Trump says US ‘knocked out’ facility. Was there a Venezuela strike? – USA Today

President Donald Trump said the United States on Dec. 24 “knocked out” a facility, leaving unanswered questions about whether the U.S. had launched its first on-land strike in Venezuela, which Trump has been threatening to attack for months.

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out,” Trump said in a Dec. 26 interview on WABC. Trump did not elaborate on where the facility was.

A strike on Venezuelan territory would constitute a significant escalation of Trump’s ongoing pressure campaign to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The Pentagon referred USA TODAY to the White House, which did not immediately return a request for comment. The Venezuelan government has not commented publicly.

Trump’s comment set off swirling rumors after local news reports and videos on X circulated of an explosion at an industrial zone in Maracaibo, a city in northwestern Venezuela. Primazol said in a public statement that a warehouse it owned in the area had caught fire in the early hours of Dec. 24.

During the interview, Trump also touted the dozens of strikes the administration has launched on Venezuelan boats suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed more than a hundred people. The Coast Guard has also seized two oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, and it is pursuing a third that refused to be boarded.

Since the boat strike campaign began in September, Trump has regularly threatened to strike targets on land as part of the sweeping effort to unseat Maduro. Legal experts say that the boat strikes are illegal and that despite the Trump administration’s claims, Venezuela is not a major source of deadly drugs.