Venezuela’s New Landlord
When Donald Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War in 2025 it was on-brand for him. Like so many other Trump rebrands of America, it’s a throwback to a prior title phased out in 1949 when the Department of War became the Department of Defense. The man who’d insisted on an intentionally confrontational presidential portrait now ran an institution which sounded intentionally belligerent.
Despite the speed of that rename, no one expected that within a year the DOW would really conduct a war, or that it’d go as planned. Pete Hegseth has been battling for credibility since day one of being installed at the DOW by Trump. And Trump is notoriously mercurial about every decision he’s publicly involved in. One day’s brilliant social media post becomes the next day’s denial or deflection by the White House Press Secretary.
Yet the most denialist figure about this issue hasn’t been Trump, it’s Marco Rubio, who’s gone on the record multiple times to deny that America was trying to force regime change in Venezuela. Rubio always had his eyes on regime change in Cuba and one road to this is through Venezuela. As an intimidation tactic towards Cuba, what has happened represents a huge victory for him.
It’s unclear, though, who this victory is for. I don’t know any Americans whose priority is regime change in Venezuela. I’m aware the precedent is General Noriega forced out of Panama during the first Bush administration. Yet this appears different. There are major business lobbies in America and the President isn’t averse to self-dealing. If Venezuela has vast oil reserves and you’re an American oil company who was ejected decades ago from that lucrative situation you can lobby your president to get that business opportunity back.
A trickier question looms post-invasion. Can it be expected that Trump, who’s explicitly pushed economic policies which have made life precarious for the American working class, focus on America’s economy when he wants to run Venezuela as a satellite territory? The amount of money involved in this regime change is real, and could’ve been used to solve issues at home.
Trump has teased the public with the idea of stimulus checks. One charitable view of this is to redistribute American wealth. A less charitable view is that one family receiving a check for a few thousand dollars a year over the next four years is a way to bribe them into accepting an ongoing graft which Trump’s businesses are conducting in the public eye. Will the checks be forthcoming since Venezuela has been taken? Will a bewildered Congress and Senate, both completely left in the dark about the takeover, see this as a way to restore faith in voters who’ve explicitly asked them to focus on domestic matters?
Signature checks aside, once the oil gets extracted, how does that improve the lives of the people at home? In the days of conquest those viewed as most deserving of war spoils were the King, his generals, and the officers under their command. If the King’s subjects could afterwards eat spiced cakes or view looted artifacts in a museum that was a bonus, but not essential to conquest. Unfortunately, exotic imports and vivid war stories don’t transform the working class’ need for money. What is acutely concerning is that Trump is so unconcerned with his own conflicts of business interest that it’s likely America’s new oil wealth will not be translated into any meaningful windfall for the public, of either America or Venezuela. This invasion is the equivalent of the Lexus car advertisements where the car with the gift wrap is an oil derrick and the house belongs to a familiar oil executive.
Given that Republicans have recently embraced the buzzword “affordability,” I’m curious how they’ll spin this takeover. At home, thousands of workers have been ousted from previously safe federal jobs. Small business owners are constantly anxious about controversial tariffs which change every month. Key healthcare subsidies are set to expire, which will astronomically inflate insurance costs for both Republican and Democratic voters. Working-class Americans aren’t winning. Life has become a humiliating sequence of eviction orders, bankruptcies, overdue credit card and mortgage bills, all ushered in by an absentee landlord. Now the landlord has a new property and if I were a tenant in Venezuela I’d be very concerned about this turn of events.