As always with Donald Trump, there is good and bad to report. That is especially true about the weekend’s historic, dramatic events in Caracas.

Good riddance to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, a nasty piece of work who had impoverished and subjugated his people, summarily deposed by a spectacular US military operation ordered by Trump.

Maduro now faces drug-trafficking charges in a New York courtroom and the rest of his life in US federal prison.

But when Trump says, ‘We are going to run the country [Venezuela] now’, there is not only cause for concern but reason to fear for the worst.

The Venezuelan people are glad to see the back of Maduro. But they don’t want him replaced by an imperial Yankee emperor sitting in a foreign capital 2,000 miles to the north. They will not wear it.

For the moment there is relief that Maduro has gone to face his just deserts. He was a menace to his own people. A drug-runner on a massive scale, beholden to the country’s barbaric cartels. A prodigious arms trafficker, too. And a wedge for Russia, in cahoots with Cuba, in America’s own backyard.

The Cubans provided him with the intelligence resources to maintain a brutal grip on his people – in return for enough Venezuelan oil to sustain the ailing communist gerontocracy in Havana.

The brutality got worse the longer he was in power. Arbitrary arrest, torture and even killing of political opponents became commonplace. Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed by the regime’s thuggish security forces.

President Trump addresses the media from Mar-a-Lago after the military action in Venezuela

A destroyed anti-aircraft vehicle at La Carlota military air base in Caracas, Venezuela's capital

The dead hand of state socialism turned what was once the richest country in Latin America, with the largest oil reserves in the world, into an economic basket case, impoverishing the population with soaring inflation and collapsing national output.

The Venezuelan economy was disappearing before our very eyes as its GDP slumped. So were its people. Nearby countries were flooded with 8million refugees, including the US, to which Maduro encouraged mass illegal migration to sow division among Americans.

It is a measure of its warped values that only elements of the British Left are mourning Maduro’s demise – unlike anybody in Venezuela, beyond those whose wealth and status depended on the regime’s survival and who now fear that they too will face justice.

But the little matter of what happens next is already at the fore. The omens are not encouraging thanks to Trump’s desire – described as ‘bizarre’ by a leader of the democratic opposition in Caracas – to run the show himself.