Acting President of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez condemned Saturday’s apparent assassination attempt against President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
On Saturday, a man identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen attempted to attack the White House Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Hilton, which Trump was attending for the first time as President of the United States in the company of his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other senior members of his administration. A Secret Service official received a gunshot round to his bulletproof vest, but is presently in “great shape,” President Trump later detailed.
A senior Trump administration official confirmed to Breitbart News on Sunday that Allen wrote a manifesto expressing his intention to target Trump administration officials, which he shared with his family before he stormed the event. He was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and several knives according to NBC News.
Rodríguez joined other international heads of state expressing solidarity on social media with President Trump and First Lady Melania after Saturday’s attempted attack. In her message, written both in Spanish and English, Rodríguez condemned the attack and extended best wishes to Trump, the First Lady, and to all attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“Violence is never an option for those who uphold the values of peace,” Rodríguez wrote.
Venezuelan state media and regime-affiliated left-wing propaganda networks such as Telesur, in a notably unusual move for the Venezuelan socialist regime, reported on Rodríguez’s messages of support. The main state-owned television channel VTV noted Rodríguez’s “strong condemnation” of the attempted attack against President Trump and his wife Melania.
For years, Rodríguez, aligned with the Venezuelan socialist regime under late dictator Hugo Chávez and now-deposed Nicolás Maduro, maintained an antagonistic stance against the United States and the Trump administration. She has recently, however, adopted a collaborative stance with the Trump administration following Maduro’s arrest in a U.S. law enforcement operation in Caracas on January 3.
Rodríguez was serving as Maduro’s vice president and oil minister when he was arrested by U.S. forces, and she was sworn in as “acting president” of Venezuela hours after Maduro’s capture. In the weeks following the January 3 U.S. law enforcement operation, Rodríguez began collaborating with the Trump administration and described President Trump as a “friend” and a “partner.”
The Venezuelan acting president’s collaboration has led to Venezuela restoring diplomatic ties with the United States after a seven-year rupture. U.S. diplomat John M. Barrett arrived in Caracas last week to serve as the new chargé d’affaires of the U.S. embassy in Venezuela, succeeding Laura F. Dogu who oversaw the reopening of the embassy.
Rodríguez’s collaboration has led to significant reforms to Venezuela’s notoriously restrictive oil and mining laws, and the official visit of several high-ranking U.S. officials to Caracas as part of the Venezuelan regime’s efforts to attract U.S. help and foreign investment towards restoring the nation’s rundown oil and energy infrastructure, left in a partial, constantly malfunctioning state after decades’ worth of socialist mismanagement.
The U.S. lifted sanctions on Rodríguez in early April and recognized her as Venezuela’s head of state in March so as to facilitate President Trump’s three-phase plan to restore democracy in Venezuela after nearly three decades of socialist rule. Rodríguez publicly thanked President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio this month for the “goodwill” in restoring ties with Venezuela and for successfully interceding in the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s decision to restore ties with Venezuela following roughly two decades’ worth of hostilities the Venezuelan regime during the rule of Chávez and Maduro.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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