By Janisse Miles
January 19, 2026
Although many people in the U.S. — and every U.S. president — are aware that if they are sent to terrorize other regions, it is primarily for the benefit of an oil company’s bottom line. It has been assumed that sitting politicians will have to manufacture consent, usually relying on racism and xenophobia to bring the public to the conclusion that U.S. intervention is just and the leaders of the targeted country deserve their forceful removal and worse.
When the attack on the Twin Towers occurred on September 11, 2001 — the closest a generation of U.S. residents ever got to experiencing a fraction of what other countries endure at the hands of U.S. occupation — the mass trauma was immediately weaponized into Islamophobic propaganda. This included publicizing several countries in South Asia celebrating the attack on a previously untouchable regime that’s been waging war on their homeland for decades, and rarely showing those same areas holding candlelight vigils for the 9/11 victims.
Desires for “revenge” were encouraged with ire directed specifically toward the Iraqi president at the time, Saddam Hussein. Although neither the Iraqi president nor any part of Iraq was found to have a connection to al-Qaida, the group allegedly behind the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush relied on racism to convince the U.S. public to assume a connection.
By the time the “war on terror” was coined by the Bush administration nine days after the towers fell, there was a jump in hate crimes on the domestic front equating Muslims and anyone who looked vaguely South or West Asian to terrorists that needed to pay for the attack. According to brookings.edu, by the end of 2002, almost 60% of people in the U.S. supported invading Iraq. And by 2003, 69% of Americans believed Hussein was personally involved in the attacks, and 82% believed that he provided assistance to Osama bin Laden, alleged co-founder of al-Qaida. All of these allegations were unfounded.
What Saddam Hussein was involved in, however, was control over Iraq’s oil reserve, the third largest in the world at that time. According to journalist Ron Suskind, about eight months before the attacks Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to, “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests.”
He said: “It would change everything in the region and beyond. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about.” After increasing the attacks on Iraq’s oil facilities and looting equipment immediately after, the administration drafted a plan to rehabilitate these now mysteriously war-damaged establishments — by privatizing them. (“The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill,” Ron Suskind, 2004)
In 2005, however, the new Iraqi Constitution declared that oil and gas would remain in the public sector.
U.S. wants to grab Venezuela’s oil
Much like Bush with Iraq, Trump has had a longstanding target on Venezuela’s back. In the 2019 memoir of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, he recalls Trump stating that Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil, and they’re right on our back door.” That same year, Trump imposed sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA, intended to block $7 billion in assets, resulting in a projected $11 billion loss. This was an effort to financially suffocate a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, whose oil exports uphold its economy — at least until the people agree to the removal of their current president, Nicolás Maduro, in favor of a leadership that will bow to U.S. imperialism’s tyranny. (“The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” Andrew McCabe, 2019)
But when these sanctions didn’t trigger the desired regime change, the propaganda circuit began: claims that Venezuela is pumping cocaine to the United States with Maduro at the helm. In a video posted on X on Aug. 7, 2025, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared Maduro “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world.” And instead of looking for proof, the administration offered a $50 million reward to whoever had information leading to Maduro’s arrest.
Once again, the administration relied on racism, taking the drug-peddling stereotypes imposed on Mexico and placing that vitriol on another Latine country, despite Venezuela not even being on the CIA’s watchlist for drug trafficking.
The big lie
The U.S. spent the fall of 2025 murdering at least 87 people by illegally bombing Venezuelan fishing boats in international waters by air, and Trump proceeded to tell the public and U.S. sailors alike on Oct. 5 that this was a good thing — that for every person the U.S. killed, 25,000 lives were saved due to the large quantities of fentanyl imported to the U.S. by Venezuela.
Yet the majority of people here were horrified, with 48% opposing the airstrikes. The president had shared video footage of these murders on his social media and claimed the scene was overflowing with bags of fentanyl, but there clearly are none. (pbs.org, Oct. 19, 2025)
Trump not even manufacturing consent
Now, with the people not buying the lies, Trump has dropped the façade. On Dec. 10, after the U.S. seized a tanker off the coast of Venezuela, Trump made it very clear that his grudge goes back to 2007, when Venezuela nationalized its oil under President Hugo Chavez and nationalized assets from some U.S. and other foreign oil companies. He told reporters: “They took our oil rights — we had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.” (pbs.org, Dec. 17, 2025)
The administration scrambled to launder these statements the next day, with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirming that, yes, the U.S. seized a tanker, and yes, intends to seize the oil within it, but that’s only because this is sanctioned oil whose profits would have fueled “narcoterrorism of rogue and illegitimate regimes around the world.” (pbs, Dec. 11, 2025)
But because no one can find any proof of said narcoterrorism, the $50 million remained uncollected, and Maduro remained unarrested. Then Trump himself decided to have his military invade Venezuela and kidnap Nicolás Maduro along with First Combatant Cilia Flores in the early morning of Jan. 3, killing dozens of officials, military personnel and civilians without so much as approval from Congress, let alone United Nations authority.
Later that day, Trump claimed his intentions were to “bring outlaw dictator Nicolás Maduro to justice” and have him face court proceedings for multiple federal charges of narcoterrorism and drug trafficking and once again, as the U.S. so graciously says, “we will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” (reuters.com, Jan. 4)
Trump claimed that Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, now interim president, was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” despite Rodriguez referring to the U.S. attack as “brutal aggression.” Then he once again applied the oil of social media, announcing that Venezuela “will be turning over” up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S. and that the profits from oil they allow Venezuela to keep will be used on American products only! And Trump’s $100 billion pitch to oil executives to invest in his plans for the country, televised even after ExxonMobil declared the oil “uninvestable,” is now available to view on YouTube. (time.com, Jan. 5)
Trump flaunts real goal: oil
Instead of being secretive about the fact that the United States intends to gut another county for its oil reserves as presidents before him have, Trump is actively flaunting it. Why? Because he believes nobody will stop him.
After attempting the traditional method of selling a war to the people for a few weeks, Trump has decided that he doesn’t have to. Presidents before him would fear consequences. But as a billionaire, a convicted felon and someone proven to be extremely close to the possibly most prolific pedophile in modern times, without any real threat of removal from office, he knows there aren’t any consequences to fear. He also has no fear of not being reelected and therefore has no reason to scrub his image. To him public opinion is nothing but a nuisance.
After over two straight years of growing dissent over the unconditional funding of the genocidal state of Israel and the sustained slaughter of Palestinians, the ruling class didn’t have to change a thing outside of social media algorithms. Politicians on both sides are adept at ignoring protests, rallies and demonstrations and are 100% expecting the same tactics with a different flag. (whose flag? Not clear)
This moment in history illustrates why we need to broaden our imagination when it comes to methods of resistance. Politicians, oil barons, weapons manufacturers and billionaires are all banding together to taunt us. They know we know their games too well for them to hide them, so they’re not hiding them. If they don’t hide them, what exactly are we going to do about it?
Being able to make demands on the government comes with wielding the power that the working class harnesses. The atrocities the ruling class inflicts both domestically and internationally are not civilized nor polite, and so the onus should not be put on those resisting those atrocities to be nice or peaceful. Keeping the struggles visible in the public eye is important, but change does not happen unless we aim for the capitalist class. Otherwise, as we see today, they will get too comfortable in attacking the working class and oppressed people and recolonizing the Global South, from West Asia to Venezuela.
