Only I can fix it · Second term · № 53
'If I don't win, we're going to have Venezuela'
“Tell what, if I had lost this election, if you had Kamala—it's the same thing: Joe and Kamala. I call them equals. If you had Kamala come in, I believe that our country would have been Venezuela on steroids. I used to say that during the campaign, "If I don't win, we're going to have Venezuela."”
- Said
- , House Republican Members Retreat
- Subject
- the U.S. economy
- Topic
- Economy & prices
- Era
- Second term
What happened
He won, so the counterfactual was never tested. Three days before the remark, on January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro in a Caracas operation in which roughly 80 people died; Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president on January 5 and the U.S. took de facto control of the country's finances, foreign policy and oil sales. At home, by September 2026 the Fed had raised rates for the first time since 2023, bond yields were near 20-year highs, and the debt was growing by more than $2 trillion in the year.