“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.”
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 Critics deride it as outdated imperialism.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.
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.
