US President Donald Trump on January 6, 2026, accused Nicolas Maduro of imitating his dancing, among other crimes, as he celebrated the capture of the Venezuelan leader in a freewheeling speech to Republican lawmakers. US President Donald Trump will meet the heads of major US oil companies on Friday, aiming to convince them to support his plans in Venezuela, a country whose energy resources he says he expects to control for years to come. US forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a sweeping military operation on January 3, with Trump making no secret that control of Venezuela’s oil was at the heart of his actions.
Washington has “maximum leverage over the interim authorities in Venezuela right now,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt when she confirmed the talks with top US oil executives. “We’re meeting tomorrow with all of the big oil executives, they’re going to be right here in the White House,” Trump said in an interview broadcast by Fox News Thursday night. Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who was Maduro’s deputy, has said that her government remains in charge, with the state-run oil firm saying only that it was in negotiations with the United States on oil sales.
US outlet NBC News reported that the heads of Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips are expected at the White House meeting. “It’s just a meeting to discuss, obviously, the immense opportunity that is before these oil companies right now,” Trump’s spokesperson Leavitt told reporters Wednesday. Chevron is the only US company that currently has a license to operate in Venezuela.
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Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips left the country in 2007, after refusing then-president Hugo Chavez’s demand that they give up a majority stake in local operations to the government. Sanctioned by Washington since 2019, Venezuela sits on about a fifth of the world’s oil reserves and was once a major crude supplier to the United States. But it produced only around one percent of the world’s total crude output in 2024, according to OPEC, having been hampered by years of underinvestment, sanctions, and embargoes.
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