It’s often said that one of Donald Trump’s biggest innovations in American politics is to confess to his corruption right out in the open. Over the years, Trump has frequently confirmed the truth of that diagnosis. But during remarks to reporters on Sunday about his invasion of Venezuela, he gave this a new spin, taking his corruption international in a fresh way.
“We need total access—we need access to the oil and to other things in their country,” Trump said when asked what he’s demanding of acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who has replaced Nicolás Maduro since U.S. forces transported him here. Asked specifically about Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump said: “We’re gonna run everything.”
This “total access” will go to “very large United States oil companies,” Trump says. While he has insisted this will partly benefit Venezuela, he also says that the country’s oil “wealth” will go to the U.S. as “reimbursement for the damages caused to us by that country.” Trump’s conception of those “damages” is based on the idea that Venezuela “stole” from us when it nationalized its oil industry in 1976—a complicated history but one that doesn’t remotely support his claim. So this now looks very close to outright plunder.
To truly appreciate this, note that most analysis of Trump’s plans for Venezuela has proceeded on two tracks. One of them, as Seva Gunitsky explains, posits that Trump envisions a “tripartite” division of the world, in which the U.S., Russia, and China all bless one another’s domination of their respective regions in a “hegemonic carve-up.” The other sees Trump’s action through the prism of domestic corruption: He’s turning Venezuela over to American oil companies and executives, some of whom bankrolled his reelection.
We need to put those two pieces together. Trump appears to envision something like a “hegemonic carve-up” that also gives regional MAGA-friendly oligarchies a major stake in our “share” of that tripartite division’s spoils. This is already the Putin model: authoritarian rule that enables smash-and-grab oligarchy by those in the regime’s good favor. Trump is making it unusually explicit that in this sphere of influence, Trump-approved oligarchs will be enriched by our regional spoils.
“Baked into Trump’s views on these so-called spheres-of-influence are opportunities to enrich himself, his inner circle, his donors, and his fellow oligarchs,” Casey Michel, a New Republic contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, tells me. “Putin envisions a world in which a small group of imperialists loot their portions of the globe as they see fit. Trump has been envious of this model for a long time. He’s implementing it himself in the Western hemisphere.”
To be fair, it’s not obvious that oil companies themselves want in on this scheme. At a minimum, they don’t want to appear open to it: Politico reports that some are “leery” about making such investments, given the logistical challenges of revitalizing the country’s oil industry amid uncertainties about its future.
But what matters here is that Trump himself envisions a future for the region—and for U.S. energy oligarchs—along these lines. When Trump insists the U.S. has a right to “access” all of Venezuela’s oil based on a badly distorted story about our victimization by that country—after the U.S. military invaded it and kidnapped its leader—he’s effectively declaring we have the right to take its resources by force. It all smacks of the schoolyard bully sneering, “What did you say about my mother?” to a hapless smaller kid who actually said nothing, then citing this invented insult as justification for forcibly taking his lunch money.
It’s this international vision that Trump is blurting out when he says that “we need total access” to Venezuela’s oil. You may recall that during the 2024 campaign, Trump told a roomful of oil executives that he would govern nakedly in their financial interests while demanding $1 billion in campaign contributions in an explicit quid pro quo. Trump has now taken this candor further: Whether the oil companies want this or not, he is telling them they have great riches to reap if they buy into his hegemonic-oligarchic schemes. And he’s doing so right out in the open. This isn’t the same as calling this a “war for oil.” It’s more an invitation to oligarchs to join in his conception, such as it is, of the future world order.
By the way, this may be only the beginning of the corruption here. The American Prospect has a great piece reporting on how elite gamblers gamed prediction markets on the invasion, probably with the help of inside information. The aftermath could present more such opportunities.
Beyond all this, Trump’s illegal, unprovoked invasion of Venezuela wrecks the notion that he was ever “antiwar” or “anti-interventionist” in any real sense. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky explains, he’s fine with wars that are about “raw power in service of plunder and conquest.”
We have been told endlessly that many voters who picked Trump were partly frustrated with the foreign military adventurism of bipartisan elites. But that raises a question. Let’s accept for now that many Trump voters are driven by that frustration—that many harbor JD Vance’s stated skepticism that foreign intervention can do good in the world that’s worth our national sacrifice. Will they now decide that Trump’s version of adventurism is a good thing? Now that Trump has laid bare its corrupt, elite-enriching nature, will they go along with a war that’s nakedly about pillage and plunder, either on moral terms or on the grounds that it narrowly benefits the national interest?
Trump seems confident that they will. He told reporters Sunday that his voters are “thrilled” with this action, adding: “They said, ‘This is what we voted for.’”
As it happens, a new Washington Post poll sheds light here. It finds that only 40 percent of Americans approve of the decision to capture Maduro by military force, versus 42 percent who disapprove, and only 37 percent say this was appropriate without congressional approval while 63 percent say it wasn’t. But among those who voted for Trump, 80 percent support the capture and 78 percent are untroubled by the lack of congressional authorization.
So maybe Trump supporters are fine with this sort of military intervention, after all. It’s hard to know if they would support turning all Venezuela’s oil over to U.S. companies; the poll finds only 46 percent of them support the U.S. taking control over that country. But here’s the thing: Trump himself obviously thinks they approve of that too. Listen to the tone of his declaration that this will thrill his voters, and it’s clear he thinks they fully back the rapacious nature of his mission.
That says something grim about Trump’s view of his own supporters. He thinks they are just as corrupt, amoral, indifferent to the fate of those killed by our military, and eager to pillage weaker countries for the spoils of conquest as he is.
