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Trump’s colonialist Venezuela fever dream
Pillaging resources like this is the stuff of fascist regimes.
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Last week, gas prices shot up to a Labor Day weekend record of $4.15 a gallon. Diesel prices also broke records, reaching $5.85 — 55 percent higher than in February, when Trump started his illegal war of aggression with Iran.
Higher diesel increases trucking costs, which will drive inflation for groceries, clothes, and any other shipped goods. Americans already ranked inflation and cost of living as their highest concern a month ago, before this latest surge. Now, as midterms loom, voters who rightly blame Trump’s war-mongering and indifference for high prices are only going to get angrier. Republican operatives are reportedly panicking.
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Trump as usual pretended he had a solution. Ever since American forces kidnapped Venezuela’s dictator Nicholas Maduro in January, Trump had been trying to arrange for US seizure of the country’s oil. Last week the White House claimed Trump had succeeded and “secured the biggest oil deal in world history.” The US was to have “majority control of more than 65 billion of proven oil reserves.”
Trump of course said that the deal would address costs at the pump, boasting that “ultimately, prices are going to come down.” But even he admitted he couldn’t say for sure whether those benefits would be tangible before the election.
If he was not a liar, Trump would have admitted there is zero chance that Venezuela’s oil will help lower prices by the midterms. In fact, his lust for other countries’ oil is, like all his policies, almost completely divorced from any effort to help Americans.
This gross colonial resource grab is not for America at all. It is for Trump, because gross colonial power grabs give opportunities for self-dealing and, more importantly, make him feel powerful and presidential. His ego is the world’s largest gas guzzler, and what it belches out, in the US and worldwide, is corruption and misery.
Plunder
Trump has long made it clear that he loves the idea of invading other countries and stealing their stuff. All the way back in 2016 during his first run for president he blithered that Obama’s Middle East policy was insufficiently extractive.
“Take the oil. I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil. They still haven’t taken the oil,” he said.
Maduro was a brutal authoritarian and some analysts cheered Trump when he kidnapped and imprisoned him, insisting the US was acting to establish freedom and democracy. The Wall Street Journal called Maduro’s seizure “an act of hemispheric hygiene against a dictator who spread mayhem far and wide.”
When Trump talked about his goals, though, democracy was not high up on the agenda.