“Garbage”: How Trump used to talk about Venezuelan oil

Not long ago, President Donald Trump had a clear opinion of Venezuelan oil.

Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, he called the country’s crude “horrible,” “tar,” “the dirtiest stuff you can imagine,” and the “worst oil probably anywhere in the world.” But, less than two years later, President Trump has framed his move to depose Nicolás Maduro in large part as a move to seize this “garbage” oil.

His reservations about the quality of the fossil fuels he plans to acquire have disappeared. Instead, the president has suggested he may be willing to send in more US troops to keep control of it and that he’s not “afraid of boots on the ground.” Gone, too, are Trump’s warnings that Venezuelan heavy crude will pollute the air in American communities when it’s refined stateside.

Trump’s disparaging remarks about Venezuelan oil were not a one-off. He made a version of the same argument at least five times between June 2023 and August 2024. The typical pitch went something like this: When I was president, we drilled top-tier American oil. Now we import tar from Venezuela and pollute our country in the process. 

Here’s a longer version from a speech to North Carolina Republicans in June 2023:

When I left Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela. So we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe this.

Their oil is garbage. It’s horrible. The worst you can get. Tar. It’s like tar. And to refine it you need special plants … We have liquid gold. The best, most beautiful stuff you can get. Liquid gold. Better than gold. Right under our feet … But with Venezuela, they put their oil and they refine it in Houston! So all those pollutants go right up in the air … So, we lose economically. And we also lose from an environmental standpoint. Because it is really dirty stuff. The dirtiest stuff you can imagine.

The bit has a typically Trumpian cognitive dissonance to it. If he’d been re-elected in 2020, America would have benefited greatly by taking control of Venezuela’s oil, he claimed. At the same time, Democrats were idiots for using such horrible, polluting oil.

Since capturing Maduro, Trump’s estimation of Venezuela’s fossil fuel reserves appears to have shifted. As he stated in a Tuesday post on social media, Venezuelan authorities are set to send the United States up to 50 million barrels of their “High Quality” oil.

The new plan, as Trump laid out in announcing Maduro’s capture on Saturday, is for American oil companies to spend “billions of dollars” rehabilitating Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, Trump and his team are now developing a “sweeping initiative to dominate the Venezuelan oil industry for years to come.” That would include “acquiring and marketing the bulk” of the oil from Venezuela’s state-run oil giant. The goal is reportedly to lower the price of oil to Trump’s preferred number of $50 a barrel, a level so low that it could imperil US production of the “liquid gold” Trump celebrated on the campaign trail. 

There are many potential roadblocks. Unlike Trump, fossil fuel companies, which have been notably quiet about any plans to expand production in Venezuela, remain fully aware of the risks of investing in a politically unstable country to get heavy oil at a time when prices are already low. They are now reportedly discussing seeking financial guarantees from the Trump administration before investing in Venezuela. Trump has similarly floated the possibility of reimbursing oil companies for the money they spend rebuilding infrastructure in the country. 

Nor does there appear to be any near-term exit plan. Earlier this week, the New York Times asked Trump how long the United States is likely to assert control over Venezuela. Six months? A year? 

“I would say much longer,” Trump responded.