We don't need more oil in America. So why grab it from Venezuela?

The Venezuelan adventure that went on this weekend should make you ask "WHY?" Not just for the arrogance and general unconstitionality of it, but also because of this "reasoning".

Q: China, Russia, and Iran have interests in Venezuela. How does this operation affect your relationships with them? TRUMP: In terms of other countries that want oil, we're in the oil business. We're gonna sell it to them. We'll be selling oil.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 3, 2026 at 11:28 AM

Here's the funny part about that - we already have a ton of oil on the market these days, and we can't use what we have.

While gasoline usage for late November and December is up a bit from the higher-priced days of 2022 and 2023, you can see that it is still lower than it was in the non-COVID years of Donald Trump's 1st presidential term.

This reflects more people working remotely and not having to commute vs the 2010s, and the increasing proportion in electric and hybrid cars on the market, reflecting the incentives towards those vehicles that were put into law during the Biden Administration.

But that hasn't stopped oil companies in America from drilling. Outside of the travel and oil price crash at the start of the COVID pandemic, we've seen a general increase in the amount of oil being pumped out of the ground in this country over the last 8 years, with production hitting a new high of 13.87 million barrels a day for October.

Put the lack of demand and the higher oil output together, and gasoline has been more plentiful in the 2020s than it was in the pre-COVID era.

That situation has also likely put us at an economic limit of oil production, because oil prices have been consistently falling, and have been below $60 a barrel since that record production level was reached in October. That $60 a barrel number is important, because Texas oil producers told Federal Reserve officials last March they needed prices to be above there for it to be worth it to drill more.

So if you think that the capture of Maduro may lead to added oil onto the US market, I don't that's true. And if we didn't have a senile psychopath as President, he might not be talking up an oil imperialism angle that may well not happen, or could injure America's oil industry.

Even if this move is not going to do much to help the US oil industry or lower prices beyond where they already are (and if you set aside how ILLEGAL this all is under the general rules of diplomacy) maybe this grabbing of Maduro was in the works for a while, and there was a clear succession plan in place that's better for both the US and Venezuela.

President Trump said on Saturday that Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president and would act as a partner in letting the U.S. run the country. Less than two hours later, Rodríguez made clear she viewed the U.S. as an illegal invader that must be rejected.

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) January 3, 2026 at 5:55 PM

So like a lot of other things with this Administration, here is where we are for both the economic and political ramifications of this weekend's activities in South America.

So you're saying there is no plan. Cool, cool.

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— jakemadtown.bsky.social (@jakemadtown.bsky.social) January 4, 2026 at 12:20 PM

This is what we get with a government run by Flor-idiots, oil men from Tex-ASS, tech oligarch shut-ins, and Faux News content creators.