In Venezuela Takeover, Trump Makes It All About The Oil

WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump on Saturday defended his regime-change military attack on Venezuela as a “law enforcement” operation to arrest a drug kingpin, just five weeks after having pardoned and released from prison a convicted drug kingpin and despite his multiple statements that the incursion was to gain access to oil.

“Our military, working with us, law enforcement, successfully captured Maduro,” Trump said, referring to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, at a news conference from his Florida country club, where he has spent the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

Trump went on to say that the US military would run Venezuela for the foreseeable future. “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he said.

“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” he added. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition, and it has to be judicious.”

He also claimed that Venezuela had “stolen” oil from the United States.

“We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations,” he said. “This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country. Considered the largest theft of property in the history of our country. Massive oil infrastructure was taken like we were babies.”

But Trump’s claimed interest in Maduro’s alleged drug trafficking stands in marked contrast to his Dec. 1, 2025, pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez. The former president of Honduras had been serving a 45-year sentence in federal prison after a jury found he had been responsible for smuggling more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Trump claimed — without evidence — that Hernandez had been wrongfully prosecuted by his predecessor, Joe Biden, even though the criminal probe of his activities had spanned three presidential administrations, including his own first term from 2017 to 2021.

Meanwhile, Trump has been open about his desire for US exploitation of Venezuelan oil reserves.

Running to regain his office in 2024, Trump said he had been close to gaining that control in his first term.

“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door,” he said at a North Carolina rally.

Just two weeks ago, Trump mentioned oil as a justification for his military buildup off Venezuela’s coast.

“They took our oil rights, removed our companies, and we want them back,” he told reporters on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac beside Air Force One.

Trump has, for years, expressed his belief that the United States had the right to confiscate oil using the military. Even as he falsely claimed to have opposed President George W. Bush’s Iraq war from the outset, he said he would have seized Iraqi oil. “Take the oil!” he frequently said at his rallies in 2016.

Trump, in his remarks on Saturday, repeated a number of his common lies about Venezuela and drug smuggling. He claimed that each of the alleged drug smuggling boats he has ordered destroyed in recent months represented 25,000 American lives saved.

In fact, that could only be true if the boats were carrying the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl, and the Trump administration has not offered any proof of this. Most fentanyl entering the US comes in across the Mexican border, carried by US citizens.

The 100 people killed on the boats so far were likely smuggling cocaine or even marijuana.

Trump also claimed, again, that Venezuela had dumped thousands of its criminals and mentally ill people into the United States. There is no evidence of this, and the false claim could reflect Trump’s confusion between individuals seeking political asylum and people in mental health facilities.