Tag: donald trump

US gets first $500 million Venezuelan oil deal, holding some proceeds in Qatar

The Trump administration’s first sale of Venezuelan oil is valued at $500 million, an administration official told Semafor.

The sale marks an initial milestone in the administration’s stewardship of Venezuela after the US ouster of its former leader, Nicolás Maduro, 11 days ago. President Donald Trump has indicated that the US would effectively run Venezuela for an indeterminable amount of time and take control of up to 50 million barrels of its oil — marketing and selling it while distributing the proceeds back to Venezuela in an arrangement with little precedent.

Trump signed an executive order on Friday that provided some details on how the US plans to block courts or creditors from tapping any revenue from those oil sales. Venezuela owes international bondholders, oil companies and others as much as $170 billion — one reason why US firms have been reluctant to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure.

Trump told ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance last week that the US is “not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault.”

The administration official told Semafor that the interim leadership in Venezuela, led by former Maduro No. 2 Delcy Rodríguez, has “fully cooperated” since the US-Venezuelan energy deal was announced last week, adding that the US has “leverage” through sanctions and oil sales.

Revenue from the oil sales is currently being held in bank accounts controlled by the US government, as indicated in Friday’s order, according to the administration official. The main account, according to a second senior administration official, is located in Qatar.

The second official described Qatar as a neutral location where money can flow freely with US approval and without risk of seizure. Trump’s order noted that at least some of the revenue would be held in US Treasury accounts.

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Senate GOP blocks vote to limit President Trump’s authority on Venezuela

Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to dismiss a war powers resolution that would have limited President Donald Trump’s ability to carry out further military action against Venezuela, with two GOP senators reversing their earlier support for the measure.

Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to defeat a Democratic-backed motion after the Senate split 50-50 on a Republican effort to dismiss the resolution.

The outcome followed five Republican senators who originally joined Democrats to advance the legislation last week. Two of those Republicans, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana, ultimately withdrew their support.

Democrats forced the debate after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid earlier this month.

“Here we have one of the most successful attacks ever and they find a way to be against it. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s a shame,” President Trump said Tuesday during a speech in Michigan.

President Trump also criticized several Republicans who maintained their support for the resolution, blasting Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Even if the resolution had passed the Senate, it stood little chance of becoming law because it would have required President Trump’s signature.

Lawmakers also cited the release of a heavily redacted 22-page Justice Department memo outlining the legal basis for the operation that captured Maduro. The memo states that the administration currently has no plans for expanded military action.

“We were assured that there is no contingency plan to engage in any substantial and sustained operation that would amount to a constitutional war,” the memo said, signed by Assistant Attorney General Elliot Gaiser.

The administration has justified its actions by citing wartime authorities under the global war on terror, after designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations. It has also characterized Maduro’s capture as a law enforcement operation tied to longstanding U.S. criminal charges.

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This Is What Tyranny Looks Like Now: No Crowns. No Coups. Just Unchecked Power.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that gave voice to the discontent of a nation struggling to free itself from a tyrannical ruler who believed power flowed from his own will rather than the consent of the governed.

Paine’s warning was not theoretical.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we find ourselves confronting the same dilemma—this time from inside the White House.

When asked by the New York Times what might restrain his power grabs, Donald Trump did not point to the Constitution, the courts, Congress, or the rule of law—as his oath of office and our constitutional republic require. He pointed to himself.

According to Trump, the only thing standing between America and unchecked power is his own morality.

If our freedoms depend on Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed morality, we are in dangerous territory.

Over the course of his nearly 80 years, Trump has been a serial adulterer, philanderer, liar, and convicted felon. He has cheated, stolen, lied, plundered, pillaged, and enriched himself at the expense of others. He is vengeful, petty, unforgiving, foul-mouthed, and crass. His associates include felons, rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers, sex traffickers, and thieves. He disrespects the law, disregards human life, is ignorant of the Bible, illiterate about the Constitution, takes pleasure in others’ pain and misfortune, and is utterly lacking in mercy, forgiveness, or compassion.

Christian nationalists have tried to whitewash Trump’s behavior by wrapping religion in the national flag and urging Americans to submit to authoritarianism—an appeal that flies in the face of everything the founders risked their lives to establish.

That whitewashing effort matters, because it asks Americans to abandon the very safeguards the Founders put in place to protect them from men like Trump.

Trump speaks in a language of kings, strongmen, and would-be emperors advocating for personal rule over constitutional government. America’s founders rejected that logic, revolted against tyranny, and built for themselves a system of constitutional restraints—checks and balances, divided authority through a separation of powers, and an informed, vigilant populace.

All of their hard work is being undone. Not by accident, and not overnight.

The erosion follows a familiar pattern to any who have studied the rise of authoritarian regimes.

Trump and his army of enablers and enforcers may have co-opted the language of patriotism, but they are channeling the tactics of despots.

This is not about left versus right, or even about whether Trump is a savior or a villain. It is about the danger of concentrating unchecked power in any one individual, regardless of party or personality.

This should be a flashing red warning sign for any who truly care about freedom, regardless of partisan politics.

The ends do not justify the means.

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Trump to antisemites: You’re not welcome in MAGA

President Trump had a resounding no for any antisemites claiming to be part of the Republican Party or his MAGA movement.

“I think we don’t need them,” he told The New York Times in an interview. “I think we don’t like them.”

His comments, made in a Wednesday interview but published on Sunday, came after a series of high profile ultra-conservative figures have made controversial comments about the Jewish people and antisemitic speech has split Republicans.

Trump said: “I condemn” antisemitism.

He said he’s an ally of Israel and was awarded its Israel Prize, considered the country’s highest honor.

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From Noriega to Maduro: The Long US History of Kidnapping Foreign Leaders

While it has undoubtedly shocked the world, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro fits into a long history of United States kidnapping of foreign leaders.

On January 3, U.S. Special Forces entered Venezuela by air, captured Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, killing around 80 people in the process. They were flown to the United States, where Maduro was put on trial on spurious drug trafficking and possession of firearms charges.

Despite President Trump himself declaring that “kidnapping” was an appropriate term for what happened, corporate media around the world have refrained from using the obvious word for what transpired, preferring to use “capturing” or “seizing.” These terms reframe the incident and cast doubt on its illegality, helping to manufacture public consent for a grave breach of international law. Indeed, managers at the BBC sent out a memo to its staff, instructing them in no uncertain terms to “avoid using ‘kidnapped’” when reporting on the news.

Targeting Venezuela

Maduro is not the first Venezuelan official Washington has helped kidnap. In 2002, the Bush administration planned and executed a coup d’état that briefly ousted Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, from power.

The U.S. government had been organizing and financing the ringleaders of the coup for months, flying the key players back and forth to Washington, D.C. for meetings with top officials. On the day of the coup, American Ambassador Charles Shapiro was at the mansion of local media magnate, Gustavo Cisneros, the headquarters of the coup.

Two U.S. warships entered Venezuelan waters, moving towards the remote island of La Orchila, where Chavez was helicoptered to. Chavez himself stated that senior American personnel were present with him during his abduction. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration immediately endorsed the proceedings, describing them as a return to democracy.

Chavez was only saved the same fate as Maduro after millions of Venezuelans flocked into the streets, demanding a return of their president. Their actions spurred loyal military units who retook the presidential palace, and the project fell apart. After the coup, the United States quadrupled its funding to the coup leaders (including Maria Corina Machado) through vehicles such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

A further kidnapping of a Venezuelan official occurred in June 2020, when the United States downed the plane of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Saab was in Cabo Verde at the time, traveling back from a diplomatic mission to Iran, where he has been helping break American sanctions. He was only released in 2023, after Venezuela negotiated a prisoner swap which included a number of CIA agents captured in Venezuela in the act of carrying out terror attacks against the country’s infrastructure.

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Iran’s Inflation Protests Turned Into an Uprising. Will Trump Get Involved?

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who made Iran an Islamic republic in 1979, famously said that revolution was “not about the price of watermelons.” He held economics in contempt as the science of feeding donkeys. As his successor, Ali Khamenei, is learning, people will make a revolution about the price of watermelons. Demonstrations against inflation in late December have become some of the most violent unrest in Iran since the 1979 revolution.

The country has been under a total communications blackout since January 8, but the information that has emerged from Iran indicates that there has been a massive, bloody crackdown. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a nonprofit in Virginia, has verified 483 civilian deaths and 47 deaths of police and military personnel. On Sunday, Iranian state television broadcast video from a morgue in Tehran overflowing with bodies; authorities claim that the situation is now under control and hosted a progovernment rally in Tehran on Monday.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran if the government kills protesters. He told reporters on Sunday that “it looks like” his line has been crossed, and that he “might meet” with Iranian negotiators, or that “we may have to act because of what is happening before the meeting.” His cabinet is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to discuss options, including war, to support the protesters.

Trump’s promise to intervene “encouraged [Iranian authorities] to act much more aggressively and brutally,” Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Professor Vali Nasr said during a panel hosted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where I used to work. “You just end the protests quickly and take this off the table, so if that’s the excuse for intervention, it’s not going to be there anymore,” he explained, quoting a hypothetical Iranian official. 

As the space for political dissent has shrunk in Iran, protests have become more frequent and violent. In 2009, around 72 people were killed in protests by the reformist movement against a contested presidential election. In 2019, the government responded to protests about fuel prices by shutting down the internet, killing at least 321 people, and banning reformists from parliament. In 2022, when Iranians rose up against mandatory hijab laws, the crackdown killed at least 551 people.

This round of protests began with a merchants’ strike that was triggered by the Iranian rial hitting a record low against the U.S. dollar. (Unlike many of Iran’s self-inflicted economic problems, economist Esfandyar Batmanghelidj pointed out, the currency crisis has been directly caused by U.S. economic sanctions.) In the midst of the protests, the government announced that it would cut billions of dollars from import subsidies—increasing prices in the short term—and instead give citizens an additional $7 per month.

The unrest suddenly escalated in the second week of January. Video evidence from before the communications blackout, compiled by military observer Mark Pyruz, shows that protest sizes ballooned by five times between January 5 and January 7. Then, several Kurdish parties and Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince exiled in 1979, called for their followers to come out on the night of January 8. At that point, authorities shut down the internet.

It’s unclear how much control Pahlavi actually has on the ground. Last summer, after the Israeli war with Iran, he claimed to have recruited 50,000 defectors from the Iranian government online. On Sunday, the former crown prince called on oil workers to go on strike in a video message. There’s no evidence that Pahlavi has been able to summon either the defectors or the strikes; on Sunday, he went on Fox News to appeal publicly to Trump, who has refused to meet with him, for help.

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The Rubicon crossed – Team Trump’s nihilistic anti-values paradigm

So, finally an act of unvarnished predatory action by Trump and his team – the abduction of President Maduro in a lightning night-time military strike – has launched 2026 into a pivotal moment. A pivotal moment not just for Latin America, but for global politics.

The “Venezuela method” is aligned with Trump’s “business first” approach which is rooted in constructing a “financial reward system,” whereby diverse stakeholders to a conflict are offered financial benefits that permit the US to (ostensibly) achieve its own objectives, whilst locals continue to extract rewards from the exploitation of (in this case) Venezuelan resources – under US close supervision.

In this template, the US does not need to create a new governing régime from scratch, nor put “boots on the ground” – for Venezuela, the plan is that the existing government of the newly-sworn in President, Delcy Rodriguez, will remain in control of the country – so long as she follows Trump’s wishes. Should she or any of her ministers fail to follow that blueprint, they will receive the “Maduro treatment,” or worse. Reportedly, the US has already threatened Venezuela’s Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, that he will be targeted by Washington unless he helps President Rodriguez meet US demands.

Put another way, the plan comes down to a single underpinning premise that the only thing that matters is the money.

In this context, the US approach to Venezuela resembles that of a Vulture Hedge Fund “buy-out”: Remove the CEO and co-opt the existing management team with money to run the company to new dictates. In Venezuela’s case, Trump likely hopes that Rodriguez (who has been “talking” with Secretary Rubio via the Qatari royal family, and who is also the Minister responsible for the oil industry) has squared off all the factions that compose the Venezuelan power structure to accept the relinquishment of state sovereign resources to Trump.

What is so pivotal here is the shedding of all pretence: The US is in a debt crisis and wishes to seize – for exclusive US use – Venezuelan oil. Submission to Trump’s demand is the only variable that matters. All masks are off. A Rubicon has been crossed.

“Venezuela will be turning over 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil to the United States of America, sold at market price with the money controlled by me,” Trump has written on Truth Social.

The erasure of the American “project” – the substituting of self-interested hard power for the American narrative of it being “a light to all nations” – constitutes a revolutionary change. Myths and their supporting moral stories provide the meaning to any nation. Without a moral framework, what will hold America together? Ayn Rand’s celebrated belief that rational selfishness was the ultimate expression of human nature cannot reconstitute social order.

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Trump 2.0, Year 1: A Libertarian Nightmare

A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know.

Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.

Just in the past week, since his piratical and unconstitutional imperial conquest of Venezuela, he’s declared that he, from his own personal ukase, is taking command of a dizzying range of economic and foreign policy matters, from his planned further imperial conquest of Greenland (accompanied by declarations from his satrap Steven Miller and himself that no external force or authority holds back his powers to conquer and wreak destruction on the world) to dictating how weapons contractors can compensate their executives or deal with their stocks, the interest rate credit card companies can charge, and whether certain companies can buy houses.

While he’s gone hog wild so far in 2026, the pattern of his core authoritarianism was already well demonstrated in 2025. Trump wielded state power to punish enemies and reward friends, sent the military into city streets under bogus pretenses and over the objections of local elected officials, authorized masked cops to enforce “papers, please” policies on U.S. citizens moving in public (the loosing of such largely undisciplined shock troops in American cities where they are not wanted has predictably resulted in the unconscionable murder of a citizen), ordered the serial murder of suspected drug smugglers, and disrupted the global economy by making Americans pay sharply increased taxes on imported goods, for starters. 

He has concentrated what was supposed to be the competing branches of the federal government into the whims of one man, and erased distinctions between federal and state, public and private. America has never had a president who acted more like a monarch.   

Not all of Trump’s actions and statements are mired in his core authoritarianism. This does not absolve him. Not everything negative reported about Trump’s actions, or the specifics or reasonable implications of something he said or did, ultimately bears out. This does not make him acceptable. Yes, previous administrations have also violated Americans’ and the world’s economic and political liberties and lives. This does not mean Trump deserves a pass. His specific, documented exertions of state power over the past year should be enough to declare him a dangerous foe of American liberty. 

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President Trump Posts Picture of Himself as ‘Acting President of Venezuela’

President Trump on Sunday shared a picture of a fake Wikipedia page that described him as the “Acting President of Venezuela” as he continues to push the idea that the US is “running” the country following the attack to abduct President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump has insisted that the real acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president, is willing to go along with his plan, which has received a cool reception from US oil companies.

While Rodriguez has said she’s willing to cooperate with the US, her government has maintained a message of unity and defiance in the face of US aggression and continues to call for the release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

“In these difficult times our country is experiencing, Venezuelans have once again demonstrated that our greatest strength is national unity and historical awareness,” Rodríguez said in a post on Telegram on Monday.

“The collective response has been one of firmness, serenity, and determination to preserve peace, raise our voices for the release of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, and defend the constitutional order, which guarantees protection and social justice for our people,” she added.

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Trump orders plan to invade Greenland – media

US President Donald Trump has ordered his senior commanders to draw up a plan for a potential invasion of Greenland – a move that could potentially lead to a complete collapse of NATO, the Daily Mail reported on Saturday, citing sources.

The US president has long sought to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory under Danish sovereignty, citing security concerns and the need to deter Russia and China, while not ruling out a military option to capture the island. This stance has put him at loggerheads with the European members of NATO, which have rallied behind Denmark.

According to the Daily Mail, Trump asked the Joint Special Operations Command to prepare invasion plans, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff are pushing back, arguing that the move would be illegal and lack congressional support. One source told the paper that senior generals “have tried to distract Trump by talking about less controversial measures,” such as a “strike on Iran.”

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