Sunday in Trump's America
I know a lot is happening - but let’s keep our eyes on the ball. Venezuela's oil riches.
Watching Donald Trump try to sell a con in 2026 is like observing a three-card monte hustler who still believes the crowd can’t see his thumb. The Venezuela gambit—that sweaty, palm-greased narrative about Caracas as some narco-terrorist hellmouth threatening Peoria—has all the hallmarks of a Trump production: the bellowing, the flag-waving, the studied performance of righteous fury, and underneath it all, the unmistakable stink of crude.
Let us be clear about what Venezuela actually possesses that makes it so urgently, so desperately in need of American attention: the largest proven oil reserves on planet Earth. Larger than Saudi Arabia’s. Larger than Iran’s. A sea of black gold sitting beneath a government too weakened, too isolated, and too reviled by the international community to mount much resistance should someone—say, a real estate developer with autocratic yearnings—decide it needs liberating.
The drug trafficking talking point has been trotted out with all the subtlety of a Fox News chyron. One might ask, as apparently no one in the White House press corps has the stomach to do, why Venezuela—a country the DEA’s own statistics rank as a minor transit point compared to Mexico, Guatemala, or Honduras—suddenly became the locus of America’s pharmaceutical anxieties. The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. The fentanyl crisis is real and devastating and arrives predominantly through our southern border and via China. Venezuela’s contribution to this tragedy is, to use a technical term, negligible. But negligible doesn’t get you aircraft carriers. Negligible doesn’t justify the expansion of executive power.
What Trump understood—has always understood with the feral instinct of a man who grew up watching his father squeeze tenants—is that Americans will tolerate almost anything if you dress it in the language of protection. Tell them their children are in danger. Tell them drugs are pouring across borders. Tell them dark forces are massing. The vocabulary of threat is the skeleton key to the American id.
The Venezuela operation is regime change with a rebrand, Iraq with better marketing, a smash-and-grab dressed up as humanitarian concern. The playbook is so weathered its pages are falling out: demonize the leader, catastrophize the threat, manufacture the consent, and promise the spoils will pay for themselves. We were told Iraqi oil would fund reconstruction. We were told it would be quick. We were told we’d be greeted as liberators. The graves at Arlington do not suggest this strategy has been, historically speaking, a winner.
But here we are again, watching a president who dodged service in Vietnam fantasize about military adventures, stroking maps and mispronouncing names and assuring us that this time—this time—American intervention will be surgical, righteous, and above all, profitable.
What makes this particular mendacity so enraging is its laziness. The Trump operation has always been powered by the assumption that no one is paying attention, that the audience is too exhausted, too fractured, too doom-scrolling to notice when the stated justification for war doesn’t survive contact with a single Google search. Venezuela is not flooding America with fentanyl. This is not a debatable proposition. It is a fact, sitting there in plain sight, while an entire political apparatus pretends it cannot see it.
It has been observed that power in America is about the quality of the lie you can get away with. By that measure, this is a decidedly low-quality lie—a dimestore fabrication, a knockoff Rolex sold on Canal Street. And yet here we are, watching it work, watching cable news dutifully transcribe the press releases, watching the drumbeat build toward whatever extraction operation is being planned in rooms where the maps have oil fields circled in red.
The Venezuelans themselves—the actual human beings living in that shattered economy, the millions who’ve fled, the opposition figures who’ve spent years fighting Maduro at genuine risk to their lives—are props in this production. Their suffering is real and has been real for years, long before Donald Trump noticed their country on a petroleum reserves chart. Where was the humanitarian concern when intervention might have been legal, multilateral, and focused on their welfare rather than their resources?
This is the Trump doctrine stripped of its bunting: take what you want, call it security, and dare anyone to stop you. It is gangsterism elevated to foreign policy, the ethos of the casino applied to geopolitics. The house always wins, and the house is not Venezuela, and it is certainly not the American taxpayer who will fund whatever military adventure finally materializes.
One watches this unfold with the sick recognition of someone who has seen this movie before. The lies about Venezuela are not new lies. They are the same lies, wearing different costumes, speaking in the same cadences of manufactured emergency. And the oil—patient, indifferent, enormously profitable—sits beneath the ground, waiting for whoever is shameless enough to come and take it.
In the end, that is what Trump is selling: shamelessness as strategy. But to make it work, he needs us, the people to focus on something else - and that’s easy in Trump’s America.
We have a dead mother shot in the face. We’re taking our pirate ships on the road so to speak. Denmark beware! Ukraine burns. China chomps.
And America smolders.
