Yeah, I was mostly surprised about the brazenness of it all. So the plan is to take over the government, take over the oil industry, sell the oil and in infinite grace give the Venezuelans some part of it back (minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country)

And all that as official doctrine, not even some secret strategy paper or covert ops campaign.

Edit: I had to chuckle at his "reviewing" of the Monroe doctrine as DONroe doctrine. There is "on the nose" and there is "punching someone in the face"...

> Washington being now safest and free of crime

I'd make the case it depends on who's defining what is and is not a crime.

Consider that the POTUS is a 34x convicted criminal, and yet he not only has total freedom, he literally has the highest quality personal protection ecosystem on the planet, and so much more.

So, who is the criminal here? Which are the crimes? And what is _actually_ going to happen?

The ironic thing is that nationalizing the oil was pretty much the most defensible part of Chávez's legacy.

(To be clear I'm not a fan of Chávez or of Maduro.)

He also indicated they will work directly with Maduro's second in command, not the putative winning candidate from the last election. This is purely about theft.

Not taking sides here, just trying to steelman: some Venezuelans might be so done with Maduro, that they consider US getting the oil profits to be a fair price.

I prefer this honesty over the unrealistic expectations the US set up in each Mid East country plus Afghanistan.

How exactly will the US run the country? They have just one guy

More quotes in that vein,

> "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so."

> "We're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have it"

> "It's gonna make a lot of money"

> "Well, you know, it won't cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial"

Reading @atrupar.com 's live transcriptions,

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com

I think it’s normalization. If they can ignore Congress, lie to them, break American law, ignore international law, what’s to stop them from violating the constitution? It’s how they will ultimately deport 100 million Americans, like they proposed a few days ago on the DHS Twitter account. Don’t fix things through the political process - just ignore them and use military force.

> And then a few seconds later: "US oil companies will go into Venezuela"

Venezuela is down to 1 million barrels per day, down from 3 million per day from the 2000s because of the sanctions after Hugo Chavez. They own the worlds largest reserve (about 300 billion barrels worth) and it was always my understanding that we worked with them before Hugo Chavez went the route he went and brought a great nation to shambles for a power trip.

I think Venezuela will recover with our aid, but a lot of their old infrastructure is gone, they will need investors. They will also need to deal with their crime problem and hold real elections for once.

Oil companies already had contracts that Maduro violated.

> I am still curious about the whole side bar about Washington being now safest and free of crime.

I heard that as Trump doing his usual thing patting himself on the back while justifying the continued use of our military for domestic law enforcement.

>> Never the US has been so honest around so many lies in the same speech.

Its more this: https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1q34556/mill...

>>"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and >>judicious transition"- And then a few seconds later: "US oil companies will go >> into Venezuela"

The new President of Venezuela will be called Fulgencio Batista...

>ZERO concern of the current US administration about the welfare of Venezuelans

I get the impression they are concerned at least a bit with the welfare of Venezuelans. Maybe a secondary consideration to drugs and oil but here's what Trump was saying:

>We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious

transition. So, we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get

in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the

country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious

transition. And it has to be judicious because that's what we're all about. We

want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. (https://youtu.be/cQdRlS4uf0E?t=3784)