Two women vie for Venezuela's top office, but Trump will decide

• Following the U.S. removal of Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez has been installed as Venezuela's interim leader.
• Political rivals Delcy Rodríguez and María Corina Machado are now competing for the favor of U.S. President Donald Trump.
• Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is scheduled to meet with Trump, who has publicly expressed doubts about her ability to lead.
• Rodríguez, who has a history of engaging with the Trump administration, has been deemed "very cooperative" by the White House.

WASHINGTON − One is a smart, savvy political operator. She sometimes rubs people the wrong way but skillfully navigates her way through Venezuela’s power hierarchy. She’s now installed as the country’s interim leader after the United States forcibly removed President Nicolás Maduro.

The other is a former member of the country’s National Assembly and an activist who led the opposition to Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what the committee that bestows the honor described as her “tireless fight for peace.” She was expected by many in Venezuela to take the reins of the country after Maduro’s downfall.

Delcy Rodríguez and María Corina Machado are the most prominent political figures in Venezuela. Political rivals, Rodríguez and Machado are key players inside the Latin American nation's nascent power vacuum. Both deeply understand that their future, and that of their country, is tied to winning the favor of one man: Donald J. Trump.

Machado, who has been living in hiding outside Venezuela, is expected to bring her charm offensive to Washington later this week. She is scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Thursday, Jan. 15. It will be the first time they’ve spoken since Oct. 10, the day she was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump had wanted and had lobbied to get.

No meeting between Trump and Rodríguez has been scheduled, but the administration says it has been in regular touch with her in the months leading up to Maduro’s removal. Trump has said that he’d like to go to Venezuela when things settle down and that he’d like to meet with Rodríguez.

The sit-down between Machado and Trump comes two weeks after members of a U.S. Army elite force, operating under the cover of darkness, swooped into Maduro’s compound in Caracas, captured him and his wife, Cilia Flores, and whisked both to New York to face drug trafficking charges.

For Machado, the White House visit is make or break. Inside Venezuela, it had long been assumed that, should Maduro fall, the country’s next president would be Machado or Edmundo González Urrutia, whom she had picked to run for president after the government barred her from running. González won the 2024 election, but Maduro refused to accept the results and declared himself the winner.

A few hours after Maduro’s capture on Jan. 3, Trump, speaking at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, dispelled any notion that Machado would become Venezuela’s next president.

"I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” he told reporters. “She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect.”

A classified CIA analysis had concluded that Rodríguez, Venezuela’s vice president, would be best positioned to lead a temporary government in Caracas if Maduro should be removed, multiple news outlets reported. Trump said a U.S. team, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, would run Venezuela until a safe and proper transition could take place.

Rodríguez was formally sworn in as interim president Jan. 5.

Machado missed opportunities to rally support

For Machado, an outspoken opponent of Maduro’s party since it first won power under Chávez in 1998, Trump’s remarks were not only a severe blow to her campaign to lead Venezuela. They were also a sign of how she had misread key cues and missed other opportunities in her effort to rally U.S. support.

Machado, known by her supporters as Venezuela’s “Iron Lady,” had been working for months to win over Trump, even dedicating her Nobel Peace Prize to him “for his decisive support of our cause." Machado suggested in early January that she would give her prize to Trump, but the Norwegian institute that bestows the honor threw cold water on that idea, saying that the award is permanent and final and that it cannot be transferred to another person.

Other opportunities to curry favor with the Trump administration went unheeded.

Machado, who speaks English, declined a request early in 2025 to meet with Trump’s personal envoy, Richard Grenell. Grenell had been tasked with engaging in diplomatic talks with Maduro’s regime to explore possible oil deals with his administration and try to help secure the release of Americans detained in Venezuela.

Grenell also reached out to Machado, who agreed to talk to him over the phone instead of meeting with him in person, according to The New York Times. Over time, the newspaper said, their relationship deteriorated; Machado and her team ignored Grenell’s request for a list of political prisoners, and Grenell grew frustrated when she expressed no concrete ideas of how to put the democratically elected government into power.

Grenell did not respond to a request by USA TODAY for comment.

Rodríguez, on the other hand, had been working behind the scenes for years to win Trump’s favor.

Rodríguez, who was Venezuela’s finance minister when Trump was elected to his first term in 2016, ordered Citgo, a subsidiary of the state oil company, to contribute $500,000 to Trump's inaugural committee, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Rodríguez is also fluent in English and reportedly lived in Santa Monica, California, during her college years. The daughter of a leftist guerrilla leader who was detained in the kidnapping of an American businessman, she served as the head of Maduro's communications ministry, later as foreign minister and then vice president.

Her portfolio expanded to include control over much of Venezuela’s oil economy after Maduro promoted her to vice president in 2018. Tasked with managing U.S. sanctions on the country’s most important industry, Rodríguez scrapped price controls, spearheaded an anti-corruption campaign and put in place other reforms that slowly helped boost oil production and endeared her to much of the country’s business community.

Delcy Rodríguez swoops in after Maduro capture

After Maduro’s capture, Rodríguez denounced the U.S. strike as a "brutal attack." But she quickly developed a more conciliatory tone, saying she wanted to move toward balanced and respectful relations with the United States. She invited the U.S. government to work with her on “an agenda of cooperation.”

For her part, Machado took a swipe at Rodríguez during a television interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

"Delcy Rodríguez, as you know, is one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narco-trafficking," Machado said. "She’s the main ally and liaison with Russia, China, Iran, certainly not an individual that could be trusted by international investors. And she’s really rejected, repudiated by the Venezuelan people."

But the Trump administration has been encouraged by what it has seen out of Rodríguez.

Asked whether Trump has confidence in Rodríguez, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Jan. 11 that the events of the past week had shown that Trump made the right assessment of what needed to take place in Venezuela.

Rodríguez and her team have been "very cooperative" with the United States, she said, as evidenced by the oil deal Trump cut with them and their commitment to release of political prisoners.

"We've seen a great level of cooperation, and the president expects that to continue," Leavitt told reporters at the White House.

During her meeting with Trump, Machado needs to convince Trump “that the only way to actually ensure stability” is for the opposition to be in a position to take power, said Uriel Epshtein, chief executive officer of the Renew Democracy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that runs a program that brings together dissidents from around the world.

For example, Exxon’s CEO said last week that Venezuela is currently uninvestable. Machado needs to explain that will remain the case so long as Rodríguez is in charge of the country, said Epshtein, who is close to the Venezuelan opposition.

“So protecting and supporting the opposition is not only a matter of doing the morally right thing, it is a matter of achieving the ends that Trump himself set out,” he said.

What is the plan for running Venezuela?

Trump’s work with the interim government is about the administration of the country in the short term during the transition from Maduro, said Alexander Gray, who was chief of staff at the National Security Council during Trump’s first term.

“They have some real logistical challenges in that nobody from the Venezuelan opposition has had a role in running Venezuela for 25 years,” he said. “Trying to come in and take over some immediate role, I don't think that's realistic.”

Gray said Machado should have “reasonable expectations” for when it makes sense to have the opposition come back into the country and should arrive with a “very clear sense” of what she’s asking the United States to do to help restore democracy.

That includes presenting a plan for reforming the country’s national election commission and its judiciary, which is packed with pro-regime judges.

“There's just so many blocking and tackling pieces that have to get fixed here before it makes sense to announce this big democratic transition,” said Gray, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank. “And so I think she needs to be very clear with the Americans about what it is she needs to realistically be in a position to have that transition.”

For the United States, what happens next is less about “picking and choosing the opposition and more about working with the current regime” to get them to do the types of things that would make a transition possible, Gray said.

It’s not about Machado or Rodríguez, he said.

“It really is about having a partner who's willing to be cooperative here on this transition and executing the immediate things that we need in the short term.”

Contributing: Lauren Villagran

Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. A veteran reporter, he has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS

Francesca Chambers is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY covering foreign policy. Follow her on X: @fran_chambers