Aug 7, 2026
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Add us on GoogleSeven months after a brief U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. effectively controls the country’s oil. President Donald Trump is boasting about it.
During a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Trump talked up the U.S. relationship with Venezuela, now under interim leader Delcy Rodriguez, who was installed soon after Maduro’s removal in early January. The Trump administration has dictated many of the Venezuelan government’s political and financial decisions ever since, including control of its oil sales and the revenue generated.
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“We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela and we’re getting along great with them,” he said. “Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela, one of the most fertile places for oil in the world.”
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He continued: “As you know, it was a 48-minute war, it lasted 48 minutes. And we paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times…That’s the old -fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
The $13 billion question
The comments offer a glimpse into a piece of Trump’s worldview where might makes right. Critics deride it as outdated imperialism.
“The people of Venezuela have suffered decades of tyranny and now a devastating earthquake, yet Trump brags about stealing their money,” said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, in an X post.
The Pentagon hasn’t publicly laid out the cost of the U.S. attack that deposed Maduro. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimated that combined military operations in Venezuela and the Caribbean — including U.S. airstrikes on alleged drug traffickers — have cost at least $4.7 billion from August 2025 through March 2026.
The Financial Times recently reported that the U.S. had collected $13 billion in Venezuelan oil revenue since January. The newspaper cited data on Venezuelan crude oil shipments from Kpler, a shipping platform, as well as price estimates for heavy crude.
There’s been scarce public accounting for the oil cash so far. The Venezuelan government under Rodriguez set up a website to detail its “sovereign transparency” with only one entry listed: a $300 million oil sale on March 13.
The Venezuelan oil industry has been in a state of disrepair for nearly a decade due to crippling U.S sanctions and economic mismanagement. Daily oil production in Venezuela ticked up to 1.1 million barrels per day in the second quarter of the year, according to a July report from the bloc of oil-producing countries OPEC. Last year, daily production hovered around 900,000 barrels per day.
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Mounting scrutiny
Congressional lawmakers are stepping up their scrutiny of the current financial arrangement between Venezuela and the U.S., particularly in the wake of twin earthquakes in the country that killed more than 6,000 people in late June.
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Democrats are taking the lead in pushing for more information on how the money is being managed and spent, as well as ensuring anti-corruption measures are in place.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the Trump administration was operating with “an unacceptable lack of transparency” around its control of Venezuelan oil sales.
“The President’s statements, along with the lack of evidence of material benefit to the Venezuelan people facing 5,000 deaths and almost $20 billion in costs from catastrophic earthquakes, further our concerns about how Trump Administration officials have used these funds,” Garcia wrote in letters sent to the State, Energy and Treasury departments on Tuesday.
Michael Kozak, a State Department official overseeing U.S. diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere, said Venezuelan oil revenue is deposited into a joint account managed by the Treasury and State Departments.
“The money remains Venezuelan money,” he said at a July 14 Senate hearing. “It’s money they get from oil, they put it into that account and in order to spend it… they have to get our permission.”
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Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a policy and politics journalist based in Washington D.C with a focus on economics. He is experienced in connecting the significance of events in the capital to the lives of everyday Americans whether its taxes, tariffs, interest rates or federal programs.
