Oil First, America Last
Trump sold out voters for oil and the chance to cosplay the strongman in Venezuela
We’re barely a week into 2026 and Trump has already thrown any semblance of a New Year’s resolution out the window, launching a good old fashioned War for Oil under the pretense of regime change in Venezuela.
Trump’s dramatic military operation to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife was followed by the announcement of a vague plan to have the US “run” Venezuela. Oh, and take over the country’s oil infrastructure.
I’m calling it what it is: a brazen assault not just on a sovereign nation without congressional approval, but also on the “America First” agenda that delivered him a second term.
He’s playing the hits in a George W. Bush tribute band while operating under the delusion that he’s redefining US foreign policy with the “Don-roe Doctrine.” But no amount of wordplay is going to distract from the fact that this is a blatant resource grab. I don’t see any way around this: it’s meant to line the pockets of wealthy donors at the expense of solving Americans’ crushing affordability problems.
This all matters because Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, more than even Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Last year, Trump told oil executives at a Mar a Lago dinner that if they donated a billion dollars to his campaign that they would get a “deal because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.”
The guest list included execs from Chevron, Continental Resources, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum. Here we are, a year later, and he’s made good on the promise. Those oil execs are getting the “Quo” to go with that “Quid Pro.” It’s a thank-you gift to the wealthy elite who helped him with the election. And a conspicuous snub to the people who actually supported him. His MAGA voters won’t be getting anything out of the deal. You can’t buy eggs with access to oil reserves in Venezuela.
Ben Rhodes summed it up best in our latest conversation.
“Trump is motivated above all, not by any MAGA ideology. He’s motivated by power and money. And both of those things intersect here in Venezuela.”
What surprised me wasn’t the lockstep Republican support, it was who broke ranks.
While we got the reliable stream of copy/paste boilerplate statements from most Republicans, I spotted some cracks in the MAGA façade.
Steven Bannon hedged his sycophantic recap of the military operation on his podcast War Room with a hint of critical thinking, asking whether this is “harkening back to our fiasco in Iraq under Bush.”
Noted geopolitical strategist Candace Owens issued a characteristically deranged proclamation to her 7.5 million X followers that “the CIA has staged another hostile takeover of a country at the behest of a globalist [sic] psychopaths.” Horrendous framing, but she’s not wrong.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, in full-scale rebrand mode, offered an assessment on NBC over the weekend: that this has nothing to do with the American people. It’s all about big oil, corporations, and Trump’s cronies. She went after Trump’s trigger point, affordability, in a long, shockingly coherent post on X.
“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”
If she’s the voice of reason, I have to make a call to Netflix about a Stranger Things spinoff, because we are in the Upside Down.
Here’s what I don’t want to see happen next: Democrats turning this into an argument about proper procedure that tunes voters out. We’re getting a firehose of commentary about how this was illegal and a complete violation of norms, and it’s not wrong. But it’s the wrong argument to make now. The last thing I want is for Democrats to fall into the trap of missing the forest for the trees (again, let’s be frank) if they focus on trying to protect the sanctity of governmental protocol and not everyday Americans.
The bottom line here: Trump sold himself as the president who would end Forever Wars. I’ve seen this movie before, and I have a pretty good idea of how it ends.
Now he’s launched one of his own, without involving Congress, to reward the billionaires who funded his campaign and line his own pockets. If “America First” is now “Oil First,” you’d better believe I’m going to take him at his word when he shows us exactly who comes last.
WHO IS GONNA STOP HIM??? 🤬
Happy now MAGA. Tired of being lied to, cheated, grifted, conned????