Caption: The Dome of the US Capitol Building is visible as US Capitol police officers stand guard after anti-Trump protesters gather around a Republican Study Committee news conference on U.S. President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of law enforcement in the District Of Columbia on Capitol Hill on September 2, 2025 in Washington, DC

PRESIDENT Donald Trump said Tuesday that US forces had attacked a boat carrying drugs from Venezuela and “took it out.”

The US forces “shot out a boat…, a drug-carrying boat, lots of drugs in that boat,” Trump said in the White House. “So we took it out.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X that the “US military conducted a lethal strike… against a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela and was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization.”

The announcement followed days of mounting tension between Washington and Caracas.

Venezuela’s leftist President Nicolas Maduro has declared a state of “maximum readiness” to defend against what he says are US military threats.

The Trump administration, which accuses Maduro of heading a drug cartel, has announced a deployment of warships to the southern Caribbean in what it labeled an anti-drug trafficking operation. It has made no invasion threat. (AFP)