The Stolen Oil Lie
How Trump Rebranded Regime Change as "Reclamation" in Venezuela
Trump campaigned on “no more stupid wars,” selling himself as the leader who would bring troops home and end “regime change.” Yet the Venezuela operation has become the opposite: an extraordinary U.S. intervention that culminated in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and Trump openly signaling long-term American control over Venezuela’s future, with U.S. oil companies positioned as the “rebuilders” and beneficiaries. 1
Officially, Maduro is being charged with drug and weapons trafficking to preserve the “Drug War” justification. In reality, Trump lost patience as months of U.S. military attacks on fishing boats failed to move Maduro to resign. The drug-war framing was clearly a pretext for something else.
Now comes the new claim — the one designed to make conquest sound like housekeeping. Trump says Venezuela “stole” oil from the United States, and America is merely taking back what was taken.
That claim is false and it’s not a small error. It’s the rhetorical keystone that turns illegal regime change and resource capture into righteous “reclamation.”
Here’s the reality they’re trying to overwrite:
Venezuela’s oil is not “U.S. oil.” Venezuela nationalized its petroleum industry decades ago, asserting state ownership of resources within its borders. U.S. and other foreign companies once operated there, held concessions, and built profits, but operating rights are not national ownership.2
What did happen, especially in later decades, is that specific companies lost assets and contracts through expropriations and political upheaval. Those losses became the subject of lawsuits, arbitration awards, and long-running financial warfare. That is a corporate and legal history -complicated, contested, and expensive - not a story of Venezuela “stealing America’s oil.”
But, the corporate version is useless for propaganda. It doesn’t rally crowds. So it gets repackaged into a national insult: they stole from you; we will take it back; the invasion is restitution. 3
That is why the line gets repeated. It is a shortcut around sovereignty, law, and motive. It converts a grab into a rescue.
Enter Venezuela. The oil jackpot he thinks should be his.
Yes, Venezuela sits on immense reserves and a crippled industry. PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company, is hollowed out - aging refineries, degraded pipelines, skill flight, sanctions that choke financing and equipment. Output has risen and fallen through workarounds and outside buyers, but the headline remains the same. With serious investment and competent management, Venezuela’s production could be rebuilt.4
To a president who sees everything, including countries, as distressed assets waiting to be flipped, that looks like the prize behind Door Number One. He does not see Venezuela as a sovereign nation with its own people and politics. He sees an underground bank account waiting for a change in management.
So when Trump talks about “poison coming from Venezuela,” remember what he is not talking about. The drug actually driving overdose deaths in the United States is fentanyl, tied overwhelmingly to production networks outside Venezuela. Whatever trafficking moves through Venezuelan waters, the scale of military hardware and the trajectory of escalation do not fit drug policing. They fit coercive control of a petro-state sitting on a mountain of oil. 5
Once you see that, the mission reads very differently. The point is not to “save” Venezuelans from cocaine or Americans from overdoses. The point is to choke revenue, scare off alternative buyers, and deliver a simple message: full access to Venezuela’s reserves will only be possible under a government that will play ball with Trump and his donors, and under a story that tells Americans this is not conquest, but payback.
The narco-terror language is covering for a resource grab.
The Real Pattern
Strip away the slogans and the flag-draped language, and a simple pattern emerges.
Trump has created an American budget that tells hungry children, disabled people, and low-income families there is no money for food, medicine, or rent - while pouring vast resources into a foreign operation sold as “drug interdiction” and executed like regime change.
He promised “no more wars,” but he is running a low-visibility, high-lethality campaign designed to topple a government and install something more friendly to his own interests - and now, more openly, more profitable to his donors, especially the oil companies who bankrolled him were promised a return: fewer restraints, and a world rendered to serve fossil-fuel power. 6
He has dismantled long-term clean-energy projects and climate policies, throwing away jobs and ceding ground to global competitors, while positioning himself as the man who can bring back “cheap gas” by prying open someone else’s oil fields. He has wrapped it in the language of drug war and terrorism, counting on the public’s fear of “cartels” to blur the line between interdiction and invasion. 7
Why Venezuela, and why now?
Because Venezuela offers him everything he wants at once:
A pliant future government sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves.
A dramatic stage on which to act out his fantasies about “taking” a country.
A dress rehearsal for a new kind of American empire, where billion-dollar weapons enforce the interests of fossil-fuel oligarchs.
And, as always, a distraction - a spectacle that lets him posture as tough on drugs and crime while his administration guts the social safety net at home.
Regime change in Venezuela is not about democracy. It is not about the rule of law. It is not even, really, about drugs. If it were, the focus would be on the actual drivers of U.S. overdose and on legitimate, lawful international pressure - not on a made-up story about “stolen” oil.
It is about oil, power, and a president who has never seen a struggling country he didn’t want to carve up and run.
Footnotes:
Yes, yes, yes!!! This is what I have been saying - rather loudly - since yesterday. And, if this is a distraction from Epstein, he's done a great job. No one has mentioned those documents. They have mentioned impeachment and the 25th Amendment, however. Let's see how far that goes.