It’s the Oil

At his inaugural ball, President Donald J. Trump said that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” What planet is he living on? I understand his rationale of peace through strength. In the case of Venezuela it is as bogus as a three dollar bill. The weekend operations escalated war-like behavior, not peace-making. If peace is what he wants, Trump is going in the opposite direction.

According to the Military Times, U.S. military operations are surging under Trump. He has overseen at least 626 air strikes, compared with 555 for President Joe Biden during all four years of his term. Military operations occurred in eight countries listed in the article. Donald Trump is not a peacemaker.

I viewed the entire press conference about weekend operations in Venezuela. It was hard to stomach all the misrepresentations and lies — the self-aggrandizement — yet it yielded a couple of things.

As many of us believed, the invasion and kidnapping of the Venezuelan president was about taking the country’s oil. Some in the United States have been lusting after it for decades. Trump confirmed this during the presser. How U.S. oil companies would proceed is sketchy at best.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported on Sunday:

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference where he boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.” (Cedar Rapids Gazette front page, Jan. 4, 2026).

Not so fast! Shortly after Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s new president she pushed back on Trump. “We are determined to be free,” she said, according to the New York Times. “What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity.”

“We had already warned that an aggression was underway under false excuses and false pretenses, and that the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective: regime change in Venezuela,” she said. “This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources. This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it.” (New York Times, Jan. 3, 2026).

What should happen next is Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and General Dan Caine — and probably others — are removed from office. The only remaining question is how that gets done.

On Sunday, Jan. 4, Veterans For Peace was part of an anti-war demonstration in Iowa City. Here are some photographs I took.