To understand why Donald Trump just (illegally) attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the country’s president and his wife, you only need to look at this chart, which is based on OPEC numbers.
Trump didn’t attack Venezuela because it produces fentanyl. It doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because President Nicolás Maduro controls the Tren de Aragua gang. He doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles. It doesn’t even exist.
It’s about the oil, stupid!
Don’t believe me? Think it sounds a little conspiratorial?
Well, here’s the thing: Donald Trump, the self-declared ‘peace president,’ the serial liar, also likes to say the quiet part out loud from time to time.
In 2003, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at least pretended their illegal invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein wasn’t about Iraq’s oil. It was about democracy! WMDs! Al-Qaeda!
Donald Trump, weirdly, shamelessly, and luckily for us, has been brutally honest on the subject of Venezuela and his motivation for regime change in Caracas.
Here he is in his own words.
1. “Return the oil”
On Dec. 16, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was ordering “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE” of all Venezuelan oil tankers by “the largest Armada ever assembled” until “such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
To be clear, US companies, as even the Washington Post has pointed out, “never owned oil or land in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest proven reserves of crude, and officials didn’t kick them out of the country.”
2. “We want it back”
On Dec. 17, a journalist asked the US president on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews: “Is the goal of the blockade of Venezuela regime change?”
Trump replied: “You remember, they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil, from not that long ago. And we want it back.”
Another reporter then asked the president: “On Venezuela, sir, you mentioned getting land back from Venezuela. What land is that?”
To which Trump responded: “Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had. They took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching. But they’re not going to do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”
3. “We’re going to keep it”
On Dec. 22, Trump told reporters in Palm Beach that the US government planned on keeping the oil illegally seized from Venezuelan tankers in the Caribbean.
“We’re going to keep it,” the president said.
“Maybe we’ll use it in the Strategic Reserves – we’re keeping it. We’re keeping the ships also,” he added.
He also acknowledged having spoken to “all the big” US oil companies about them returning to Venezuela once Maduro was removed from office.
4. “They have all that oil”
Trump has a long history of coveting Venezuela’s oil reserves.
In his 2019 memoir The Threat, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe quotes first-term Trump saying Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”
5. “We would have gotten all that oil”
Don’t take Maduro’s word for it. Take Trump’s word for it. He has long been obsessed with seizing Venezuela’s oil.
In June 2023, while he was out of office, Trump said at a rally in North Carolina:
“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.”
