Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.
Anton Troianovski at NYT:
While he was out of office, President Trump mused about what would have happened if the United States had taken control of Venezuela.
“We would have gotten all that oil,” he said in a speech at the North Carolina Republican Convention in 2023. “It would have been right next door.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump made it clear that he now intends to follow through.
In the last year, as the Trump administration built up pressure against Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, the president and his top aides said that the aggressive U.S. actions were necessary to curb drugs and migration from that country. But on Saturday, as Mr. Trump discussed the predawn attack on Venezuela that led to the capture of its leader, it was evident that the president’s longtime fixation on oil was a driving factor in his decision to greenlight the mission.
“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he celebrated the seizure of Mr. Maduro, promising that American companies would be able to tap more of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
On January 21, 2017, he told the employees of the CIA:
But when I was young—and I think we're all, sort of, young. When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We'd win with trade. We'd win with wars. At a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors, "The United States has never lost a war." And then, after that, it's like we haven't won anything. We don't win anymore. The old expression, "To the victor belong the spoils"—you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn't a fan of Iraq. I didn't want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil. Now, I said it for economic reasons. But if you think about it, Mike [Pence], if we kept the oil you probably wouldn't have ISIS because that's where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil. But okay. [Laughter] Maybe you'll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.
But taking military action on behalf of the oil companies is likely to be unpopular. Americans do not like oil companies:
