“It’s All About the Oil, Stupid!”: Mehdi Hasan on Trump Attacking Venezuela & Kidnapping Maduro

AMY GOODMAN: “It’s All About the Oil, Stupid!” That’s part of the headline of a new piece by our first guest, Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the online news site Zeteo. In the piece, Hasan details how President Trump has repeatedly admitted that gaining access to Venezuela’s oil was a key reason why the U.S. attacked Venezuela Saturday and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

On Monday, Maduro and his wife pleaded not guilty to federal charges in a New York courtroom. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. This is part of what President Trump said on Saturday from Mar-a-Lago.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The oil companies are going to go in. They’re going to spend money. They’re going to — we’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One he had briefed oil executives ahead of the attack on Venezuela, something he did not do for members of Congress.

REPORTER 1: Have you spoken with the oil companies about — 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yes.

REPORTER 1: — going into Venezuela?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I have.

REPORTER 2: Which ones?

REPORTER 3: Have you received any commitments?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: All of them, basically.

REPORTER 3: Any commitments from the oil companies?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They want to go in so badly.

REPORTER 4: Did you speak to them before the operation took place about — did you maybe tip them off about what was coming?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Before and after. And they want to go in. And they’re going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela, and they’re going to represent us well.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, oil company stocks surged in value. Paul Singer, a billionaire who’s a top donor to President Trump, is set to profit immensely, since his investment firm purchased Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, for $5.9 billion. The Venezuelan government estimates Citgo’s value at $18 billion.

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on the U.S. attack. Venezuela’s ambassador to the U.N., Samuel Moncada, said Venezuela is targeted due to oil and energy resources.

SAMUEL MONCADA: [translated] Venezuela is a victim of these attacks as a result of its natural wealth. Oil, energy, strategic resources and the geopolitical position of our country have historically been factors of greed and external pressure. When the use of force is used to control resources, impose governments or redesign states, we are faced with a logic that refers to the worst practices of colonialism and neocolonialism. Accepting this logic implies opening the door to a profoundly unstable world, where countries with greater military capabilities can decide by force the political and economic destiny of other states.

AMY GOODMAN: Joining us now is Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo.

Thanks so much for joining us again, Mehdi. Why don’t you start off with the title of your piece, “It’s All About the Oil, Stupid!” or, to be exact — yep, “It’s All About the Oil.” Talk about what happened. Your response to the abduction of the Venezuelan president and his wife, the charging yesterday — what the Trump administration has said he is guilty of doing actually didn’t jibe exactly with what he was charged with — but then, what all this means, as Trump talks about narcotrafficking, but also, what, mentioned 25 times in his press conference afterwards, talked about the word “oil”?

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. Good morning, Amy. Thanks for having me.

I wrote that piece on Saturday in a hurry at 7 a.m. when I woke up and saw the news that the U.S. had attacked Venezuela. And I pulled together — it’s a list of Trump comments, basically, from the past few months and years. I went back to 2019 and Andrew McCabe, who was FBI deputy director. He wrote in his memoir in 2019 the threat — he quotes Donald Trump saying in government during his first term, “The country we should be invading is Venezuela. They’re right next door, and they have all that oil.” Trump was thinking about Venezuela’s oil long ago. Even during his period in the wilderness, between 2020 and 2024, he did rallies where he spoke about, “If I was still in charge, we would have Venezuela’s oil.” And, of course, he spent much of December, just before the New Year’s, talking about “We want our oil rights back. Our oil was stolen from us” — all BS, nonsense, lies — said, “Venezuela took our oil. We want it back. They need to return it,” he said. They took an oil tanker. He said, “We’re going to keep the oil.”

So, I put that all together in a quick piece on Saturday, thinking people are going to attack me, as they did in 2003, when people like you and me, Amy, were saying it’s about the oil. Iraq was about the oil. But in those days, the people in power pretended it wasn’t, right? George Bush, Dick Cheney and others, they said it was WMDs. They said it was democracy. They said it was al-Qaeda. They at least pretended that it wasn’t about the oil. Trump, as you just pointed out, has spent the last three days nonstop telling us it’s about the oil. So, you have all these people on the right and in the center, you know, saying, “The sophisticated analysis is it’s not about the oil. That’s a conspiracy theory.” And then you have Donald Trump comes out, as usual, throws them all under the bus, says, “No, it’s about the oil.” He just can’t stop talking about the oil. Every time he’s asked about anything, he says, “Well, let’s talk about oil.”

And as you pointed out, oil company stocks are up. He gave oil companies a heads-up that he didn’t give members of Congress, per the Constitution. If you go back to the election campaign, Amy, in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago, he hosted a bunch of oil company executives and said, “Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll help you all out.” He’s helping them out. He’s enjoying himself. This is what he likes. He’s not actually done a full regime change. He’s kept the Maduro government in place, Delcy Rodríguez, the vice president, in place, as long as she plays ball on the oil. He’s made that very clear.

So, this was about oil. It was never about narcoterrorism or drugs. This is the same president who pardoned the former president of Honduras just a few weeks ago, who was convicted in American court and imprisoned for bringing 400 tons of cocaine into the country. It’s not about democracy. This is a president who loves dictators, is pals with Middle East and Asian and African dictators, loves Kim Jong-un. And this wasn’t about, you know, running a cartel. The indictment that said that Nicolás Maduro was the head of a cartel, the Cartel of the Suns, as you pointed out earlier, de los Soles, it’s a completely made-up cartel, as experts have said for years. I said it in my piece on Saturday. And now they’ve dropped it. Classic Trump administration, whether it’s someone that ICE is taking or some foreign leader that they’ve kidnapped, when they come in front of a judge, they always change their tune.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Stephen Miller. He’s got a number of titles, but mainly the deputy chief of staff. This is what —

MEHDI HASAN: Fascist is one of them.

AMY GOODMAN: — he said on CNN.

STEPHEN MILLER: By definition, we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So, for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country during this transition period.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Stephen Miller. “We are in charge,” he said.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, your response?

MEHDI HASAN: And Donald Trump has said the same, right? On Air Force One on Sunday night, it was very interesting to see Trump’s comments, because, as usual, his people went out to do operation cleanup on the media. They tried to clean up his remarks from Saturday, where he said, “We’re going to run Venezuela.” This is the famous antiwar, anti-regime change, anti-nation building, anti-neocon Republican president. And yet, on Saturday, he says, very quickly, “We’re going to run Venezuela.” So, on Sunday morning, all these people go out on the Sunday shows and say, “That’s not what he meant.” Marco Rubio does cleanup in aisle 11, goes on the Sunday morning shows and says, “What he meant was we’re going to keep the blockade in place.” And then he goes out on Air Force One on Sunday night and says, “Uh, no, if I tell you who’s in charge, it’ll be controversial.” They say, “Who?” He goes, “We’re in charge. We’re running it.”

And then you have Stephen Miller, who’s also very blunt. I mean, he is the voice of Trump’s id, making clear that might is right. The same people who told us for years that “America needs to mind its own business. America needs to nation build at home. America needs to stop all these foreign wars,” they’re now loving this moment. You know, they’re very hyped up. They think they’ve got a big win. They’ve loved this kind of smooth, elite special forces moment where they pulled Maduro out without any American losses. It has shades of postwar Iraq “mission accomplished,” the hubris of the George Bush administration and the neocons in the spring of 2003. You know, it all looks fine in the short term. It’s the long term and the medium term that’s the problem. And they don’t really have a plan for Venezuela. They don’t really have a plan for any of these countries they’re now threatening. Trump is threatening Cuba. He’s threatening Colombia. He’s threatening Iran. And, of course, he’s threatening Denmark by threatening to take Greenland. And Stephen Miller is now pushing this new line that might is right. You know, we’re not going to pretend that we care about international law or U.N. resolutions or national sovereignty. We’re going to take what we want.

And you’re seeing that in the MAGA media universe, too, Amy. You’re seeing people like Matt Walsh, the far-right podcaster at The Daily Wire, who used to say, “I’m a noninterventionist. We shouldn’t go abroad. We should focus on America.” Now he’s saying, “Well, we should do whatever we want. We’re a superpower, and Third World countries just have to get on board.” So, that’s an interesting development here in the MAGA movement, which claimed to be antiwar. And some of us — I’m sorry, Amy, to have to say this — some of us spent much of 2024 warning people on the left that Donald Trump is not antiwar, will not be a dove. He will actually be a belligerent hawk who starts new wars. He bombed seven countries in 2024, seven countries in the space of his first 12 months, and now he’s threatening to bomb four more, one of whom is a European ally.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Trump’s National Security Strategy, which was released last month, which states the U.S. will, quote, “assert and enforce a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”? And, of course, Trump himself now is referring to the “Donroe Doctrine.”

MEHDI HASAN: Well, Donald Trump has the brain and comprehension and attention span of a toddler, and I say that in a very generous fashion. So, when he hears new words, new terms, something that makes him sound good, he jumps on it. So, of course, when right-wing media came up with this idea of the Donroe Doctrine, borrowing from the Monroe Doctrine — of course, Donald Trump couldn’t tell you what the Monroe Doctrine was, if his life depended on it — he loves this idea that he’s now doing something new in American history, he’s a president who’s breaking new ground, and this new ground being we’re going to run the hemisphere. You saw the post that the State Department put out yesterday saying, “It’s our hemisphere,” which people pointed out is both, you know, performatively strong, like being the neighborhood bully, but also weak, because you’re basically saying, “Well, the rest of the world isn’t ours,” which is what previous American presidents suggested that they were leader of the free world. Trump’s basically saying, “Well, this is ours, and China, Russia can have their spheres of influence.” And it is very 19th-century-esque. “Let’s divide up the world between the powers.”

But on the National Security Strategy, obviously, European governments were alarmed when they saw this National Security Strategy. It is — it’s very hard to describe. It’s nuts, in many ways. If you read it, it’s written — it feels like parts of it are written by the Groypers, by the neo-Nazis around the Nick Fuentes types. It talks about the decline of Western civilization. It says Europe is being destroyed, is committing suicide by allowing in nonwhite immigrants. It talks — you know, it treats the West and Europe as America’s main enemy, because we know how much Donald Trump actually likes Vladimir Putin. So, it’s a very bizarre document, that is both hawkish and belligerent and isolationist and withdrawalist at the same time. It’s classic Trump. He has no consistent views or principles. And people say, “What is Trumpism? We need to find out this guiding ideology.” Donald Trump is a collection of impulses.

And that’s why we’re now seeing, in the space of 72 hours, the same people who spent years telling us that “Regime change is bad. This is a different Republican Party. This is not the George W. Bush neocon party,” suddenly they sound even more hawkish than Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney, as I said in my piece, whatever the opposite of rolling in your grave is, he’s doing it right now, because I don’t remember George Bush and Dick Cheney threatening four countries at a single press conference, one of them being in a European country. Trump is doing that.

So, this isn’t about ideology. This isn’t about some new doctrine. This is about might being right. This is about Trump’s nativist impulses meeting his belligerent impulses. There was a cartoon that Pete Hegseth retweeted from the @TrumpWarRoom account over the weekend, which has Donald Trump standing astride Latin America with a stick in his hand. That is their approach to the world right now. Let’s see how long it lasts.

AMY GOODMAN: And Iran? You have on Monday The Jerusalem Post reporting there are multiple indications the U.S. and Israel are looking into regime change options in Iran. Lindsey Graham was on Fox. He put on a hat that said “Make Iran Great Again.” Are you concerned about moving from Venezuela to Iran?

MEHDI HASAN: Hundred percent. And also, Graham took a picture with that hat standing alongside Trump. And Donald Trump, of course, we were told, would be the guy who doesn’t want a new war in the Middle East. We were told he would do a deal with Iran and do deals with everyone in the region. And, of course, he became the first American president to bomb Iran. He did what Obama and Bush and Biden did not do: He bombed Iran last year, in violation of international law. He claimed it was to stop this, quote-unquote, “12-day war” between Israel and Iran. But smarter analysts, like Trita Parsi and others, pointed out that this was unresolved, that 2026 would be a year where we would see military conflict again.

If you had asked me prior to the New Year’s what I was most worried about, I would have said Iran and Venezuela. And Venezuela has happened. Iran is next. In fact, the day before he bombed Venezuela, Amy — actually, let me get the timeline right. On Christmas Day, he bombs Nigeria, on Christmas Day. On New Year’s Eve at a party in Mar-a-Lago, he’s asked, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?” He says, “Peace. Peace on Earth.” Then, on Friday, January 2nd, he posts, “We’re locked and loaded, ready to attack Iran.” And then, on Saturday, he attacks Venezuela. This is the most hawkish president of my lifetime. At the moment, right now, as of right now, George Bush must be wondering what’s going on in his house in Dallas, looking at what Trump’s up to. So, yes, I’m very worried about war with Iran.

The Israelis and the Israeli press, as you mentioned, are loving this moment. They’re seeing this as a moment — remember, they’re tying Venezuela to Iran. They’re saying, “Venezuela supported Hezbollah. Iran supports Hezbollah. These regimes are all connected. It’s kind of like a new Axis of Evil.” So, of course, they’re pushing for an attack on Iran. This is not just Netanyahu, by the way. I know we love in this country to say Netanyahu. It’s the entire Israeli political spectrum. Benny Gantz, an opposition leader, former general, openly called, I think yesterday or Sunday, for the Americans to take out the regime in Iran, as well.

And, of course, this is what hubris does to you. Donald Trump will look at what happened in Venezuela and say, “Well, I did it so smoothly and bloodlessly.” By the way, they killed Venezuelans, including Venezuelan civilians, but no Americans were lost. “And I got praised by people in the media for my wonderful win.” That’s the kind of hubris that would allow someone like Trump to go, “Well, maybe we should do it in Iran. Maybe I should listen to Lindsey Graham and Benjamin Netanyahu and Marco Rubio and do it in Iran.” Of course, Iran is a very different kettle of fish to Venezuela. That won’t be a walk in the park, I can assure you.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi, when you talk about Nigeria, let’s not forget it’s the largest oil producer in Africa. Iran —

MEHDI HASAN: Completely coincidental, Amy. Completely coincidental.

AMY GOODMAN: And Iran, of course, overthrown in 1953 by the United States, the democratically elected leader, on behalf of BP. So, oil all the way, not to mention Iraq in 2003, when you mentioned — 

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — George W. Bush. I just wanted to go to Jeffrey Sachs speaking at the U.N. Security Council yesterday, the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

JEFFREY SACHS: In the past month, President Trump has issued direct threats against six U.N. member states, including Colombia, Denmark, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria and, of course, Venezuela. … Members of the council are not called upon to judge Nicolás Maduro. They are not called upon to assess whether the recent U.S. attack and ongoing naval quarantine results in freedom or in subjugation. Members of the council are called upon to defend international law, and specifically the U.N. Charter.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was professor Jeffrey Sachs. Mehdi Hasan, in this last 30 seconds, supposedly on Thursday there’s going to be a vote and a debate in the U.S. Senate on the War Powers Act. Can you talk about the significance of this and where you see this all headed? What, the Maduros — President Maduro is expected to be back in court, I think it’s March 17th.

MEHDI HASAN: Well, we don’t know if he’s going to actually win or lose. The Trump DOJ doesn’t have a great record in prosecuting people. It will be hilarious if they lost and Maduro walked free. Let’s see.

Very quickly, the story of the Trump administration at home has been people rolling over for him — Big Law, big universities, Big Tech, all of the banks, all rolling over for him, universities rolling over for Trump. And now the story on the international stage is the same. European allies cannot bring themselves to condemn what Trump did. The British government, embarrassingly, could not even say, “He shouldn’t take Greenland. America is wrong to be threatening Greenland.” Congress has abdicated its role on foreign policy, on war making. So, at every stage, Donald Trump, luckiest man in the world, finds no opposition. I think this is all going to come bite everyone in their backsides very quickly. If he does take Greenland, the Europeans will feel very foolish for not standing together when he went and went after Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, award-winning journalist, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo. We’ll link to your piece, “Trump’s Venezuela Attack: It’s All About the Oil, Stupid!”

Coming up, Alexander Aviña, associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, on the what they’re calling the — what he’s calling the — Trump’s calling the “Donroe Doctrine.” Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Grateful,” performed by Patti Smith in our Democracy Now! studio.