Mr. President, You’re Not Supposed to Admit We’re Going to Steal Venezuela’s Oil

There’s a little dance that is traditional when the United States of America is preparing to put boots on the ground in a sovereign nation, to depose a leader via regime change while seizing control of anything we might find valuable or useful to our national interests. Politicians, up to and including the President, are supposed to act as if setting foot in that other sovereign state is the last thing they want to be doing, recognizing the potential for a long and costly quagmire, one that could cost American lives. As a result they’re supposed to build a case, to Congress and the American people in the court of public opinion, that intervention is an unfortunate necessity, driven by pressing matters like human rights abuses that compel us to act because we’re good people and we care so much about the plight of those poor souls living under a harsh, tyrannical regime. You’re supposed to say that we’re “bringing freedom” to the oppressed! You are not, in other words, supposed to play up the seizure of valuable assets as the main reason for why you’re preparing to invade another country–not if you in any way care about our nation’s global image. And it’s safe to say that Donald Trump doesn’t, given that he just admitted that the U.S. will be claiming the entirety of Venezuela’s oil reserves for itself.

As is so often the case with stories that revolve around or begin with a pronouncement from the Mad King via a post on his own Truth Social, there’s an inherent risk here of sanewashing Trump’s sentiment and tone by attempting to explain what he just posted in cogent terms. Therefore, just go ahead and read this particular ramble, if you can stomach it. It’s the only way to really suffuse yourself in the aura of crazy that Trump is projecting these days as he straight up proclaims that the oil of Venezuela in fact belongs to America, which is why we’ve begun a “complete and total blockade” of Venezuelan oil tankers (and maybe other random ships?).

The natural starting place for a reaction here is perhaps to simply ask what the fuck Trump is talking about or referring to, when he says the blockade will last “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.” At what point, exactly, did Venezuela steal all the oil, or “land,” or unnamed “assets,” from the United States? How does Venezuela manage to steal oil, located in Venezuela, from America? How did they steal their own land from us? What do these assets even entail? As you know, when making grand ultimatum pronouncements on social media to a foreign power, it’s generally described as a best practice to be as vague as you possibly can be in terms of defining what exactly it is you’re demanding. Oldest trick in the book: You just yell “GIVE US THE ASSETS!”, and conclude that any response is failure to do so while your foe is still reeling in the cognitive backlash of “Wait, what assets are we talking about?”

In this case, Trump is most likely (but who can say for sure?) referring to the evolution of Venezuela’s oil industry since the 1970s, when it was nationalized. Prior to that date, American oil companies such as Exxon, Mobil, Shell and Gulf Oil had been major forces in that industry, and foreign oil companies accounted for roughly 70% of all the oil being produced in the country. Those American companies were forced out when Venezuela nationalized the oil industry, losing billions in assets at the time. Since then, American companies have had a limited presence in the Venezuelan oil industry, with the exception of Chevron, which operates with a confidential license from the U.S. government granted by the Biden administration. So effectively, Trump is more or less using the justification of lost American oil company revenue in the 1970s as justification for how he now considers Venezuelan oil in 2025 to have been “stolen” from the United States, half a century later. Seem reasonable to you?

Venezuela stole oil and land from the United States?

That’s impressive for a country 1,700 miles away.

How exactly did they manage to steal our oil and land? Slip ’em into their pocket while browsing the magazine rack?

— Emily (@emilyyour8.bsky.social) Dec 16, 2025 at 7:01 PM

Simultaneously, the Truth Social post above also features Trump designating the entire Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a terrifying pronouncement that could be used to justify the indiscriminate, extrajudicial killing of pretty much any person connected in any way to Maduro’s government–“terrorists” have no rights, after all. We’re already using the same types of justification and the same types of language to handwave all concerns and inquiry into the unceasing campaign of boat strikes in both the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, which this week claimed another eight lives of people the government didn’t even attempt to prove were “narco-terrorists.” Based on precisely nothing, Trump recently claimed that “Every boat that gets hit, we save 25,000 American lives, and when you view it that way, you don’t mind.”

That kind of grim but cartoonishly wrong napkin math is perhaps in some way related to Trump’s recent pronouncement via executive order that the U.S. government will categorize the street drug fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” and could be another thing that would conventionally be used as justification for an invasion of a country like Venezuela, rather than the President appearing on social media to proclaim that we’re going to seize some oil reserves. The only minor problem: Trump’s own administration grudgingly admits that Venezuela doesn’t produce or distribute any fentanyl, and the vast majority of the cocaine it does produce is in fact distributed to Europe. Even in the U.S., overdose deaths from drugs of all kind have been in significant decline long before Trump returned to office, down 27% in 2024 alone. The CDC estimates that roughly 80,000 total overdose deaths of all kinds happened in 2024, which in terms of Trump’s “25,000 lives saved per boat” equation, means that 3 or 4 boat strikes should have spared America in its entirety going forward. What’s that, we’ve already blown up 25 boats? Well, I’m sure he’ll return to his math and square up those numbers soon.

Venezuela, shockingly, affirmed in response to Trump’s pronouncement that they do in fact have ownership of the oil in their native country, calling the President’s actions an “irrational military blockade” and a “grotesque threat.” Some members of Congress, simultaneously, are characterizing the United States as already at war with Venezuela, citing elements such as a Justice Department memo from 1961, which notes that “a blockade is a belligerent act which, as a matter of international law, is ordinarily justified only if a state of war, legal or de facto, exists.”

But hey, at least Exxon might be pleased to hear the news.