‘51st State’: The White House’s latest threatening taunt to Venezuela

An image of Venezuela with the American flag superimposed within its borders and two words: “51st State.” And eight minutes later, another tweet. A nine-second video showing Secretary of State Marco Rubio in January 2026 paraphrasing rapper Biggie Smalls — “If you don’t know, now you know” — with the New York mogul’s music playing in the background, after announcing the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Then the now-iconic image of Maduro inside an aircraft en route to New York is shown. And finally, Rubio again, dressed in the same gray Nike tracksuit as Maduro. They are memes, jokes, trolling. But the official White House account joked on Tuesday afternoon, without subtlety, about something profoundly serious: annexing Venezuela.

In recent weeks, even months, Venezuela has not been mentioned much by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has been more concerned with the Iran war, Supreme Court rulings, or, occasionally, Cuba. And Caracas has been mentioned very little since the beginning of the year when Delcy Rodríguez positioned herself as Maduro’s successor and began opening the country to U.S. investment, seemingly fulfilling Washington’s every demand.

In recent days, however, this trend has shifted. Trump had already alluded to the idea of ​​making Venezuela the 51st state and received a response this Monday from interim President Rodríguez. “President Trump knows that we have been working on a diplomatic agenda of cooperation. That is the course and that is the path,” Rodríguez said from The Hague. “Venezuela certainly has the largest oil reserves on the planet and one of the largest gas reserves as well. The path is cooperation for understanding between countries,” she noted.

But the changes in Venezuela, beyond new laws regulating oil and mining operations, aren’t very noticeable. The economy hasn’t experienced explosive growth, and foreign investment hasn’t flooded the country. Although Trump himself hasn’t publicly and explicitly indicated exasperation with the pace of Chavismo’s economic opening, the messages posted on X can be seen as a threat.

This is how Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the first head of state to react, interpreted it. After putting an end to months of discord with the Republican last January, the Colombian president addressed the publication on X. “This official tweet from the White House is an idea completely contrary to that of Simón Bolívar,” he warned. “This new idea in the U.S. government cannot be implemented without the will of the Venezuelan people, who would be asked to betray their son: Simón Bolívar, the founder of Gran Colombia and of Venezuelan freedom.”

From the U.S. perspective, there’s nothing more to help decipher the message. In fact, it’s not the first time that map has circulated on social media. It also appeared in another mocking image showing Trump with several European leaders in the Oval Office, with a map of Venezuela as the 51st state in the background. On that occasion, amid the controversy surrounding threats to annex Greenland, the Venezuelan map went largely unnoticed.

Many of the current U.S. government’s official social media accounts have become a collection of provocative memes. Recently, the president clashed with the Catholic Church by posting an image of himself as Jesus, which he deleted shortly afterward. Immigration agency accounts, for example, routinely post memes and AI-generated images that mock detained immigrants in a dehumanizing pattern. And still others have been shown to incorporate and conceal far-right and white supremacist messages within their posts. In that sense, the White House’s posts could also simply be a spectacle for its own audience.

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