Mask Off Empire: Trump Admits 'We've Taken Out So Much Oil In Venezuela'.

Trump Says The Quiet Part Out Loud.

Donald Trump, yet again, said the quiet part out loud about U.S. imperialism, admitting that the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was done to steal the country’s oil, for U.S. profits.

Trump, during a speech , sadistically boasted, “We’ve taken out so much oil in Venezuela, we’ve paid for the cost of the war [in Iran] about 25 times over”.

Trump yet again- with his brazen imperialism- has ripped the mask of U.S. empire.

The U.S. war on Venezuela did not start with Donald Trump. The longstanding U.S. war on Venezuela included a failed CIA coup in 2002 , CIA support for violent riots in 2014, and increasingly crippling sanctions from 2015 onward,which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.

At the UN Security Council, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs documented the “United States regime-change effort spanning more than two decades” in Venezuela.

Sachs noted:

The recent United States record with respect to Venezuela is clear.

In April 2002, the United States knew of and approved an attempted coup against the Venezuelan government.

In the 2010s, the United States funded civil society groups actively engaged in anti-government protests, notably in 2014. When the government cracked down on the protests, the U.S. followed with a series of sanctions. In 2015, President Barrack Obama declared Venezuela to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

In 2017, at a dinner with Latin American leaders on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump openly discussed the option of the U.S. invading Venezuela to overthrow the government.

During 2017 to 2020, the U.S. imposed sweeping sanctions on the state oil company. Oil production fell by 75 percent from 2016 to 2020, and real GDP per capita (PPP) declined by 62 percent.

The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly voted overwhelmingly against such unilateral coercive measures. Under international law, only the Security Council has the authority to impose such sanctions.

On 23 January 2019, the United States unilaterally recognized Juan Guaidó as “interim president” of Venezuela and on 28 January 2019 froze approximately $7 billion of Venezuelan sovereign assets held abroad and gave Guaidó authority over certain assets.

These actions form part of a continuous United States regime-change effort spanning more than two decades.

Much of this was done under the bogus cover of “human rights” and “democracy,” but from the beginning, it was an organized plot spearheaded by the oil giants Chevron and Exxon Mobil to steal the country’s oil.

Journalist Vijay Prashad documented that :

In 2001, Chávez’s [Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro’s predecessor] Bolivarian process passed a law called the Organic Hydrocarbons Law, which asserted state ownership over all oil and gas reserves, held upstream activities of exploration and extraction for the state-controlled companies, but allowed private firms – including foreign firms – to participate in downstream activities (such as refining and sale). Venezuela, which has the world’s largest petroleum reserves, had already nationalized its oil through laws in 1943 and then repeated in 1975. However, in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal reforms pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and by the large US-owned oil companies, the oil industry was substantially privatized.

When Chávez enacted the new law, it brought the state back into control of the oil industry (whose foreign oil sales were responsible for 80% of the country’s external revenues). This deeply angered the US-owned oil companies – particularly ExxonMobil and Chevron – which put pressure on the government of US President George W. Bush to act against Chávez. The US tried to engineer a coup to unseat Chávez in 2002, which lasted for a few days, and then pushed the corrupt Venezuelan oil company management to initiate a strike to damage the Venezuelan economy (it was eventually the workers who defended the company and took it back from the management). Chávez withstood both the coup attempt and the strike because he had the vast support of the population. Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, started a group called Sumaté (“Join Up”), which placed a recall referendum on the ballot. About 70% of the registered voters came to the polls in 2004, and a large majority (59%) voted to retain Chávez as the president.

But neither Machado nor her US backers (including the oil companies) rested easy. From 2001 till today, they have tried to overthrow the Bolivarian process – to effectively return the US-owned oil companies to power. The question of Venezuela, then, is not so much about “democracy” (an overused word, which is being stripped of meaning) but about the international class struggle between the right of the Venezuelan people to freely control their oil and gas and that of the US-owned oil companies to dominate Venezuelan natural resources.

Trump first ripped the mask of the U.S. regime change campaign while on the 2024 campaign trail, boasting that , “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door”.

Trump has gotten what he wanted, after the kidnapping of Maduro late last year, and has yet again admitted that the decades-long U.S. war against Venezuela all along was an imperialist plot to steal the country’s oil, (with an extra push from the Israel lobby).

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