Media Pontificating About Trump’s Motives for Attacking Venezuela Keep Ignoring that he Openly Admitted It Was to Take Their Oil
BBC, Politico, WaPo, CNN entertain many reasons for why Trump wants regime change in Venezuela—while ignoring the most obvious.
It’s rare in politics that a politician openly discusses their true, cynical motives for doing something that is extremely violent and controversial. Indeed, outside of opening numbers in broadway musicals, real humans rarely lay out their true feelings, motives, and aims. But, in the United States, we have Donald Trump as our president, someone who, for all of his destruction, death and self-dealing, every now and then, openly explains his motives. As he pointedly did in 2023 to an audience in North Carolina while lamenting his 2020 loss, telling the crowd, “when I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. [Had I won in 2020] we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.”
Fairly important context when attempting to assess why Trump has recently ratcheted up attempts to overthrow the government in Venezuela and install his preferred MAGA-aligned alternative.
One would think this open admission, supported by mounds of additional evidence, would remove the need for guesswork, pontification, and the typical capital-A Analyses over The Why of an extremely unpopular and potentially disastrous military action. But, then again, one of Western media’s primary purposes is to presume good intentions on the part of the US and its allies, even when it’s someone as cartoonishly imperialist as Donald Trump.
In recent explainers about Trump’s Venezuela policy and motives, the BBC, Washington Post, and Politico publish thousands of words, interview experts, and try to suss out what’s behind Trump’s brazen attempts to overthrow the government in Caracas. But not a single one seriously entertains the possibility that Trump is interested in Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest known oil reserves in the world.
In its explainer, “Warships, fighter jets and the CIA - what is Trump’s endgame in Venezuela?” the BBC’s Ione Wells and Joshua Cheetham make no mention of oil or natural resources. Their piece hints at a potential ulterior motive—“Why this probably isn’t just about drugs,” reads one subheadline—but proceeds says nothing about what the motive other than “drugs” could be. The article predictably props up every justification for regime change and interviews only pro-regime change experts.
In two recent articles on the subject, (Trump beats the drums of war for direct action in Venezuela [10/22/25], Maduro braces for a U.S. attack; Venezuelans worry more about dinner [11/1/25]) The Washington Post spends hundreds of words pontificating about Trump’s motives without mentioning resources or oil once. The latter article, by Ana Vanessa Herrero and Matthew Hay Brown, did insist that “ordinary Venezuelans” don’t really care about a US military attack, a claim they back with a grand total of two interviews with “ordinary Venezuelans.” This claim is contradicted by surveys on this particular question, with only 10 percent of even anti-Nicolás Maduro Venezuelans supporting U.S. military intervention, according to a September 2025 poll conducted by Panterra.
In an October 23 Politico Q & A with Trump’s former Venezuela ambassador, James B. Story, about “What Trump’s Venezuela Strategy Is Really About,” reporter Eric Bazail-Eimil did not ask about—much less mention—natural resources as a potential motive. All of the nominal anti-drug motives were simply taken at face value. One can see similar omissions in countless cable news segments on the topic, where Trump’s desire to control Venezuela’s immense resources is just not broached, much less centered as a motivating factor.
Indeed, with one exception (a single USA Today article from October 18, 2025) Trump’s 2023 comments about wanting to seize Venezuela’s oil have not been mentioned in any major western outlet: not in the New York Times, not the Washington Post, not the BBC, not CNN, not MSNBC, not ABC, NBC, or CBS News. They are inconvenient to the go-to narrative populating Western media, that of Trump as sincere, if brazen and misguided, anti-drug warrior. So they are simply ignored, despite their urgent relevance to his military build up and threats.
But Trump himself isn’t the only source for oil as a motive. Former Deputy Director and acting Director of the FBI during Trump’s first term, Andrew McCabe, claimed in his 2019 memoir that in 2017 Trump told intelligence officials in a private meeting, “I don’t understand why we’re not looking at Venezuela. Why we’re not at war with Venezuela? They have all the oil and they’re in our back door.” And this sentiment is, of course, consistent with numerous other times that Trump openly talked about seizing other countries’ resources:
Iraq: Trump has repeatedly claimed the US “should have kept the oil” when it exited Iraq.
Syria: In 2019, Trump told reporters he left troops in Syria “only for the oil.”
Greenland: Since taking office in January, Trump has repeatedly claimed he would seize Greenland for its rare earth minerals, such as lithium and titanium.
Panama: Since taking office in January, Trump has repeatedly laid claim to the Panama canal for its strategic importance to US empire.
Ukraine: In exchange for continued military aid in its war against Russia, Trump compelled Ukraine to hand over mineral rights to the US and US companies, something Trump boasted about.
Trump is openly motivated by a desire to control the resources of other countries and has been for decades. Indeed, it’s his most consistent, publicly espoused motive behind his foreign policy—dominance and extraction for US corporate profit.
A report yesterday in Semafor shows this fact is certainly on the minds of US investors chomping at the bit to “invest” in (see: take control and profit off of) Venezuela’s myriad natural resources. According to Semafor:
In addition, UBS’s chief investment office put together an eight-page memo last month that focuses on “visualizing the day after tomorrow” in Venezuela. The research document highlighted the Trump administration’s “hawkish approach” towards Caracas and noted that “Venezuela’s transition away from Chavismo could unlock major opportunities,” in part because of its oil reserves and “severely underutilized economy.”...
In addition to its oil reserves, UBS cited Venezuela’s “fertile soil” and notes it occupies a prime location “to develop as a transportation hub for the Americas and Europe.”
So why is this motive almost never entertained by US media? Why is it ignored by the BBC, Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN reports when laying out the reasoning behind the White House’s military build up and threats? It’s not some dot-connecting, red yarn-corkboard-in-the-gargage conspiracy: Trump himself has made clear that he wants the US and its companies to control Venezuelan oil. And his preferred replacement for Maduro, María Corina Machado (who recently repeated January 6 conspiracy theories claiming Maduro rigged the 2020 election for Joe Biden) has promised as much, telling Donald Trump Jr. on his podcast last February, “we have more oil [than Saudi Arabia], infinite potential. And we’re going to open markets. We’re going to kick [out] the government from the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all our industry…this country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.”
Trump is a violent man, a man who doesn’t care for people he sees as weak, subhuman, or racially inferior. He’s an unmitigated chauvinist and a liar. But he’s a relatively honest man when it comes to laying out his own motivations, and he has shown little interest in running through the motions of liberal human rights pretenses. His preferred pretext, “going after drug cartels,” is taking up all the space in media discourse, but it’s not remotely sufficient—nor, as some of these articles gingerly note, does it make any sense as an anti-drug action. So why the sudden interest in regime change in Venezuela? Is oil the only reason why Trump and his band of committed neocons want to overthrow the government in Venezuela? Of course not. But it is a major one, and we know it’s a major one because Trump has openly said as much. It would be useful if our media quoted Trump’s own motives for attacking Venezuela when seeking to understand his motives for attacking Venezuela.