Trump said he would 'run' Venezuela. Now he owns its worst disaster in decades 

The crisis engulfing Venezuela in the wake of two deadly earthquakes marks a major test of Donald Trump’s claim to “run” the country after the US capture of its then-president, Nicolás Maduro, in a smash-and-grab raid in January.

The death toll rose on Wednesday to 1,943, with tens of thousands still missing amid rescue attempts. Thousands more have been made homeless and dependent on food aid. The country is facing reconstruction costs of up to 100 per cent of its GDP.

The US has played a central role in relief operations, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised a “whole of government response” to the crisis. This has included a commitment of $300m (£225m) and the deployment of 900 military personnel, as well as aircraft and ships.

Three families reflect on the early signs of the illness, which affected their parents.

They include the things they missed or dismissed, what they’d do differently and what they’d want other people in the same position to know.

One of the first incidents that rang alarm bells for Robert was his mum falling victim to a suspected scam from someone selling mattresses door-to-door. 

She also started to struggle with cooking and making her special dishes she’d been making for decades without a problem.

We [had] just sort of played along with everything. But on one particularly bad day, I blurted it out over the phone, ‘Because you’ve got dementia, mum!’ She threatened to kill herself, which was very scary. Maybe it’s something I should have explained properly to her from the get go…

I think we missed some of the really early subtle signs.

Rosie’s mother was diagnosed with Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 58 but some symptoms, like brain fog, were put down to the menopause.

She had become more forgetful, and was repeating herself, but as she had always “been scatty” it was dismissed.

It was on strange things like going to the same buffet.

Chloe was just 14 when her mum, Sarah, was diagnosed with young onset frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease.

Another time Sarah, who was diagnosed in her forties, forgot how to boil an egg.

On Saturdays, when she’d usually go shopping, she’d go out and come straight back home, almost like she forgetting
what she was going out for.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Writer Sadhbh O’Sullivan looked into her own forgotten subscriptions when she became a first-time buyer, and realised how much she was wasting on things she wasn’t using.

I’d long considered myself to be quite a reasonable spender. 

But the hidden costs across her bank accounts, like free trials that hadn’t been cancelled and memberships for abandoned services, proved otherwise.

It was full of small amounts, £2.99 here, £4.50 there. These small amounts added up.

According to a Nationwide survey almost one in five Brits don’t use every platform they pay for.

The bank suggests they could save as much as £400 a year by ditching them. 

National Trading Standards’ 2025 research found 4.7 million people were paying for subscriptions they didn’t know they’d signed up for.

In 2024, a government report found unused and unwanted subscriptions cost consumers up to £1.6bn a year.

Hunt them down

Banking apps usually list your ‘subscriptions’ separately from direct debits and standing orders so you can easily spot what you’re shelling out on.

Check everything

You can be debited through credit cards, E-payment services, your mobile phone bill, Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Don’t vow to use a subscription you’re not going to, even if you
have good intentions.

Many businesses have changed from monthly to annual payments so look further back.

Make sure to track any subscriptions you have kept so you can cancel them, if need be, in future.

But staff say many people treat their shops like a tip.

Here they share the most useful donations they get, and the
ones that drive them mad.

The quality of donations over the last year has diminished.

Claire Stockman, head of retail for St
Luke’s Hospice [pictured], says many donations include used items from fast fashion like Boohoo and Primark, which they cannot sell for more than £2, if at all.

of what comes into St Luke’s Hospice is unsellable, Stockman says.

She adds its soiled, damaged beyond
repair or smelly.

Harriet, a volunteer at Crisis in Dalston,
says people bring in clothes that are dirty and stained – things that they cannot sell
on Vinted.

She also sees dirty kitchenware and technology that no longer works.

There was a box donated after someone’s family had passed and in it were all these medals. I researched them and the whole collection ended up going for £2,340…

A good donation is anything new with tags on, anything that hasn’t been opened, or higher quality items.

Items that have been well looked after are more likely to sell and generate a better price for charity too.

Harriet adds that knick-knacks and wine glasses are surprise hits in her branch.

Here, psychologists, career consultants and sleep experts give their best advice on how
to beat the gloom that the
work week is looming…

Pave the way on Friday

Psychologist Maria-Teresa Daher-Cusack says to wrap up tasks and not to leave big or difficult things for Monday. And write a to-do list for the next week so you know what to expect when you return after the weekend.

Get outside early

Doctor Naheed Ali says getting out on a Sunday morning – not sleeping late – helps regulate the circadian rhythm that can become skewed over the weekend.

On Sunday spend time away from technology to allow yourself a personal reset away from doom scrolling.

Put yourself in the best position to rest by avoiding large meals, screens and caffeine.

If possible don’t stack your Mondays with high-pressure tasks.

Don’t just save joyful things for the weekend. On lunch breaks, try to do something you enjoy.

If the Sunday scaries are constant, listen to them. If every Sunday fills you with dread and nothing seems to quell it it’s worth asking if it’s the job, the culture or the career itself. No one should spend half their weekend bracing for impact… ” says Victoria McLean

But no country’s energy system is 100 per cent secure and large-scale blackouts, although rare, are possible.

Here’s how to prepare, and what could happen, if we do have a blackout.

If the UK’s power went down tomorrow, these are the ways it is likely to impact you first.

For EV owners that are already on the road, Professor Keith Bell, who works in electricity planning, recommends that those with an EV with reasonable charge use it as a generator, like your own store of electricity.

In the case of the power system going down, petrol isn’t a totally safe option as queues at petrol stations could be huge and places are likely to run out of fuel.

The longer the power takes to return the worse things are likely to get. In 2021 Storm Arwen physically damaged power lines across the UK.

During the 1977 New York blackout, which lasted 25 hours, there was civil unrest, resulting in widespread looting and arson, although intense heatwaves are thought to have exacerbated the situation.

To get updates during a power cut – a car radio can be used, but in severe weather it might be safer to stay inside.

A minimum of 2.5-3 litres of drinking water per person per day is recommended.

The Government recommends opting for torches over candles, for safety reasons.

The moves by the Trump administration show what is at stake for the US in Venezuela, following its intervention in January, which saw Maduro replaced by his deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, and the US take control of the country’s oil trade, said Jose Enrique Arrioja, managing editor of Americas Quarterly magazine.

“Washington cannot afford to have this unprecedented experiment go wrong, especially in light of the big picture of the US exercising again a dominant role in the Western hemisphere,” he told The i Paper.

Arrioja said early signs point to the White House taking its responsibilities seriously, with US forces on the ground in some of the worst-affected areas before even the Venezuelan army. He also pointed to Trump’s references to a high death toll in the immediate aftermath of the first earthquake before figures were widely known.

“They definitely have a really close monitoring system in place in Venezuela,” Arrioja said. “That tells you how important and how sensitive it is for the Trump administration.”

But some experts believe the US could and should do much more.

Since January, Washington has taken control of Venezuela’s oil, the largest proven reserves in the world, via an opaque arrangement with Caracas.

The US oversaw an estimated $8bn (£6bn) in oil sales in the four months after the toppling of Maduro. A State Department official told Congress in April that about $3bn (£2,2bn) had been disbursed to Venezuela, but they did not know what funds remained in US and Qatari bank accounts that were used to handle the transactions.

Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC, said US support to Venezuela after the earthquakes was a “drop in the bucket when you look at the billions of dollars of income from oil sales”.

He added: “You would hope that much more of these funds would be released to help assist Venezuela with the relief and reconstruction going forward.”

Main also pointed to sanctions relief as a vital lever the Trump administration could pull, having made only piecemeal moves to unravel previous restrictions imposed over suspected election rigging and human rights abuses after Maduro took power in 2013.

“Sanctions were definitely a major factor in the biggest depression we have seen anywhere in the world outside of conflict, with a GDP collapse of 75 per cent,” he said of the period after Maduro took power.

Most of those sanctions are still in place, Main told The i Paper. “So they continue to have a real dampening effect that is playing out now in these rescue effects. It’s not easy for humanitarian groups to send assistance and funds to local actors given these compliance issues they have to work around.”

The Venezuelan regime is under mounting pressure over its response to the crisis. Rodriguez, the interim president, was booed on a visit to a badly-affected areas, and her interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, has been accused of obstructing aid efforts.

Max Hess of the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute said the Rodriguez administration could soon face a messy struggle for survival that could further test Trump’s commitment to the country. “The tragedy, and the deepening political crisis that it caused, raises the possibility for the transition to become less orderly, in which case Trump would certainly be willing to cut ties,” he said.

The White House is also facing questions over its commitment to democracy in Venezuela. After the capture of Maduro, the Trump administration laid out a three-step plan for the country: stabilisation, recovery and then political transition with free elections.

But the process remains opaque and the White House has so far stuck by Rodriguez while shunning Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader who gave her 2025 prize to Trump.

Machado had sought to return to Venezuela during the crisis but her flight was blocked by Caracas with US endorsement, American officials told The New York Times. A State Department official called her plan a “political stunt”.

The regime has become so unpopular that much of the Venezuelan public is broadly supportive of the US taking further control of their country, Arrioja said, pointing to recent polls by local and international organisations that show Trump and Rubio remain more popular than Venezuela’s leaders.

One recent survey gave Rodriguez an approval rating of -34 per cent and placed Rubio and Trump as the second and fourth most popular on a list with Venezuelan politicians.

Trump’s intervention in Venezuela began with a spectacular helicopter raid. Now a desperate nation is looking to him for salvation.