“Money coming out of the Ground”: The Trumpire Bumbles Into Venezuela
According to Donald Trump: “We’re going to run the place.” What could go right?
Iraq, but much dumber.
After 12 days of golf at Mar-a-lago, and a week of racist propaganda about Somalis, Donald Trump kicked off the new year by overthrowing Venezuela.
In two incoherent appearances, first on FOX, and later at a news conference at Mar-a-lago, Trump bragged about a violent attack on the Venezuelan capital, the arrest and exfiltration of its president Nicolás Maduro, and a vague plan for the United States to “run the place” and get the “money coming out of the ground.”
In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq for its oil, first on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had orchestrated 9/11, and later because of alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the Bush regime never came out and admitted why it was really there.
The Trumpire, on the other hand, sees no need to hide its greed and illegal colonialism behind such diplomatic niceties—much less consult with Congress on the subject.
Despite months of murdering people on “drug boats” in the Caribbean to try to give itself a legal rationale—first to “stop fentanyl,” which does not come from Venezuela, and then “other drugs”—Trump keeps blurting out the true purpose of his aggression: seizing the largest oil reserves in the world for his donors.
“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Despite Trump’s admission, Maduro was indicted by a grand jury in SDNY—an ironic venue choice given Trump’s own legal problems there—on a range of charges connected to alleged narco-terrorism, including “Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices”—a U.S. gun law from 1934.
On one hand, the military operation to invade Caracas and kidnap Maduro is being portrayed as law enforcement, and on the other as trillions of dollars in free oil. It would not be unfair to call the message schizophrenic.
While Maduro is being transferred to New York to await trial, there is no obvious plan as to who is actually going to “run” Venezuela. Trump rejected Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who would have actually won the election against Maduro. Instead, Trump says Venezuela will be run by a “team of people,” including “people in the military” and also involve the existing Vice President of Venezuela—because “she really doesn’t have a choice.”
However, the Vice President of Venezuela has come out and said “we are ready to defend Venezuela” and will “never be a colony.”
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez addresses the nation, calls for Nicolas Maduro’s release and says the country will never be a colony of any nation.
—Reuters
Now Trump is threatening a “second wave” of attacks if Venezuela does not bow down to the demands of the Trumpire to give up their oil.
It will get worse—because it’s Iraq but much, much dumber.
The Day After Anchorage
This operation appears to have been in process since at least August, the same time that Trump first sent warships towards the Caribbean.
As I wrote at the time, Trump sent ships starting the day after Putin visited Alaska—very strange timing, unless it was a direct result of conversations in Anchorage.
The simplest explanation for this timing would be a quid pro quo between Trump and Putin—Ukraine for Venezuela. Putin gets his prize in Europe, and Trump gets trillions of dollars in oil.
As Dave Troy points out on X, in her Congressional testimony in 2019, Fiona Hill suggested exactly that kind of deal had been on the table in the first Trump administration.
Looking back at the brutal behavior of the Trump regime towards Zelenskyy—and the servile nature of its relationship to Putin, there is little to disprove this as a core motivation.
Trump thinks he owns the entire Western Hemisphere now.
Oil for the Bubble
But why is oil such a huge concern of this regime right now? Why do they seem to be in almost a panic about getting more of it?
The reason is that the AI bubble must stay inflated—at all costs. Without cheap energy, you cannot light up trillions of dollars in GPUs and data centers. And Elon Musk will never get his trillion-dollar Tesla pay package. That’s why the billionaires are so excited about it.
But this bubble does not just contain technology. The bubble of the entire regime seems stretched to a breaking point. The economy is teetering; the backlash to the billionaire class is mounting; and very few Americans are excited about another deadly quagmire over foreign oil so they can get more chatbots.
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In line with this, Trump uttered something else during the presser that commentators haven't picked up. After the second time Trump talked about the oil companies needing to spend billions to upgrade the Venezuelan oil infrastructure, he said quietly (almost offhandly) that the oil companies would be reimbursed for the billions they will spend. Another payoff to his funders, this time from government (our) funds, and reduces their risk to zero.
Is the Southern District of New York able to refuse trying Maduro on these false charges? The whole thing is quickly going to turn into a cluster—fuck.
Mamdani is being attacked by the Trump administration right out of the gate