Washington DC - House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday that Venezuela should hold elections soon, despite President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressing little interest in the prospect following the US coup.

Speaking to reporters after a briefing to lawmakers from Rubio and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, Johnson added he did not expect the US to send troops to Venezuela, a possibility that President Donald Trump refused to rule out publicly.

"I expect that there will be an election called in Venezuela," he said.

"Some of these things are still being determined, of course, but it should happen in short order. And I think it will need to be, so that their economy can remain stabilized and the country can remain stabilized."

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The US shocked the world by launching an attack on Caracas Saturday and abducting its president, Nicolás Maduro, who was jailed in New York along with his wife while awaiting trial for drug-trafficking charges.

Trump then promptly announced the US would be running Venezuela, controlling and exploiting the world's largest confirmed oil reserves for its own benefits.

Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, has since been sworn in as interim president.

Rubio told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that discussion of elections "is premature at this point," while Trump told the network: "We have to fix the country first. You can't have an election."

Johnson, meanwhile, defended the legality of the operation and the lack of prior notice to Congress, despite experts agreeing that the attack was a blatant violation of international law.

"We are not at war. We do not have US armed forces in Venezuela and we are not occupying that country," he said.

"We don't expect troops on the ground. We don't expect direct involvement in any other way, beyond just coercing the new – the interim – government"

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Democrats left the briefing skeptical. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said: "Regime change and so-called nation building, it always ends up hurting the United States."

"I left the briefing feeling that it would again," he added.

Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the timing of the attack "is suspicious to me," suggesting Trump wanted to divert attention from issues at home including health-care costs.