This time, it is our homegrown, possibly diminished, and clearly aging autocrat taking us to war. Last week, I wrote about his buddy Vladimir Putin, who has taken Russia to war. And I wrote about the brave people of Ukraine – who each day offer an example of what it takes to repel an invasion and stand up for democracy and self-determination. I suggested that for those of us willing to open our eyes to it, Ukraine is a living example of how the United States is on the wrong side of Putin’s war, on the wrong side of history, and on the side of cowardice and acquiescence.
Well, it didn’t take long for Donald Trump to double-down and make the lesson even more obvious. Yes, he has managed to mirror Vladimir Putin, and produce his own unique Special Military Operation. He surrendered to the madness that inflicts so many of those autocrats who have taken their nations to wage an unnecessary war. For greed. Or to prove how very powerful they are. And, as is so often the case, to distract from their manifest failures to adequately provide for their own people:
So often Donald Trump has betrayed the people of Ukraine, accepting—with only the occasional low-key complaint—the escalation of Putin’s brutal invasion and constant bombing of civilian targets. Now, despite his oft-repeated campaign rhetoric about “America first” and his continuing rants about the evils of Biden’s nation-building, he has taken us to war with Venezuela. Let’s be clear, no matter what Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, or Donald Trump say, this was not a simple exercise of law enforcement. And as we will see, this is not about narco-terrorism or about the drugs that are killing Americans. This is nothing more than Donald Trump’s desire to distract from his manifest failure to deliver lower prices, to end the war in Ukraine, and, probably most important of all, to somehow magically disappear his obvious involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring. Now, as the fever of imperialism spreads to his slavish sycophants, they cannot help but brag about American dominance. No matter how stupid. No matter the cost.
And, lest we forget, there is the added benefit of repaying big oil and big energy for their extremely generous campaign contributions.
Truthout reminds us:
A new report details how fossil fuel executives helped finance President Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, spending millions of dollars to influence the race in his favor. The report from Climate Power, a progressive group dedicated to ‘winning the politics of climate,’ suggests that Big Oil’s donations to Trump — coupled with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on lobbying Congress over the past year — will majorly increase profits for the industry. ‘Big Oil’s total financial influence this election cycle amounts to an astounding $445 million, the report states, noting that the oil and gas industries also donated to dark money groups in support of Republicans and Trump that make it ‘nearly impossible to understand the full scope of their impact’ over the past year.
Of the money that has been disclosed, $96 million went directly to Trump’s presidential campaign. That’s about one-tenth of the amount Trump requested from Big Oil executives during a secretive meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in April, when he begged executives to give his campaign $1 billion and vowed to enact policies to increase their profits in return.
Another $80 million from oil and gas companies went to advertising to support Trump and Republicans, or toward positive advertisements for the industry during the election cycle. And a whopping $243 million was spent on lobbying members of Congress last year, the Climate Power report shows. The investment from these companies is ‘likely to pay dividends’ for them, the report suggests, in the form of deregulation of the industries and new drilling permits, among other actions by the administration.
Which brings us to this:
The New York Times writes:
President Trump announced that U.S. forces … were flying President Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of the country. The Trump administration had been building pressure on Mr. Maduro for months … Mr. Trump made the announcement on Truth Social, his social media platform, and said that the United States had carried out ‘a large scale strike against Venezuela’ in an operation that was conducted ‘in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement.’ He said that Mr. Maduro’s wife had also been captured …
When asked if he had sought congressional authority for the operation or what is next for Venezuela, Mr. Trump said he would address those matters during a news conference at 11 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, speaking on a state-run television station after Mr. Trump’s announcement, said that Mr. Maduro’s location was unknown and asked Mr. Trump for proof of life.
Earlier on Saturday, the government of Venezuela accused the United States of carrying out military attacks in the capital, Caracas, and other parts of the country after large explosions were reported at a military base in the city … The Venezuelan government declared a state of emergency in response to the attacks and said they had occurred in Caracas and in the states of Miranda, Aragua and La Guaira, according to a statement from the Venezuelan communications ministry.
Venezuela ‘rejects, repudiates and denounces’ U.S. military aggression, the statement said. It also called on ‘on all social and political forces in the country to activate mobilization plans and repudiate this imperialist attack.’
Now, if you are struggling, as so many are, with the relentless increases in the cost of living, you can easily be forgiven for not quite understanding all this. President Trump’s January 3, 2026, Mar-a-Lago press conference, was probably the most confusing press event I have witnessed over the years. And if you are wondering why we decided to go to war with Venezuela rather than cut grocery prices, stabilize rents, or restore cuts to Medicaid, well, none of those questions, not to mention any answers, ever made it to the agenda. One justification for the rendition of Maduro was quickly replaced by another.
But let’s begin with the obvious and frightening reality that Donald Trump was clearly in awe of our/his military might:
Late last night and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power, air, land, and sea was used to launch a spectacular assault, and it was a—an assault like people have not seen since World War II. It was a force against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of Caracas to bring outlaw dictator, Nicolás Maduro, to justice.
This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history … No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday …
Yes, “extraordinary military action,” “spectacular assault,” “a force against a heavily fortified military fortress,” “military might”—make no mistake, this is the language of war. But, but, but… there was never any declaration of war, and Congress, the body constitutionally awarded the power and responsibility to wage war, was not even consulted. So much for Article I, Section 8, Clause 11: “The Congress shall have Power … To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water …”
And yet, Donald Trump assured us that this was not a war, but rather a law enforcement action—with the military along for the ride to protect the Department of Justice personnel tasked with the removal of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from Caracas to Manhattan.
Still, even as he pivoted to his law enforcement explanation, Donald Trump could not help but revel at the power of the war-making machinery at his disposal:
We’re a respected country again like, maybe, like never before … And if you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it, but it was an incredible thing to see …
We had many helicopters, many planes, many, many people involved in that fight, but think of that: not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed. The United States military is the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet, by far, with capabilities and skills our enemies can scarcely begin to imagine. We have the best equipment anywhere in the world. There’s no equipment like what we have …
[Emphasis added.]
You might ask yourself: If this was really a law enforcement mission, why had President Trump not expressed similar enthusiasm for the preparation and drafting of the indictment, offering fervent and passionate praise for the attorneys at his Department of Justice? But that never happened because Donald Trump had something far more mind-boggling to announce than the successful execution of an arrest warrant.
Because we are now adding control of the previously sovereign nation of Venezuela, and its 30 million people, to his presidential portfolio:
We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So, we don’t want to be involved with, uh, having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.
[Emphasis added.]
Then Donald Trump explained:
And it has to be judicious because that’s what we’re all about. We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland. We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind … We’re there now, and … So we’re gonna stay until such time as, we’re gonna run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place.
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’ve 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.
[Emphasis added.]
I know a heck of a lot of Venezuelans hated Nicolas Maduro with good reason, but had I somehow missed the vote they took to invite Donald Trump to run their country? To take their oil? Hadn’t they taken it back from the multinational oil companies and nationalized it?
Now, usually, when an outsider—especially one who does not speak the language and has never lived there and who does not particularly like the people who do live there—begins to run your country, it is because he has invaded and won a war, not just executed an arrest warrant. So, I am guessing, when told that the gringo MAGA president of the United States says he is going to run their country, many Venezuelans might regard this as a pretty serious declaration of war.
Then Donald Trump shared with NBC News:
Venezuela will not have new elections in the next 30 days … ‘We have to fix the country first. You can’t have an election. There’s no way the people could even vote, … No, it’s going to take a period of time. We have — we have to nurse the country back to health.’
Moreover, he said, the U.S. may subsidize an effort by oil companies to rebuild the country’s energy infrastructure — a project he said could take less than 18 months.
‘I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,’ he said. ‘A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.’
In another surprise, Donald Trump informed NBC that his recent Venezuelan law enforcement operation would have some added costs—beyond the $500 million to $1 billion it probably cost taxpayers to snatch Maduro. And so it might be a bit more expensive than your usual arrest. It will take a lot of money to send Trump’s friendly multi-billion-dollar oil companies back into Venezuela to take the oil he is pretty sure is his now. And they probably won’t want to spend their own money, so they will need some help, which means the taxpayers will probably have to reimburse them for all the dough they will be spending to get Donald Trump’s oil industry up and humming.
Change of plans, loyal MAGA. Time to make room in your MAGA heart and some room on those MAGA hats. Room for more “making great.” It is time to make Big Oil Great Again. And because it is not Biden’s nation-building this time but Donald Trump’s, we have got to make room for Make Venezuela Great Again.
Of course, nobody said that stealing one of the world’s most valuable natural resources from a nation of 30 million is going to be easy. Which is why Donald Trump has designated his best team to make it happen. NBC reports:
Trump identified a group of U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance — who will help oversee America’s involvement in Venezuela. ‘It’s a group of all. They have all expertise, different expertise,’ he said. But he had a one-word answer for who is ultimately in charge: ‘Me.’
Some of us learned over the years that our earliest military successes can often provoke unimagined consequences and long-term failures. So while Big Oil may be glad to have the opportunity to retake all that oil, I imagine they are more aware than Hegseth, Rubio, Miller, and Trump that this is a very long-term, highly complex, and dangerous proposition. Many industry analysts recognize the extreme difficulty in restarting the neglected Venezuelan oil industry.
As Yellowball, a commodities expert, noted on X:
When people say ‘Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves,’ as you undoubtedly have seen being thrown around a lot on here, they are technically referring to a specific accounting definition, not to a stock of easy, cheap barrels ready to flood the market. To unpack that, you need to get into what those reserves are, how they behave in the subsurface, what it costs to turn them into marketable liquids, and how price, technology, and above-ground risk interact. That’s a lot to cover, but let’s give it my best shot. On paper, Venezuela has roughly 300–303 billion barrels of proved reserves, about 17 % of the global total and slightly more than Saudi Arabia. The critical detail is that around three quarters of that booked volume is extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco Belt in eastern Venezuela … the technically accurate part is that the country has extremely large volumes of extra-heavy oil in place, and a big subset of that was once judged economically recoverable at high price assumptions and booked as proved. The more relevant questions for energy strategy are how many of those barrels are genuinely economic under realistic long-term prices, how quickly they can be brought onstream given infrastructure and institutional constraints, what netback they deliver at the refinery gate, and how exposed they are to being left in the ground if demand peaks. On those metrics, Venezuelan barrels sit much further out on the cost and risk curve than the headline ‘largest reserves’ soundbite suggests.
RazorOil, an experienced Canadian engineer and heavy oil expert with 18 patents in the field, added his perspective:
I am guessing extracting that oil will not be easy without a large-scale U.S. military support force to protect the endeavor. It is not hard to imagine escalating violence and the likelihood they may have to confront armed members of the regime, former FARC guerillas, and a population who, however much it despised Maduro, will not easily surrender its natural resources to Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
Here is a relevant post from Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, who specializes in security affairs:
Donald Trump is currently intoxicated with the possibilities of using American military power to impose his will. But I guarantee you he has not studied the successful insurgencies in Cuba, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara slowly and successfully overwhelmed the far superior force of the dictator, or the similarly successful guerilla efforts of the Sandinistas against Somoza in Nicaragua. Not to mention the defeat of the American military in Vietnam.
I suspect Donald Trump’s arrogance and greed—combined with the slavish fear of almost every Republican politician unwilling to oppose him—will lead them all headlong into a predictable quagmire and easily avoidable disaster. As for the Venezuelan people, our allies, and our competitors, Donald Trump has made it obvious that, as the chief architect of this enterprise, his primary motive is to steal as much (oil) money as he can. For himself, his family, and friends. As always, his greed seems without limit, lacking any sensible safeguards. He loots in the way he has sexually abused women: without any semblance of subtlety, with arrogance and a certain Mafia-like thuggishness. And he is unable to refrain from bragging about his exploits.
Over the past decades, we have watched as he has sold a variety of over-priced crap, without any semblance of remorse. He has bought an airline that then went bankrupt as fast as his casinos, hawked Trump University’s worthless business courses (for which he was convicted of fraud and forced to reimburse $25 million to students), and, most recently, has been selling highly questionable crypto to his MAGA supporters. He has traded influence for real estate deals with Arab monarchs and managed to score a Qatari luxury jet. So, I do not doubt he has already calculated the very fair percentage of the profits Big Oil will extract that will be due him as a gratuity for diverting Venezuelan oil their way.
But, for the moment at least, let’s put aside Big Oil, their potential revenue, and the very likely multi-billion-dollar price tag to be paid for the American people. Let’s analyze the mission that began this whole shebang: the arrest of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores and their removal to an American court of law:
PBS reports:
Maduro made his first appearance in an American courtroom Monday on the narco-terrorism charges the Trump administration used to justify capturing him … Maduro, wearing a blue jail uniform, and his wife were led into court around noon for a brief, but required, legal proceeding that will likely kick off a prolonged legal fight over whether he can be put on trial in the U.S.
The New York Times writes:
Nicolás Maduro, the ousted Venezuelan leader, and his wife pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other federal charges … Nicolás Maduro, the ousted Venezuelan leader, insisted on Monday that he was still his country’s president and had been ‘kidnapped’ in the U.S. military raid on Caracas that captured him and his wife two days ago. Both pleaded not guilty to charges, including drug trafficking and other crimes, in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan.
‘I’m innocent. I’m not guilty,’ Mr. Maduro said through an interpreter after Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein asked him for his plea. He continued, ‘I am a decent man. I am still president of my country.’ Mr. Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, who like her husband wore a short-sleeve navy shirt over an orange prison uniform, had a bandage on her forehead and what looked to be bruising near her right eye. She told the court that she was ‘not guilty, completely innocent.’ …
At the conclusion of the hearing, a man stood up in the gallery and told Mr. Maduro in Spanish that he would pay for his crimes. Mr. Maduro responded that he would win his freedom and declared himself ‘a prisoner of war.’
[Emphasis added.]
So, let’s look in detail at the crimes they are being charged with:
The indictment charges Maduro with using his position to “transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.” In addition, the indictment claims Maduro provided “Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela.” It states:
[M]assive-scale drug trafficking has also concentrated power and wealth in the hands of MADURO MOROS’s family, including his wife, the purported First Lady of Venezuela CILIA ADELA FLORES DE MADURO, the defendant, and MADURO MOROS’s son, member of Venezuela’s National Assembly NICOLAS ERNESTO MADURO GUERRA, a/k/a ‘Nicolasito,’ a/k/a ‘The Prince,’ the defendant. This cycle of narcotics-based corruption lines the pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect, and transport tons of cocaine to the United States.
The indictment claims:
[T]he defendants, have partnered with narco-terrorists from the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (‘FARC’), Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (‘ELN’), the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, and Tren de Aragua (‘TdA’), including TdA’s leader, HECTOR RUSTHENFORD GUERRERO FLORES, a/k/a ‘Nino Guerrero,’ the defendant. In sum, MADURO MOROS and his co-conspirators have, for decades, partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the United States.
The Department of Justice will have the burden of presenting evidence to a jury and convincing them of Maduro’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly, I have no idea about the persuasiveness, or lack thereof, of that evidence. I will say, given recent events, there is some reason to doubt the good faith intentions of the administration.
Let’s start with the contention that Nicolas Maduro partnered with narco-terrorists from FARC, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas and Tren de Aragua (TdA). On May 15, 2025, The Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard fired two intelligence analysts who had examined and analyzed possible links between Maduro and the Tren de Aragua gang:
The Washington Post noted:
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council, weeks after the council wrote an assessment that contradicted President Donald Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Gabbard removed Michael Collins, the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, as well as his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, according to a spokesperson for Gabbard’s office.
The actions are the latest purge by Gabbard, who has said she is fighting politicization of the intelligence community but has removed or sidelined officials perceived to not support Trump’s political agenda. The NIC is the top U.S. intelligence community body for analyzing classified intelligence and providing secret assessments to the president and other top policymakers …
The firings took place a week after the ODNI released a partially declassified intelligence assessment, dated April 7 and produced by the National Intelligence Council, that found that the Venezuelan government is most likely not directing the activities of the gang known as Tren de Aragua, or facilitating its operations in the United States …
The document, whose existence was first reported by The Washington Post, undercut Trump’s stated rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Trump invoked the 18th-century act in mid-March, proclaiming without evidence that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating an ‘invasion’ of the United States ‘at the direction’ of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.
[Emphasis added.]
You can download their assessment here.
As for Maduro’s role in drug trafficking, the indictment states:
NICOLAS MADURO MOROS, the defendant—like former President Chavez before him—participates in, perpetuates, and protects a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of their partner drug traffickers. The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top—referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials. Venezuela sits in a geographically valuable location for drug traffickers, with northern access to the Caribbean Sea via several large ports and western access to the mountainous regions of Colombia, where coca is grown and turned into the vast majority of the world’s cocaine supply in jungle laboratories. Starting in or about 1999, Venezuela became a safe haven for drug traffickers willing to pay for protection and support corrupt Venezuelan civilian and military officials, who operated outside the reach of Colombian law enforcement and armed forces bolstered by United States anti-narcotics assistance …
By in or about 2020, the State Department estimated that between 200 and 250 tons of cocaine were trafficked through Venezuela annually. The maritime shipments were shipped north from Venezuela’s coastline using go-fast vessels, fishing boats, and container ships. Air shipments were often dispatched from clandestine airstrips, typically made of dirt or grass, and also from commercial airports under the control of corrupt government and military officials.
Let’s say the Department of Justice has a compelling case that will prevail and result in convictions. Still, it is hard not to question the motives of the administration. It was Donald Trump who recently pardoned the former President of Honduras, a man unanimously convicted by an American jury for his role in a massive drug-smuggling operation that rivals anything Maduro is being accused of:
The BBC explains:
Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, has walked free after President Donald Trump pardoned him – a man once characterised as the key figure in a drug trafficking scheme that flooded America with over 400 tonnes of cocaine. Trump has said that Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a US court, is a victim of political persecution and has been ‘treated very harshly and unfairly’. The pardon has surprised some experts, given the seriousness of the crime and the administration’s promised crackdown on illegal drugs flowing into the US … US federal prosecutors accused him of accepting a $1m bribe from notorious drug lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán for his first presidential campaign in exchange for protecting narcotics routes through Honduras … US prosecutors argued that he was a central figure in a more than 18-year-long drug-trafficking scheme that funnelled over 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US – equivalent to roughly 4.5 billion individual doses … Prosecutors detailed how Hernández abused office by shielding drug traffickers armed with machine guns and grenade launchers. In exchange, he received millions of dollars to fuel his political campaigns …
Trump announced the pardon on 28 November in a Truth Social post, writing that, according to ‘many people that I greatly respect’, Hernández had been unfairly treated by prosecutors. In the same post, he also endorsed Tito Asfura for president of Honduras ahead of Sunday’s election. Asfura ran under the same National Party ticket as Hernández …Trump’s endorsement of Asfura wasn’t surprising to many, given the right-leaning National Party’s ideological alignment with the current US administration.
As I write, 14 of the largest oil companies, cautious and wary, are meeting in the White House.
Based on the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández and the pressure Donald Trump is putting on the oil companies, seizing and exploiting Venezuela’s oil seems far more important to the president than stopping the flow of drugs into America. And since Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump seem not to know anything about recent history, let me leave you with yet another warning from someone who does:
I don’t know about you, but from my vantage point, Donald Trump has failed big time to Make America Great Again. And I sure as hell don’t think he is the one to Make Venezuela Great Again.
