things to us to continue.

The Western Hemisphere is right now a much safer place to be. I want to thank everybody for being here. I want to thank General Raisin Cain. He’s a fantastic man. I’ve worked with a lot of generals; some I didn’t respect, but this guy is fantastic.

I watched last night one of the most precise attacks for justice. I’m very proud of him, and I’m very proud of our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who I’m going to ask to say a few words. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (Pete Hegseth): Well, thank you, Mr. President. Finally, a commander in chief the world respects and the American people deserve. As the president said, words can barely capture the bravery and the precision of this historic operation, a massive joint military and law enforcement raid flawlessly executed.

American warriors are second to none. What all of us witnessed last night was sheer guts and grit, gallantry and glory. I’m simply humbled by such men. I tip my hat to our chairman, Dan Raisin-Kane, and all those Americans who stood watch last night.

Our warriors are the elite of America, and again, President Trump has your back. No other country on planet Earth could pull this kind of operation off, and no other president has ever shown this kind of leadership, courage, and resolve.

As the President said, our adversaries remain on notice. America can project our will anywhere, anytime. The coordination, the stealth, the lethality, and the precision—the very long arm of American justice—were all on full display in the middle of the night.

Nicolas Maduro had his chance, just like Iran had their chance, until he didn’t. He effed around and he found out. President Trump is deadly serious about stopping the flow of gangs, drugs, and poison to our people.

He is deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us and reestablishing American deterrence and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. This is about safety, security, freedom, and prosperity. This is America first. This is peace through strength.

Welcome to 2026 and under President Trump, America is back. I’d like to welcome now our chairman, Chairman Raisin Cain, to give a few more details about the operation.

Speaker 3 (Chairman Raisin Cain): Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, Mr. President, and good morning. Last night, on the order of the President of the United States, the military conducted an apprehension mission in Caracas to bring to justice Nicolas and Cecilia Maduro.

This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discreet, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January second. It was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that frankly only the United States military could undertake.

I’d like to talk you through some of the details without compromising our tactics. Our interagency work began months ago, integrating complex air, ground, space, and maritime operations. This mission required every component of our joint force working in unison.

We leveraged unmatched intelligence capabilities from the CIA, NSA, and NGA. We watched, we waited, and we remained professional. This was an audacious operation that required the utmost precision and integration within our joint force.

An extraction so precise it involved more than a hundred and fifty aircraft launching across the Western Hemisphere in close coordination. The goal was to get an interdiction force into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise.

Failure of one component would have endangered the entire mission, and failure is never an option for America’s joint force. Let me talk a little bit about the preparation. We understood how Maduro moved, where he lived, what he ate, and even his pets.

Key was choosing the right day to minimize potential for civilian harm and maximize surprise. The weather in Venezuela is always a factor, and the men and women of the military sat ready, waiting for the President to order us into action.

Last night, the weather broke just enough. At 10:46 p.m. Eastern Time, the president ordered the military to move forward. He said to us, “Good luck and Godspeed.” Those words were transmitted to the entire joint force.

Aircraft launched from 20 different bases. In total, more than a hundred and fifty aircraft—bombers, fighters, and drones—were in the air. As the night began, helicopters took off with the extraction force, flying a hundred feet above the water.

As they approached Venezuelan shores, we layered effects provided by SpaceCom and CyberCom to create a pathway. Overhead, those forces were protected by aircraft from the Marines, Navy, Air Force, and Air National Guard, including F-22s and B-1 bombers.

As the force approached Caracas, the joint air component began dismantling and disabling air defense systems. The goal was always to protect the ground force. We arrived at Maduro’s compound at 1:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The apprehension force descended into the compound with speed and discipline. On arrival, the helicopters came under fire and replied with overwhelming force. One of our aircraft was hit but remained flyable and eventually returned home.

Maduro and his wife were taken into custody by the Department of Justice, assisted by the military, with no loss of U.S. life. After securing them, helicopters were called in to exfiltrate the force while fighter aircraft provided suppressive fire.

The force successfully exfiltrated and reached afloat launch bases by 3:29 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Both Maduro and his wife were embarked aboard the USS Iwo Jima. What we’ve witnessed is a powerful demonstration of America’s joint force.

We train and rehearse so that we cannot get it wrong. Our jobs are to deliver overwhelming force at the time and place of our choosing. I am immensely proud of our joint force and filled with gratitude to represent them.

Speaker 4: Well, I don’t have much to add other than these points. Nicolas Maduro was indicted in 2020. He is not the legitimate president of Venezuela. He is a fugitive of American justice with a fifty-million-dollar reward.

Nicolas Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this. He was provided very generous offers and chose instead to act like a wild man. The other message here is that Maduro liked to play games—inviting Iran in and confiscating American oil companies.

He thought nothing would happen. I hope people now understand that the 47th president of the United States is not a game player. When he tells you he is going to address a problem, he means it. He actions it.

This is a president of action. If he says he’s serious about something, he means it. This was a direct threat to the national interest, and the president addressed it. This is a president of peace, but he doesn’t go out looking for fights.

Generally, he wants to get along with everybody, but don’t play games with this president in office because it’s not going to turn out well. We’re going to be running it with a group, and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure.