Good morning. I’m still in London, where Paddington Bear is unavoidable. President Trump defended his economic record in a combative televised address. He also added plaques to his “Presidential Walk of Fame” near the Oval Office. They mock his Democratic predecessors. We have more news below. But I’d like to start today by asking a question you may have had yourself as the United States and Venezuela square off. That is: What is Trump trying to achieve?
PetrostateYesterday, Venezuela said its military would escort oil tankers heading to Asia to stop the United States from seizing them. Washington spent the fall punishing and pressuring the Caribbean nation in an ostensible campaign against drugs. Now we may have a glimpse of where this conflict is going. Venezuela, which once welcomed American energy companies, has the world’s largest oil reserves. President Trump wants access to them again. He wrote on social media that U.S. operations there would continue until the country returned to the United States “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” That helps explain the last three months. An escalationThe campaign began on Sept. 2, with military strikes on small speedboats that the Trump administration claimed, without offering evidence, were trafficking drugs. Then the strikes continued, again and again. There have been 26 so far, killing 99 people across the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean, acts that legal experts say may amount to war crimes. Then the campaign escalated. Trump authorized planning for covert C.I.A. action and deployed the largest naval force in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The military positioned warships off Venezuela’s coast, sent bombers to fly just offshore and dispatched troops and sensitive radar equipment to Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation just a few miles away. These moves didn’t always make sense. Officials explained each development as an effort to stop the flow of drugs from Venezuela to the United States. They call the country a narcostate and its president, Nicolás Maduro, a cartel leader. But Venezuela is not a drug producer, and most narcotics smuggled through the country are headed for Europe, not the United States. U.S. officials say it’s about dislodging Maduro from power. Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair. Why? Developments in the last week offered another rationale. Liquid goldIn the last week, the United States has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker and promised to blockade “ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS” going to and from the country. Officially, these boats are trading crude in violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran, as they’ve done for many years, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But there’s more, as my colleagues Edward Wong and Julian Barnes put it: Venezuela and its oil lie at the nexus of two of Mr. Trump’s stated national security priorities: dominance of energy resources and control of the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela has about 17 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, or more than 300 billion barrels, nearly four times the amount in the United States. And no nation has a bigger foothold in Venezuela’s oil industry than China, the superpower whose immense trade presence in the Western Hemisphere the Trump administration aims to curb. Trump wants that oil for the United States. He has wanted it for years. During his first term, he backed attempts to oust Maduro. After he left office, he lamented their failure. “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse,” he said in a 2023 speech. “We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil.” This time, Edward and Julian report, he’s pushing harder. In secret negotiations with the Trump administration, Maduro offered to open Venezuela’s oil industry to American companies. But that would have left Maduro in charge of dispensing it. The White House said no deal. ProspectingAcquiring oil is not the administration’s only argument for a sudden and fierce Venezuela policy. The U.S. strikes have also targeted boats off Colombia, suggesting the attacks are not entirely about Maduro. Additionally, much of Venezuela’s oil trade violates U.S. sanctions — and props up governments like Cuba’s. But Trump remembers a past when South and Central America were open markets. Before Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976, foreign companies accounted for 70 percent of production there. American drillers like Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil were major players. (Today, only one American company, Chevron, still operates in Venezuela.) In the early 1960s, my colleague Simon Romero explains, Venezuela had the largest American expatriate community in the world. Yesterday, Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, recalled that bygone era on social media. His post, a political gambit filled with misrepresentations, read like the beginning of a mission statement. It was an explanation of all that had come before, from the boat strikes to the military buildup to the threat of a blockade. It read like a prologue. “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” he wrote. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.” For more
The government is ramping up efforts to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance from the Trump administration. Under federal law, naturalized Americans — people who have acquired U.S. citizenship, numbering around 26 million — can lose that status if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. Around 120 total denaturalization cases have been filed since 2017. Now, though, the administration’s new guidelines call for 100 to 200 new cases per month. Activists warn that such an effort could lead immigration officials to go after people who made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork, and that the program would sow fear among law-abiding Americans.
Trump’s Speech
China
Reiner Killings
Bondi Attacks
Congress
More on Politics
Other Big Stories
If Democrats want to make good on their affordability message, they should support oil and gas production, Matthew Yglesias writes. Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on addressing addiction. The Times Sale starts now: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year.
The Lives They Lived: Many artists, innovators and thinkers died this year. The New York Times Magazine has tributes to them, which aren’t obituaries so much as explorations of brilliance lost. Click here to read them. A new Gilded Age: Conspicuous consumption has returned to restaurants in New York City, Julia Moskin reports. Here, for example, is a $435 tomahawk steak at Le Chêne in the West Village, along with a $260 turbot fillet. At La Grande Boucherie in Midtown, there’s a whole suckling pig, $600. The lobster roll at Lex Yard in the Waldorf Astoria? It’ll run you just under $70. “The more expensive it is, the faster it sells,” the chef at Le Chêne said. Stealing the show: The Oscars are leaving network television. They will be streamed live on YouTube starting in 2029.
2,400— That is the approximate number of dinosaur footprints a nature photographer discovered recently in the Italian Alps. They are more than 200 million years old and so well preserved that the marks of toes and claws are visible in the stone.
College football: Sherrone Moore, the former Michigan coach, had a “long history of domestic violence” against a female staff member, the woman’s lawyer told the police. Moore told the police he di |
