It’s the Oil, Stupid
Foreign Extraction: Trump decides Venezuela’s oil is for his taking.
When you are an elected authoritarian unbound by your party and the Supreme Court, how do you prove your strength? Take a page out of the schoolyard bully playbook and beat up weaker kids. That’s what the United States is doing in its invasion of the sovereign nation Venezuela and the kidnapping of its leader. As Jamelle Bouie explains, this is an unprovoked, illegal act of war.
President Donald Trump views himself as a strongman untethered by constitutional niceties and international law. Eagerly justifying military intervention, administration apologists say Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro was a corrupt politician who put his country on the road to ruin while enabling and profiting from the Latin America drug trade.
This may be true. But invading a weaker country in this way violates all the principles that President Franklin Roosevelt stood for and the “Greatest Generation” died for battling and defeating the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Italy in World War II.
King Trump, of course, rejects everything good and noble in America’s past. Instead, he wants only to double down on the nasty illiberal tradition of racist violence and dispossession (savage slavery and loss of freedom for Blacks and conquest and genocide for Native Americans) that defines the United States at its worst. Acting as if the United States can plunder Latin America at will is part of that less than noble past.
Trump says the U.S. will “run” Venezuela. The abduction of Maduro was executed without a hitch and seems to be yet another effort by President Trump to distract from the Epstein scandal, bad poll numbers, and the “affordability crisis.” But for the United States, “running” Venezuela could get quite messy. American troops on the ground protecting Chevron oil rigs will not go over well with Trump’s America First backers who want no part of regime change after disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A far-right wannabe dictator, President Trump views international relations as a sphere of influence game in which strong nations dominate and invade weaker nation-states in their geographic area. By Trump’s logic, the United States can seize and control any nation in Latin America it wants (Are Cuba and Columbia next?). This logic seems to extend to Russia invading and seizing Ukraine and China moving against Taiwan.
Why Venezuela? Venezuela’s vast oil reserves (303.2 Billion barrels in 2024) exceed those found in Saudi Arabia (267. 2 B barrels)! Iran (208.6B barrels), Iraq (145B barrels), and the United Arab Emirates (113B barrels) are next on the international list, with the United States only 9th at (45B barrels).
Unsurprisingly, the Venezuela raid enriches one of President Trump’s confidants – in this case MAGA billionaire and oil baron Paul Singer. In November 2025, Singer’s private investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, bought Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company, for $5.9 billion. Citgo owns three major refineries on the Gulf Coast built specifically to refine heavy-grade “sour” crude of the type found in Venezuela. Because the sale was forced by creditors of Venezuela after the country defaulted on its bond payments, Singer got Citgo at a discount. Advisors to the court that oversaw the sale valued Citgo at $13 billion.
Judd Legum reports that the 81-year-old Singer, with a net worth of $6.7 billion, donated tens of millions to support Trump allies in the 2024 congressional cycle, including $37 million to support Republican candidates. In June 2025, Singer bankrolled a primary challenger to Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, Trump’s leading foe in the Epstein matter, with $1 million, the largest contribution. The president has personally met Singer at least four times since 2016.
Petro dollars and resource extraction is what regime change in Venezuela is all about. Talk about drug trafficking is pretext belied by the president’s recent pardon of ex-Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez, despite his conviction and 45-year sentence for helping traffick more than 400 tons of cocaine!
Conceding green energy to China, the Trump regime is doubling and tripling down on fossil fuel extraction as if it is 1900 and the reality of global warming is not blowing in our faces with the force of a Category 5 hurricane. Just ask the residents of Pacific Palisades and Altadena about the climate-powered firestorms that destroyed their homes and communities in January 2025.
On January 3, just a few hours after President Trump attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, the New York Times published a story about a melting Antarctica. “As humans heat the planet by burning fossil fuels, the ice at the bottom of the Earth is changing in ways that are anything but slow, with consequences that are anything but distant.”
But Trump and his major financial backers across Texas, New York, and Silicon Valley are addicted to fossil fuels and want to party like it’s 1950. Ignoring indisputable science, they conveniently believe in denial and magical thinking. Their motto: enjoy power, wealth, and opulence today – the future be damned.
Make America Great Again spells greed and plunder for our corrupt president and his billionaire buddies.