President Trump on Sunday night asserted again that the United States was “in charge” of Venezuela, hours after his top diplomat had pivoted away from such earlier suggestions of direct control to say that the administration would instead coerce cooperation from the new leadership in Caracas.

“We’re dealing with the people that just got sworn in,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington from Florida. “And don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I’ll give you an answer, and it’ll be very controversial.”

“What does that mean?” a reporter asked.

“It means we’re in charge,” the president said.

Mr. Trump did not provide details, but he appeared to be referring to control over the Venezuelan government, whose top officials made defiant statements after the U.S. military entered the country early Saturday and seized Nicolás Maduro, the autocratic leader.

The acting leader of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, a vice president under Mr. Maduro, struck a more diplomatic tone on Sunday night, saying, “Our people and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war.”

When asked what he needed from Ms. Rodríguez, Mr. Trump said: “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”

On Sunday morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to recast Mr. Trump’s assertion a day earlier that the United States would “run” Venezuela, saying instead that the administration would keep a military “quarantine” in place on the country’s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there.

When asked how the United States planned to govern Venezuela, Mr. Rubio did not lay out a plan for a U.S. occupation authority, like the one that the George W. Bush administration put in place in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but spoke of leverage over a Venezuelan government run by allies of Mr. Maduro, now jailed in Brooklyn, to force policy changes.

U.S. forces will continue to prevent oil tankers on a U.S. sanctions list from entering and leaving the country until the government opens up the state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment — presumably giving priority to American companies — and makes other changes, he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News.

“That remains in place, and that’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes, not just to further the national interest of the United States, which is No. 1, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” he said.

And in a testy exchange later on “Meet the Press” on NBC News, Mr. Rubio complained that people were “fixating” on Mr. Trump’s declaration at a news conference in Florida on Saturday that the U.S. government would run Venezuela. He added that “it’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this.”

Mr. Rubio said on CBS that the U.S. naval force that Mr. Trump massed in the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela over recent months — “one of the largest naval deployments in modern history, certainly in the Western Hemisphere” — would remain in place to enforce the quasi blockade, with the aim of “paralyzing that portion of how the regime, you know, generates revenue.”

And he added that Mr. Trump could put U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela beyond the recent operation in which Army Delta Force soldiers seized Mr. Maduro, if it served American interests. The president “does not feel like he is going to publicly rule out options that are available for the United States,” Mr. Rubio said.

A White House official said Mr. Rubio had detailed in his interviews on Sunday what Mr. Trump had meant when he used the word “run,” and that there was no contradiction in their remarks. The official said top Trump aides “will continue to diplomatically engage” with the current leadership in Venezuela.

In Venezuela, the official line of the government remains fierce resistance to the United States. Vladimir Padrino López, the defense minister, gave a speech demanding the return of Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were flown to a Brooklyn detention center on Saturday. “Our sovereignty has been violated and breached,” he said, backed by uniformed soldiers.

The Venezuelan government’s count of the number of soldiers and civilians killed during the U.S. incursion rose to 80 on Sunday, according to a senior Venezuelan official. Mr. Padrino López said that U.S. forces had killed a “large part” of Mr. Maduro’s security detail in the attack. No American service members were killed, though several were injured by hostile fire, U.S. officials said.

Mr. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday that if Ms. Rodriguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”